Is God good?

It'd be nice if you'd consider that there might be a reason to doubt the divine origin of the Bible beyond being "stupid." Whose ideas could you trust if not your own? Whose would you even have access to? I know you say you're down on the whole notion of using one's intellect to determine what is true, but you've never been able to explain to me what else there is. You can only think with your brain, not anyone else's. Reading and interpreting the Bible isn't a process by which you become an empty vessel, sitting there passively as scriptural truth gets poured in.It doesn't work like that. You have to interpret,. You have to participate. And ultimately, your own intellect is the only thing you can trust in that process because it's the only thing you're able to participate with. There's just no getting around the fact that whatever you think the Bible says, it's you thinking it says that. Your interpretation of the Bible is, ultimately, something you're creating, not something that has been created for you. There's a reason that people in comas can't read the Bible. Reading is a participatory act, not a passive one.I'm not telling you to start trusting your intellect to determine what is true and false, Faith. I'm telling you that you already do. Yes, it never works when you do it. That's because we look at you and see the results. Benighted, ignorant, tied up in knots trying to explain even the simplest concept about the world because of a harmful, idiotic philosophy of turning your back on your own intellect. It's like you've taken a sledgehammer to your own kneecaps and now you're telling us that's a great way to take a stroll. We can look at you and see that faith just isn't good for anything.I've always had respect for your intellect, Faith, but it's the only positive thing about you, and I've never been able to understand why it's the thing you seem to hate most about yourself. How do you square that with all the times you've told us that the existence of God is obvious on its face?

If you think that, then I think in your naivete you have precious little experience with the various brands of stupidity that seem to accrue only to the intellectually exceptional: supply-side economics, Objectivism, Bon Iver, etc. Just being smart doesn't absolve one of the responsibility to believe things only on the basis of good evidence. See, this is more interesting. I'm surprised that having been an atheist you're so insensitive to what would convince the rest of us atheists, now. Why on Earth would you think we'd be convinced by your special pleading? Like this, from your other posts:

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No it's not, it is something we KNOW, and the Bible and the God of the Bible are the ONLY things that are known in this way.

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Like, what? Why should I believe that, when anybody could say that? Why would you think just telling me that's true would be something that would have convinced me? Would that have convinced you, when you were an atheist?If you were convinced to move from atheism to Christianity, then it seems reasonable to speculate that you may be in possession of an argument that convinces at least some atheists to become Christians. What I wonder is, why don't you share that with us instead of making these intellectually-empty fallacies of special pleading that you can't honestly believe could be convincing. Anybody can say "it's something we know, but only this is something we know." Obviously the first thing anyone says when they're trying to convince you is to affirm that they're not lying. Even the liars. Truth-determining has to rely on a more rigorous process than "look and see who says they're telling you the truth." The problem is, there are no Biblical witnesses. That's like saying that Frodo is a "witness" to the events detailed in Lord of the Rings, and hey, why would Frodo lie? You've got the scope completely backwards. The fact that the Bible says that some people witnessed something in the Bible doesn't corroborate anything that happened in the Bible, because if the Bible can't be corroborated (and is therefore made-up) then the witnesses in it could be (and likely are) made-up, too. What makes something a witness is independence; two people who have no reason to conspire together, but tell the same story anyway, corroborate each other. But a story from the first that there is a second, but that guy's not here to actually tell his story, isn't independence. It's not corroboration when you just make up a story about a second guy who was there and saw it all, and if only he was here he could tell you that. It's just another story. Well, yeah, Faith. Explanations ring hollow when they don't fit reality as I see it. Why would I accept the power of "faith" without seeing some kind of evidence that it makes anything better? That it's a better tool for learning about the natural world? I mean I'm coming up on my twelfth year of being a rational skeptic, and I have to say, it's been working out like gangbusters for me in terms of questions answered, learning made possible, new skills, my career, my marriage, all of that. If I thought there was actually someone out there who was blessing me I'd be forced to describe myself as "blessed." (But I don't.) All of that made possible, as I see it, by a commitment I made to evict from my mind any belief I couldn't support, at least to myself, with good evidence. You've asked us to consider that what you and they believe might be true, without giving any argument that it actually is. I'd like to ask you to consider that all these great men and women, and yourself, might be completely wrong. And I'm prepared to offer arguments that suggest that they are, if you want to hear them. (Most of them you already know, though.)

Look, of course it's mind-numbing to simply dismiss religious special pleading; special pleading is a fallacy, one of the best-known, and so there's no mental effort required at all to recognize it. Fallacious arguments aren't convincing because they don't lend any support to their conclusions. (That's what "fallacy" means.)And you can't just say "oh, but my special pleading is different" - that's the special pleading! You're acting like we're the ones who aren't taking your arguments seriously. We're sitting over here, wondering when you're actually going to give us an argument. But nobody who wrote any part of the Bible was a witness to its events. Not even the Biblical fundamentalists claim that the Bible was authored by eyewitnesses. The best they can claim is that the Bible claims eyewitnesses to its events, but it names almost none of them and certainly no independent corroboration survives to this day, if there ever was any. We're all considering that we might be wrong by engaging with you. But what's the evidence we're wrong?"Consider that you might be wrong" isn't an argument, because without additional evidence we just arrive at whatever conclusion we arrived at the first time. "Ok, I might be wrong about atheism. Let me just go over the evidence one more time... nope, atheism still looks right." You have to give us something new if you actually expect our consideration to cause us to arrive at a new conclusion. How else do you expect it to work?I mean, let me tell you what it was like for me, Faith, to go from Christian to atheist: I knew that Christians said the Bible was uniquely the product of divine inspiration and the sole testatment of the Lord. I already knew that Christians said that without faith, the wisdom of the Bible would seem as foolishness. I knew that Christians said that only Christianity had the savior who died for our sins that we might reach salvation.I knew all those claims already, Faith, and believed them, and when I started considering that I might be wrong about them I discovered new-to-me-evidence that they were wrong. The Bible isn't the testament of divinity but a human work built by a committee. The "wisdom" of the Bible seems foolish to outsiders because it is foolish, and Christians go through elaborate efforts to convince themselves that it is not. Christianity isn't the only religion with substitutionary atonement; it's not even the first. The idea of a divine-as-man savior come to die for our sins goes back 2000 years before the supposed birth of Christ.So when you tell me to "consider that I might be wrong", Faith, I do - but because you don't have anything new for me, that consideration leads right back to the same place it did the first time - atheism.

I don't know where you're getting an eyewitness experience of the ministry of Jesus from that John passage. What the John author is claiming here is "eyewitness" to the Christian faith; in other words he's claiming no more than any Christian would claim in the present day - that they've seen the power of faith, the fellowship of Christ's church, and so on. To claim that the John author is claiming personal witness to the events he details is to betray that you've not read your Bible, Faith:

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John 21:
20 Peter turned and saw that the disciple whom Jesus loved was following them. (This was the one who had leaned back against Jesus at the supper and had said, Lord, who is going to betray you?) 21 When Peter saw him, he asked, Lord, what about him?

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22 Jesus answered, If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? You must follow me. 23 Because of this, the rumor spread among the believers that this disciple would not die. But Jesus did not say that he would not die; he only said, If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you?

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24 This is the disciple who testifies to these things and who wrote them down. We know that his testimony is true.

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The John author (the gospels are not actually named after their authors) wrote in AD 90, almost six decades after Jesus supposedly died. There's no way that he could have been alive during the ministry of Jesus. The Gospel of John itself tells us that it is the testimony of "the disciple whom Jesus loved", not the author's own witness.Nobody who wrote any part of the Bible, Faith, was a witness to any of its events. If you're laboring under the misapprehension that it is, it's because you just don't know your Bible very well. Matthew, Mark, Peter, Jude, and James aren't the writers of any of the New Testament. They aren't the authors of any work that survives to this day, in fact. The Gospels don't attribute their authors, only their supposed sources - but, of course, attributing your work to a more authoritative source (for instance, the impossible testimony of the "disciple whom Jesus loved") is precisely the sort of fabrication you'd make if you were trying to fool people into your religion. What, his own death at the end of Deuteronomy? Moses somehow wrote down the location of his own burial? That makes no sense. Moses isn't the author of any part of the Bible. That's what I'm doing. I'm really considering it so that it might change me. But until you give me new evidence I didn't consider the first time, what's going to be different this time that I might be changed? You seem to think that your position is so obviously true that if I'm willing to believe it, I'll be convinced by its self-evident truth.But Faith, I did believe it. I was convinced of its truth when I started to consider it. It was the act of considering it that made me an atheist. Why would considering it again have a different result, unless there's something new to consider?

There's nowhere in the Gospel of John where the author claims to be John. The testimony recounted in John is ascribed not to the writer but to the "disciple that Jesus loved" which the John author can't have been and doesn't claim to be. So, again, Faith, due to your unfamiliarity with the Bible you've made a mistake about its authorship. The Bible recounts no eyewitness testimony at all. How could it, written decades after the fact in places hundreds of miles away? It's absurd. But I am considering it. This is the process of consideration - listening to what you have to say, and trying to reconcile it with what I already know. The problem is, the things you're saying to me don't seem to be true. They contradict abundant physical evidence; they even contradict the plain text of the Bible. You're going to have to present more evidence for my consideration if you want me to be swayed.

That's insulting nonsense, phat. I'm no "hardcore atheist." I became an atheist as a Christian; how could bridges be burned? The bridges are open: my eyes can see and read; my ears can hear. Nothing else is required to receive the evidence.The bridges are intact and I've been other them and back. There's just nothing at the other side; God is make-believe.

What do you mean "no way"? The way for it to be true is by being true. It could be true; it's just not. One, it's not a secret, and two, it's not just for me - I'm not selfish like that. It's anyone. God's never done anything for you, or for Faith. He's never done anything for anyone ever, not even once. And the way that's best explained is that there's no such thing as God.I'm not so selfish that I require God's hand in the world to work to my benefit. I just require that it work to someone's.

I don't think Faith thinks murder is ok, and regardless of our opinion of her views I think she deserves not to have ascribed to her views that she doesn't actually hold.