Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Unfortunately, that's not true at all. Religions are designed to spread, like a virus.
They go door-to-door, stand on corners (with loudspeakers or just to give you flyers), they visit underdeveloped countries in missions to convert others, they use their power to influence laws related to reproduction and sexuality, they harm children (i.e. protect pedophiles within their congregation), they demonize and persecute gay people, and so on.
Organized religion, for several thousands of years, have started wars and killed countless people "in the name of god".
And that's only the major religions. If you get into smaller religions, then you're talking about anything from harassment to mass suicide to child wives and beyond. Anything goes when "god is with you".
You can't prove the non-existence of something... and it's nobody's job to prove that something does not exist.
To the OP: There's a small book called "Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith Paperback" by J. Anderson Thomson and Clare Aukofer, which would be of interest. You can probably read it in an afternoon, but it's insightful.
You can in fact prove the non existence of a thing that is logically incoherent. Obviously the default position to be is agnostic, but you can actually disprove the existence of specifically a tri omni God via the problem of evil.
If an all knowing, all powerful, all loving being existed, we would not observe evil in the world as it would be knowledgeable enough, powerful enough, and care enough to get rid of it. We observe evil, so this being does not exist.
Of course, a lot of behaviour of God in the bible suggests that he is not all loving, which would trivially resolve the paradox, but a lot of Christians believe in a tri omni being anyway, which makes my prior argument non entirely irrelevant.
You can't prove the non-existence of the god(s) that today's religions worship, because their goalpost is always moving and logic isn't in their belief system. That's because religiosity allows someone to suspend logic and rational thought. This leads to someone believing in illogical things as fact, even if fact hasn't been established.
Yes, the fact that evil exists would prove that an all-powerful, loving god who will do anything to protect "his children" doesn't exist.
But then the religious folk would say, "evil things happen as part of God's plan." and that shuts down your evidence. It's always like this, because faith is quite literally "believing in the absence of evidence".
It's super easy to disprove, for example, the "power of prayer", but the person claiming that prayers are answered should be the one to prove this, in a way that can be tested and verified.