Jubbergun wrote:
Nothing about that refutes my point, Aestu. If the good is inconsequential, then so is the evil, for exactly the same reasons. Any organization's/movement's potential for good is proportionate to its potential for evil.
See sig; if this were true we'd be indifferent to our form of government or economic system or political philosophy, or any other sort of value judgement about the kind of system we prefer working with.
We make those comparisons because the values in question are neither arbitrary nor equal.
Jubbergun wrote:
That's all well and good, but while you can prove that the world is round, you
can't prove that God doesn't exist. You can say that the preponderance of the evidence points to that conclusion, but you can't say with 100% certainty that there is no god, yet this is exactly what atheism does. Atheism may seem more rational because of the preponderance of the evidence, but in the end it is no different than any form of theism in that both require a belief in what cannot be proven.
Yes I can because I know what the gods are and where they came from, and I can cite a mass of historical and literary evidence to that effect.
I can trace the gradual evolution of religion from ancient faiths and superstitions and forgotten gods that evolved into the ones we know today, I can cite how those ideas were carried and used by individuals known by name and deed to advance their own agendas, and I can identify the parallels between different instances of religious ideology in ways that preclude the material existence of the gods.
For example, I am of Jewish heritage. I know that my ancestors developed their beliefs by way of exposure to Egyptian and Zoroastrian beliefs during their exile in Egypt and later Babylon. And I likewise know that just as Judaism evolved from Zoroastrianism, Christianity evolved from Judaism. I also know that Greek and Roman stories share a heritage with Jewish beliefs, and in fact, after Jewish-Roman contact, some authors like Ovid based their stories on Jewish myths. Since I know where those beliefs came from, I know what they are, and I know that the gods played no role in the story - only man.
I know that God didn't actually come to my ancestors and tell them, "here I am", because I know that they got these ideas by being exposed to other people who had slightly different beliefs. Therefore, the beliefs they had in more recent times about the particulars of the nature of God are not inherently truthful, despite being the object of absolute faith, but rather derived from other, equally "absolute" beliefs.
I know that my ancestors were not truly monotheistic - they did not deny the existence of other gods, they merely believed that theirs was the one true god. In connection with my knowledge of history and ethnography, I know that they came to be truly monotheistic as their views were extremified by persecution by pagans, and the gradual evolution and spread of other monotheistic faiths. Since I know that monotheism as we know it is an invention of mankind in response to history, I know that it is not divinely ordained.
I know that the stories about Moses are very similar in many respects to the stories about Romulus. I know that Moses did what he did because he faced the same problem Romulus did, which was turning a bunch of nomads and former slaves into a cohesive society.
I know from reading history that religious policies that were considered sacred and absolute in their time are, with perspective and parallel, known to have been motivated by selfish personal drives. I know that beliefs held by the ancients in ways similar to our own have since fallen out of favor; therefore, there is no reason to believe our own beliefs any more correct. It is logical to conclude that as ours are built upon the same premise, they are equally faulty.
In short, I have great knowledge based on fact about the history of the gods, and I know that it is man, and not the factual existence of the divine, that has given rise to contemporary religious beliefs as we know them. And therefore, the gods were created by mankind, and are factually not extant.