“Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” ~ 1 John 4:8
“Many of us grow up doubting the love of God because of the relationships we have with others. Broken relationships, hurt from others, or even our own bad choices and cause us to doubt why God would choose to love us. Sometimes well-meaning churches even misguide us into thinking that we need to earn God’s love by behaving or acting “good enough”. God demonstrated the greatest act of love when Jesus Christ died on the cross for us. We no longer have to work toward being love, it is given freely for all.” ~ ibelieve.com
All I have to say personally is that I know a lot of people who don’t believe in God. They haven’t been set on fire yet, so I don’t know what God you see. The God I know sent his only son to die for me, an action I cannot repay. I pray you find God’s love, it’s really amazing when you do find it.
Anyone else want to add? What examples have you of God’s love? Let’s turn this post around, shall we?
~ Elisabeth
“Do. Or do not. There is no try.”, “Fear is the path to the dark side…fear leads to anger…anger leads to hate…hate leads to suffering.” - Yoda
“My fellow fish monsters, far be it for me to question your stupid civilization or its dumb customs, but is squeezing each other’s brains out with a giant nutcracker really going to solve anything?” - Fry
I can quote stories too.
Great. All you have to do now is prove your imaginary sky monster exists at all, as anything more than just the hazy scribblings in a book of inconsistent tales and fables written by anonymous people who weren’t there. Along with all the other storybook characters, for whom no extant physical evidence exists. Not even that this “Jebus” person existed or died on the torture device you worship and wear around your neck, as a grotesque symbol of death and the destruction of the world you’re so looking forward to.
If you can’t, then you’re conceding none of the above matters. It’s obfuscating blah, based on “faith” - an unfalsifiable delusion that does not bring truth or fact. We know this because every religious person has “faith” - faith in their god-claim and faith that you’re wrong. And there is literally nothing, no despicable act, no horrific thought, no grotesque deed, that cannot be justified by faith alone. I mean, it is, afterall, the justification for all the religious violence that plagues the world.
And thus there is also literally no difference between your “faith” and someone worshipping the invisible purple dragon, Zeus or the goblins in their shoes.
“Whoever does not live does not know Flying Spaghetti Monster, because Flying Spaghetti Monster is living.” ~ Cannelloni 10:1.
Therefore, if you live, then you know the Flying Spaghetti Monster. You’re just in denial. FSM trumps your god. FSM is not just love, but life itself. We only live through FSM. Just have faith.
Here are my favorite examples of “god’s love”:
Atheists, what are your favorite examples of “god’s love”? Maybe Jephthah and the mob-boss-god? Maybe where “god” brags about creating evil? When he torments two child-like people for not having the knowledge to know right from wrong? What about his invaluable contributions to football games and the acquisition of parking spots and the recovery of car keys… at the cost of 22,000 children’s lives each day? Or just his long string of unwanted abortions throughout history, the single greatest abortion practitioner ever recorded?
Thank goodness this despicable creature is just a fairytale myth, with no evidence it exists or even manifests in this world, or humanity would have to rise up an army to destroy it.
Let’s not let Xtians dishonestly hijack a post just because they don’t like what’s in it, regardless of how accurate it is, literally forcing themselves onto others, as the proselytizers do.
This “god” creature is an immoral genocidal, hypocritical, filicidal monster. The fact you worship it cals into question either your own judgement, or your own knowledge about your horrible, horrible superstitions.
Thank goodness it’s just a grotesque story, and we understand the universe around us much better than these bronze-age myths describe. We know, for example, that a perfect god who needs to be worshipped cannot exist, by definition. An omniscient god who bestows free will cannot exist, by definition. An all-loving god who will punish you for eternity in a fiery pit for temporal slights cannot exist, by definition. These are self-refuting, self-canceling attributes.
Oh no how dare you teach kids morals or lessons that can be passed down generations with a book thats older then some civilizations. Ahh the horror.
Considering those morals are simply plagiarized from other civilizations, and already understood through humanity’s own evolved human empathy, all it does is retell what we already knew, There is no revealed knowledge in the bible, no new information.
This can hardly be surprising, considering human civilizations the world over that had nothing to do with the tiny patch of desert in which the fables of the bible occurred, managed to figure out the same thing.
For thousands of years, nobody needed the bible in China or India or Japan or South America or Australia to figure out the obvious correlation that killing and stealing was detrimental to the health, cohesion and propagation of the species.
On the other hand, what the bible does do is condone slavery, command people to be stoned to death, and sanctions war and murder against those who are different. And, yes, even in the New Testament. Do you do those any more? No? Why not? Could it be because your secular human morality finds the notion repugnant? Or are you admitting that without your book of superstitions, you would be a savage monster, because you wouldn’t otherwise know that murder is wrong? Decisions…
And we know from studies that “religious children are meaner than their secular counterparts”. Religion does not increase morality, it reduces it, by providing unlimited “do-overs” by simply asking your imaginary sky wizard for a free pass. Clearing your conscience and absolving your guilt and responsibility by simply deciding that the clouds say everything’s okay.
This is reflected in the fact that the most religious states in the US tend to have higher rates of crime. You would expect that the more religious states would be the least crime-riddled. But, no. That is not true at all.
The idea that your book of blood-soaked superstitions of war, violence, hate, irrationality and vengeance are the basis for morality is laughable and demonstrably fallacious.
And the idea that your bible precedes any civilization is just blatant ignorance. There is no place on Earth where the human species have been present for less than 2000 years… except Antarctica… which your god didn’t know existed, since it thought the world was flat.
