I have only one hope for this book. When someone says that God answered their prayers, I want them to take a moment to understand the corollary. They are essentially saying that what they were asking for was deemed so important to the functioning of the universe that God Himself felt it worthy to come down from the heavens, suspend the laws of the universe, and intervene on their behalf. If we are to believe that God intervenes in our daily lives, we must then believe that God has weighed the merits of their prayer request to that of a child and a grieving parent beseeching Heaven for food or clean water and God finding the starving child unworthy. There is nothing humble about this.
If faith can move mountains, surely it can withstand a little criticism...
If God is all-knowing and perfect, we should be able to expect a perfect text explaining in clear, unambiguous terms exactly what He wants and expects. No holy book fits that description.
History has shown us that religion is not a moral barrier to immoral actions and virtually every religion has blood on its hands. In fact, many egregious atrocities have been committed by those who believed that they had God on their side.
99.9% of all God's intelligently-designed creatures have gone extinct. If you designed and built 1,000 houses and 999 of them crumbled to the ground, would you call yourself an intelligent designer and architect? Perhaps God shouldn't have rested on the 7th day...
As human knowledge has advanced, resurrections have declined. Infer what you like from that fact.
God doesn't regrow limbs no matter how many people might pray for it. He never has. He never will and actions always speak louder than words.
The Christian Reward System is a morally-bankrupt belief system with no place in today's modern society. To view it any other way is naive, dangerous, and insulting.
The simple, non-debatable fact is that the United States is a democracy - not a theocracy. The power to govern is derived from the people - not God. If our founding fathers wanted us to be a "Christian Nation", they could have created us so. All evidence to the contrary.
To say that gays and lesbians can't get married because it is against my religion is like saying that someone else can't eat donuts because I'm on a diet.
Wishful thinking does not lend itself to the truth and I don't feel remorseful for pointing this out.
Simply stated, faith is gullibility personified.
Voluntary ignorance is not something to be proud of and yet we can find great numbers of people embracing this on a daily basis.
Faith does not require evidence, and oddly enough, someone's faith is considered "stronger" when there's less evidence to support it. I fail to see how this is a virtue.
We don't force Christians to teach science in their churches so it would be appreciated if they didn't bring their faith into our public schools.
When someone doubts evolution by asking "If we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?", the ONLY appropriate response is "If we came from dirt, why is there still dirt?"
Atheists and agnostics, the most religiously-knowledgeable group, dismiss organized religion while those who are less religiously-knowledgeable swear to the authenticity of things they often aren't even aware of.
If God didn't know that man would sin, then God is an imbecile who falls tragically short of the all-knowing moniker. If He did know that man was going to sin and went through this whole process anyway, He did it to please Himself. What kind of God is this that builds something faulty, blames His mistakes on the faulty creation, and then requires Himself to sacrifice Himself to Himself for the redemption of His faulty creation? Can you follow the thread on this? To further confuse the situation, when Jesus is apparently raised from the dead, what do we make of the "sacrifice" itself? If the Son and the Father are one, the sacrifice would be purely cosmetic, hardly worthy of the term "sacrifice". Nothing of value was lost.
The simple fact is that not every religion can be true. When you realize this, it quickly becomes apparent that many millions of people are literally praying to...nothing. The concept of God goes from invisible to downright imaginary.
When we critically evaluate religious claims to moral superiority, we can see that the Bible is no more useful as a guide to morality than a map of Chicago is to guiding us around New York City.
Modern moralists do not get their morality from the Bible and this premise can be highlighted by the simple fact that if actions like adultery were actually punishable by stoning and death, we would face a shortage of politicians.
You might think that the Book of Matthew was written by...Matthew. Not a single person who put ink to papyrus ever actually met Jesus. The authors of the Gospels are anonymous. That's not something they rush to tell us in Church on Sunday, is it?
The most ardent supporters of Christianity will deny evolution but will gladly talk about the infallibility of the Bible...which speaks of mythological creatures as if they were real and had roles to play. To believe in Jesus but not the cockatrice, cherubim, dragon, witch, or satyr is like saying you believe in Santa Claus but not the elves or flying reindeer.
I challenge anyone to prove that my pink unicorn doesn't exist. I would gladly accept a successful refutation because it would mean that a model exists to prove the nonexistence of their god as well.
If the story of Noah's Ark were even remotely true, the most ambitious, psychopathic serial killers among us would blush with embarrassment and envy at the totality of God's killing spree.
If I were to tell a man that rubbing green Jell-O on his bald head will help him regrow hair, he's going to require more proof before rushing out to the store to purchase Jell-O. If I were to tell the same man that the book he has in his hands on Sunday was written or inspired by the creator of the universe, he surprisingly requires no further evidence.
Let's be honest. How believable would the story of Jesus or Muhammad be if it happened today?
The Bible and Qur'an are treated no differently than a modern-day software license. Nobody ever reads the whole thing, but that doesn't prevent millions of our neighbors from scrolling to the bottom and clicking "I Agree".
God becomes a convenient excuse for things we don't understand and faith is the glue that binds that belief together.
Putting a religious man like Republican Paul Broun from the great state of Georgia on an official government body charged with keeping science at the forefront is no different than asking a pedophile priest to run a daycare – it's inappropriate and wrong.