[The link is to: Discovering Religion: Ep 01 - Ready-Made World (Introduction)]
I have tried to talk with theists about god but it inevitably boils down to one thing; you have to be made to believe in something you aren’t privy to, something you cannot sense or detect in any manner, something that defies logic and common sense and the laws of nature. I have tried to understand a theist’s view of the universe; I just cannot because it makes no sense to me. It defies everything I understand and believe in, everything that billions of people around the world do too. Monotheism today is based on a god that has never been seen or heard, only mentally perceived by the select few, individually, personally, whatever … but never convincingly or openly or even in twos.
Well the short answer here is that none have been proven to exist, in any real manner, ever. If one is going to believe in a god then they first have to be told, somehow, that such an entity as god exists. Then they have to be told, somehow, what’s in this god’s heart and mind (assuming our image) … after his existence is proven. Well, we don’t have any footprint nor some godly encyclopedia (or another). We can produce proof that many gods have existed through our history, just not this one??? All we have are some Bronze Age books written by unknown authors and translated by unknown translators, not the ‘paper’ trail I would want to vouch for. This brings me up to the OT. Yahweh has to be god because it says so in there, just so. Everything concerning monotheistic religion today has to rely on the birth of the universe, the Garden of Eden and Adam’s original sin just to try and justify the suffering and persecutions to follow. If there is some way to reconcile this stuff with anything other than a creationist view, well I just cannot see it and I see no point at all in even discussing a Young Earth.
Discovering Religion: Ep 02 – Young Earth http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9Vx_KLRUpE&feature=autoplay&list=PL1304B00CFE5CBA41&playnext=1