Originally Posted by
bvnny
There's no way for you to say with certainty that the world is "terrible" and "cold", like, you would have to evaluate all the good and bad things about the world, come to a conclusion as to the importance of such things (like, does the happiness of children and the sadness of adults hold the same level of importance in the grand scheme of things?), and you can't do those things without objective metrics, points of reference, which we don't have since there's not another planet with rational living beings for us to compare their situation to ours (at least, not that we know about).
Humans are clearly inferior and highly flawed. For instance, Homo erectus, ‘Upright Man’, survived for close to 2 million years, making them the most durable human or human-like species ever. This record is not very likely to be broken even by our own species : homo-sapiens. It is very doubtful whether Homo sapiens will still be around a thousand years from now, so 2 million years is really out of our league.
Homo-Sapiens are so inferior and flawed that we will be likely exterminated within 1,000 years by a super human race of the genus homo made superior through biological engineering, cyborg engineering (cyborgs are beings that combine organic with non-organic parts) or the engineering of inorganic life etc..
Because we now know that the earth is but a tiny speck of dust in an unfathomably large universe, the notion that human beings are "special creations of God", and in particular are so important that God "gave his only begotten Son" for their "salvation" now seems like such palpable nonsense that anyone who believes it would have to be demented. And inasmuch as all the major religions are built around the notion that they are "special creations" of the Creator of the Universe, we can forthwith assign all such religions to the dustbin of superstition. The argument here is evidently much like what Bertrand Russell had in mind when he said, "That God would bother with humans proves that he is demented; that he is demented proves that he does not exist." --JBR
Now answering your two other questions, about there's not being a "proof" for God's existence and why he doesn't "show" himself: Well, most theories actually don't have a definitive proof, we accept them because they work well with our current framework for thinking certain things, like imaginary numbers in Maths and most of Quantum Physics, religion is another framework in a way, and it works well to explain certain things, so there's really no need for a "proof" of God's existence to the people that believe in God...
That also responds your objection about God doesn't showing himself, since empirical knowledge is not necessary to work within certain frameworks of thought.
Imaginary numbers aren't a theory genius and they can be proven to exist within the framework of pure mathematics -- the theorem (not theory) can be proved from fundamental axioms. That it is useful for engineering of electronics etc.. is just a coincidence.
Religion is another framework a primitive outdated one :
Science is different from most religions in the way it makes 'converts', and, more generally, in how it gets people to believe in its assertions. In particular, people become converts to science because they see that it works: Science builds buildings and bombs and sends rockets to the moon -- something no religion seriously pretends to do. On the other hand, people become converts to religion because they think they see that it works, but are mistaken: For example, people become converts to religion because of such things as (a) their parents shape their beliefs at an impressionable age (ie, brainwash them); (b) they have a psychic or psychic-like experience which makes them think that God is responsible, whereas in reality they may only have had a pinched spinal nerve, or perhaps a genuine psychic experience, the latter of which does not prove the existence of God, but only that there are things that science still doesn't understand; or (c) they survive some traumatic experience which makes them think that God is the only thing that could have gotten them thru it, eg, military combat ("There are no atheists in foxholes") or taking a subway ride in New Yawk.
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Scientific theories are ones which are supposedly objectively-verifiable by any person of sufficient skill -- a fact reflected in the custom that a theory is not accepted as scientifically correct or useful unless it has been judged publishable in a scientific journal by the author's scientific peers, and experimentally verified by another scientist of recognized credentials. In contrast, religious theories are accepted on the basis of the babblings of religious hermits who beat themselves bloody, refuse to wash, and -- small wonder -- haven't had sex for at least six weeks (OK, make that 40 days).
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About 400 years ago, the Christian religion "knew" everything. It "knew" the earth was flat, "knew" that there were witches, "knew" that animals could be tried for crimes, "knew" that the Bible was the literal word of God, "knew" the difference between right and wrong, "knew" that the difference between man and beast was that only men have "souls", "knew" that the earth was the center of the universe, and so on. Since that time the things that religion "knows" has been shrinking at the speed of light -- or at least the speed of thought. Copernicus showed that the sun was the center of our "universe"; Galileo discovered new worlds; Newton showed that it was physical laws, and not a Godhead, that determined the movement of the planets; and so on. Today, what religion "knows" can be contained in a pinhead, and generally is. -JBR
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