"Whether God exists or does not exist, He has come to rank among the most sublime and useless truths." (Denis Diderot, 1746)
Dear Believers, prove your god or gods is/aren't just fiction(s).
Here's a question I
once asked an atheist↗—
Are you aware of the recent bit about a woman who is "covered in Jesus' blood"↱? It's kind of an astonishing—Poe's Law come to life—video. Her circular reasoning and changing of subjects aren't unfamiliar maneuvers, and one need not be covered in His blood to play those games. But when it comes to "the point where their unsupported beliefs start having detrimental impacts on other people"↗, yeah, actually, I'm not looking forward to figuring out how to get through to her or her congregation, but perhaps you might explain just how it is you think asking her to submit to your judgment per mocking, fallacious, self-satisfying criteria, will do anything useful toward attending the harms she might bring to herself or others?
Yeah, it's probably still merely an opinion that treating people like that with such determined disrespect only entrenches many of them more deeply in their beliefs, but please do give us your opinion on how bullshitting them like the arrogant, relativist, amoral atheistic stereotype they prejudicially expect will magically (see what I did, there?) accomplish what useful outcome.
Still, even the less insane will only tolerate ignorant, self-satisfying mockery for so long. What do you really think you're accomplishing?
—and it's true, these years later, I never did get a response.
Faith is not a response to that, it's a dodge. We've had several thousand years for such proof to be found and so far, nada.
But here you're asking for proof of something you can't even describe. And that's the tricky part: At some point, you must settle on a god, whereupon you are now arguing about
a god.
The thing is that "God" is just a word. Even presuming an active, living monotheistic godhead, It is, necessarily, quite literally infinite. No religious person who tries to answer your question will fail to be wrong, and the wise among them already know this, because among those several thousand years are at least a few hundred in which atheists such as yourself have failed to comprehend what they're dealing with.
Let me be clear, though: This manner of atheistic rhetoric ought to be inconsequential, except that's sort of the problem. Playing word games while asking people to prove "their" god exists according to "your" description and standards just hasn't done anything useful over the course of these last thirty or so years; its only accomplishment is entrenchment.
Practical application: Demanding that Quaker, right there, answer for that Southern Baptist over yonder is simply asking them to answer for your own imagination, as such. As the one is a Quaker, they probably won't hold it against you, but they will, because they are human, log another memory of belligerent atheistic nonsense. Any Lutheran, Episcopal, Catholic, &c., within earshot will probably be a little more judgmental. By the time you get to nonsectarian Christianist community churches, megachurches, and the new churches of identity politic—you know, the identity and nationalist ministries rising specifically because the more established churches, even Moethodist, are insufficiently self-satisfying—all you're doing is provoking people of faith and convincing them of your mean spirit.
†
Meta-analysis: The first thing is that it's hard to know what God means to any believer compared to any other. More applicably, though, many and perhaps most evangelical atheists don't seem to distinguish betweeen godheads when considering different sects of Christianity, and that's just for instance. They don't seem to make much of the differences between the Abramic iterations other than to blindly complain that religious people don't all believe the same thing. Beyond that, diverse religious paradigms have fundamentally different outlooks on what is divine, &c. Consider that such demands as the thread title have no meaning to Sufis (associated with Islam), Buddhists (widely diverse), or Taoists (a joke on Buddhism).
Here's a line from
over four years ago↗:
• If there is no Nisqually angel of three o'clock in the afternoon on Wednesday, it does not seem so much to hope the reasons why are apparent.
Another, from
not quite four years ago↗:
• Here is a contrast: Existential questions of life and death, purpose and meaning, to the one, and, What day is it? to the other. Most religious people's focus has to do with daily life.
That is to say, there comes a point at which your expectations of religious people are entirely your own. Most people don't put that much thought into foundational questions that feel so far removed from daily practice. Voters, for instance. Some overwhelming majority of American specialty dieting. It's kind of like the difference between a psychoanalyst and a "life coach", between addressing an important question and habituating oneself to not ask.
It's one thing if you might want the faithful to give it a little more thought, but at some point there just isn't much difference between that and asking them to convert to your religion.
Again: At some point, your inquisition must settle on a god to discuss, whereupon you are arguing about
a god, and, such as this thread goes, that is
your God, not theirs.
And, honestly, Gojirasa, at Sciforums it's twenty-five years later, even longer over the course of some of our lives; you're beating a dead horse as if there is some necromancy that will bring it back to life so you can kill it again. Nobody who actually does this routine really believes some Christian is going to roll over and convert if you talk down to them enough; the whole point is about having someone to talk down at.
And it's like that one guy who never answered; he's just this atheist, y'know, but if he and I actually have common ground, such as "the point where their unsupported beliefs start having detrimental impacts on other people", as he once put it, then his actual behavior is counterproductive. He's not the only one; insofar as he's just an example, he happens to be someone who left a record.
While we can't let a small pocket of evangelical atheists at a backwater website define an entire idea, it is also true there isn't some secret corpus of extraordinarily insightful contemporary atheistic analysis kept hidden away as evangelists turn around to deliver performative pabulum in public.
Reaching back, say, fifty years, we might observe that two-bit atheistic evangelism just isn't up to the job. It's like the
thread↗ in which someone asks, "Do religious people matter in America?" and is variously reminded that religious people are in charge. And when we take a moment to consider the
new Christian spirit↗ that has taken power in the House and seeks to hold the entire government, it should at some point become clear that the usual childsplay just isn't getting the job done.
Looking back over the time of Sciforums, we can only wonder what evangelical atheists thought they were accomplishing. I mean, you know, other than the smug satisfaction of believing they have found an occasion when certain otherwise undignified behavior is somehow acceptable.
It's one thing to
hand atheists tools↗ for dealing with this kind of religion, but it seems to
confuse↗ and
distress↗ them. (It's not uncommon, and, sure, it's not just atheists, but when some part of a discussion
exceeds comprehension↗,
some folks feel uncomfortable↗.)
Here's a version from a
couple years ago↗:
It's like the old song: How do you solve a problem like re-li-gion? And, sure, the answer is, you don't, but more usefully, restore God to Its realm of sublime and useless mysteries. This can be a complicated, and even difficult process, but the basic gist is straightforward enough: Where you, me, and the proverbial next guy all agree there is a problem about religion, one way to change course is to move the focus of religious discourse away from the problematic range. That is, instead of running after religious zealots, make them catch up to others. How many times can we come back to the point about not letting people we know are wrong set the terms of discussion; consider a period running over forty years in which people seem to be disputing over the wrong question↑.
And it's not like you do any better when
someone else↗ writes the setup. Other than taking satisfaction, what is it you think threads like this accomplish?
