The God of Christianity is probably real.

I have made it my goal in this debate to demolish the intellectual and moral pretenses of the Christian religion. Of course this demolition will have to take a back seat to the resolution that awaits us. I consider Christianity to be a wicked, depraved, and intellectually bankrupt cult that consistently perpetuates blatant falsehoods and is responsible for outrageous amounts of needles suffering- even whilst it maintains an air of superciliousness. Two thousand years is far too long far any illusion to be sheltered from the light of reason. The time of its destruction is before us. My antagonist will simply be arguing in favor of the existence of the God of Christian theism, no more and no less. ======== Contention 1: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. ======== Whatever can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. Or as Carl Sagan famously put it "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Without extraordinary evidence that God exists we can reasonably say that claiming to know that God exists is an unsupported and unsupportable claim to knowledge. ======== Contention 2: Christian theology is unsupported by evidence. ======== Sam Harris did a good job of surmising the main thesis of Christianity's salvation scheme so allow me to paraphrase what he wrote. Jesus Christ, a carpenter by trade, was born by parthenogenesis, ritually murdered upon a cross for the collective sins of his species, and then promptly resurrected after an interval of three days. Afterwards he ascended bodily to "heaven" where for two millennia he has watched over the Earth in anticipation of his imminent return, at which time he will judge humanity for its skeptical doubts and grant immortality to those that had the good fortune to be convinced, upon mother's knee, that this baffling litany of miracles was the most important series of truth claims ever revealed about our cosmos. [1]-[2] Of course Jesus hasn't completely left humanity out to dry after his untimely departure from this Earth. If you manage to telepathically tell this invisible carpenter/ zombie/ deity that you will forever be his servant in loving worship then you will get bliss in the afterlife. He has also availed himself to be conveniently eaten in the form of a cracker to remind you of how unworthy and wretched you are. This would also technically constitute cannibalism if you are a believing Catholic. Is there any doubt that if only a single person were to believe this he would be considered mad? ======== Contention 3: Hearsay is insufficient evidence to validate the truth of miracles. ======== The main quandary with arguing for the truth of religion, and Christianity in particular, is that the evidence for our religious doctrines is either terrible or non-existent. Christianity is predicated upon the reliability of the miracle stories of Jesus laid out in the New Testament. This is why people believe that Jesus is the son of God, divine, etc. These textual claims are problematic for a number of reasons. As many of you are probably already aware the earliest Gospels were not written until some four decades after Jesus was supposedly crucified. [3] On top of this there are no extra biblical accounts of the miracles of Jesus. But the truth is actually quite a bit worse than that. Even if we had multiple contemporaneous eye witness accounts of the miracles of Jesus that would still not provide a sufficient basis to believe that these events actually occurred. The problem is that first hand accounts of miracles are quite common even in the 21st century. There are literally millions of educated westerners who think that their favorite guru has magic powers. The powers ascribed to these gurus are every bit as outlandish as those that were given to Jesus. Millions of people believe that Sathya sai baba, the south Indian guru, is a living god. He has been claimed, by his followers, to have raised the dead, materialize objects and he even claims to have been born of a virgin- which isn't all that unique in the history of religion or in history generally. [4] If you're curious enough you can even watch some of his miracles on youtube. Sathya sai baba's miracles probably wouldn't even impress most children that weren't otherwise indoctrinated into his tawdry cult. So why, dear Christian, don't you treat the miracle stories of Jesus with the same skepticism? ======== Contention 4: Religion is the language of ignorance ======== Religion had the unfortunate advantage of being our first form of Philosophy. Full credit to religion for attempting this, some one had to try after all. But because it was our first it was our worst. Such is the case with virtually all other human endeavors. Ten thousand years ago we didn't know why the tides came in and out, why the sun rose, why people die, where we came from. God seemed to be a perfectly reasonable explanation for that time. We now have better explanations both for the origins of our species and for the origins of our cosmos; so much better that had they been available to us ten thousand years ago religion never would have taken root. [5]-[6] No one would now go back to a time when we had no real philosophy; when we thought that the Earth was flat and that it orbited the Sun. Religion comes to us, in other words, from the infancy of our species. It comes to us from a time when we didn't know that there were microorganisms that caused disease. Theology was the branch of ignorance that came to us from a time when all causal relationships about the world were opaque and when we didn't know a damn thing. Therefore it is not surprising that our curious and bemused ancestors would have endorsed various supernatural explanations for various natural phenomena; they didn't know any better. ======== Conclusion ======== The fact that I could write this essay and sleep peacefully at night should be a sign to you of how unfounded I think your religious certainties are. I am not convinced by any of the patently absurd miracle stories of Christianity or any of the shoddy philosophical arguments that have been used to support them, and I don't think you should be either. On the other hand I am convinced by the evidence which shows that Christians are part of a pathological subculture that has been groomed to not look critically upon its own discourse. This entire game is zero sum, dear Christian; one of us will have to concede after having admitted to intellectual and moral defeat. Best, Freeman Sources: [1]http://www.reasonproject.org... [2] Read any of the four Gospels: Mathew, Mark, Luke, or John [3]http://wiki.answers.com... [4]http://en.wikipedia.org... [5]http://evolution.berkeley.edu...... [6]http://www.talkorigins.org... Definitions: God - the supernatural being conceived as the perfect and omnipotent and omniscient originator and ruler of the universe; the object of worship in monotheistic religions. Real- being or occurring in fact or actuality; having verified existence; not illusory. Christianity (from the Greek word Khristos, "Christ", literally "anointed one") is a monotheisticreligion[1] centered on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in the New Testament.[2] The Christian faith is essentially faith in Jesus as the Christ (or Messiah), the Son of God, the Savior, the manifestation of God to humankind (Immanuel), and God (Yahweh or the "Lord") himself. -------------------http://en.wikipedia.org...------------------------ No semantics please, that wouldn't be very Christian. ;p