God is Dead (Redux)

Much thanks to Lupricona for his/her argument and questions. I hope this dialogue will bring greater understanding between our positions. 1) I'll start off my responses by saying that we truly live in a strange time when a creationist can ask this question and not feel some sense of irony. My beliefs are not arbitrary; they are defined by science and reason. I haven't stumbled upon them; thousands upon thousands of research hours have gone into proving the truth of evolution. A small fraction of this time has been spent on creationism, with little success, and no time has been spent on proving the existence of God, with a similar null output. I will say this again: I was a creationist for more than a decade before I finally committed to the Socratic principle of following the evidence, instead of spouting rhetoric and pseudoscience. You know exactly what it's like to be a skeptic. You're a skeptic about Zeus, Brahman, Allah, and Xenu. Some of us just take it one step further. I don't assert there is no God, I just say the 'evidence' for a God appears shoddy to me. I don't know and neither do you, and neither does the Catholic priest or the Muslim imam or the Buddhist monk. Pretending like we do know has led to quite a few atrocities and the stifling of much science. And, for goodness sake, truth is not subjective! How many atheists do you know who think two plus two equals five? Truth is the closest to reality that observation, experimentation, and independent corroboration can verify - I don't need a genocidal God who murdered a planet to tell me that killing is bad; evolution has built empathy into me to tell me that. 2) With regards to mythology, I don't need historical sources. Snakes can't speak. People can't live for a thousand years. Giants and ghosts and angels and demons don't exist. Diseases and natural disasters aren't curses for wickedness. Menstrual blood isn't evil. Two of each animal species can't fit on a boat 450 ft long. Virgins in the first century couldn't give birth. People can't walk on water. The dead can't come back to life. The moment you scientifically prove one of these statements to be false is the moment they cease to be mythology. Contradictions within the Bible only require one source, and it certainly isn't historical: the Bible itself. For space, I'll cite only a few taken from the KJV. Genesis 1:3-5 says God made day and night on the first day of creation, but Gen 1:14-19 says he made the sun and moon on the fourth day. How can there be day and night without the sun and moon? Genesis 1 says animals and birds were created before man, but Gen 2:19 says God made man, then made animals, then brought them to Adam to be named. Genesis tells us that the sin of Adam was responsible for the fallen state of mankind, but Ezekiel 18:20 says the person who sins is guilty, not their children or descendants: "The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them." This quote is at odds with yet another passage, Jeremiah 16:10-11, which says: "And it shall come to pass, when thou shalt shew this people all these words, and they shall say unto thee, Wherefore hath the Lord pronounced all this great evil against us? or what is our iniquity? ... Then shalt thou say unto them, Because your fathers have forsaken me, saith the Lord, and have walked after other gods, and have served them... and have not kept my law;" Matthew 20:29 says that as Jesus left the city of Jericho, two blind men called after him: "As Jesus and his disciples were leaving Jericho, a large crowd followed him. Two blind men were sitting by the roadside, and when they heard that Jesus was going by, they shouted, "Lord, Son of David, have mercy on us!" In Mark 10:46-47, it was one blind man: "...As Jesus and his disciples, together with a large crowd, were leaving the city, a blind man, Bartimaeus (which means 'son of Timaeus'), was sitting by the roadside begging. When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!" Are we to believe the three men said the exact same thing on two separate occasions? Or is it more likely that the oral traditions the Gospels were based on got two different stories? Mark 6:8 says Jesus told his disciples to bring nothing but a staff on their journey. Luke 9:3 sees Jesus explicitly forbidding his disciples from carrying staves. Jesus has divine authority to perform miracles, and yet Pharaoh's pagan magicians during the exodus could perform miracles as well. The Bible contradicts many ancient sources. Space prohibits me from going into detail, but one quick example is the aforementioned census during the birth of Jesus in the book of Luke. The Romans were master historians, yet we have no reports of any such census. The only conceivable conclusion is that the author of Luke, writing decades after the death of Jesus, needed a way to 'fulfill' the prophecy in the book of Micah about a savior from Bethlehem. Many more examples can be found in the books "How Jesus Became God" by Bart Ehrman and "How God became God" by Richard Smoley. 3) Good grief! The Bible is my justification! Did you look at the sources I provided? Numbers 31 refers to virgins as 'plunder' to be divided among the priests and soldiers. Deuteronomy 13 says all nonbelievers should be executed. The Pentateuch repeatedly says homosexuality is a crime, which is why God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. God drowned a planet because it angered him, commanded the genocide of the Amalekites, and sends anyone who doesn't worship him (even if they're morally decent) to a pit of fire for eternity. I don't need a masters in philosophy to tell that this is wrong. What about Christian ethics? What about 'thou shalt not kill' and 'turn the other cheek'? Do you know what it's called when an all-powerful ruler doesn't have to follow the laws of his kingdom? A dictatorship. And don't give me that bologna about the Old Testament and the New being different. The Bible says many times that God is unchanging. If it was okay for him to do it then, it's okay for him now. And I don't need a justifiable moral theory to tell yours is ridiculous. Let me use an analogy. Say you and I are walking in the park, and a big pink teapot falls in front of us out of a clear blue sky. If I were to say "This means space aliens want us to drink tea!", you don't need an explanation of how the teapot got there to dismiss mine as being absurd. 4) How have I straw-maned? I've given my perspective and arguments to support it. If I were to say to any random person off the street, 'your wife is cheating on you', or 'Elvis is alive', or 'Superman is a real person who really saves people', what is the first thing anyone would respond with? Anyone in the world? 'Show me some evidence'. I believe the evidence for God is shoddy at best, and not indicative of any particular god over another (why Yahweh and not Allah)? I don't belittle the Christian explanation, so long as it doesn't lie to support it's narratives. My family's still Christian, and I have many Christian friends. There are many Christians; the pope, the archbishop of Canterbury, etc who believe in evolution over creationism. I think there is no evidence for creationism, which is why I belittle creation explanations - because they lie. Yes, I am familiar with ICR and Answers in Genesis. Kent Hovind and Ken Ham and Ray Comfort and all those other detestable characters. They remind me of Bond villains with how they delude so many into following them. Just because many (well, more than a few) scientists are creationists doesn't mean their conclusion is correct. Thousands of engineers believe the US government planned 9/11. Many archaeologists believe extraterrestrials seeded life on this planet. Thanks.