Absolute proof against the existence of God, as described in the Abrahamic religions

[Evangelicalhumanist]

'No longer will they teach their neighbour, or say to one another, 'Know the LORD,' because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest," declares the LORD. "For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more."

This is a prophecy we believe has not yet been fulfilled, so the Author Himself is acknowledging this and for Him it is not a problem.

Back them up how? With links? You don't post anything like that for what you say so I don't feel the need to do so.

You have no way of proving that the people who own the Bible aren't reading it. You might as well say the same about any other book people own. But with billions of copies sold, even a small number of those people reading it would make it the most widely read book in history.

Why are you so concerned with what God wants from you and His purpose for you when you don't believe? Are you searching for God or something? Theological differences aside, most believers in God will you that God wants you to love Him by living a virtuous life of humble simplicity, practicing compassion, mercy and pursue truth.

Look at what you've both said: "This will happen," but "we believe this is a prophecy that has not yet been fulfilled." And that makes it true how? I do not know him. Lots and lots and lots of people -- even here on RF -- do not know him. Billions around the world do not know him. Are we neither the least nor the greatest? What are we then, nobodies?

I don't know that people don't read the Bible as much as you think? I know dozens of Christians personally who don't know it as well as I do. See if you can get a decent reference out of that great Christian, Donald Trump. He knows it about as well as he knows his toilet paper.

I practice compassion, mercy and pursue truth -- and that last a whole bunch more than I find among those who tell me what "Truth" is but couldn't demonstrate it with PowerPoint! But I need to be humble and simple, too? Grovelling is a good thing?

You all make statements, large, expansive, brave statements about something that you cannot even show me. All you can do is tell me what you think is true, and wonder why I can't believe it.

Well, if you can make statements that you can't defend, why can't I?

 

[Rival]

Look at what you've both said: "This will happen," but "we believe this is a prophecy that has not yet been fulfilled." And that makes it true how? I do not know him. Lots and lots and lots of people -- even here on RF -- do not know him. Billions around the world do not know him. Are we neither the least nor the greatest? What are we then, nobodies?

I don't know that people don't read the Bible as much as you think? I know dozens of Christians personally who don't know it as well as I do. See if you can get a decent reference out of that great Christian, Donald Trump. He knows it about as well as he knows his toilet paper.

I practice compassion, mercy and pursue truth -- and that last a whole bunch more than I find among those who tell me what "Truth" is but couldn't demonstrate it with PowerPoint! But I need to be humble and simple, too? Grovelling is a good thing?

You all make statements, large, expansive, brave statements about something that you cannot even show me. All you can do is tell me what you think is true, and wonder why I can't believe it.

Well, if you can make statements that you can't defend, why can't I?

If 'the Bible itself doesn't expect what you do' isn't enough for you then I can't help you. If you use the Bible to make your argument then I can use it to make mine.

 

[Saint Frankenstein]

Look at what you've both said: "This will happen," but "we believe this is a prophecy that has not yet been fulfilled." And that makes it true how? I do not know him. Lots and lots and lots of people -- even here on RF -- do not know him. Billions around the world do not know him. Are we neither the least nor the greatest? What are we then, nobodies?

I don't know that people don't read the Bible as much as you think? I know dozens of Christians personally who don't know it as well as I do. See if you can get a decent reference out of that great Christian, Donald Trump. He knows it about as well as he knows his toilet paper.

I practice compassion, mercy and pursue truth -- and that last a whole bunch more than I find among those who tell me what "Truth" is but couldn't demonstrate it with PowerPoint! But I need to be humble and simple, too? Grovelling is a good thing?

You all make statements, large, expansive, brave statements about something that you cannot even show me. All you can do is tell me what you think is true, and wonder why I can't believe it.

Well, if you can make statements that you can't defend, why can't I?

So basically you just want to rant? Again, I don't see why you care so much about an entity you don't believe exists. It can't be because you're feeling persecuted because you live in one of the most liberal cities in one of the most liberal countries in the world. What answers are you looking for? You seem angry that God Himself doesn't personally come down from Heaven and ring your doorbell. I think @Rival is correct in that you seem to be upset about people being humans.

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

So basically you just want to rant? Again, I don't see why you care so much about an entity you don't believe exists. It can't be because you're feeling persecuted because you live in one of the most liberal cities in one of the most liberal countries in the world. What answers are you looking for? You seem angry that God Himself doesn't personally come down from Heaven and ring your doorbell. I think @Rival is correct in that you seem to be upset about people being humans.

No, you are absolutely and utterly wrong.

I care about humans more than you can guess. But I am also a reader of history, a seeker after knowledge -- and for the record, dogma is not knowledge.

I look at the world, and I see how history has played out, and I fear for humanity -- I really do. The only real way to understand the natural world is through rational thought, and all truth is proportional to the evidence for it. Yet, I watch as Americans refuse to wear facemasks because "I was born in a free country." To which I say, "and you are free to attempt to understand the consequences of your actions, and to behave like a decent person in the face of that understanding."

But they don't. And irrational beliefs will insure that they continue not to. We have, armed and ready to go, enough weaponry to destroy all life on this planet, but we're having a really tought time with a virus we can't even see -- and refuse to behave intelligently in the face of -- and you think that humanity is destined for great things? Armed people are shooting up schools -- even little children -- in the US and nobody can have a rational discussion about gun ownership? And you think humanity is destined for great things?

Well I disagree. And I will continue to disagree as long as people continue to behave as irrationally as they do. And it is religion that will light their way.

 

[Saint Frankenstein]

No, you are absolutely and utterly wrong.

I care about humans more than you can guess. But I am also a reader of history, a seeker after knowledge -- and for the record, dogma is not knowledge.

I look at the world, and I see how history has played out, and I fear for humanity -- I really do. The only real way to understand the natural world is through rational thought, and all truth is proportional to the evidence for it. Yet, I watch as Americans refuse to wear facemasks because "I was born in a free country." To which I say, "and you are free to attempt to understand the consequences of your actions, and to behave like a decent person in the face of that understanding."

But they don't. And irrational beliefs will insure that they continue not to. We have, armed and ready to go, enough weaponry to destroy all life on this planet, but we're having a really tought time with a virus we can't even see -- and refuse to behave intelligently in the face of -- and you think that humanity is destined for great things? Armed people are shooting up schools -- even little children -- in the US and nobody can have a rational discussion about gun ownership? And you think humanity is destined for great things?

Well I disagree. And I will continue to disagree as long as people continue to behave as irrationally as they do. And it is religion that will light their way.

I don't see what that has to do with religion. Atheists and anti-theists are also irrational humans. Humanity is definitely screwed up and the world is getting worse, hence why I don't put my faith in humans.

 

[Link]

I don't see what that has to do with religion. Atheists and anti-theists are also irrational humans. Humanity is definitely screwed up and the world is getting worse, hence why I don't put my faith in humans.

It's that he expected if a God exists, guidance to do have done better from Him. It's a pretty strong argument, until, you realize, that God doesn't change a condition of a people unless they change themselves.

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

It's that he expected if a God exists, guidance to do have done better from Him. It's a pretty strong argument, until, you realize, that God doesn't change a condition of a people unless they change themselves.

In which case, what need of God?

 

[Link]

In which case, what need of God?

God helps, guides, doesn't force the change.

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

I don't see what that has to do with religion. Atheists and anti-theists are also irrational humans. Humanity is definitely screwed up and the world is getting worse, hence why I don't put my faith in humans.

And yet, as @Link just suggested, it's only humans that are going to change anything, so your faith seems misplaced. (I remember being taught as a child that "God helps those who help themselves," and thinking, "then why do I need God?" And then when I did help myself, I got punished for it!"

But as "irrational" as non-theists may be, at very minimum we don't chain ourselves to dogmas that we need help remembering. I don't get up in the morning and recite my times-tables. I don't need to recite the "creed of gravity" to know I should step off the roof of a building. I don't DENY the obviousness of sciences like evolution that helps us to understand how viruses can change -- allowing us at least a tiny edge in trying to fight them.

The U.S. is losing its preeminence in science, for the simple reason that religion constantly tries to tear it down. China will own the majority of it in the near future -- probably along with Israel.

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

God helps, guides, doesn't force the change.

Why is he providing no guidance to Muslims in the sciences or peace, or literature? There was a time when Islam saved an absolutely immense amount of the world's knowledge, and yet today, it appears utterly uninterested in knowing anything other than religion.

Jews are 0.2% of the world's population, yet have 21.1% of the Nobel Prizes. Muslims are 24.1% of the world's population, yet have 0.8% of the Nobel Prizes. That difference is utterly astonishing!

 

[Link]

Why is he providing no guidance to Muslims in the sciences or peace, or literature? There was a time when Islam saved an absolutely immense amount of the world's knowledge, and yet today, it appears utterly uninterested in knowing anything other than religion.

Jews are 0.2% of the world's population, yet have 21.1% of the Nobel Prizes. Muslims are 24.1% of the world's population, yet have 0.8% of the Nobel Prizes. That difference is utterly astonishing!

This has to do with history of colonialism. I don't see relevance.

 

[Saint Frankenstein]

And yet, as @Link just suggested, it's only humans that are going to change anything, so your faith seems misplaced. (I remember being taught as a child that "God helps those who help themselves," and thinking, "then why do I need God?" And then when I did help myself, I got punished for it!"

But as "irrational" as non-theists may be, at very minimum we don't chain ourselves to dogmas that we need help remembering. I don't get up in the morning and recite my times-tables. I don't need to recite the "creed of gravity" to know I should step off the roof of a building. I don't DENY the obviousness of sciences like evolution that helps us to understand how viruses can change -- allowing us at least a tiny edge in trying to fight them.

The U.S. is losing its preeminence in science, for the simple reason that religion constantly tries to tear it down. China will own the majority of it in the near future -- probably along with Israel.

Well, I also agree with @Link in that God has provided guidance and has made His will known. We've been told many times by many holy people throughout the millennia about how we should treat each other and how to create a just world. Zoroaster, the Buddha, the Biblical Prophets, Christ, Muhammad, etc. all tried to raise the ethics of humanity compared to the prior situation of their cultures. But we don't listen. We're too busy being greedy, hateful, judgmental and callous.

As for America, we're too busy being raped by the global capitalist cabal to fund things like science. America is close to imploding. All the signs of that are there - the reemergence of racism and tribalism, the rise in suicide rates every year, the explosion of substance abuse and addiction, the epidemic of mental illness and doctors throwing harmful big pharma drugs around like confetti meanwhile things like marijuana which help people in so many ways are kept illegal on the same level as heroin (!), shrinking wages, disappearing jobs (and what jobs are readily available are minimum wage retail and service jobs that go nowhere), more and more people falling into poverty each year, a crumbling infrastructure, etc.

China is an Orwellian nightmare much like the USSR was, except worse due to the technology they have to keep people under control. They don't recognize the dignity of human life and commit many atrocities in the name of "science". Science divorced from morality and ethics is a horror show. Israel is run by bunch of racist warmongers who oppress the Palestinians.

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

Well, I also agree with @Link in that God has provided guidance and has made His will known. We've been told many times by many holy people throughout the millennia about how we should treat each other and how to create a just world. Zoroaster, the Buddha, the Biblical Prophets, Christ, Muhammad, etc. all tried to raise the ethics of humanity compared to the prior situation of their cultures. But we don't listen. We're too busy being greedy, hateful, judgmental and callous.

And yet, have you read any of the posts by atheists on these forums? Have your read atheists philosophers -- none of whom has ever advocated anything but ethical behaviours in how we treat one another? Good heavens, have you read some of what I've written? I'm the one who doesn't even want to allow states to execute people -- and you think that my non-belief in God is somehow detrimental to my ethics?

As for America, we're too busy being raped by the global capitalist cabal to fund things like science. America is close to imploding. All the signs of that are there - the reemergence of racism and tribalism, the rise in suicide rates every year, the explosion of substance abuse and addiction, shrinking wages, disappearing jobs (and what jobs are readily available are minimum wage retail and service jobs that go nowhere), more and more people falling into poverty each year, etc.

That's mostly your own capitalists. They've been shipping jobs to cheap offshore venues for decades, hollowing out America's own manufacturing. And they are the same capitalists that are buying your politicians lock, stock and barrel, too, so it's not going to get any better.

China is an Orwellian nightmare much like the USSR was, except worse due to the technology they have to keep people under control. They don't recognize the dignity of human life and commit many atrocities in the name of "science". Science divorced from morality and ethics is a horror show. Israel is run by bunch of racist warmongers who oppress the Palestinians.

Yes, it is a nightmare -- one that the US helped to nurture by buying more and more of what they wanted to sell, and then borrowing more and more of the money they thus earned back from them, to pay for tax cuts that were always losing propositions.

Again, all of that is available to anybody who would care to look at history with the necessary skeptical eye.

 

[Saint Frankenstein]

And yet, have you read any of the posts by atheists on these forums? Have your read atheists philosophers -- none of whom has ever advocated anything but ethical behaviours in how we treat one another? Good heavens, have you read some of what I've written? I'm the one who doesn't even want to allow states to execute people -- and you think that my non-belief in God is somehow detrimental to my ethics?

That's mostly your own capitalists. They've been shipping jobs to cheap offshore venues for decades, hollowing out America's own manufacturing. And they are the same capitalists that are buying your politicians lock, stock and barrel, too, so it's not going to get any better.

Yes, it is a nightmare -- one that the US helped to nurture by buying more and more of what they wanted to sell, and then borrowing more and more of the money they thus earned back from them, to pay for tax cuts that were always losing propositions.

Again, all of that is available to anybody who would care to look at history with the necessary skeptical eye.

I didn't say your non-belief in God is detrimental to your ethics. Please don't put words in my mouth so you can feel persecuted. Most of those ethics that non-believers in the West follow are filtered down from Western Christian ethics such as a belief in social justice and the dignity and rights of man. You can ask @Vouthon and @Augustus about that as they're better at explaining it and love to talk about it. Lol. Most people just follow the moral/ethical system of the culture they live in regardless of what their personal beliefs are. Even Neopagans who try to reconstruct pre-Christian tribal religions "pretty up" their ethics to make them more in-line with the Christianized societies they live in, despite the fact that the cultures they're channeling had ethics that taught just the opposite.

 

[YoursTrue]

Free to go against His will is freedom to be doomed hinged on a belief of His existence though. If I knew He existed I would know to accept His offer. Since I honestly have no reliable record of Him it strains credulity of the claims.

Straight up, offer me salvation face to face and then explain His morality, and the truth and motivations behind it all. Why the run around? And a thousand different believable roads to choose from?

If I take the Bible at face value I'm seeing a vengeful God, against creatures who barely have enough time to test the winds before they are exterminated. Generations come and go, and all of a sudden doom without any explanation until Jesus.

Hello there, osgart! Some questions here -- first off, as far as the Ten Commandments, we are speaking about the Bible, right? Same with the Noachian Flood, and the plagues of Egypt (killing of the first-born). I just want to make this clear, although there were explanations before Jesus. OK, don't want to get too involved, but what was the explanation with Jesus, since you speak of 'doom without any explanation until Jesus...' (Thanks for your response, by the way. )

 

[osgart]

Hello there, osgart! Some questions here -- first off, as far as the Ten Commandments, we are speaking about the Bible, right? Same with the Noachian Flood, and the plagues of Egypt (killing of the first-born). I just want to make this clear, although there were explanations before Jesus. OK, don't want to get too involved, but what was the explanation with Jesus, since you speak of 'doom without any explanation until Jesus...' (Thanks for your response, by the way. )

Bible is what I am referring to.

Often times God commands his people to kill. Then Jesus comes along and extends mercy. There was no mercy back in the OT. But the NT all of a sudden declares to do it. And that all have sinned and actually need mercy.

 

[YoursTrue]

Our religious texts, from Moses through Mohammed (and possibly others, but I don't care) make one thing absolutely clear: what God truly wants -- IS. They tell us God wanted the heavens and earth, and they therefore happened. That he wanted man, and nothing could stop it.

Oh, and later, that he wanted all the "first born" of Egypt to die -- and they died. This god has such perfect aim that he was able to immediately kill, in one night, every person and every animal in the land of Egypt who was the first out of any womb (and presumably egg, though that's not specifically mentioned. I assume "hatched" is the equivalent of "born"). Or this God wants the whole earth covered with water so that everybody and everything non-aquatic dies, except for a few he decides to save. And it happens.

What God wants to happen, I say again, according to these religions, happens -- and nothing can stop it.

And we are also told that this God wants to be known by us, and to be worshipped, in full apprehension of his nature.

And yet....this doesn't happen! All that we appear to "know" about the nature of God, about how to worship, of what he wants, about how we should behave --- we know from billions of humans running around and arguing vociferously for this view, or that version, or these prayers, ot this set of rules. And we never, ever manage to work it out definitively.

And what's the reason? Because it's US. God doesn't want anything -- because as we know, what God wants, God gets. And this failure of ours to settle on one God, our incessant schismatic fracturing, really ought to be all the proof any thinking person needs that the proposed God simply doesn't exist -- and that that's why the state of our religious bickering is what it is.

From your title of the thread, you say you believe there is proof against the absolute existence of god as described in the Abrahamic religions. First off, I'd like to know if you have a belief in God, Abrahamic or not.

 

[YoursTrue]

Bible is what I am referring to.

Often times God commands his people to kill. Then Jesus comes along and extends mercy. There was no mercy back in the OT. But the NT all of a sudden declares to do it. And that all have sinned and actually need mercy.

OK, thanks for explaining. Let me think about this. But before I go into a deep thinking state -)) I'd like to start with the beginning, because first of all, God the Almighty made it clear to Adam (and Eve) that He had the power of life and death over them, didn't He, since He created them. Let's start there before we get into other waters. <g>
And if we can't go into it in depth now, I'll look forward to a discussion later --

 

[osgart]

OK, thanks for explaining. Let me think about this. But before I go into a deep thinking state -)) I'd like to start with the beginning, because first of all, God the Almighty made it clear to Adam (and Eve) that He had the power of life and death over them, didn't He, since He created them. Let's start there before we get into other waters. <g>
And if we can't go into it in depth now, I'll look forward to a discussion later --

Well there are two opposition's I have to the Bible. One is that the events of the Bible could not have happened. Two is the justice of the Bible.

 

[osgart]

OK, thanks for explaining. Let me think about this. But before I go into a deep thinking state -)) I'd like to start with the beginning, because first of all, God the Almighty made it clear to Adam (and Eve) that He had the power of life and death over them, didn't He, since He created them. Let's start there before we get into other waters. <g>
And if we can't go into it in depth now, I'll look forward to a discussion later --

OK, thanks for explaining. Let me think about this. But before I go into a deep thinking state -)) I'd like to start with the beginning, because first of all, God the Almighty made it clear to Adam (and Eve) that He had the power of life and death over them, didn't He, since He created them. Let's start there before we get into other waters. <g>
And if we can't go into it in depth now, I'll look forward to a discussion later --

I have little problem with Adam & Eve getting expelled from the Garden. They failed the test of heart; fair enough.

I fail to see the justice in having people being born with sinful natures. Why allow that?

And killing first born Egyptians isn't exactly merciful.