DreamSlayer said:
The "example" uses language that makes the group sound dumb for what they believe in. The "example" puts people down for believing as a group.
The "example" itself is hypocritical.
How is it hypocritical? To be hypocritical is to say you have beliefs, feelings or virtues that you don't really have. The example makes the Santa people look dumb to show believers what it feels like to be in a world full of dumb people. Santa is used because the religous people in this world are likely to think that Santa is not real. The example is an analogy drawing a parallel between Santa and the Christian god.
If the "example" simply said - Christians often put others down for not believing, or, often express their views in ways that can make people feel hurt, and they should stop, I would have agreed with you.
However, the "example" bashes large faith groups for thier beliefs, not just thier actions.
I think the writer of the example is using an extreme analogy to draw and keep people's attenion. It bashes groups for both their beliefs and actions that result from those beliefs.
You've researched all religions and know that none have any proof that they are right?
Impressive.
I haven't found any that have evidence that they are right. The default position is to not believe until a religion shows the evidence. All of the ones I have come cross so far claim to be the right one, but haven't given evidence.
agreed. The problem is we are limited by our understanding, and our own interpretation. A simpler example would have been:
If God is all powerful, can he create an object he can't lift?
If God is all powerful, can he make himself not exist?
Because people use the word "Omni-anything" You have assumed that there are no boundries or parameters.
If God is all Good, and all powerful, Can God Lie?
If a God exists, do not assume you can understand all of that being. If a God exists, you must accept that there will be asspects that will escape human logic.
How do you know that there
must be aspects of gods that are unknownable to us?
Things like gods making a rock it can't lift are meaningless because these situtions are logically impossible. Omnipotence is about being able to do any logically possible things. It does not include doing logically impossible things.
This is from here
So do not believe in a God, because humans make mistakes and contridictions?
It is said that the Christian god wrote or inspired the bible. If the bible was so important to the religion, the god should have ensured the writings and all future writings keep their original meanings. Yet, the bible went through many copyings and translations and later versions are different from earlier versions. There are whole web sites about the contradictions found in the bible. If the bible was so important, god should have been able to make sure that nobody would find anything that was or even looked like a contradiction.
People do alot of things to try and better themselves. God does not exist because people fail at an atempt? is not the process the point? I strive at something, but if there is a chance of failure, the attempt should not be taken?
If the process is the point and if religions are supposed to make their believers good, all of them should end their process at the same place, the heaven or other good place the religion has. What about the bad places like hell? The people in heaven and hell have finished the process of life. If they're in hell, religion had failed to prevent that.
Do you understand the word "spiritual"? by it's very deffinition, it is something that can not be proven physically. Do you believe in love? It can not be proven. Chemical reactions within the human body to specific stimuli that result in a feeling/emotion, does not constitute love, otherwise we would all be in love with the samethings.
It has no Physical properties. Anything "Spiritual" by definition, would have NO physical properties.
How the environment affects chemical reactions in the body varies with each person, making them be in love with different things. People could have different memories of when they were first in love. Then they'd have different triggers for feeling in love.
If spiritual things cannot be physically detected, then how do you know if you're talking with a god? They've
found that temporal lobe epilepsy is associated with being very religious. They made people have religious feelings by using magnetic fields on their temporal lobes. Maybe people with that condition helped to develop religions, which lasted beyond those people's lifetimes as social and belief systems. An example is Ellen White who got her head hurt and then began to have religous feelings and became one of the founders of the Seventh Day Adventist movement.
So it looks like it could be things happening in the head, rather than things from the spiritual world. A principle named Occam's razor is used. Out of a set of explainations that can explain something, the explaination that assumes the least is often the best. We have explainations that only refer to physical things like the brain and explainations that refer to spiritual things like god. Occam's razor cuts away the spiritual world because so far, things in the physical world had been enough. Through the ages, as we learned more about the physical world, the domains where god is invoked had grown smaller.
There are people who say that if something does not have physical characteristics, then it's meaningless to consider it as real. It might as well not exist.
If the possibility of a God exists, which it does;
and if his purpose was for individuals to believe in him not by proof, but out of faith;
and if there was a consequence for not believing;
then there would be no harm in believing. In fact, there would be harm in not believing.
As the old quote goes.
If I believe and you don't, and we die, what difference will it make if you are right?
If I believe and you don't, and we die, it will make an eternity of difference if I am right.
This is known as
Pascal's Wager. It assumes that either the Christian god exists and sends people to a heaven or a hell or that no gods exist. It does not account for other possilities.
The wager does not account for the possibility that there is a God or gods who, rather than behaving as stated in certain parts of the Bible, instead reward(s) skepticism and punish(es) blind faith, or reward(s) honest reasoning and punish(es) feigned faith, or does not punish belief or disbelief at all.
How do you know if the god in question is really the Christian god? It could be Allah, Santa or Cthulhu who would punish you for believing in the Chistian god instead of them.
It also assumes that there are no costs resulting from belief. That includes time and money. Belief could cost you if your beliefs prevent you from accepting things like evolution that would have helped you to discover things. The page also uses the example of JW's not accept blood transfusions. If there were no gods, they'd die needlessly.
There are also people who say that people who believe just in case there is really a god or gods to stay out of trouble don't have true belief.
A "God" who would make a universe without "evil" but only "neutral" and "good", but knows that the possibility of "evil" could have existed, has just robbed you of a choice you could have made.
A "God" who robs you of a choice is a Tyrant.
A "God" who forces you to do only good is a Tyrant, with Robots as servants.
The fact that you judge any action as "evil" with no basis of contrast makes me wonder why you think there is "evil" in the world? What makes one action "evil" and one action "good"?
That assumes that this universe has all choices made available to us. Maybe there could be types of actions other than good, neutral, evil and those in between, but the god haven't designed the universe to allow for those actions. We won't know about those types of actions by design. Maybe we got robbed of an infinite number of possible types of actions. Taking away evil isn't that much more. The people in the universe designed not to have evil won't be robots programmed to do good. They'd still have the choice of being boring and neutral or good. They won't know about evil, so being robbed of evil won't matter to them like it doesn't matter to us that there could be types of actions we don't know about because of them not being designed into this universe.
Different people have different ideas of what good and evil are. Here are mine: Good is something that aids something. Evil is something that hurts something. An action can have degrees of both because there are multiple things in the universe and it is possible for actions to affect more than one thing in different ways. I consider humanity important, so I try to do actions that help and not hurt humanity. It is difficult to know for sure how much your actions help or hurt things because of the large number of things and connections between things with processes operating over many different timescales.
For example, it might be good for someone to give someone else a ride home. It is good to the one who got the lift, but it could be considered evil because it adds pollution to the air and is therefore a small evil action against everybody who breathes that air.
A teacher in my high school told us we didn't have to say the pledge if we didn't want to. In my senior year, we had the pledge in the middle of the morning and sometimes, I'd continue my class work without saying it. Hey, I'm getting an education, why can't that be good for the country? 
I don't understand the point of this topic? Why judging those who have different faith? I am so tired of people being harassed because of their faith. If you have notice that United States gave us a freedom to choose what religious we want to follow, a choice of free religious expression. There are so many type of religions out there such as Christianity, Bubbhism, Atheist, Jewish, Catholic, Judaism, Jehovah's Witness, Protestant and etc. We should not impose our religious on anybody else. We should welcome all religious and accept all prayers. We shouldn't tolerate one another, but to respect one another. That's why I keep my faith to myself. I believe in God and I also believe in Jesus. I don't go around judging others for their believes. Even if we have our disagreements in religious, that doesn't give us a right to compare each other's faiths and briefs.