Religious literacy done right

Sorry that I have misunderstood "religious literacy" in my last post. Here is the correct way to approach. I agree and I recommend it.

Should children be protected from religion BS?

This video proposes 4 reasons of why kids should be exposed to religion literacy. I don't agree. Comments follow each of the reasons.
1. So they can better understand the world
I totally agree that we should educate our kids to understand the world, but that understanding should be based on reason, logic and observation. History should be learnt and should be learnt correctly, without the religious colouring of the facts. To let our kids understand the world, and the world-view of some religious people is OK as long as we treat the subject matter as facts, observation and social phenomena. We don't need all the imagining gods, sins that are inherited and all those incoherent nonsense.
I am not sure what it means by "religious literacy". A logical thinking curious mind is what we want our kids to have.
2. To enpower them
In order to enpower our kids to reject nonsensical religion stories, we need to infuse scientific principles to our kids early. Let them know the correct history, the unnecessary human suffering due to or in the name of religion. Help our kid to build a robust logical thinking mind and be able to challenge the preaching they will inevitable meet someday. Talk to our kids about the beauty of the cosmology, the wonders of science. Read them good peoms and help them enjoy good music. Enpowerment is about knowledge. Read the bible with your kids and help them to question the absurdity and inconsistency of the bible. BUT definitely, not send them to any sunday church service!
The Howard Dean example in the video demonstrates the stupidity of the USA population, not that of Dean. Yes, running for political position, one needs to be aware of the perception of the public. With increasing atheism in USA, running an office from a position of atheism should be a breeze of fresh air and may actually help a candidate to cross over the line, hopefully in the near future.
That knowledge in the bible is necessary part of an adult discourse is an indication of the social illness created by religion. Among all the literature, there are much better reading. At this point in time, it may be necessary to read the bible with your kids, especially in USA and Australia. However it should be done at an appropriate age, with guidance and with proper logical thinking applied.
3. To help them make their own informed choice
My question will be how many different religion ideas that we have to provide to our kids in order to make their informed choice. The correct informed choice, the default position, is atheism. Until proven otherwise, god does not exist. This basic logical thinking premise is more important in order for our kids to make healthy choice through their lives.
4. To prevent the "teen epiphany"
Again, do we introduce drugs to our kids to help them deal with "teen's drug epiphany". Again, the correct position is knowledge. The proper training in logical thinking, reasoning, the need to look at evidence and ability to argue your own position.

In my responses here, I have taken the position that the introduction of religious ideas as attending churches. If I have mis-interpreted the message, my apology. However, my position is that the bible is a fiction, a bad story in fact. The proper way of educating our kids is to educate - give them sound approaches to solve problems, give them tools to think, to argue and to make decision. If you are not sure, don't read the bible with your kids and don't expose that bad story to them early. Half-baked counter arguments against god will have an opposite effect when teens are trying to learn to be independent. If you want to inoculate against religion, give them the power of logic, evidence-based thinking skill and lots of literature exposure to enrich their emotion, and the language to express their feelings - using the great words from the great literature instead.

God bless America

Intelligent Falling theory may be the reason of the great U.S. of America's falling with all the blessing from god.

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By a user Sacha in Kiva team forum

Assume there is a god that created the universe. Then, god either:
1) created the universe and the laws thereof, and now stands back observing, but not interfering with, his creation (aka "deism")
2) created the universe and now actively manages his creation (aka "theism")

#1 is no different than a universe without god, at least as far as we are concerned, since the universe obeys rules that we can suss out. Supernatural events are simply natural events we don't understand, but which we have the power to understand, since they obey laws that we can understand.

#2 is the viewpoint that most religions take, however it can be shown (http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/god5.htm, previously featured in this forum IIRC) that god does not answer our prayers, and therefore, such a god is relegated to either managing his creation according to laws (reducing this god to the same god in #1) or to managing his creation in a random/arbitrary, not-adhering-to-any-laws, kind of way.

If we assume that god is random, then that leads to the conclusion that the universe is unintelligible. Since that is not what we see around us (that is, we appear to be able to make sense of and build consistent models of the universe around us), we can conclude that god is not random or arbitrary.

So, the best we can hope to do is attempt to understand the universe, and if we are to attempt that, then we have to assume that the universe is understandable. Any reference to god is unnecessary, since the universe acts according to laws we can discover and understand (or is basically random and unintelligible, which we reject). Allow me to rephrase that: Even if there is a god, even if he created the earth and all the plants and animals thereon, evolution is _still_ the current state-of-the-art in understanding the origin of species.

The ultimate conclusion is: learning about creationism in the context of biology makes no sense.

Origin of Stupidity

Religious People Make Better Citizens - or not

The Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists and the Non-Religious team at KIVA.org will soon be reaching the $1M of micro loans to people in need. The second team Kiva Christians is at $620K mark.

There is good people and there is bad people. It does not take religion to make people good!

What's an error of 8 minutes done to Science?

Or what has religious done to human's quest of understanding?

Look after your pet after the Rapture

For those Christians living in Melbourne Victoria Australia, if you like me to look after your pet when Rapture comes and you are lifted to heaven living your pets in Earth, I am happy to look after them for you, for a fee. Please leave a message in the comment and I will contact you to discuss about the fee and arrangement.

Just to be clear, I am an atheist, so I am sure I will not be lifted to heaven even if I have done all the moral things. I will remain on Earth to look after your pet for you.

Card Carrying Atheist

A blank card here

The Rise of Atheism

Random Acts of Kindness

It does not take religion to have good people doing good thing....

Origins of the christian bible

It is generally believed that the books of the New Testament was written AFTER Jesus (if he ever existed) was dead [reference] The source of stories in the books are mostly heresys liberally plagiarised from Greeks' myths. The title of this post links to a list of sources from which the books of the bible have taken inspirations. :-)

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Our universal craving for a belief system does not make a 'convincing argument for a higher power.' It simply confirms our universal fear of the unknown and unknowable. - hrmitcrb (a user in the Pirate Bay)

Does it take a comedian to tell you how ridiculous is the christian BS?

Book Review: There is a god by Antony Flew - final thoughts

There is a God by Antony Flew is not a really brilliant work and there is nothing new to most atheists familiar with the sort of questions posted. The writing itself is not interesting enough to draw me to read the book line by line. I basically fast read the book in a few hours.

For those Christians reading my blog and looking for my conversion to christianity will be very disappointed. First of all, the Flew's god is the same as Einstein's cosmo god. The Flew's god is not a personal god. His god will not answer prayers and have no interest in the daily life of human.

His first card, "nature obeys laws" is a philosophical mistake as he completely reversed the role of laws. Nature behaves in certain ways. We human invent laws to describe the nature's behaviour. Praying to a god who will change the nature's consistency in reaction to the prayer is wishful thinking. There is no evidence of any prayers having any effect.

The second card looks at the origin of life. Between the two competing candidates: god creates a human with a purpose verse Darwin evolution, the second is supported by large amount of fossil records, demonstrated by human domestication of animals, and selected modification to food crops etc. Yes, there are gaps, but I believe these are gaps to be filled by more evidence. (I am not a biologist, so my knowledge is very limited.) To me, the Darwin evolution shows a path of gradual accumulation of complexity which will lead to intelligence. The god assumption needs to explain how god gets his/her intelligence in the first place before I can accept it is an option on equal footing with evolution.

The third is the existence of nature. Nature exists and we are living in it. Nature existence is a fact. It is well known that to answer the origin of a system, we have to look outside the system, or make assumption about the origin of the system. There are still unknown about what the universe is like before the big bang. However, with that theory (a big bang), many observed events and data can be explained. On the other hand, the god-placebo does not provide any additional explaining ability to anything. The jump from a cosmic god to a personal god who is interested in our everyday life is too large a jump for me to consider logical nor reasonable. Even if there were a cosmic god, this god would not be interested in 1 of the 6.75 billion human who is one of the 1.5 million species on Earth, which is one of the eight planets of the Solar System which is one of 200 billion stars making up the Milky Way which is one of the 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe [ignoring the possibility of multiple universes] [see].

Book Review: There is a god by Antony Flew - 3

The third card in Flew's table is the existence of nature.

Quoting the lyrics of Richard Rodgers,

Nothing comes from nothing,
Nothing ever could.

He immediately points out the atheist's reasoning for the ultimate begining. It was acknowledged that Every system of explanation must start somewhere, and this starting point itself cannot be explained by the system. Then what value judgement do we apply to alternate possible explanation may be found. In this case, it is the god-placebo verse the big bang-placebo. In the god version, we cannot explain the background radiation we detected in the Universe, we cannot explain the red-shift of the spectrum from stars, ... and a whole set of observed, repeatable data. On the other hand, the big bang theory explains the background radiation, the red-shift and much more.

Whether it is quoting Stephen Hawking or David Conway, the beginning assumption is a personal subjective choice. I don't see quoting anyone famous can add value to the argument. At the end of the day, this is a fundamental philosophical question which has been with us since the beginning of conscienceness and I don't pretend I have any better answer.

But if you force me to take a stance, I will go for the big bang theory because of its additional value in explaining phenomenon which cannot be explained by the other alternative.

Book Review: There is a god by Antony Flew - 2

In this post, I am dealing with Flew's second "card" - life.

Admittedly, origin of life is a favourite topic for theists to argue their case. Quoting

Andy Knoll, a professor of biology at Harvard and author of Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Life, notes:

If we try to summarize by just saying what, at the end of the day, we do know about the deep history of life on Earth, about its origin, about its formative stages that gave rise to the biology we see around us today, I think we have to admit that we’re looking through a glass darkly here. We don’t know how life started on this planet. We don’t know exactly when it started, we don’t know under what circumstances.

Jumping from "does not know the origin of life" to "god created life" is a huge jump and such logical argument flaw should not have been committed by a philosopher. Here I like to deal with the case in two parts: origin and purposefulness.

Before Darwin's evolution theory, there is no path leading from a simple molecule to complex life form. However, evolution provides an alternative explain to the god-placebo explanation. Complexity is the result of many small cumulative changes. The key is of course the word cumulative. Random changes do not lead to increased complexity because the next random change may have completely wiped out the 'advantage' of the previous changes. However, once a "memory" has been developed, the changes start to accumulate, instead of randomly cancelling out. The path to complexity has started.

No matter how improbable an event may be, given sufficient tries, it will happen - just like winning lottos. We cannot predict who will win which lotto, we are quite sure that every now and then, someone will win a lotto!

Flew describes the life as intelligently organized and purpose-driven is again a completely human-centric old idea. Different organism, plants and animals have adapted to their respective niche and to the pattern-demanding mind of human, the pattern looks organised. Pig's purpose of life is not to become meat for human! Again, it is a human construct to add purpose to life. A more humble and logical stance would be that we are just lucky to be on the more complex branch of the evolution tree and we have evolved to be able to use tools, hence got the upper hand, and mistakenly have messed up with the environment. If we are gone, the nature will just happily continue.

Book Review: There is a god by Antony Flew - 1a

Some additional comments:

Flew quoted John Leslie:

1. The principle of special relativity ensures that forces such as electromagnetism have an invariable effect regardless of whether they act at right angles to a system’s direction of travel. This enables genetic codes to work and planets to hold together when rotating.
2. Quantum laws prevent electrons from spiraling into atomic nuclei.
3. Electromagnetism has one-force strength, which enables multiple key processes to take place: it allows stars to burn steadily for billions of years; it enables carbon synthesis in stars; it ensures that leptons do not replace quarks, which would have made atoms impossible; it is responsible for protons not decaying too fast or repelling each other too strongly, which would have made chemistry impossible. How is it possible for the same one-force strength to satisfy so many different requirements, when it seems that different strengths would be required for each one of these processes?

These three views of the nature, quoting physical laws sound very strange to me. As a student of Physics, I never read any scientist saying that the principle of special relativity ensures that forces such as electromagnetism have an invariable effect regardless of whether they act at right angles to a system’s direction of travel. Special theory of relativity assumes the velocity of light to be a constant in vacuum and draw conclusion of the mass energy conservation. Electromagnetism has one-force [???] strength. This totally lost me. Physicists describe several types of forces, including gravitation, electromagnetic, strong and weak forces and so on. Saying electromagnestism is very strange and quoting "one-force strength" is even more weird. By the way, the reaction in stars is nuclear rather than electromagnetic.

The obvious lack of understanding in the most basic concepts of Science is enough to reject any "philosophical" arguments based on such concepts to attack the fundamental of the science.

Book Review: There is a god by Antony Flew - 1

Review: There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind by Antony Flew

I have no interest in Flew's past, so I skipped to start at Chapter 4 where he laid the cards on the table. He saw three important scientific spotlights that point to God:

The first is the fact that nature obeys laws. The second is the dimension of life, of intelligently organized and purpose-driven beings, which arose from matter. The third is the very existence of nature.

I don't claim myself to be a philosopher, but I do understand that philosopher thinks deep and looks at things from multiple view points to try to draw a reasoned conclusion. However, with the cards laid as such, I saw an immediate problem.

Let me just deal with the first "card" in this post.

Laws, in this case, refers to the physical laws, e.g. theory of relativity, energy and mass conservation and so on. We must understand that these "laws" represent our human collective understanding of the Universe around us. Nobody writes the laws and then get nature to "fit into the laws". Human observes, from the chaos around us, we apply reasoning and logic, to explain repetitive occurrences of events. There are events which cannot be verifiably repeated and such events do not fall into the science realm. As such, no wonder nature obeys laws BECAUSE the laws are the ways we describe the nature.

In Chapter 5, Flew continued his flawed argument asking the question who wrote the laws.

Yes, many physical laws are beautifully symmetric when expressed in the mathematical equations, sometime is also simple beyond belief. However, mathematical formulae are shorthands. For the uninitiated, each of the symbols in the formulae can take books just to explain. For the physicists and mathematicians, the symmetry expresses the "regularity" or the consistencies of repetitive events. The simplicity on the other hand reflects the deep levels of abstraction the mathematics as a tool has. Combined, that represents the expressiveness of the tools we human used to describe the regularity of the Universe.

Taking the hint from Flew, a more philosophically worthwhile question may be "why nature exhibits consistency and hence we can observe and create laws to explain/predict similar events". But asking the "why" question is dumb, as explained by Richard Dawkins. Purpose, as the question behind the why questions, is a human mind construct. We constantly need to simplify all the chaotic happenings around us and our minds organise them into causal relationships, evolutionarily that help us prepare to respond to potentially deadly events.

I'll respond to the next two "cards" after I read the corresponding chapters.

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The objections to religion are of two sorts - intellectual and moral. The intellectual objection is that there is no reason to suppose any religion true; the moral objection is that religious precepts date from a time when men were more cruel than they are and therefore tend to perpetuate inhumanities which the moral conscience of the age would otherwise outgrow. - Bertrand Russell

American founding fathers were not as religious as most would like to think

Fora.tv

God bless America

Almost all USA polies end their speech with 'god bless america'. What does it really mean? Here George Carlin answer this question.

Bart Ehrman

Bart D. Ehrman is an American New Testament scholar and textual critic of early Christianity. He is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. [reference]

Burden of Proof

I was having a lively debate with Zama over the other post since 21st August until now (about 17 days). You can view the complete debate here. Now that his college is about to start, we shall stop our discussion now.

One issue that we cannot resolve is the 'burden of proof" of the existence of god. As in most debate between theist and atheist, the religious usually will push the burden of proof to the unbeliever. My position is that man created god, an imagination. Just like I cannot disprove the existence of the pink unicorn in real life (yes, the pink unicorn exists in someone's imagination), I cannot disprove the existence of god.

Is there a way to convince the theists that they have the burden of proof?

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Religion, the word itself scares most people silly. It is a word that speaks of irrational belief, naïve commitment and pathetic escapism. - Mendel Jacobson


So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence. - Bertrand Russell

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I put it to you that we have not yet, as a race, proven ourselves actually intelligent.

Not until we have solved basic poverty (that is to say that everyone has enough to eat, shelter, and a means of improvement), eradicated racism, and put superstition/religion in it's place (the past). Then at least we'll be able to start thinking we're actually an intelligent species. - Chris Means [a comment on the Kiva site]

American History for the Christians

Entertainment tonight

Wife beating rules

If you enjoy and like to beat your wife, occasionally or regularly, here are the rules:

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By Bertrand Arthur William Russell [Third Earl Russell] (1872-1970) British philosopher, mathematician, social critic, writer

My conclusion is that there is no reason to believe any of the dogmas of traditional theology and, further, that there is no reason to wish that they were true. Man, in so far as he is not subject to natural forces, is free to work out his own destiny. The responsibility is his, and so is the opportunity. -- "Is There a God?" commissioned by, but never published in, Illustrated Magazine (1952: repr. The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Volume 11: Last Philosophical Testament, 1943-68, ed. John G Slater and Peter Köllner (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 543-48, quoted from S T Joshi, Atheism: A Reader

I mean by intellectual integrity the habit of deciding vexed questions in accordance with the evidence, or of leaving them undecided where the evidence is inconclusive. This virtue, though it is underestimated by almost all adherents of any system of dogma, is to my mind of the very greatest social importance and far more likely to benefit the world than Christianity or any other system of organized beliefs. -- "Can Religion Cure Our Troubles?" (1954)

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones. -- Unpopular Essays, "An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish" (1950), p. 149, quoted from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence; and in this respect ministers of religion follow gospel authority more closely than in some others. -- quoted, in part, from Jonathon Green, The Cassell Dictionary of Cynical Quotations

The essence of the liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment. This is the way opinions are held in science, as opposed to the way in which they are held in theology. -- Unpopular Essays, "Philosophy and Politics" (1950), p. 149, quoted from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. -- "Christian Ethics" from Marriage and Morals (1950), quoted from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.-- Unpopular Essays, "Ideas That Have Harmed Mankind" (1950), p. 149, quoted from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines. -- source unknown

William James used to preach "the will to believe". For my part, I should wish to preach "the will to doubt". What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite. -- source unknown

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time. -- "Is There a God?" commissioned by, but never published in, Illustrated Magazine (1952: repr. The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Volume 11: Last Philosophical Testament, 1943-68, ed. John G Slater and Peter Köllner (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 543-48, quoted from S T Joshi, Atheism: A Reader

That is the idea -- that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called Ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with all its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion. -- "Why I Am Not A Christian," Little Blue Book No. 1372 edited by E Haldeman-Julius.

The whole conception of a God is a conception derived from the ancient oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men.... We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. -- "Why I Am Not A Christian," Little Blue Book No. 1372 edited by E Haldeman-Julius.

My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others.-- "Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?"

Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor all their own. -- What I Believe

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.... This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me. -- "What I Have Lived For," the prologue to his Autobiography, vol. I p. 4

My whole religion is this: do every duty, and expect no reward for it, either here or hereafter. -- childhood diary, quoted from Against the Faith by Jim Herrick

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite. -- Skeptical Essays (1928)

Are you never afraid of God's judgment in denying him? "Most certainly not. I also deny Zeus and Jupiter and Odin and Brahma, but this causes me no qualms. I observe that a very large portion of the human race does not believe in God and suffers no visible punishment in consequence. And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence."-- "What Is an Agnostic?"

If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it's still a foolish thing.-- source unknown

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.-- The History of Western Philosophy, quoted from Lee Eisler, ed, The Quotable Bertrand Russell

Everyone should be able to see clearly

Donate to this project here.

On Science

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On Christian justice

Jesus's sacrifice wasn't really a sacrifice at all. He didn't lose anything really. He suffered a finite amount of pain for a finite amount of time. He didn't actually die, He simply resumed the existance He had before He was physically born. He just went back to being God. How is that a sacrifice? It is an absurd concept for an omnipotent and omniscient Lawgiver to go through the wasted motions of sacrificing Himself to Himself in order for Him to forgive those who do not live up to the impossible standards that He invented.

The (claimed)punishment imposed by God for the unsaved, is eternal torment in Hell. There is no justice in inflicting any form of eternal punishment for any possible finite crime. Even Hitler or Dahmer, as vile as were their actions, are not deserving of such punishment. Their actions certainly would warrant punishment far beyond the normal scope, but no act justly warrants eternal torture. - Chuck

[Christians] may THINK that it is moral or kind for someone to step in and take another's punishment, whether that be a fine or imprisonment. However - and being a lawyer and legal academic has the advantage of me being able to say this with both knowledge and authority - it would not be legal and it would not in fact be just.

Punishments have a number of purposes but these are aimed at the criminal, not the victim. The clearest example of this is that the money paid in the form of a fine does not go to the victim but to the state. In legal systems where victims of crimes are sometimes compensated with money from a state fund, this money is only indirectly paid for by fines (taxes go into the fund also) and thus refutes rather than supports your argument. - The Legal Theorist


Christian Theocratic Justice:

God is the absolute master of the universe. He answers to no higher authority, and His term in office is infinite. He wrote all the laws by which to govern Man, He decides who has broken these laws, and what consequences they shall suffer. As a result of the very first infraction, God has deemed all men worthy of the highest punishment.

While God is inextricably bound to His own legal system, fortunately, in His infinite wisdom, He has found a loophole. In order to absolve Man of the debt that God arbitrarily decided is owed to Him, God must make Himself a son. This Son of God (who is also God) must be put on Earth and tortured to death by the aforementioned criminal humans, thereby paying the fine owed by these humans back to Him (God).

Did you follow all that? God must allow His Son (who is also Himself) to be brutally executed by humans (with His guidance), so that humans can be forgiven (by Himself) for the crimes that He says they committed. - Prester John

The issue of Christianity is you have to sell damnation and people being horrible by their nature before you can sell them salvation. - Wait What

God is offering to save us from a situation that He ultimately caused. After all, if I am a born sinner because of what two human beings did thousands of years, why I am punished for that?

It's like God is the obsessed teen boy in that movie Endless Love, who starts a fire just so he can "save" Brook Shields and her family. - Rufus

He knew ahead of time what would happen to most of humanity, yet he proceeded with the set up (putting the "fallen angels" on earth where he knew that one of them would deceive adam and eve in the first place), yet he still went ahead with it.

If he'd tossed those "fallen angels" into the lake of fire in the first place, this mess may not have happened.- Reynold

Your God punished the entire human race--all of "creation," really-- because two people ate something He told them not to. Your God decreed that all human beings (except for Adam and Eve) should inherit a sin curse and in essence be born guilty of sin, and all because two people ate something He told them not to.

The default condition of the human race is guilty, and this is at God's command (according to your religion, of course). So no, I'm not very impressed with God's so-called sacrifice. Maybe if He hadn't ordered us to be born under a sin curse in the first place, then He wouldn't have needed to sacrifice anybody? - captain howdy

You guys missed some key plot lines in the story. Adam was told that if he ate from the tree he would what?? Burn in hell for eternity? No. He would die. So Adam, and all his descendants were cursed to die when Adam disobeyed God and ate anyway. Jesus came along and died in our place. Now most folks when they die, they are stuck for eternity in hell. Jesus on the other hand, because He is God, was able to raise Himself from the dead after three days. The death penalty for sin is paid. Those who put their trust in Jesus get new life in Him, and the assurance of resurrecting as He did. - EJ & MJ

The fundamental problem with Mr. [Ray] Comfort's attempted analogy is that he has misrepresented the nature of civil law. He has suggested that violations of civil law can result in imprisonment, when in fact civil torts do not allow for the imposition of such a punishment. He has also suggested that the intervention of a third party could prevent the imprisonment of an individual who has been convicted of a legal violation, yet no aspect of United States law allows for such intervention. This suggests that Mr. Comfort's attempted analogy relies either upon a lack of understanding of civil and criminal law or wilful ignoring of fundamental aspects of it. If Mr. Comfort is wilfully ignoring fundamental aspects of a legal system, then his analogies are inherently dishonest, and thus he should not be considered a credible source of information. If Mr. Comfort is simply such a poor researcher that he is unaware of the aspects of law that he has failed to address in his analogy, then there is little reason to believe that he has adequately studied the subjects that he is addressing and thus he should not be considered a credible source of information. - Dimensio

[about Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit] So, if the penalty for sin is death, then why do most people end up stuck in hell for eternity? That goes way, way beyond the threatened punishment, does it not? On this argument, would not the punishment for unrepentant sinners be that they would never be resurrected at all, to glory or to hellfire -- that atheists, at least, would get exactly what they expect out of death (i.e. an end to existence)?

On the other hand, if the penalty for sin is death, and Christ took that penalty for those who repent and believe, then why do even the most saintly and faithful Christians die anyway? Yes, they'll be resurrected (if you're right), but then, if you're right, everyone will be resurrected; some just will deeply regret the fact. - Steven J.