Answer: A lie is a lie, even if everyone believes it. The truth is the truth, even if no one believes it.
I dont know who said that, but it’s very true.

“How do you account for the vast archaeological documentation of Biblical stories, places, and people?”

Response: How do you account for fossils? And where is all this proof and why have i neve heard of it?

“How do you explain David’s graphic portrayal of Jesus’ death by crucifixion (Psalm 22) 1000 years before Christ lived?

How do you explain that the prophet Daniel prophesied the exact YEAR when the Christ would be presented as Messiah and also prophesied that the temple would be destroyed afterwards over 500 years in advance (Daniel 9:24-27)?

How could any mere human pinpoint the precise birth town of the Messiah seven full centuries before the fact, as did the prophet Micah?

How do you account for the odds (1 in 10 to the 157th power) that even just 48 (of 300) Old Testament prophecies were fulfilled in Jesus Christ?

How was it possible for the Old Testament prophet Isaiah to have predicted the virgin birth of Jesus (Isaiah 7:14) 700 years before it occurred?”

Response to all those questions: Okay, All the information and sources for these happenings is found only in the Bible. Correct? Well, if an atheist does not believe the Bible, then you are making absolutely no sense.

“If God does not exist, then from where comes humanity’s universal moral sense?”

Response: Alright, The only thing standing between you and complete immorality is God? So without fear of god you would be out raping and killing everyone? Wow, that’s pretty bad.

“Have you ever wondered why thousands of intelligent scientists, living and dead, have been men and women of great faith?”

Response:
* Thomas Jefferson
* James Madison
* John Adams
* Mark Twain
* Albert Einstein
* Thomas Edison

Yep. All atheist/agnostic.

Alright. Theres more. But I think i proved my point.

I am not interested in any argument with anyone I do want

to reply to replacing the THEE’S and THOU’s These words

in no way are innerchangeable with the word you.The word you

adfdresses no one in piticular usedboth singular or plural

The Words Thee and Thou Are very personal, words of reverence

They express deep love And should never be replaced

Best Wishes

L Johnson

REALLLLLLLLLLLLY? Dude, don’t get me wrong, I’m an atheist too, but get your facts straight or else you make us all look bad. Atheism has probably been around since the first human thought maybe there is no god. It’s been around AT LEAST as long as since Socrates was forced to drink poison hemlock because he didn’t believe in the gods of his city state. The scientific revolution didn’t come until millenia after that.Hate to sound like a jerk, but it’s better for a fellow atheist to bust your balls than a Christian.

Time, space and everything we know is more complex than anyone can fully understand or will ever understand…as William Shakespeare wrote..’there is more to heaven and earth than in all thy imaginings’. One day you and I will have absolute certainty, until then all anyone can have is hope and faith, its sad that you appear to have neither and therefore seek to dismiss that which you cannot understand.

BTW I am not a particularly religious person, I am simply pointing out that everything we believed 500 years ago has been turned on its head and many more things we currently hold as facts will turn out to be wrong in the next 500 years, you or I cannot state with absolute certainty that there is nothing more to life, or the universe than we understand today.

puts it so simply a caveman could understand it! lol

But we should be concerned with our own souls and what we accomplish in this life.

He achieved much in his career, and made time to show charity.

Think about what you can give.

How do you account for the vast archaeological documentation of Biblical stories, places, and people?
What archaeological evidence, exactly? And how does any of it support biblical stories? And how does finding evidence that places, stories and people mentioned in the bible may have existed provide any proof of the existence of god?

Since absolutely no Bible prophecy has ever failed (and there are hundreds), how can one realistically remain unconvinced that the Bible is of divine origin?
I’m not aware that any biblical prophecies have ever been correct, except in hindsight, as is the case with any other future telling or prophecy.

How do you explain David’s graphic portrayal of Jesus’ death by crucifixion (Psalm 22) 1000 years before Christ lived?
How can you possibly interpret psalm 22 as a graphic portrayal of a specific person’s death? The only familiar bit there, from my memory of the four gospels, is casting lots for the garments, and funnily enough the gospels were written and translated by people who had read psalm 22. If a sensible person read psalm 22 they might realistically think it was about someone being killed either with a sword or by wild animals, but certainly not by crucifixion.

Symbolic language is very interesting. In order to describe something powerfully, it is common to use descriptions or references from widely known sources. It would make sense for the gospel writers to refer to the well known OT stories and prophecies in describing many things, including Jesus’ death.

How do you explain that the prophet Daniel prophesied the exact YEAR when the Christ would be presented as Messiah and also prophesied that the temple would be destroyed afterwards over 500 years in advance (Daniel 9:24-27)?
Are you reading the same bible I’m reading? Daniel 9:24-27 talks about WEEKS not YEARS.

How could any mere human pinpoint the precise birth town of the Messiah seven full centuries before the fact, as did the prophet Micah?
Given how clear and accurate your previous biblical references are, I doubt very much that the bible contains any predictions, except maybe described after the fact, indicating anything of the sort.

How do you account for the odds (1 in 10 to the 157th power) that even just 48 (of 300) Old Testament prophecies were fulfilled in Jesus Christ?
You haven’t even bothered to give us ONE Old Testament prophecy that can reliably be said to have been fulfilled anywhere, any time. How about you list them, one by one, and we’ll see whether they measure up?

How was it possible for the Old Testament prophet Isaiah to have predicted the virgin birth of Jesus (Isaiah 7:14) 700 years before it occurred?
Very easily, given the length of time between Jesus’ birth and the recording of stories that his mother was a virgin. I’m not saying they lied, exactly, but it would make their story a lot more interesting if it could be fitted into the OT stories as well.

How can anyone doubt the reliability of Scripture considering the number and the proximity to the originals of its many copied manuscripts?
Errrr… shouldn’t that be, how can anyone consider the biblical documents to be any more accurate in a modern sense than any other ancient documents, given the number of times they were copied, translated, argued about, etc.; and it’s very important to understand the different points of view of the writers to modern readers. For example, a medieval chronicler would hear stories about the king, and interpret and record those stories that fitted with his own agenda. If a chronicler whose monastery was funded by the king heard two stories, one saying the king was good and one saying the king was bad, he would write down his own version of the ‘good’ story, because his livelihood depended on the king’s favour. He would not have had our modern ideas of ‘objective’ or ‘fact’ to get in his way either – he wrote for different reasons to ours.

In what sense was Jesus a “good man” if He was lying in His claim to be God?
You’re the one who says Jesus was a “good man”, not me. And you’re getting a bit narrow there – Jesus may have believed he was the son of the Yahweh. Or he may have been lying. He may or may not have been a good man, according to his own principles or according to ours. Was William the Conqueror a good man? Did he believe he was a good man? How do you know?

If the Bible is not true, why is it so universally regarded as “the Good Book”?
The christian bible is by no means universally regarded as ‘the Good Book’. It is believed by a large but unspecified number of Christians as ‘the Good Book’. A great many Christians don’t believe that the bible is ‘literally true’. As far as I am aware, the Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, Jews, Taoists and Zoroastrians of the world are all just as firm in their belief that their own religion is the correct one as any Christians. Why is it your religion which is correct, not theirs?

Did you know that the Bible has been the number one bestseller almost every single year since the 1436 invention of the Gutenberg printing press?
So what? If Gutenberg, his printing press and the necessary conditions (increasing literacy, desire for one’s own personal interpretation of the bible, ease of commercial transactions over a wide area) had occured in India, the Bhagavad Gita would have been the number one bestseller every year. That’s just geography.

If God does not exist, then from where comes humanity’s universal moral sense?
From the human mind, the same as all religions do! Human morals can mostly be traced back to a sense that the best method for humans, as a species, to survive, is for us to assist and care for each other. We are a species reliant on each other for our lives. We are far from the only animals to have similar drives – many animals care for members of their own family or living groups. As human societies have progressed, we have developed from wanting to protect our immediate family group, to our village or tribe, to our region, our nation, and now we are developing a sense that the whole world is our ‘family group’. I ask instead, if God exists as Christians claim, why do groups of humans so far removed from Christianity have a moral sense? Would you prefer to tell me either that Australian Aborigines have no moral sense, or that god gave them a moral sense but failed to reveal ‘himself’ to them? Either answer is pretty nonsensical.

If man is nothing but the random arrangement of molecules, what motivates you to care and to live honorably in the world?
An honourable life is a fairly modern construct, I think. As I explained above, the survival of our species depends on the majority of humans in a group being reliant on and caring for each other. If you take ’survival of the species’ as the central motivation, a lot of our moral ideas make a great deal of sense.
Can you explain how personality could have ever evolved from the impersonal, or how order could have ever resulted from chaos?
I rather think that chaos results from order, doesn’t it? Didn’t you study maths or physics at school? No, I can’t explain how personalities have evolved, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a rational, non-supernatural explanation. The primary logical fallacy that religious people make, in my opinion, is to assume that anything they don’t understand has no rational explanation. It’s much more reasonable to assume that we do not yet know everything.

If Jesus’ resurrection was faked, why would twelve intelligent men (Jesus’ disciples) have been willing to face death for what they knew to be a lie?
All we have is a collection of stories that as far as we know were first recorded a generation after the events they describe, and have been translated, argued over and adapted for two thousand years since. How do you explain the inaccuracies of Herodotus, or Bede, or Marco Polo? How did so many Europeans believe for so long that Prester John ruled a kingdom of Christians in the midst of Africa?

How do you explain the fact that a single, relatively uneducated and virtually untraveled man, dead at age 33, radically changed lives and society to this day?
Did Jesus change the world, or did his followers who wrote down the stories? Or the early Christians like Paul who preached so widely? Or Constantine, who chose that cult of the many to bring to the public eye? According to your view of history, either a great many individuals of no particular merit have changed the world, and continue to do so – or no individual has that great an effect.

Why have so many of history’s greatest thinkers been believers?
Because of the society they lived in. When there were no better answers, religion was what you had to explain the world. And let’s face it – religion is nice. It’s comforting. You can blame a lot on it. You can feel safe when Mummy isn’t there to hold your hand. So many great thinkers have been Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, etc etc etc. Is that so remarkable?
Have you ever wondered why thousands of intelligent scientists, living and dead, have been men and women of great faith?
Have you ever wondered why so many intelligent scientists have been men and women of no faith? Same reasons as other people become religious or nonreligious, I suppose. Have you ever wondered how many people throughout history have conformed to religion because they didn’t want to stand out or considered mad/evil/whatever?

If time never had a beginning, but rather goes backwards infinitely or has gone through an infinite number of cycles, then how is it possible that we are here today?
I’m not a physicist, so I don’t know if time had a beginning or not. Neither do you.

How can something as small as a brain understand extremely complicated aspects of the universe, even though it is (supposedly) just a bunch of chemical reactions and electrical signals? But at the same time, this brain can’t create another brain like itself, so how can nature, that has no brain, create a brain?
This brain has not yet created another brain by itself. That is not the same thing as can’t. As for nature creating brains, while I think you’re not smart enough to comprehend the randomness of brains evolving and seem to need to anthropomorphise ‘nature’, right now I’m typing with one hand while nursing the baby that ‘nature’, by means of amazing natural processes, created with a brain.

Everyone knows Mount Rushmore was the result of intelligent design. Do you think the human body is the result of intelligent design?
Is it? You do like to make assumptions. I can’t see anything intelligent about Mount Rushmore. And what does that have to do with humans? Intelligent Design is one of the stupidest ideas modern fundamentalists have come up with.

When you look at a lot of creatures such as zebras, turtles, butterflies, bees, lady bugs, leopards, etc., you will notice amazing color patterns designed into them. Who came up with those? Does nature have a “taste” in colors, and does it know which colors go together nicely? Once again you fail at logic. You have assumed first that certain colours ‘go nicely’ together as though that is a universal constant. I assure you if you look at high fashion through the last few centuries you’ll see that is not so! Second, why would it not be more likely that our tastes are formed by what we find in nature, rather than nature forming creatures based on our tastes?

How do you account for the origin of life considering the irreducible complexity of its essential components?
I’m not a scientist, however, scientists do not consider life nor its components to be irreducibly complex. If you don’t understand how a computer works, it looks like magic. If you do understand the computer, you laugh at the people who think it’s magic.

How can the Second Law of Thermodynamics be reconciled with progressive, naturalistic evolutionary theory?
You’re making that mistake about chaos and order again. Go and draw a simple fractal pattern – simple rule, complex result.

How do you reconcile the existence of human intelligence with naturalism and the Law of Entropy?
See above.

How come there are some things on our planet seem that they are especially designed for us? For example, the 2 most comfortable colors are blue and green , which happen to be the color of the sky and most of the nature around us. Who chose those colors to be there , before earth even existed?
Possibly the most annoying thing about religion is its egocentricism. As I said above, isn’t it more likely that we’ve evolved to find blue and green the most comfortable colours? Maybe we’ve evolved to fit the world we’re in, rather than the world being fitted around us. It’s hard, but try and think about the universe as something that doesn’t care about you one tiny little bit.

Why does the Bible alone, of all of the world’s holy books, contain such detailed prophecies of future events?
Does it? According to who? How many of the world’s holy books have you read?

Is it absolutely true that “truth is not absolute” or only relatively true that “all things are relative?”
How on earth does that have anything to do with whether any gods exist? Truth is a human idea, and is therefore only applicable to humans.

Is it possible that your unbelief in God is actually an unwillingness to submit to Him?
No. I used to be very envious of people who had that sense of community, and who could take comfort through hard times and dark nights in their beliefs. But I stopped believing in gods just as I stopped believing in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy and that my Dad can fix anything. It’s a much scarier world now, but at least I’m not lying to myself.
Does your present worldview provide you with an adequate sense of meaning and purpose?
Why do you assume that the world is there to give you meaning and purpose? Or that meaning and purpose are things that one should aspire to? I’ve never been particularly purposeful and the only lives that have meaning are fictional ones written to have meaning.

How do you explain the radically changed lives of so many Christian believers down through history?
Same goes for believers of other religions, as well as all other kinds of spiritual enlightenment. And then of course there’s non-spiritual ‘revelations’. My realisation that I didn’t believe in god was very similar to many people’s conversion stories. It changed my life because suddenly I became reliant on myself and stopped believing the universe revolved around me.

Are you aware that every alleged Bible contradiction has been answered in an intelligible and credible manner?
I’ve never encountered any intelligible or credible justifications for Christianity. Most, such as this list of questions, tend more to the incoherent and ill informed. If there was any real evidence for any religion, it wouldn’t be a matter of doubt, would it? If it was true, there would be no need for belief or faith, any more than we need to believe in the kitchen table. (Unless you’re having a good solid episode of existential doubt, which I think is healthy now and then. Once you’ve got to cogito ergo sum it’s quite fun to doubt the chair you’re sitting on).
What do you say about the hundreds of scholarly books that carefully document the veracity and reliability of the Bible?
That they are not very scholarly, not very reliable, and only veracious to those who don’t need convincing. As above, if we had real evidence, it wouldn’t be a religion.

Why and how has the Bible survived and even flourished in spite of centuries of worldwide attempts to destroy and ban its message?
For most of the last two thousand years, there have been sufficient places in Europe and around the world where questioning, destroying or banning the bible was a heinous crime. Of course it survived! If I lived in a pre-modern Christian society I’d keep quiet and eat the wafer, I’m not interested in being ostracised, tortured or executed!

Have you ever considered the fact that Christianity is the only religion whose leader is said to have risen from the dead?
No it isn’t. Lots of ancient religions tell of similar stories. And the hindus believe everyone gets reincarnated, so it’s nothing special to them!

How do you explain the empty tomb of Jesus in light of all the evidence that has now proven essentially irrefutable for twenty centuries?
Nobody’s got any evidence that there ever was a tomb, never mind an empty one. And what’s so remarkable about an empty tomb? People have been removing bodies from tombs for a long, long time.

If Jesus did not actually die and rise from the dead, how could He (in His condition) have circumvented all of the security measures in place at His tomb?
All you’ve got is a story, written down long after these events are supposed to have taken place, by people whose idea of ‘truth’ was somewhat different to ours. Why do expect me to take this question seriously?

If the authorities stole Jesus’ body, why? Why would they have perpetrated the very scenario that they most wanted to prevent?
Do you believe that Atlantis existed? Because the evidence for that is just as sound as the evidence for this.

If Jesus merely resuscitated in the tomb, how did He deal with the Roman guard posted just outside its entrance?
Do I need to repeat myself? It’s a story. It wasn’t written by Conan Doyle, so I don’t see why I should treat it as a detective story.

How can one realistically discount the testimony of over 500 witnesses to a living Jesus following His crucifixion (see 1 Corinthians 15:6)?
I do not accept any part of the bible, including this one, to be a reliable history of the life, death or resurrection of Jesus. We have nothing to say that those five hundred witnesses were anything more than invention, or at best exaggeration. Ask rather, why would I accept such dubious ‘evidence’.

If all of Jesus’ claims to be God were the result of His own self-delusion, why didn’t He show evidence of lunacy in any other areas of His life?
Look at the lives of many self-proclaimed prophets, are they all insane in other areas of their lives? Consider also that in the context of the society in which Jesus lived, mental illness as we understand it didn’t exist. These are people who quite happily wrote and recorded as story about devils possessing a herd of pigs! I don’t think your modern understanding applies to them, any more than their ancient understanding applies to you.

Is your unbelief in a perfect God possibly the result of a bad experience with an imperfect church or a misunderstanding of the facts, and therefore an unfair rejection of God Himself?
No, I had an excellent experience of church growing up. I held my childhood priest in great respect and affection and I count him, and the nun who ran our school, as great positive influences in my life. I have read and questioned for many years the religious texts of the world, discussing them with believers in those faiths, as well as other atheists. I am not rejecting any god, I simply do not believe in anything supernatural. It seems to be difficult for religious people to comprehend, but it is that simple.

How did 35-40 men, spanning 1500 years and living on three separate continents, ever manage to author one unified message, i.e. the Bible?
I’ve read the bible. It’s one of the least unified and coherent religious texts in the world. It reads just like a collection of writings by many people written over a long period of time. It amazes me anyone could consider it unified.

Because life origins are not observable, verifiable, or falsifiable, how does the theory of “evolution” amount to anything more than just another faith system?
Evolution is an hypothesis that is subject to the tests of the scientific method, and thus far meets those tests. We can see many examples, observable and verifiable or falsifiable, in the world of evolution at work, from small scale things like breeding particular traits in animals or crops, to archaeological records, to the discovery of mechanisms in nature that show possible steps in the evolution of particular things, like eyes.

What do you make of all the anthropological studies indicating that even the most remote tribes show some sort of theological awareness?
In a scary world, what can be more natural to try and find answers and comfort? Without the technology and understanding we have today to observe and explain the world, how do you make sense of it? Supernatural answers seem pretty obvious to me. Besides, surely a tendency to create a theological world in even the remotest tribe serves more to undermine belief in your particular god than to enhance it. If your particular god was any truer or realer than the others, surely that particular god would be universal?
If every effect has a cause, then what or who caused the universe?
You’ve made three assumptions there. First, that every effect has a cause, and second, that the universe is an effect with a cause. Third, that some external agency caused the effect.

How do you explain the thousands of people who have experienced heaven or hell and have come back to tell us about it?
News to me that anyone’s been to heaven or hell and come back to tell us about it! Doesn’t that rather cheapen the ‘miracle’ of Jesus’ resurrection? I’m aware that plenty of people have experiences when close to death that they interpret variously as spiritual experiences of some kind, if they are religious people, I’m yet to find anything to say they’ve been anywhere other than their own mind.

How do you explain the countless people who have received miracles from God?
Have you ever wondered why the street you’re looking for always seems to be close to the edge of the map on the street directory? Is it some kind of spooky supernatural occurance? No, it’s because mathematically there’s a lot more ‘edge’ than ‘middle’ on the map, so the chance is greater that the street will be near the edge than in the middle. Same kind of reasoning applies to most miracles – if you don’t understand the reason for something, you consider it an amazing ‘miracle’, coincidence, etc. Once you understand something, the miracle becomes merely the remarkable.
Is there any evidence that would satisfy you and persuade you to become a believer, or are you just going to believe what you WANT to believe?
Of course, if I was presented with evidence that any particular religion is true, I would believe. It would need to be proper evidence though – not the shoddy stuff that fundie Christians consider to be evidence. The bible is not evidence. Someone’s personal story of how they found god is not evidence. Something that you do not understand and therefore choose to apply fairy stories to is not evidence.

Most of the questions make the fundamental assumption that God exists – so they don’t even have any merit unless you can convince me he/she/it does first! You can, can’t you?

I mean, you said that Smurfs are demonic, and that they are occult in nature. Seriously?? Really?? First of all, if you are watching a show MEANT FOR 5 YEAR OLD’S, and critiquing it that closely, then I think you really need to get out more.

But, what do I know? I’m just some heathen that stumbled upon your site, and while I SHOULD have been amused, I found myself quite disturbed that people who think like you still exist in the 21st century.

Take my advice, pull your nose out of the bible for just a moment, and look around you. Read a real book.