Religion

[Paddy™]

Everyone here is an "atheist"

oh my god

Did you read the rest of the sentence?

fact that it's fiction.

It's not a fact

I'd say it's fiction. If tales of people performing miracles and rising from the dead don't qualify as fiction I'm not sure what does.

The Bible is worthless as a historical document; its writers wrote their accounts of the events portrayed in it long after they are said to have happened, hundreds of years later in most cases. I don't choose to believe, or even give passing thought, to a document based on written accounts of oral histories of ancient events which defy the most basic laws of nature and would cause any first year history student to be expelled with extreme prejudice if he were to present such a work as his end of term paper.

Many of the central events in the Bible which might well have been possible turn out not to have happened after all. The mass exodus from Egypt, for instance. Archaeological investigations, performed by Israelis with a bias in favour of proving that the event actually occurred, found no evidence of it. Likewise, there's no evidence that there was a census like the one detailed in the Bible, or that the first-born males were to be slaughtered under Herod's orders, or that there was any great flood.

I could probably build a more convincing case that the Lord of the Rings trilogy was based on actual events.

edit: Ashtorreth yes i did and it doesnt really make any difference, he still marked everyone to be an atheist

So you DO believe in Thor and unicorns? Maybe I was too presumptuous, it hadn't occurred to me that you might be reserving judgement on the question of whether or not Thor actually exists.

I go along with the scientific approach; nothing is ever 100% proven, and nothing can be 100% disproved. Thor could exist, but we have to take what evidence is available to us and make the best decision we can with it. So, is it likely that Thor exists? Absolutely not. Being an atheist doesn't mean you state with certainty that God doesn't exist, it's taking the position that the evidence for a God is extremely sparse/dubious/unreliable.