Your eternal destination: you decide.

One thing that modern science has taught us is that if there is a god, he is an amazingly cleaver and inventive individual. The specters of galaxies, cosmic nebulas, elementary particle interactions, and life on earth as we know it leave us in awe. The suggestion that such a being would want to surround himself for all eternity with mumbling, chanting, genuflecting sycophants is just quite ridiculous. No, he would want to surround himself with bright, questioning, curious people who through their relentless search for knowledge and understanding of the wonders of the universe show their true appreciation for all that this god is capable of. People that challenge and analyze everything that they are told and will not accept doctrinaire and flaccid explanations on face value just because others accept them. People who are driven to think for themselves. Atheists!This does not mean that the religious are condemned to an eternity in hell. God is far to loving and merciful for that. He has set aside a special place in heaven with a very bright light at the end of a long tunnel and spiritual elevator music that continually fills the air. Here the religious, fallen to their knees in devout supplication, believe that they are perpetually in the presence of the one true god, and all those of different convictions are suffering eternal torment. They are in a state of bliss, and god, having positioned himself as far from them as heaven will allow, is also in a state of bliss as he and his cohort of atheist thinkers parse the infinite possibilities of his universe in enthralling discourse.

Iceage seems to be shivering.

In post 73, Iano asserts: "An atheist must admit that God can exist." But this is a radical shift from the proposition of his opening post, "Even the most rabid athiest will accept that God of the Bible could inf fact exist." (bold and italics mine, misspellings his.)I can assert that in fact the god of the bible cannot possibly exist. In fact, I cannot even force myself to accept, even for hypothetical purposes, the possibility of the god of the bible existing. How is it possible for this to be impossible? There are two possible ways: 1) The assertion is so totally in conflict with readily known facts and common sense that the mind cannot even contemplate it; 2) the assertion fails even rudimentary logical tests. The 'god of the bible' assertion fails even the most rudimentary test of logic: self consistency. I cannot no matter how hard I try, accept even as a possibility that there is a Chevy Corvette that is simultaneously made out of steel and not made out of steel, or an apple that is completely red and completely blue at the same time, or that the moon is closer to the earth than the sun and that it is further from the earth than the sun, or that (fill in the blank). The god of the bible is logically inconsistent and self contradictory. He is ever changing and he is never changing. He is cruel and vindictive and he is loving and merciful. He is incapable of error and he apologizes for his errors. Etc., etc., etc. Apologists try to explain away some of these obvious contradictions by the dialectic device known as hucksterism, but the only device that really works is self delusion.So Iano's assertion that an atheist cannot deny the possibility of the existence of the 'god of the bible' (GOB) is completely false.Something else worth noting, particularly by Iano and Faith: Allah is the god of the bible. Also, Islamists do believe in Jesus.

The tilde is all yin and no yang. The umlaut gives me a creepy feeling. Whenever I read some German I feel very selfconscious for the next several days, like someone is staring at me. Life on earth is hell.

Your post and this thread are showing why so many westerners, particularly christians, are flocking to eastern religions and philosophies. Christianity is such a crappy one-shot, all-or-nothing proposition. You get just one bite of the apple, and if you don't bite it in exactly the right way, chew it exactly 25 times before swallowing, or even choose the wrong apple to start with, you are condemned to an eternity in the lake of fire. Imagine going to a university where your very first wrong answer on any test gets you permanently expelled. No higher education. No glamourous job in the software industry. You probably wind up fighting some nut case's war in the middle east. That's the christian dogma. There was recently a thread in this forum asking people's opinion on whether Hitler went to heaven or hell. I didn't read or participate in that forum, but I believe he was reincarnated as a dung beetle on a small island where all the animals have very serious diarrhea. It will take him thousands of reincarnations before he's even human again. But he does get more chances to see if he can get life right. Hell, even Jerry Falwell is converting over to the more rational and certainly more divine eastern ways of belief, although I understand that in his case, the conversion occurred when he first noticed how similar his appearance is to the Bhudda. So, Iano's OP challenge is completely beside any point and irrelevant. Whenever you die, do you want your eternal fate to be decided by just your first beta-version attempt at life, or by an exquisite sequence of personal growth and gaining of wisdom; of deaths and rebirths that bring you ever closer to to your ideal existence?

Can a person who doesn't believe in Santa Claus know that Santa Claus does not exist?