Interesting comments, but again, every one of them is from your own frame of reference. Here's my point: belief in God or Jesus is just that - belief. It is based on faith and a desire to believe in something unseen. Sure, science can discount it all with the "lack of evidence" assertion, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Well, y'know I hear the same really poor logic from the folks who believe in bigfoot...
But your logic is not sound...
See... bigfoot is an animal... for any species of animal to survive generation upon generation there must be a breeding population... over hundreds of years that ends up being a LOT of animals... eating, shitting and dying.
Ergo.. the fact that every other animal LEAVES evidence of its living in the form of bones, scat, nests, hair, etc...
Combined with the total lack of any such evidence for bigfoot is actually a case where absence of evidence IS evidence of absence.
See?
Same with your Sky daddy... its a story you were indoctrinated with before you could think...
The book on which this nonsense is based is full of descriptions of your God as being active, interested and willing to work miracles and answer prayers.
But there is no evidence that God answers prayers or works miracles... the God described in the bible can not possibly exist because, based upon his own description, he's a logical impossibility.
And, y'see, if miracles DID happen... if logical impossibilities existed anywhere, in any form, then that would be evidence of your god at work...
but there isn't.
As human beings have improved in their ability to record and observe the world around them... the scope of God's miracles has narrowed... evaporating away to be replaced by understanding.
Used to be he could level cities with fire and brimstone- flood the whole earth... by Jesus' time he had scaled back to wedding party magic shows and curing a leper or two.
And now... god can barely manage a simple sketch of his own son.
Wow!... a mighty etch-a-sketch artist is our lord!.
The god phenomenon is exactly the same human dynamic as the Kennedy conspiracies and ufo believers... people just want deperately to believe that SOMEONE, anyone is
in control... even a capricious and malevolent God is better than the idea of no plan, no master, no hand on the tiller.
And evidence for religion is just like that for UFOs... you can count on the "evidence" for both to be ambiguous and indistinct... fuzzy images and anecdotal tales of something seen by someone who knows someone who was there....
Why? because anytime solid evidence
is collected... anytime sharply focused and verifiable photos
are taken... it turns out the're easy to identify as something perfectly natural and ordinary.
All I'm saying is that even if you are atheist, you still have a moral center, and it should direct you to having tolerance and compassion for others with differing values.
Well, I used to... but unfortunately I find myself in a world where the forces of religious fascism are not content to sing their psalms... they want to re-write US history to make this into a christian nation, they want to pass laws to force everyone else to live by their delusional rules of conduct, they want to teach school children idiocy and undermine the technological foundations upon which modern nations utterly depend...
They don't care about pollution or warming cause the RAPTURE is coming...
And religious moderates staunchly defend the fundamentalist's lunacy as something you have to repsect because they "believe" in it.
Religious certainty in their "morality" bombs abortion clinics and flies planes into buildings... IT inspires genocide in Bosnia, and Belfast and Bangladesh.
It endorses hatred of others and even rapes little boys with impunity...
And you say I have to respect that? Really?
I do have a moral center... a real morality, not predicated upon some promised reward or threatened punishment.
What passes to the religious as moral is pure self interest.
I am moral for the sake of goodness, with no anticipation of benefit or suffering.
Religion is belief without proof... except all the books that preach religion CLAIM that God offered SCADS of proof...
Used to be the eclipse was "proof" of God... the plague was "proof" of God...
But real understanding has shown us that they are not impossibilities arranged by a supreme being to inspire us with faith...
And what are you left with? the hollow cry that belief needs no proof?
Imaginary cures on television shows that enrich con men who spout the moral certainty that gpd hates fags- that is, when they don't have a dick in their mouths...
Aspirin and the lighting rod have done far more to better the lives of mankind than all the prayers in history.
Jesus never cured a kid of cancer... oncologists do.
Belief my ass.
You want to believe in something... why not believe in something you can actually do something about...believe in something that will have a real effect...
believe that mankind can stop imagining an illusory heaven and start buckling down to make this life as much a heaven as we can.
You don't need God to make your life meaningful... we invented God... we
can invent our own meaning to our own lives.
We can grow up and face reality like adults.
And religion?
You can tell when your being sold something because they ask you for money.