“To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.” ― Isaac Asimov
“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?” Epicurus – Greek philosopher, BC 341-270
Intiguing that he and others (like Plato) were speaking of one god while he lived at a time his society was still polytheistic. Or would he have ment Zeus perhaps?
one of my favourite quotes of all on this issue: from Marx's "contribution to the critique of Hegel's philosophy of right": few things irritate me as much as people using "religion is the opium of the masses" in an argument completely out of context.
By that time, in the Greco-Roman world, at least, many thinking pagans had come to the conclusion that there was one God, behind the polytheistic personae. More surprising is the expectation that God be omnipotent. That tended not to be a characteristic of the Greco-Roman deities. Super-potence was good enough.
Not a belief, but a hypothesis and the rest is such a pig-ignorant simplification that it's no mystery why it doesn't make sense to its author.
Seeing that my previous post gave me the most - rep ever for a single post, I have to conclude that atheists have no sense of humor and/or are taking themselves way too serious.
That's both sad and hilarious, since they are the ones that love to provoke by simplifying and humouring the beliefs/theories of believers in the first place...
Yes indeed, I was pretty amazed by that. But in the atheist defence, one atheist actually gave + rep to balance the negativity.