this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2025
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[–] [email protected] 111 points 5 days ago (8 children)

Honestly the whole "if there's no god then how do you know right from wrong" argument is astounding to me, I don't know how someone can say that with a straight face.

[–] [email protected] 77 points 5 days ago (3 children)

The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what's to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn't have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine. I don't want to do that. Right now, without any god, I don't want to jump across this table and strangle you. I have no desire to strangle you. I have no desire to flip you over and rape you. -- Penn Jillette

[–] Glent 25 points 5 days ago

When someone tells you who they are believe them

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago

Hell, I'm not even an atheist, but if someone actually came up to me with this kind of shit, I'd run as fast as I could. Like, why would you want to rape or murder in the first place? If you need to be threathened with eternal torture in order to be a good person, then maybe you're not a good person.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

Not only that, there's still laws to consider

[–] [email protected] 30 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Without the [holy book], how would morality exist?

Maybe we need to thank religion for saving us from some literal sociopaths...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

This right here is the answer. Religion was an effective way to control many psychopaths. Very useful before there was an effective legal system and police force.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 days ago

"So what you're saying is that the threat of Hell is the sole reason you're not a murdering rapist pedophile?"

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 5 days ago (3 children)

I remember a YouTuber explained that since watches work and had a maker, that humans are immensely more complex, so that's evidence of a maker of the human.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Don't get me started on how badly crafted the human body is. If someone designed us, they should be dragged out in the street and shot.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

Why can't I breathe out of my nose ever? Why does food go down the same hole as air? Why do I have to sleep? Why did I have to get boners in Mrs. O's second hour Spanish class right before the end of class and have to walk to lunch at half mast for the whole second semester sophomore year?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 days ago (4 children)

The recurrent laryngeal nerve. Our liquid waste evacuation tubes sharing space with our reproductive organs. Our reproductive organs being immediately adjacent to our solid waste evacuation tube. Hangnails. Acne. Teeth (god damn luxury bones).

But my go to for "if there is a god, they're not worth worshipping" is always Children's. Bone. Cancer. Those 3 words should not fucking go together.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

But my go to for "if there is a god, they're not worth worshipping" is always Children's. Bone. Cancer. Those 3 words should not fucking go together.

I watched my sibling deteriorate over the course of a few years and then die a couple days after their sixth birthday. They had a brain stem tumor which was inoperable. There is no god

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago

Add scurvy to that list, since primates lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C endogenously, while other animals kept it.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Because Mrs O has a great ass.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago

Perhaps, SatansMaggotyCumFart. Perhaps.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Without knowing the constraints I'm going to have to withhold judgment.

Unless God is omnipotent cause if so he really sucks at this.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I’d like to see a theist defend their god with “He’s doing all he can, give him a break!”

Sky daddy is supposed to be strong

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Phones are more complex than watches. Phones are made by Jesus confirmed.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago

JC Mobile - Unlimited Data, Eternal Life.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 days ago (1 children)

That's Paley's Teleological argument from the 18th century. It's a classic but back then you have to remember clocks were more impressive.

The modern day spin on it is the "fine tuning" argument. Basically: the chances of life existing at all with our earth and the solar system being in a goldilocks zone seems too perfect to be a coincidence. You can probably explain it with selection bias but it's a better argument nonetheless.

[–] MajorMajormajormajor 11 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Which would make sense if this was the only solar system in the galaxy. 1 in 8 chance (rip Pluto) is pretty impressive, but when you include the rest of the galaxy 1 in however many trillion stars with however many trillions of planets is pretty low odds. Mathematically there should be more planets with life on them, so either we can't find them, they're too far away, they all killed themselves, or some other reason is preventing us from finding them.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 5 days ago

The Bible. Never understood how anyone could read that and believe. The answer I leaned much later on is that they don't read it.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 5 days ago (1 children)

'If God isn't real, why do you say oh my God?'

That was from the deputy head of my school...

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Holy shit

Godly excrement exists. QED.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Fucking hell

Proof it's getting hot in here

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago

Cowabunga

... I'm not really sure about that one, never mind.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Yeah it does, it's Mr Hankey!

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 5 days ago (3 children)

I had one guy who told me that he believed that God made the white people.

And that the black people evolved from monkeys.

And the people like me who are Native American and the Indians and Chinese and whatnot are all products of miscegenation between the white people who have souls and the black people who do not.

Surprisingly, being told that i am the proud possessor of some undefinable fraction of a human soul was not enough to get me to participate in their religion.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

That sounds very american.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

This really makes me rethink a lot of my core beliefs. I used to believe that racism is an ancient problem that we will one day overcome, but after reading this, I believe new types of racism can still be invented, and we have to fight those too.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

So god copied an existing product, changed superficial details, and added his holy trademark?

Confirmed Bill Gates is God

[–] [email protected] 31 points 5 days ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 days ago (1 children)

My friend once told me he had heard this very convincing argument on why he should believe...

I told him the usual "gimme your wallet, I'm your god or whatever", and he relented that maybe it's not so simple.

Then a few years later, there he goes bringing it up again...

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

"My God thinks I should drink, and do drugs, and rob the blind and sick. I'm not entirely sure if that's right, but I should do those things just in case I have to to get into his good graces."

Even they have to think it sounds pretty silly when you turn it around on them.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

If there were no god wed all have no morals.

If violently abusive rapist psycopath threatening to torture you is your only reason for being nice, maybe you're a pos to begin with?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 days ago

All of them.

They're all stupid.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 days ago (3 children)

Not necessarily God but intelligent design. I saw someone talk about a banana being the perfect fruit and how well it matched the shape of our hands. So obviously someone planned that out. Must've been God, the same being that releases half a dozen new apple varieties every season.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 days ago

Sounds like someone who's never seen a wild banana.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 days ago

The banana is one of the earliest cultivated plants. It is specifically cultivated, by humans, precisely to be the best fruit possible.

Bananas rule, and we can thank their creator: 10,000 years of human ingenuity

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago

That's an argument used by Ray Comfort and former Growing Pains star Kirk Cameron.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 days ago

Chicken and Egg argument. Christian apologist said it's only a paradox for atheists. God just made eggs and chickens at the same time.

Of course, as an atheist who has seen dinosaur fossils... Eggs existed hundreds of millions of years before chickens.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 days ago

I believe in God but found the arguments in The Brothers Karamazov (and yes I read the book) to be misguided. There's a part in particular where a quasi-villainous character loses faith in God and suddenly goes right to murdering other characters who have been getting on his nerves. The whole thing takes Nietzsche to a whole new level. We aren't the sum of our schools of thought; in fact, in my faith, God doesn't really care about faith as much as he cares about how good we are. I've never met anyone before who doesn't have at least some innate sense of some kind of boundaries.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago

How would anything have been able to form, i.e. make more order, without decreasing entropy?

Of course there are multiple errors in that thought.

  1. Entropy does not mean an actual grade of (dis-)order or organization. It's one model to grasp certain processes through that concept. Outside of these the model doesn't hold.
  2. The second law of thermodynamics says that entropy cannot decrease in a CLOSED system (i.e. mass, energy, information flow at the boundary = 0). It doesn't mean that within that system there can't be local imbalances. For example: For a plant to be able to "order" - to use this term - its molecules to cells, Hydrogen atoms had to have been fused to Helium in our fusion reactor 150 million km away that we call sun which increases local entropy.

Of course there's more wrong with it, but those would be the blatant ones for me.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

The weirdest to me are variations of, "If God didn't exist it would make me feel bad." Uhh???

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago

This is like the best and most honest reason.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago

"It's not a cult." Wake up Karen, it's a cult.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago

"how else would you know the right thing to do?"

queried by a zealot at a picnic table in the park.

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