Is it so wrong of me to delight in the pleasure of reading truly terrible and infantile articles trying to “prove” the existence of God? Even though the arguments never change, I still delight in reading the faithful drone on and on about just how real God is, despite the fact that they themselves readily admit to his imperviousness to falsifiability.
What I find fascinating is just how adamant religionists are in arguing that the act of believing requires no proof, even when they themselves try to justify their own beliefs. Their mental gymnastics never ceases to amaze me; take this hilarious article written by a well meaning Christian trying in vain to defend his belief in God:
Non-believers say they need PROOF that God exists and without it they cannot subject themselves to believing in what they call a “fictional” God. My argument for this is Love. We have no proof that love exists yet we think very highly of it. People live their entire lives looking and searching for love yet it is a feeling that cannot be proven to be concrete… There are a lot of things in life that can’t be proven but we still believe in them.
Uh, actually, we do know that the emotion “love” is entirely a product of the brain; it’s not some ethereal emotion that can’t be explained by science. But wait, there’s more:
But for those people who need some sort of proof, here you go. First of all let’s look at the Bible. The Bible speaks of and passes on stories about God, his deeds, and his son. Why would a group of real people choose to make up elaborate and extensive stories of a fictional character? [Jake's notes: "Do we really need to answer this question??!!"] They have made no financial profit off of their works and have no other reason to make up these stories. Not only can most of these characters in the Bible be proven and are known to be true but the most influential and important person in the Bible, Jesus, God’s son, is known to be a real person. So most of the Bible can be proven and thus agreed with…
So you don’t need proof at all to believe in God, but the Bible still proves it’s all true! Right. It rather inconsequential that he’s completely mistaken about the supposed historical reliability of the Old and New Testament; this is exactly the kind of weird “talking out of both sides of their mouths” responses that have become a stable of religious apologetics. One minute they are telling you that proof is unnecessary, and the next they’re trying to convince you of the historical and even scientific accuracy of their beliefs. It’s further evidence that we ALL need to have some form of proof to believe in something, even if we don’t all have the same standard for just how accurate it has to be.



Tue, Mar 2, 2010
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