Biblical proof that god does not exist, or at least, not as described in the Bible.

[Binkie The Clown]

It just occurred to me as I overheard someone talking about some Bible passage that there are numerous places in the Bible where god "changes his mind", or "relents" regarding some act he was about to commit*. Since the story is that god is always perfect, and can make no errors, then the fact that god "changed his mind" about something inescapably implies that either 1) god was wrong at first and changed his mind to make it right, or 2) god was right at first and changing his mind made him wrong. Either way, there was time, either before or after, that god was wrong. It follows that god, as defined in the Bible cannot be always right.

*[font size=1] e.g. Exodus 32:14 Then the LORD relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened.[/font]

[stopbush]

1. Men are fallible, and men wrote the Bible. Every word of it. There was no

divine guidance about it. Just a bunch of tales passed down by people of varying intelligence who never thought to examine whether there was an consistent logic behind what they were writing.

Let's face it, if Jesus was actually god, he could have proven it by saying a few things that would have seemed to be lunacy at the time he said them, but that were proven to be accurate centuries later. Case in point: Jesus said illnesses were caused by demons, regurgitating the belief of the time. Imagine if he had said, "no, actually, diseases are caused by microscopic organisims that can't be seen by the human eye without employing extreme magnification."

Now, THAT might have been something only an all-knowing god would have said in that part of the world at that time.

[rurallib]

2. raised catholic, I first started questioning when i heard a caller on a radio show

- mind you this was in the early 70s when such things were never said in public - that god was made in man's image and likeness.

Now as mild as that may seem today back then on radio airwaves such a reversal of the old standard catechism answer was a show stopper. His call was disconnected immediately.

So when you bring this up, there is the exact evidence for that guy's comment. God is made in man's image and he or she changes their mind and gets mad and forgets things and all sorts of other human failings.

[Bradical79]

3. Doesn't matter when right or wrong is defined as being right with god.

Perfection in the religious Christian sense is often God, and humans striving for perfection is basically doing what God tells you and following the rules. Right and wrong doesn't really apply to a hypothetical omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient being that created the universe. Such a god can't be wrong because whatever he deems right is right.

[DetlefK]

4. The Bible is so badly written and so full of contradictions, you cannot read anything from it.

The original Jehovah is one of those antropomorphic gods that are typical for Europe and the Middle-East. (I think, Jehovah is the only remaining god, the war-god, of an older jewish polytheistic religion. And that this polytheistic religion was turned into a monotheistic religion during the babylonian exile as a penance: They didn't worship Jehovah enough because they worshipped other gods beside him and that's why they lost the war with the Babylonians. That's why they no longer worshipped deities like Ashera and focused exclusively on Jehovah from this point onwards.)

The Jehovah of the New Testament is a totally different kind of god. From a tyrant-figure, a war-god, he gets turned into the supreme being of a complex cosmology. The Jews don't have a hell. And a close reading of the Old Testament reveals that Satan is more of a "trickster"-entity than an evil/antagonistic entity. The antagonism God-vs-Lucifer exists only in the New Testament.

The New Testament is also the source where God gets elevated to being the best of all things. He is the biggest everything. And this increase in profile can only be substantiated if you have successes to show off. The New Testament does this by defining Lucifer as the perfect example of everything that is wrong: Lucifer's sin is to not worship God despite worshipping God being the "correct" thing to do. Because he's best.
Lucifer tempting Jesus in the desert is an excellent example: Jesus is in no way beating Lucifer's challenges to his godliness. He wiggles his way out of the challenges and uses them as a pretext to say that it's wrong to even doubt and test God. Compare that to the Old Testament where God is meddling all the time with the lives of people.



The Old and the New Testament should really be read separately.

[mountain grammy]

5. And taken for what it is..fiction!

[AlbertCat]

6. fiction! and mythology

But is it just because we here in the Western world grow up with Abrahamic mythology that I find it so dull and unimaginative? I mean, Hindu myths blow Christian ones out of the sky! Is that just because I find them exotic? I like Greek myths and they're pretty "western Culture", y'know....

Anyway, I find Abrahamic mythology the most unoriginal and lame stuff around.

[mountain grammy]

7. Nothing beats the Greeks..

all the best mythology.. in my opinion.

[Tigerinu]

8. AmEn

you got my vote !

[Nevernose]

9. There is no Satan in the Old Testament

There's a serpent in the beginning. Job features God in a contest with "an adversary," but not actually Satan. "Lucifer" is the Greek term for "dawn star" (i.e., the planet Venus, brightest "star" in the sky), and refers not to Satan r a literal fall from Heaven but to a prophecy about a future king of Babylon.

Satan was concocted slowly, over a period of centuries, by Jewish extremist groups like the Essenes.