While pondering, I came up with another thought experiment.

Say that Joe is a forty something Canadian

So Joe here a former atheist until about his twenties and during those times, his life was just as he would describe plain. It wasn't bad by any means, but it wasn't magnificent.

Then he finds Christianity, gets involved with churches and other Christian social groups after that, he feels his life has improved significantly. He is now in his forties and and has been part of the Christian community since he converted.

He looks around him and sees the people who influenced him most like Martin Luther King and Nelson Mendella were Christian. He reads the paper and sees his church is organizing  another blood drive and the one across from it is setting up a fund raiser to fight parkinson's disease. He has travelled across Europe and saw the prosperious religious nations such as Romania, Portugal, Poland, Italy etc... In fact him and his Christian friends on on their way to Lebanon as part of the Red Cross to help provide relieve to refugees.

He surfs the web and sees stories similar to his.

Joe then concludes that religion is a positive influence on the world. He reasons that society would be better had every one been like him and his Christian friends.

Is he wrong? If so, what is wrong with his reasoning?

Sorry for just joining a  pro-atheist message board and unloading my random thoughts. I spent a weekend with a friend of mine who is an atheist and I listened to him go on and on about atheism. I never entered into any sort of argument with him, I would just rather not go there (even though I agree with him on some points). So I post to just unload and perhaps "go there" with other atheists.

Simply put I believe in god because I observe an elegant order to universe. I see god in things like images from hubble. Looking at the night sky fills me with a sense that there is something larger than myself. Take music for instance, I could pick up a guitar and just strike random notes which would sound like crap. However put that guitar in the hands of skilled player and they basically play mathematical sequences that are pleasing to ear. I also have a hard time believing that the universe came from nothing. I believe that god created the universe and life. However I believe that these things happened through a scientific process.

Does the existence of a god need to be proven?

If so, how would one do it?

If not, why not?

I'm curious to see what the answers here may be.

Here is a question or two, 

why do you come to this website, why is this debate important to you?

and

Why should I care if there is a god or not?

A good deal of people are 'weak theists'. This means that they have the potential to allow for the possiblity of God's existence, but don't actually hold an affirmative belief in God. They usually hold to this position because they stumbled onto some atheist blog or website and consider themselves superior to others for discovering such a scandalous & new idea.

If you are one such person then it might interest you to know that your doubt actually makes you a theist, not an atheist or agnostic! Why is this so? Because I've decided to expand the definition of "theist" to include more people so that I would have the edge in debates. According to this page it's apparently ok to ignore years of the correct etymological definitions. And apparently a position is defined by people who fit the position instead of common usage.

 

EVERYONE ON EARTH WAS BORN A THEIST!

ALL RRS CORE MEMBERS ARE THEISTS!

Just a little thought experiment that crossed my mind

Say you are a psychologist and you are treating a 19 year old girl who says that God wants her to shoot herself.

How would you start? How would you try to cure her?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awS-fQUJrrM

So, just out of my own morbid curiosity, if any of you do in fact believe in HELL, what is your version of it? Better yet, I know some of you actually believe you've had a genuine taste of it. Please indulge.

I don't know if this has been discussed before.

If god knocked Mary up, he would have needed some thing to be carrying his dna that would be compatible with a human being.

So why would he need that in the first place?

Anyway, I think that theists have something they can put their money on when describing god; he has testicles.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55h1FO8V_3w