Premises:

(A) Satan rebelled against God because he didn't want to serve

(B) Satan rules over Hell

(C) Humans are sent to Hell for rebelling against God and not wanting to serve

(D) Satan tortures people in Hell

Is there ANY Xian out there who can explain why Satan would torture people who are like-minded with him? 

I can't find ANY documentation of studies that support this. Though I have heard and believe it to be true. This is the closest i could find and it isn't pretty. http://danish.newsvine.com/_news/2007/02/05/554043-professor-atheists-are-more-intelligent-than-believers

A little help?

Browsing this forum for some time I have often seen the argument that Hitler was a Christian, as though it had some sort of meaning behind it. I often wonder what the reason is for claiming that Hitler was a Christian. I really cannot find any rational reason as to why it's such a hot topic and is used excessively among the anti-theistic/anti-Christian community. I would think that by claiming to be rational one would easily catch particular fallacies that they are so fond of pointing out to their opponents. While this topic will be about Hitler and other figures of World War Two and what I consider their actual beliefs, it must be said that the use of Hitler against Christians as a sort of evidence is a fallicious argument. Even if Hitler did believe himself to be a Christian, this sort of example does not justify claims that Christianity is in any way evil or wrong. All it really is, is a guilt by association fallacy.

SEVERAL POLLS indicate that the term "atheism" has acquired such an extraordinary stigma in the United States that being an atheist is now a perfect impediment to a career in politics (in a way that being black, Muslim or homosexual is not). According to a recent Newsweek poll, only 37% of Americans would vote for an otherwise qualified atheist for president.

Atheists are often imagined to be intolerant, immoral, depressed, blind to the beauty of nature and dogmatically closed to evidence of the supernatural.

Even John Locke, one of the great patriarchs of the Enlightenment, believed that atheism was "not at all to be tolerated" because, he said, "promises, covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human societies, can have no hold upon an atheist."

That was more than 300 years ago. But in the United States today, little seems to have changed. A remarkable 87% of the population claims "never to doubt" the existence of God; fewer than 10% identify themselves as atheists — and their reputation appears to be deteriorating.

Given that we know that atheists are often among the most intelligent and scientifically literate people in any society, it seems important to deflate the myths that prevent them from playing a larger role in our national discourse.

1) Atheists believe that life is meaningless.

On the contrary, religious people often worry that life is meaningless and imagine that it can only be redeemed by the promise of eternal happiness beyond the grave. Atheists tend to be quite sure that life is precious. Life is imbued with meaning by being really and fully lived. Our relationships with those we love are meaningful now; they need not last forever to be made so. Atheists tend to find this fear of meaninglessness … well … meaningless.

2) Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history.

People of faith often claim that the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were the inevitable product of unbelief. The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.

3) Atheism is dogmatic.

Jews, Christians and Muslims claim that their scriptures are so prescient of humanity's needs that they could only have been written under the direction of an omniscient deity. An atheist is simply a person who has considered this claim, read the books and found the claim to be ridiculous. One doesn't have to take anything on faith, or be otherwise dogmatic, to reject unjustified religious beliefs. As the historian Stephen Henry Roberts (1901-71) once said: "I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."

4) Atheists think everything in the universe arose by chance.

No one knows why the universe came into being. In fact, it is not entirely clear that we can coherently speak about the "beginning" or "creation" of the universe at all, as these ideas invoke the concept of time, and here we are talking about the origin of space-time itself.

The notion that atheists believe that everything was created by chance is also regularly thrown up as a criticism of Darwinian evolution. As Richard Dawkins explains in his marvelous book, "The God Delusion," this represents an utter misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. Although we don't know precisely how the Earth's early chemistry begat biology, we know that the diversity and complexity we see in the living world is not a product of mere chance. Evolution is a combination of chance mutation and natural selection. Darwin arrived at the phrase "natural selection" by analogy to the "artificial selection" performed by breeders of livestock. In both cases, selection exerts a highly non-random effect on the development of any species.

5) Atheism has no connection to science.

Although it is possible to be a scientist and still believe in God — as some scientists seem to manage it — there is no question that an engagement with scientific thinking tends to erode, rather than support, religious faith. Taking the U.S. population as an example: Most polls show that about 90% of the general public believes in a personal God; yet 93% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences do not. This suggests that there are few modes of thinking less congenial to religious faith than science is.

6) Atheists are arrogant.

When scientists don't know something — like why the universe came into being or how the first self-replicating molecules formed — they admit it. Pretending to know things one doesn't know is a profound liability in science. And yet it is the life-blood of faith-based religion. One of the monumental ironies of religious discourse can be found in the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility, while claiming to know facts about cosmology, chemistry and biology that no scientist knows. When considering questions about the nature of the cosmos and our place within it, atheists tend to draw their opinions from science. This isn't arrogance; it is intellectual honesty.

7) Atheists are closed to spiritual experience.

There is nothing that prevents an atheist from experiencing love, ecstasy, rapture and awe; atheists can value these experiences and seek them regularly. What atheists don't tend to do is make unjustified (and unjustifiable) claims about the nature of reality on the basis of such experiences. There is no question that some Christians have transformed their lives for the better by reading the Bible and praying to Jesus. What does this prove? It proves that certain disciplines of attention and codes of conduct can have a profound effect upon the human mind. Do the positive experiences of Christians suggest that Jesus is the sole savior of humanity? Not even remotely — because Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and even atheists regularly have similar experiences.  There is, in fact, not a Christian on this Earth who can be certain that Jesus even wore a beard, much less that he was born of a virgin or rose from the dead. These are just not the sort of claims that spiritual experience can authenticate.

Atheists believe that there is nothing beyond human life and human understanding.

Atheists are free to admit the limits of human understanding in a way that religious people are not. It is obvious that we do not fully understand the universe; but it is even more obvious that neither the Bible nor the Koran reflects our best understanding of it. We do not know whether there is complex life elsewhere in the cosmos, but there might be. If there is, such beings could have developed an understanding of nature's laws that vastly exceeds our own. Atheists can freely entertain such possibilities. They also can admit that if brilliant extraterrestrials exist, the contents of the Bible and the Koran will be even less impressive to them than they are to human atheists.

From the atheist point of view, the world's religions utterly trivialize the real beauty and immensity of the universe. One doesn't have to accept anything on insufficient evidence to make such an observation.

9) Atheists ignore the fact that religion is extremely beneficial to society.

Those who emphasize the good effects of religion never seem to realize that such effects fail to demonstrate the truth of any religious doctrine. This is why we have terms such as "wishful thinking" and "self-deception." There is a profound distinction between a consoling delusion and the truth.

In any case, the good effects of religion can surely be disputed. In most cases, it seems that religion gives people bad reasons to behave well, when good reasons are actually available. Ask yourself, which is more moral, helping the poor out of concern for their suffering, or doing so because you think the creator of the universe wants you to do it, will reward you for doing it or will punish you for not doing it?

10) Atheism provides no basis for morality.

If a person doesn't already understand that cruelty is wrong, he won't discover this by reading the Bible or the Koran — as these books are bursting with celebrations of cruelty, both human and divine. We do not get our morality from religion. We decide what is good in our good books by recourse to moral intuitions that are (at some level) hard-wired in us and that have been refined by thousands of years of thinking about the causes and possibilities of human happiness.

We have made considerable moral progress over the years, and we didn't make this progress by reading the Bible or the Koran more closely. Both books condone the practice of slavery — and yet every civilized human being now recognizes that slavery is an abomination. Whatever is good in scripture — like the golden rule — can be valued for its ethical wisdom without our believing that it was handed down to us by the creator of the universe.

Imagine, for a moment, that yours truly is a god. Mighty, all-powerful, to be feared, etc. etc. etc., but NOT omniscient. I wouldn't like to be omniscient, but only omniconscious.

Here is a list of things I would and wouldn't do:

- I wouldn't make my supreme creation (let's call it "human&quot so similar to other animals, but with les hair and a little extra upstairs; my supreme creation would be something so radically different and so great, that no animal/plant would ever dare to challenge it; something powerful, intelligent, with a will to constantly improve and dominate

How was the world created. I have heard 2 basic arguments. Out of nothing came this dust or these particles? Or this dust or particles always existed. Was wondering what you would say was the creation story?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_of_contradiction

So, unless I'm misunderstanding this or wikipedia is wholly inaccurate... the more people disagree with the church on something being holy, then the more holy it must be?

So, the more people disagree with me on somehting, the more likely it's true?

-Triften

I'm officially damn tired of the redefinition defense.

This is the theist defense of a contradiction in which a "new" definition for a word is posited, and then not given.

SO...

Here are some words.  I want positive definitions, theists!  Don't tell me what they aren't.  Tell me in clear, definable language, what they ARE.

"Emotions" (God's) Human emotions are reactions.  If god knows everything, including what he will do in response to a situation he knows will happen, he cannot experience emotions the way humans do.  Theists, please define "Emotion" as it applies to god, using positive characteristics.  If you start by saying "It's not like X," you'll just get laughed at.

I'll admit it's a different way to argue...... and it's supported by something called The Law of Accelerating Returns... look it up on Wikipedia. But the Law of Accelerating Returns is no absolut rule  or anything. So here it is:

I told a Chrisitan roughly 50% of our population believes the Universe came into existance 10,000 years ago. Sure you've heard that statistic before lol. So anyway he replied with

"acually i think about 12 thousand...its in the bible. it took god 6 days of work and 1 day of rest but a thousand years to us is a day to him so that seven thousand years plus all the years that we have been on the earth comes out to be about around 11, 12 thousand years."

I was listening to the radio and heard how many Christian schools were closed due to the recent snow. My question is Why? Don't they trust God enough to keep them safe from being in an accident or getting stuck? Didn't praying work?