That atheist's conclusion seems reasonable enough to me: if a God worth his salt wanted to get a message to all of humanity, wouldn't he be able to do it efficiently?
Who said that God did not do it efficiently? The fact that most people do not accept the messenger or the message had NOTHING to do with God. It is ALL about people, who have the free will to choose what to believe.
If a new kid shows up on the block and all the other kids don’t like him because he is new and has some new ideas they never heard of before, so they feel threatened, how is the new kid to blame for that?
It's certainly a worse track record than many religions that I'm confident you would agree are human creations.
No, not really. The Baha’i Faith had spread to over 250 countries within the first 100 years, almost as many countries as Christianity is located in now. The goals were to spread geographically, not numerically. All the goals set forth by the Baha’i Faith administration have been accomplished to date. Sure sounds to me as if a God is behind it.
The growth rates of the Abrahamic religions from 1910-2010 were as follows: Judaism .11%, Christianity 1.32%, Islam 1.97%, and Baha’i Faith 3.54%.
Statistics from:
Growth of religion - Wikipedia
Is slow growth a sign that a religion is true?
I never said it was a sign that a religion is true. But it is also not a sign that a religion is false. There is no correlation between truth and growth. To imply that is to assume that people are capable of recognizing truth or that what they believe determines what is true.
In
argumentation theory, an
argumentum ad populum (
Latin for "
appeal to the people") is a
fallacious argument that concludes that a
proposition is true because many or most people believe it: "If many believe so, it is so."
Argumentum ad populum - Wikipedia
The converse of this is that
if many or most people do not believe it, it cannot be so, and that is fallacious. For example, there was a time in history when most people did not believe man could fly in the air, but most people were wrong, as we found out later after airplanes were invented.
But some people are convinced, right?
True. So it might behoove people to ask those people why they were convinced, if they want to know.
And if the message was more convincing, more people would be convinced, no?
No, because it is not the message that is the problem, it is the people who do not “like” the message for whatever reason. As I said, one reason is because it is very new and quite radical, but the main reason is because
84 percent of the world population has a faith and most of those people are attached to what they believe and believe it is the only truth from God.
If the message is true, why can't God overcome these difficulties and get people to recognize the truth?
Every day, people are convinced of new ideas that were diametrically opposed to old ideas. Why is God incapable of doing this?
Because God does not intervene with human free will and make people recognize the truth or try to convince them new ideas are better than old.
Because we find the case for God utterly unconvincing. A better case for God would convince more non-believers.
I do not know how anyone could make a better case than Baha’u’llah made. It sure convinced me, and I was not a believer before that.
Because the Baha'i message doesn't reach many people and those who do hear it usually find it uncompelling?
That is partly true, the Baha’i Faith does not reach as many people as it should because the Baha’is are too busy doing other activities. It is also true that many people do not find it compelling, not unless they believe in the oneness of mankind and care about the destiny of the human race. The Baha’i Faith is not a religion aimed at the salvation individuals as was Christianity; it is about the salvation of the human race.
