I have absolute proof that there is no God.

[seeker]

I've just seen in our local paper that a little girl who lives in our town has died. She has been the focus of much prayer since she was taken ill last year. Her parents were thoroughly good Christian people who trusted God absolutely.

The is no way that a loving, omnipotent, beneficent God who notes even a sparrow falling would not have answered these people's prayer.

So, if I had even a scintilla of doubt, it is now gone. There is no God.

Holo,

Translation errors was only one of my issues with the bible. There are plenty of translation errors which are latched onto by Christians as FACT which are quite the opposite. For example, the translation of the word "Virgin" when it should have been "Young Woman".

Regarding limb regrowth. I am pretty confident that if someone were to be limbless and say "I am going to pray to god for it to regrow within 24 hours", and the next day the limb grew back, then I would be pretty convinced (as long as I could inspect it before and after to confirm the evidence (these things need to be timebound and measurable. The problem is, prayers never "work" like this. Someone will pray for a new limb, and then if in 25 years after some medical advances such that limbs can be regrown in the lab and surgically attached, then there will be a load of wackos saying "We prayed for it and it happened - it is a miracle!". Clearly they would be idiots.

Sciencelover said: If the Bible is irrelevant to this discussion, than it is completely irrelevant to question the existence of God or the divinity of Christ based on the Bible.

I agree with you, that is why I said that that it is pointless quoting from it, and that we should just stick to the facts. It is quite clear that I could find quotes in the bible that undermine the religious view of god (e.g sections that encourage first child sacrifice), but it still doesn't prove anything, because I am just quoting unreliable and unsubstantiated text back at you.

Asking how 'you know it hasn't happened' is again, reverse thinking.

And if a limb were to re-grow how could anyone know which god was responsible?

By the way, I am not claiming that the bible can't be used to help us understand history, because it quite clearly documents historic events. It is just that we can't claim the document as reliable for working out the cause of those events, and that they do not prove the existence of a god.

The example of the translation error regarding the word "virgin" is a perfect example, because this has been misused throughout history to claim that god created a miracle and is the father of Jesus (purely based upon the interpretation of the word maiden or maid). This (with one simple word) brings a huge amount of uncertainty to one of the largest supernatural claims of the church.

You will no-doubt claim that I am talking rubbish, but you have to look at it like this: If an event occurs (e.g. someone gets pregnant) and there is a supernatural claim for how it happened, and a very plausible non-supernatural claim for how it happened, then we can be almost certain that the non-supernatural claim is going to be correct - in this case, it is far more likely that someone had sex with Mary. If you have watched Jeremy Kyle, you will have seen such claims in modern claims .

"Seeker - how do you know that hasn't happened? And if a limb were to re-attach, would you ascribe that to God, or to freak event which science hasn't yet got the words for, goes to show the power of the human mind etc etc? Honest answer please"

You are joking about not knowing if it had already happened, aren't you?

And if I saw it happening, with my own eyes and there was absolutely no possibility of trickery and it immediately followed somebody praying for it to happen, then yes I would probably believe. By the way, if anyone was thinking of it,please don't use the leg lengthening thing as evidence. I ca tell you how that's done.

Occam's Razor, as ever, applies.

Amillion - going back to the subject we were on yesterday. Iirc the upshot was that sometimes Christians will have trouble because they have made poor decisions.

The thinking pattern you're using is known as the 'just world hypothesis' in psychology. We want to think the world is fair so we utilise these thinking patterns to deal with the blatant unfairness of life.

I can't imagine how difficult it must be to confide in people at the church about personal problems if that is the logic behind suffering.

How does logic relate to non Christians who lead healthy happy lives? Or christians who are suffering right now due to war and disease all over the world. Your way of thinking calls to mind the 2006 study on the effects of prayer on heart op patients. The findings were that there were no benefits seen in be patients who were prayed for.

What was interesting was that there were more complications in the recovery of those who knew they were being prayed for. It has been suggested that the cause for this may be that those patients felt guilty that the prayer wasn't working and initially hid concerning symptoms from the Drs.

I would not wish to be part of a community that felt all my struggles were evidence of God's displeasure with me and/or personal failure. How awful! How desperately isolating. What about people who are unable to make wise decisions because of learning difficulties or mental health issues or upbringing.

Seeker - not quite a reattached limb, but someone is claiming on the other thread that they know a girl who prayed and her self harm scars disappeared. I'm guessing it would be bad form to discuss that here though (wouldn't it?) and you may not want your head bitten off over there again (though of course if god then reattached it that would indeed be a miracle....).

Yeah I saw that. I was a bit at the poster's wording saying something like how the scars disappeared and the girl was left with clean pure skin. Scars are dirty?

Seeker, which god / goddess would you then believe in? How would you choose? How about you, TechnoDad - if you witnessed an irrefutable miracle, what beliefs would you embrace to make sense of it? How would you acquie such beliefs - reading, talking to religious leaders (would you visit representatives of all religions?), making them up for yourself?

TechnoDad - yes, the Isaiah / Matthew thing is a classic issue in biblical interpretation. What Isaiah meant was not the same as what Matthew meant. Hebrew Bible scholars tend to say that what Isaiah was talking about was proablby an event in his own lifetime (not foretelling the birth of Jesus). But....the NT writers do this all the time with the OT - they get from it more meaning than was intended originally. You could say 'Well that's Matthew / whoever bending the text out of all shape to make it fit the Christian worldview' - or you could say 'these words had a power and longevity which their original speakers weren't aware of' - in my life, people have said things to me that have gone on to hold a much greater meaning than the original speakers have ever known. Am I 'wrong' to find new meaning in something that someone said when 20 years ago? If so, wrong by what lights?

One theologian calls this a 'surplus of meaning' in words - there's a load of literary / linguistic work done on how meaning is constructed, how meaning develops etc etc. Of course, if you read the Bible in a very barely factual, accountant-like, the columns all have to tally up way, you're not going to accept that. Without wishing to patronise or offend anyone, IMO one of the big problems with both fundamentalist Christians and atheists is that it often doesn't occur to them that the Bible has various genres within it, and much internal development, and although it has historical value and provenance, its writers were not, and could not have been, historians in the modern sense (the modern idea of history along the lines of Geoffrey Elton is very much an Enlightenment thing, and even with that, many contemporary historians think it is a pipe-dream that we can accurately gain an all-embracing , bird's eye view superknowledge of the past). Therefore to say that Matthew messes with Isaiah is judging the Bible by wholly artificial, reductive, distorting standards. I'm sure we've had this discussion before on here!

I think the quickest way that those of us who do not believe in the god of one ancient text is to ask the believer of that text to explain why they don't believe in the god of a different ancient text. Holo could you explain why you don't believe the words in the Koran for example?

But Technodad's point about confusion over how Mary got pregnant is absolutely fundamental to Christianity.

That's a really good question, headinhands, as the christian god was developed out of the hebrew god, by a class that was being persecuted in god's name. Then the same happened with the moslem god. If this god exists, it is all the same god being recast by different people.

Garlicnuts, yes, absolutely. sorry if I was unclear. What I meant to say was, Isaiah meant one thing. Matthew meant another. Maybe they were both right.

Head in hands, from what I've read of the Koran there is much truth and wisdom in it. From my Christian POV though, it doesn't say the central thing that I believe, which is that Jesus is God. I've always been a Christian, but to stay Christian has always been a conscious choice, and a I think at the heart of it is a deep conviction of the utter uniqueness of Jesus.

holo I asked why you don't believe the Koran is the word of God not so much why you are a Christian. How are you able to read the Koran and say 'nah, they're making it up'.

So, Holo, because a book doesn't tell you what you have already chosen to believe, you discount it? Scientists everywhere are groaning in despair right now.

On an unrelated note, I don't believe that Harry Potter is a Muggle. This view is supported by the holy books of the same name and thus I believe everything they say (and there's no internal discrepancies either... which is nice).

Head in hands, you misread my post. I didn't say that they are making it up. What an odd conclusion to draw from what I actually said!

Pedro, now you're touching (rather rudely) on the issue of where we find truth. Religious truths are not like scientific ones. If scientific truths are the only ones we are prepared to accept, that will obviously shape our lives and define the boundaries of how we think. We've definitely had this conversation on here before, ad infinitum! :)

Also re the virgin / young woman thing: NB between the writings of Isaiah and Matthew, about 700 - 800 years elapsed. Kingdoms rose and fell, the Hellenisation of the world happened, so languages changed too - so we are looking at texts written in two completely different languages (isaiah in Hebrew, Matthew in Koine Greek). As we generally agree now, gender is as much a cultural / social construct as a biological one, so is it not obvious that the words used in these two contexts will be different? if in 800 years, if someone wants to describe a young woman, who knows what words might be meaningful by then? The word 'teenager' only goes back a comparatively short time. So the Isaiah / Matthew thing is an obvious effect of the cultural and linguistic development within the Bible. All the stuff about the surplus of meaning still stands.

Holo

Yes, we have had this particular debate before and you refused to give a direct answer to a direct question last time too.

1. I stated there are translation errors in the bible which is just one of many reason to not trust the bible as a factual account to prove the existence of god.

2. You said there weren't and asked for an example.

3. I answered your request directly and gave you and example and explained that it was significant and undermined the bible.

4. You blahed on randomly, skirting around the evidence picking out other bits of potentially floored data to reinforce your POV.

Can you please give some direct answers:

1. Why is the maid/maiden issue not potentially a translation error?

2. Why doesn't the question hanging over this translation, risk undermining the entire Christian story?

3. Since this is just one of thousands of areas where the bible does not match the likely reality, how can we trust it's content to prove the existence of god?

Thanks

Pesto, got to go in a min but your little line about 'internal discrepancies' suggests that you read the bible like a dossier of evidence in a legal case. Umm... You do know that it ws written by many people in different languages, over centuries, don't you? Think of it more as a family archive and it does make more sense.

TechnoDad, got to go out but read my post re the time /culture / language lapse, think about what gender is and then I'll post later. Like I said, if you regard any Christian POV as random bletherinfs, there's not much point in my wasting my time posting as you'll already have decided on the types of evidence you're prepared to accept.

While I am completely irreligious, there is a breath-taking arrogance in claiming to have solved what is pretty much the foremost philosophical question of all time.

holo sorry the speech marks weren't me trying to mis quote you. I meant it generically as in the up shot of what a non-Muslim thinks on reading it. I appreciate there are historically verifiable facts in the Koran/Bible etc but you have ascribed a divine element to the Bible that you haven't to the Koran and I wondered how you decided that the Koran was not divinely inspired.

think about what gender is - Holo, I may be being very thick, but don't get your point. I'm going to have to ask simple questions:

Was Mary a girl?
Was Mary a virgin (ie, someone who hadn't had sex) at the time she got pregnant?
Did Mary give birth (vaginally) to Jesus?

Thank you.

Yellow raincoat.

Who said it was solved? I just said that the bible is not proof of the existence of god and that it is unreliable data.

I am quite happy to not have the answers, since I completely respect the answer "we don't know" as the only truthful answer available.

I was talking about the OP.