A thought.....

[i_am_i]

I suppose I get a bit heavy-handed at times, sorry. It's just that the nature of the main arguments I see against the existence of God seems to be to treat it as a some kind of serious proposition that needs to be ruled out by reason, rather than just saying that God is made up and leaving it at that. Do I make any sense?

In other words we are, in a way, giving a certain amount of credibility to the idea of a God when we treat it as something worthy of philosophical argument.

To be honest I never hear an atheist simply state that God is nothing more than a figment of the imagination. To me that's the whole point, that's the place we start from when we engage in these discussions, it's the whole enchilada!

Strip the thing right down to its most basic fundamental nature and then you're working from a position of greater strength, see what I mean?

Totally, I'm with you now (no need to say sorry!).  And that does make sense to me, in many ways, except I'm not certain, if you did want to argue with a theist, that you would get far with them beyond that initial statement, because they simply wouldn't agree with you.  The only reason to care about that is if you are actually trying to convince them...but maybe I'm off the mark here.

Or maybe it's me that's off the mark somewhat. Every time I see serious dicsussions about the existence of God, discrepancies in the Bible and the origin of the universe I get quite frustrated. I think to myself, "We're actually treating this as something to be serious about?"

I'm a little obsessed with this, see. How many hundred of years have brilliant minds been dealing with these "big" questions? I see that as something of a waste, I really do. It feel like shouting at the book, "It's just all made up, for crying out loud!"

Pascal's Wager, the Ontological Argument, and so on. Totally beside the point.

Yet the discussions go on as if it's something of consequence, and how could it be? We may as well be arguing about why Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd don't get along with each other.

[elliebean]

Or these two:

[xSilverPhinx]

Since I don't believe in god, whatever "evil" is attributed to him is just a reflection of what we today would consider to be morally evil relative to the morality or ulterior motives of the groups living through biblical times.