<p>Ha, what if there IS a god and he’s actually a real jerk. Then he wouldn’t have to explain anything to anyone.</p>
<p>I was raised Roman Catholic, but I’ve grown disenchanted with organized religion in general, and I now consider myself to be more agnostic than anything else. I’m going to play devil’s advocate and argue for the religious side, however, because I feel like the teams here are kind of imbalanced.</p>
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<p>According to Roman Catholic doctrine, if I remember correctly, only people who know of Jesus’ existence and therefore had a chance to follow him and yet decided not to would be denied entrance to heaven.</p>
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<p>DURR. </p>
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<p>Scientists have traced Homo sapiens sapiens’ genetics to a Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam. Sure they lived thousands of years apart, but I’m assuming you actually didn’t believe that creationism as told in Genesis is true (many Roman Catholics don’t either), so I’m guessing your argument was that 6 billion people could not possibly have been traced to one mother and one father.</p>
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<p>You can be wrong, and then you can be wronger than wrong. Believing in mythical pink unicorns isn’t on par with believing in a god, no matter how badly you want to ridicule the religious. It’s like saying, “I believe that saying ‘The Earth is flat’ is an equally wrong statement as ‘The Earth is round,’ because the Earth is not round and actually flattened at the poles.” Two different degrees of wrong. Your argument is invalid.</p>
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<li>Doctrine doesn’t state that he needs us to pray, only that he’d like us to pray. The idea is that if you disappoint him without repenting, he’ll deny you entrance into heaven.</li>
<li>I’m guessing you mean “good,” since omnipotence and omniscience have nothing to do with how one is going to go about one’s business (for example, I might know that global warming is caused by human activity, but I won’t press the issue because I want to rub it in their faces when our world starts burning to the ground). The way I was taught, evil exists because we have the capacity of free will*. God so loved the world that he wanted to give us the chance to love him back. We could choose to do evil because God wanted us to be free. </li>
<li>Mmm, you’re assuming that god actually did set forth all these religions. For all we know, God set forth one religion and humans, in their knack for screwing up, decided to change things up a bit, bringing forth a host of other religions.</li>
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<p>This has nothing to do with the topic, but if string theory and brainworld scenarios are true, there could be entire universes existing alongside of us; we just can’t see or perceive them because the strings making up the photons and fundamental particles of our universe are close-looped into the brane in which our universe resides. So our entire universe could be a little speck floating on a brane in an ocean of other branes we can’t perceive because string theory sets forth disheartening ideas. </p>
<p>To all the people quoting Carlin or Einstein or -insert intellectual here-, please come up with your own arguments instead of appealing to authority WHICH, holy crap, happens to be something many atheists regularly accuse the religious of.</p>