I do NOT believe in god

[Stealth3si]

I was
...
having doubts, asking questions, doing research, or being open-minded to what is scientifically observable or logically feasible.
...
The key component to success in discovering the real truth is that you have to...have the ability to look at the facts, evidence, and research objectively and honestly,

Judging from this, and other posts you have made, you seem to be claiming that the basis for all our beliefs needs to be objectively verifiable evidence. My question is simple: Why? Why can emotion and other subjective influences be admitted? In fact, how can they not? It seems to me that you abstracting this too much and making it all universal and objective, which ignores the fact that beliefs are held by people, not by syllogisms.

[Stealth3si]

So either god is an idiot for blaming them for disobeying him before they even knew that disobedience was wrong, or

Ignorance does not equal innocence.

god knew that would happen and did it on purpose as part of his wacko "divine plan", in which case we have HIM to blame for the evils of the world, not Adam and Eve.

Sounds a bit like a schoolgirl who blames her cheating on the teacher because he left the answer sheet on his desk?

[Stealth3si]

...
Why would god, knowing full well what was going to happen anyway, set up an environment where he knew Adam and Eve would fail?  Why would a loving god throw a tree in there that would kill his children?

But the nature of God's foreknowledge is non-causative.

Why did god allow the talking snake to be there?

You can't honestly say that Adam and Eve knew the ramifications of their choice, given you yourself said they did not know what good and evil was yet.

Why didn't he stop all your sins? The simple fact is that humans are given the choice to obey God or rebel against Him. Sometimes people's rebellion hurts others. Why didn't He stop Adam and Eve's rebellion which plunged us all into the state we're in now? Because they had a choice to make, and they made it.

"Well, the Lord said, 'let man choose,' and man did,
There's been sorrow and trouble in the world ever since."
- Rich Mullins

(never mind how obviously preposterous the notion of a talking snake is)

How anyone can believe and at least in principle, fundamentally posit if only for argument's sake, that God exists and is capable of creation ex-nihilo but not stretching the laws of science is beyond me. Even more so, your point is valid only if you're making the Bible into a scientific report about the creation of the world, but it's not. Genesis exists to give the Israelites a better picture of their God as the creator of the universe and was written in a way that they could understand.

God knew what was going to happen, so he set the dominoes in place FOR it to happen.

God's foreknowledge in no way necessitates causation.

[Stealth3si]

....
Why would god, knowing full well what was going to happen anyway, set up an environment where he knew Adam and Eve would fail?..God knew what was going to happen, so he set the dominoes in place FOR it to happen.

....
God did not know Adam and Eve would sin.

This is a decent argument, if we're talking about a God that didn't write the Bible.

I'm not sure how you could interpret any of the prophetic writings if the future is unknowable even to God.

If God had created a world that could not be foreknown, why would He go to the trouble of telling us so many things that would one day happen?

[Stealth3si]

....
Why would god, knowing full well what was going to happen anyway, set up an environment where he knew Adam and Eve would fail?  Why would a loving god throw a tree in there that would kill his children?  Why did god allow the talking snake to be there (never mind how obviously preposterous the notion of a talking snake is)?  God knew what was going to happen, so he set the dominoes in place FOR it to happen.  You can't honestly say that Adam and Eve knew the ramifications of their choice, given you yourself said they did not know what good and evil was yet.  I guess that doesn't matter, though!

Second, God did not know Adam and Eve would sin. They were perfect. His purpose was for them to have offspring and "fill the earth. It was supposed to stay a paradise. When Eve CHOSE to sin. It was her decision. When Adam followed her, he proved that he loved her more than he loved the creator of all things, including himself. We all have the right to choose. Nothing is predestined. Everyone has freewill.  They knew God was their creator and they knew they were suppose to obey him.. but they didn't which led to consequences.

The question is, 'Why do we need to know?' Perhaps it is to satisfy the premise of an abstract philosophical argument, one which some use as a smokescreen to justify their rejection of God and which acts like a floodlight for others, exposing their rejection of God to the core. But for us the question is much more practical and personal: How do I deal with the pain of sin, suffering, and death? Habakkuk asks the question, 'Why does God wait to deliver us?'

Habakkuk 1:13
Your eyes are too pure to approve evil, and You can not look on wickedness with favor. Why do You look with favor on those who deal treacherously? Why are You silent when the wicked swallow up those more righteous than they?

Habakkuk cries out in anguish, entreating God to come quickly to the rescue. Adding to that, the first thing to realize is that God is to be praised no matter the case; God has already gone above and beyond what He had to do, so what is wrong if He allows evil to befall us?

Job 1:21
He said, "Naked I came from my mother's womb, And naked I shall return there. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away. Blessed be the name of the LORD."

Yet God chose to deal decisively with sin and death and bless us, making many promises to us as His people: promises to inherit the world, promises to be vindicated and delivered, promises that He will wipe every tear away from our eyes. And all the promises of God are "Yes" in Christ Jesus; each promise has been signed and sealed with the blood of the Lamb. And the pattern of that Lamb is suffering before glory, humiliation before exaltation, death before life, abandonment before rescue. So here and now we follow in His footsteps, but God's salvation waits ready to be revealed at just the right time. So we look past the perishable suffering of today and unto the imperishable life of tomorrow, and we can trust in God's promise absolutely because it has been declared to all mankind when He raised our Lord from the dead.

Romans 8:35-39
35 Who will separate us from the love of Christ ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword ?
36 Just as it is written, "FOR YOUR SAKE WE ARE BEING PUT TO DEATH ALL DAY WE WERE CONSIDERED AS SHEEP TO BE SLAUGHTERED."
37 But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us.
38 For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels , nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers,
39 nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

[Stealth3si]

I don't mean to be offensive when I say this, but it is a situation similar to doctors looking in on patients who have mental illnesses.  The patients are convinced that what they are experiencing is real, but the doctors who can see reality and have dozens of medical studies to back their claims can clearly observe that the patients are delusional

Why didn't you say you believe doctors??   There's a doctor that has had patients become clinically dead...and then come back.  While stories of people who die and "see a bright light" are very common, there aren't very many people that want to admit they went to hell like these people did, and the doctor documented it all and put it in his books.  His book and video link:To Hell and Back, a study of NDE/OBE Near Death Experiences by
Dr. Maurice Rawlings, MD, http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8149875636555097567#    (The video is really long but for some reason the thing just stops at 44:19 minutes, I tried to get it to play a few times with no luck.)  

I also know there is a God, I have seen, I have heard, I have felt, I have experienced! You will say "examples please", do I really need to go through everything just so you can say there is a reason unrelated to God.

I'm guessing your referring to your "mental" experiences that you've talked about numerous times in this forum...but as I've posted several pages back in this thread, I've "experienced god" in a mentally unhealthy way, too.  Like I thought god was talking to me on the radio; I saw angels; I thought I was already dead and could decide to go to heaven or go back to Earth; and I thought I had to crucify myself like Jesus by stabbing myself in the heart...scary sh*t.  The reality was none of this was "god" but instead by mind/body malfunctioning due to a virus and being extremely underweight.

God speaks to us through His Word. I'm weary of people's claims that God is speaking to them today, and I'm skeptical when people attribute God's hand to natural events.

Both of your concerns and experiences here seem more about Christians than Christianity itself.

[Stealth3si]

Oh and I will always rely on the bible instead of man-made philosophy, it's a snare that's easy for anyone to fall in it's probably Satan's greatest trap.

There's nothing wrong with education, however too much time away learning in Satan's world could get you mixed up in philosophy.[/b]

...500 years ago, ... the house-arrest of Galileo due to his findings not aligning with the bibles philosophy.

Not really.

[Stealth3si]

Christians are atheists, too, when it comes to Zeus, Ra, Vishnu, Allah, Krishna, etc. etc.

Not only does this sound like Dawkins fundieism, it is irrelevant to what "religion" or "atheism" really is, as it is more of a strawman and conflation from a bad form of debating than anything else.

The Bible says the earth is flat,

...the Bible also says the earth is flat...

The bible doesn't say that. Neither scripture or history implies this. Citation?

[Stealth3si]

It's obvious to any critical thinker that the Bible was written by scared, primitive, Bronze Age men and therefore should not be regarded as anything but a work of fiction.

Any critical thinker would see that statement as misinformation.

[Stealth3si]

Hell is mentioned in my bible

That's because the translators but the word hell where Sheol(hebrew) and Hades(Greek) is supposed to be. As for hellfire the Greek word for that is Gehenna. None of these words have the Greek meaning for hell so essentially if you take out the Greek meaning for hell you get common grave of mankind.

Bait and switch exegesis. The word for Hell has been translated variously dependant on the language in which it was translated into.

[Stealth3si]

I'm not sure how many people have seen this, but I'll post it. Carl Sagan wrote this. It has somewhat of a tie-in to what people are saying here.

It's hard to trust a man like Sagan who held to a criteria just like his opponents did but chose not to follow through.

[Stealth3si]

In science we are star DUST in the bible we are Dust from the ground. Logically the Star DUST had to settle on the ground. How could these stupid people, you call them know how to pin point what we are?

...the Bible also says...rabbits chew their cud (when they don't).

Actually that bit of scripture is not false. There is a certain rabbit in the part of the world they were in (and probably other parts also  ,) which eats its own dung to gather nutrients, and the Israelites saw that as chewing the cud. So they didn't actually think that since the rabbit appears to chew constantly that it is chewing cud, but rather they felt that since it ate it's own dung it was technically doing the same thing.

[Falconer02]

It's hard to trust a man like Sagan who held to a criteria just like his opponents did but chose not to follow through.

I never implied anything about the person. I just quoted what he stated about how miniscule our world is. I thought it would be of interest for people to see/read.

Edit: Btw good to see your head pop up again.

[queenofnines]

Christians didn't invent God. The credibility of your argument falls as the IPD does not share this commonality with God. Your thinking fails when you debate using a false "given". God is not akin to invisible dragons or unicorns. They have absolutely no backing.

Yes, Christians didn't invent god.  Humans did.  Humans have invented gods throughout all history - way before the Christians - that's pretty obvious.  Humans invent god(s) for evolutionary reasons (to explain things, to overcome pointless-ness and fear of death).  There you have it.

Prove empiricism, as the claim that we are limited to empirical methods, and your claim that the possibility for god is virtually non-existent according to empiricism may have some purpose.

For one who is tossing around debate terms against me so as to sound intelligent, I'm sure you've heard that it is the believers making the claim for god that are required to provide "proof".  That is absolutely ludicrous for you to say that everything we as humans have to show evidence for/against god isn't good enough.  If someday there is tangible, observable evidence for god, we'll have to reexamine our position.  But for now there is not, and god should be able to stand up to hard scrutiny if he really existed, don't you think?

It appears to me that through most of your posts you have accounted for this proposition by the links and TUH that you have provided by appeal to authority (never mind that this is a logical fallacy.)  So your argument that the utter lack of evidence in favor of God's existence is enough proof to support atheism is basically, if we already think that atheism is right, then we can conclude that atheism is right?  This is not very convincing.

Um, your own debate-speak is working against you right here.  You lead me to assume that you don't know what you're talking about and are only trying to "sound smart".  Please don't throw around terms like "appeal to authority" and "logical fallacy" unless they can actually stand up!!

My "appeals to authority" are examples of other intelligent individuals who address many things that people easily overlook, but by the powers of logic and rationale, can be known to be true and accurate.  And as I've said earlier in this thread, lack of evidence for god was NOT good enough for me personally when I was first an atheist.  I now know that there are hundreds of points AGAINST the Christian god specifically (me being an American and all, he's the relevant one), which solidifies my position.

[fredlee1]

Everyone has different beliefs, whether in God or in something else. I myself believe in God, I believe there will be a time in your life were you are going to want to believe God exist. These are troubling times so I pray you find your journey to God, because if you believe in peace, & love that is what God is all about.