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Originally Posted by Chris
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In fairness to Stephen, I don't believe he is saying he prefers the Greek Gods because he believes they are paragons of virtue, but he prefers them because they aren't pretending to be anything other than what Tim says they are. Christianity, on the other hand, appears to be telling us that God loves everyone while God is busy killing people by the million.
---------- Post added at 12:14 ---------- Previous post was at 11:47 ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by Maggy J
Shock! Horror! Someone vehemently says they don't believe in a god and why..and people get upset.If they didn't want the answer why ask..
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That's something that angers me a little. We have various programmes about religion, sometimes telling us how great various Gods are. We even have fairly frequent broadcasts from various Churches. This is, at the very least, allowed to pass with little comment, if not actively encouraged.
Yet the minute one man dares question that God's motives, people are seemingly up in arms about it.
Chris bought up the example of the exam paper. It is possible to question exam papers
as happened at Sheffield Uni. Exam papers can also be wrong, as I experienced in one of my exam papers. It was a programming exam, and we had to dissect some code, explaining it line by line. There was one command I did not recognise, so I had a guess at what it did. I then consulted a friend who was an expert in that language (and won a BAFTA for one of his games), and he said the command did not exist, but my guess at what it was trying to do was probably fairly accurate.
My point is that exams *can* be questioned. Marks can also be adjusted if they are found to be unfair. Why can't God's motives be questioned? Why aren't Atheists given the same rights to question the existence of God in our media that the various religions are given to tell us how great He is? Most programmes don't mention God, but that is not the same thing as questioning whether God exists.
Don't get me wrong, while I personally don't believe in God, I believe everyone has the right to decide whether to believe in God or not. But I also feel that questioning our understanding of God will also (assuming he does exist) increase that understanding and actually benefit everyone.