"The god of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction:..."

Well well well well well hmmmmmm considering the absolute fact that you cannot prove that YOUR god even exists, YOUR entire debate is entirely irrelevant on those grounds alone, you’ve automatically lost the debate. Oh and Btw, I didn’t make the opening statement for RD1. Richard Dawkins did. He happens to know a lot more about YOUR god, religion and bible than you ---ever--- will. As the matter of fact, so do I. Now let’s see where your debate leads. So let’s get started. Right off the bat you dig yourself a super hole “mercy, kindness, justice , wisdom” How is that possible with deliberate massive genocides such as… Indeed god is far far far worse than Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Hong Xiuquan combined? Here's some examples... 3,000 EX 32:27-28, 14,700 NU 16:49, 24,002 NU 25: 1-11, 12,000 JOS 8: 1-25, 10,000 JG 1:4, 120,000 JG 8:7-10, 42,000 JG 12:3-6, 1,000 JD 15:14-15, 3,000 JD 16:27-30, 25,101 JD 16:27-30, 1 SAM 4 34,002, 1 SAM 6:19 50,070, 2 SAM 8 65,850, 1 KI 20: 28-29 100,000, 1 KI 20: 30 27,000, KI 19 35 -37 185,000, 2 CHR 13 17-18 500,000!!!!! 2 CHR 28:6 120,000, Esther 9:5-18 75,813 etc etc etc Yeah god is really so moral huh? There’s no such a thing as “mercy, kindness, justice” and godwho has no morality. “Wisdom”? What? No god would ever create the human race to begin with, with all of his faults, his broken bones, his heart attacks, his diseases. Also what “wisdom” is there within any god that would ---ever--- use text form as a form of communication, the worst form of communication possible? “If god is all knowing and he knows the future of all events and he wrote a book that can only be interpreted as if it endorses slavery and if its heinous violence against your children against your neighbors… how could a god be that omnipotent and devise a book where we can’t distinguish between the law of Israel and god’s law? I mean their interwoven where we have metaphor and fact and nobody can distinguish the two. We don’t know what we’re supposed to take figuratively. We don’t know what we’re supposed to take literally. Was it actually a tree? I mean come on. How can anyone distinguish this. I mean come on. It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t matter how its translated. It doesn’t matter what version. If it was written by an omnipotent being there would be ONE VERSION. And there would be only ONE WAY to interpret it because it would be written well.” Aron Ra Actually it wouldn’t be written at all. What’s wrong with your god comin’ down and talking to people? ‘Hey you know some of that stuff that’s in the book? I’m here to correct it.” Matt Dillahunty “We have to rely on copies of copies of anonymous authors with no originals and the textural testimony to a miracle for example, there’s no amount of reports, anecdotal reports that is sufficient to justify in believing that actually happened as reported. And anything that would qualify as a god would clearly understand this and if it wanted to clearly convey this to people in a way that is believable would not be relying on ---TEXT--- to do so. And this to me is the nail in the coffin for christianity. The god that christians believe in is amazingly ---STUPID---!!! If it actually wants to achieve its goal by spreading its word to humanity by relying on text, by relying on languages that die off, by relying on anecdotal testimony, that’s not a pathway to truth. And anything that would qualify for a god would know this.which shows either god does not exist or doesn’t care enough about the people to understand the nature of evidence to actually present it. Now which of those two possibilities is accurate?” Matt Dillahunty Of course there’s plenty of other things that god gives unto man with his great divine wisdom such as cancer, Hitler, Mao, smallpox, Stalin, all rapists, his anger, his rage, his fury, his evil, his jealousy. Jealousy? Oh that’s wisdom - right? In which no supreme deity would ever, want, need or desire. “hence we find various contradictions and mistakes and outright inaccuracies...” Well duh. So how do you or anyone know how to properly interpret ANYTHING or even know that this god of YOURS exists by YOUR rules? And to help you out…http://www.newsweek.com... Newsweek THE BIBLE: SO MISUNDERSTOOD IT'S A SIN “Going with the merits of the old testament…” There are no merits of the OT. How do you identify fact from fiction? You can’t. So let’s not review creation nor Adam. But you did mention free will. Sorry. If you believe in god, then you have no free will, none. You show me anywhere in your bible where it says something to the effect of “I the lard thy god grants man free will.” In fact it doesn’t exist anywhere. There’s nothing like it anywhere in YOUR bible through any of its misinterpretations. There’s tons of stuff in which I can easily prove that you have no Free Will IF you believe in god. But that is entirely another subject. Well that’s a stupid idea to have a test for Adam. much less anyone else. Adam and Eve. What a joke. Adam and Eve were warned only once in the bible and they were essentially children and not thinking adults. So they were incapable of making rational choices. Its like you playing with real guns for the first time as a child. You need to be warned again and again and again and again and again and again time after time to not play with them. Not once. Once will never cut it to their minds, nor to a child’s mind. Even worse is why should I or anyone pay the price for something that happened 6,000 years ago or so? How pathetic. And god knew that Adam and Eve would cause conflict to begin with. Yep. god loves to watch the human race fail. And he knew that they would fail to begin with. god also had to have known that man would fail as well............ that of course is if god is all knowing and all powerful, knows everything and is omnipotent. Yep. And man continues to fail because of YOUR god................................ just how he likes and wants it simply because man believes in this GOD of YOURS. “the implied struggle between good and evil as evidenced to this very day” Well YOUR god created evil because he’s evil. After all he freely admitted it far too many times in YOUR bible for him to NOT be evil. Strange isn’t it that in comparison that the Inca, many of the native American Indian tribes until your white man greasy sweaty racist pig christian wiped them out, the aborigines, Hindu’s, Gaia Mother Earth, Buddhists etc etc etc they do not practice nor preach nor go to war over their religions, not anywhere close to the evils nor hate that the christians do. Now why is that? And yet according to your god worshiping other gods is considered to be the most evil thing there is and you should be stoned to death for it. So you follow your lord’s orders and you come on down here and stone me to death. Whatsamatter? You are not going to follow your god’s orders? Why? Why not? And there you go into the free will thingy again. If god were god, he could easily take the evil out of free will. But no. Your god in being pure 100% evil, he leaves evil in free will such as the raping of a 6 year old girl by daddy while he punches her in the face for 13 years sometimes twice per week. The worst thing about it is this god of YOURS gives more value to daddy than to the little girl as she has no free will whatsoever to escape and SCREAM as loud as she can. Oh indeed as you stated “his purpose ,and the manifestation”. You got that one right. But then again there is no free will IF you believe in your god who you cannot even prove exists. Then you get into sin. I shall shut that one down right now because it does not exist in your bible as its a wall of hypocritical contradictory (1 of a good thousand or so making your bible truly unreadable) confusion. Does every man sin? Yes. There is no man who does not sin (I Kings 8:46; see also 2 Chronicles 6:36; Proverbs 20:9; Ecclesiastes 7:20; and I John 1:810) No. True Christians cannot possibly sin, because they are the children of God. Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is a child of God.. (I John 5:1). We should be called children of God; and so we are (I John 3: 1). He who loves is born of God (I John 4:7). No one born of God commits sin; for Gods nature abides in him, and he cannot sin because he is born of God (I John 3:9). But, then again, Yes! If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us (I John 1:8)Wow are you obsessed with this Adam and Eve garden of eden nonsense. Well gee there are many stories in the bible that were plagiarized. Oh let’s start off with the great flood shall we? Sheesh. Adam and Eve. “The act of creation is the single greatest act of love in the universe,” Yet you cannot even prove it happened. So I will flatly ignore that paragraph. If you want to talk about something, then you need to come up with some actual evidence. You cannot come in here and say “this is this” and expect me or anyone to swallow it. K? “Another thing we should consider about God in the old testament is that , he made laws and gave man the choice to follow them,” Oh no he most certainly did not!!!! Threatening people with death is NOT giving people a choice. Deuteronomy 13 speaks very highly of that. Especially 9-10. “But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. 10 And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die; because he hath sought to thrust thee away from the LORD thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.” So once again come on down here and stone me to death because I 100% KNOW differently for your sad pathetic frail god. Deuteronomy 17: 2-5 states the same thing. AND 4 of the 10 commandments also threaten people with death if broken. Again threatening people with death is NOT giving people a choice. I'm out of space.