That "God Exists" should be added to the "Big Issues" on DDO

I'm slighty disappointed because I was looking forward to this debate, but I appreciate Pro's concession and am excited to see that I may have changed his mind on this issue. That, after all, is what we strive for with debate, and it warms my heart that I was able to do that. For fun, I'm going to respond to some of the points that Pro made in the last two rounds. Controversial TopicI don't deny that the topic of God's existence is a popular or even controversial topic that exictes many member's, and rightfully so. It's a pervasive, thought-provoking question that we inescapable will come to face with at some point or another in contemplating our mortality. However, it is the fact that it *is* a controversial topic which ought to preclude us from making it a big issue: they say that religion and politics are the touchy subjects that we ought not discuss at the dining room table for a reason. People hold starkly different positions on the existence of a deity or even their conceptions of a deity, so attempting to conceptualize this notion by way of, as Pro suggests, O3 is far oversimplifying the issue. The O3 conception leaves out omnipresence, to name one, and scientific debates which focus on pinpointing the first cause would often focus on a deistic god. This doesn't even account for the pantheistic god that Christopher Langan and many others argue for. The point is, precisely because the issue is so pervasive and widespread is why it should not be a Big Issue. It cannot be properly pinned down nor precisely delineated, so it wold necessarily give rise to ambiguity and contentious kerfuffles among members, as well as highly variable framework analyses. The topic is *not* agreeable, as Pro contends. It will necessarily lead to the clashing of strong personalities, and well that it desirable at times, we should be promoting it with respect to something productive and conducive to intellectual advancement--that cannot possibly be the case with something as elusive and as difficult to formalize as "god. " AmbiguityPro contends that, in spite of your religion, conceptions of God will tend to converge to O3. I have already demonstrated why this will not be the case of light of deism, pantheism, and polytheism. People even within different sects of Christianity, or of varying degrees of devoutness, may have differing views as to God's wraith and the role of the Old Testament of the Bible in their lives and religion. Existence Pro seems to have missed my point with respect to existence. Surely people could debate whether God's existence matters, but that is non-topical to our discussion at hand because the Big Issue would be "Does God exist? " He seems to concede, with this point, that there is a distinction between objective and subjective existence, which would necessarily make it extremely difficult and near-impossible to adequately define God such that we could establish a universal, DDO-wide definition. Truth ValuePro seems to concede that God doesn't have truth value, but then tries to liken the issue to gay marriage. However, as I mentioned in the last round, gay marriage involves appeals to morality as well as objective and empirical facts, such as sociological research on child rearing and adoption. Philosophical arguments to the effect of free will versus omniscience and the problem of evil could make for fascinating debates, but that would require defining God as 03, which would necessarily preclude various conceptions of God and disenfranchise a host of people with fundamentally different views.