Your idea that someone should go away and read a few books and come back and have their life changed is so insulting and condescending I wouldn’t have even said that to someone when I was a christian! You win people over with facts, not rhetoric.

As for the assertion that god is human, I must protest: humans are not supposed to be perfect immortal transcendent beings that predate time and created the entire universe. You want your cake and eat it. God is human, but also not. God is human and imperfect, but also perfect. He cannot die yet died. He cannot value and yet values. He punishes for non-existent crimes that people didn’t commit. The concept is a contradiction. The only way to explain it with a contradiction. This fact is so startling I can only think you can’t see the woods for the trees.

Contradictions don’t exist in reality, so if the concept of god is a contradiction, it cannot exist in reality. And if you think differently, maybe you should “toddle home” and learn some logic.

Nice way to avoid everything else I said though!

Oh and I happen to be an atheist because I don’t believe in the same sky fairy that you seem to believe in, but *yawn* on the “faith” comment; hey if it helps you sleep at night to believe that those who don’t share your fantasies are just as irrational as you then fine, but when you say this stuff on the internet it makes you look silly.

Not to put too fine a point on it – or be deliberately rude – but if you’re going to try to use logic in your arguments you might want to toddle home and learn it first.

“The concept of god is a contradiction, and that is why it disproves his existence.”

That is a ludicrously illogical and unwarranted statement. The only thing that the contradiction comes close to disproving is the framework for the understanding of a god and his possible motives.

If, as an atheist, you are going to proselytize your faith, learn its tenets first please. LOL

It is YOU who believes that god has values, whereas I have shown this is a contradiction. Now, humans can love, and find pleasure, and happiness, etc in fellow beings and children, because they can ENRICH our lives and can MAKE OUR LIVES BETTER. However, by definition, God is perfect; nothing can possibly harm him or make him worse, and nothing can possibly make him better or improve him. It is this that seems to be lost on you; because there is absolutely nothing that can affect god, (for good or bad), he has absolutely NO choice to make that can effect him. But since a value is that which one acts to keep and/or gain, and god doesn’t need or want to keep or gain anything, he cannot value anything. The concept of love is meaningless with god.

All your arguments about god wanting to create people out of love etc are exactly what you’ve just accused me of doing: personification. You want your god to be perfect and untouchable, yet also human and have human emotions at the same time. You want your god to be flawless and unchangeable, but also have weaknesses and able to be changed by human existence/actions. It is a contradiction. The concept of god is a contradiction, and that is why it disproves his existence.

But Evanescence, comparing a human’s biological drive to procreate to God’s lack of need to procreate does not, by proof through contradiction, disprove the existence of God. In fact, it’s nothing more than personification … a flawed argument for proving mhogue’s proposition that God created humans in order to love and value them. It’s not a verification of your theory, it’s simply a failure to prove his.

Humans want to have children because we have an emotional and biological need for them that evolution has selected for. Humans NEED to procreate.

God doesn’t NEED to procreate; he has no fundamental choices to make since there is absolutely nothing that can improve him or denigrate him. God therefore cannot make any choice regarding anything that affects him, since nothing can affect him. Therefore, “value” is a meaningless term for god; he can value nothing.

Like the other concepts associated with god, it reduces to contradiction (you have to treat god as a god but also treat him like a human), this is because the concept of god itself is a contradiction. Contradictions don’t exist in reality, therefore god doesn’t exist. So the question of why he would create anything is resolved: he didn’t.

Why not create humans? It’s like bearing a child, they’re part of yourself, you watch them grow up and become like you, with some of the same characteristics and emotions and abilities…but not exactly like you of course. They’ll make mistakes but you’ll be there to help them and give them the knowledge that you have so they can have it to…

I don’t know…if I created the human being I could pretty much spend the rest of eternity enjoying them and watching them discover me and discover how to enjoy me and communicate that to others. And we would have a relationship so different from any other relationship that I had, and then someday they would leave the Earth I placed them in and finally arrive in front of my physically and that relationship would finally be perfect and complete and I could watch the wonder in their eyes as everything they’ve ever wondered was finally revealed to them and they just couldn’t do anything but drop to their knees and exclaim, “wow! thank you! I love you!” And it would just get better and better from there…

Colossians 1:16 “. . .all things in heaven and on earth were created by him – all things, whether visible or invisible, whether thrones or dominions, whether principalities or powers – all things were created through him and for him.”

I still have not found a better answer than from scripture, although there have been some ‘interesting’ comments in here.