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Originally Posted by Strange Famous
So to be clear, you would prefer anhiliation than the existence of a God who's standards you find offensive?
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This is entirely hypothetical, of course, but I'd prefer a finite life to an infinit one anyway, with or without a god. A finite existence gives my life now a great deal more personal meaning. Successes are sweeter and failures are more bitter because I know that some day my life will end and that will be that. After de-converting from Christianity, it was actually one of the things I found to be more comforting.
It's more than just "offensive", though. If everything in the Bible is true, God is rather insane. He kills for inconsistent reasons, he will at one moment demand that his followers kill for no reason whatsoever and then turn around and say, "thou shalt not kill", and the philosophies of the Old and New Testaments are almost entirely antithetical. Those paradoxes and inconsistencies suggest to me that the philosophy had many, many different authors with many, many different philosophies. If I appeared before God for judgment, I'd have a hell of a lot of questions that would need answering before I spent eternity with the guy.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Strange Famous
(and I separate the agnostic who says "these things are unknowable" from the atheist who actively and as an act of faith has the positive belief that there is no God)
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There are agnostic (weak) atheists and there are gnostic (strong) atheists. Weak atheists take up by a large degree the lion's share of all atheists in the world. I'm an agnostic atheist, or an atheist by default. I disbelieve the existence of god or gods. A strong atheist does not simply disbelieve, but actively denies the existence of god regardless of new information. I think it's an important distinction to make because one position is much easier to defend.