Jesus says in all those verses I cited that prayers are answered. Jessica, as true blue of a believer as you'll find, didn't pray for material gain-- only for her kidnapper to stop kidnapping her, stop raping her, and stop burying her alive in a sack. Her prayers weren't answered. The prayers of 100% of amputees have been ignored, too. What believers attribute to answered prayer is merely a random event-- regardless of how improbable it might seem.
And dismissing this failure to answer Jessica's prayer and every single amputee and all the many other people who would meet any reasonable requirement for having their prayers answered as part of God's plan while believers report on getting their prayers answered for getting their prayer answered to find their car keys.
The God that I don't believe in is the one covered in the Bible. I am not going to waste time knocking down other religions' gods.
We have anarchy, not free will. Free will is interpreted to be something given to us by someone. We have chaos. We have randomness. Anarchy, chaos, and randomness don't speak to our world being controlled in any way by the Bible God. Every example of man's "free will" is evidence that we are alone in the world. Whether you are a good person or do good things, it doesn't at all follow in a causal way that you will be rewarded. Good things happen to good and bad people, and so do bad things.
Is it possible that some supreme being created the universe and then left his creation alone, no interaction, for evermore? Yeah, sure. But that doesn't change my view that there is no God by any degree of certainty worth concerning myself with-- and besides, the value of worshiping said God is the reward in the afterlife and since the Bible says God does interact with us, I can't take seriously that God has an afterlife for us or that we have any actual idea what is required to get there.
I am perfectly happy about knowing that death is it. It's not depressing to me at all. I enjoy life and living just fine.
Well said--although I'd prefer to live foreever, or at least a very, very, very long time. But I don't believe things just because I would like them to be true. You can't make deals with existence, such as "If I believe X, then I'll get to live forever."
And for the audience: Morality can only come from each individual, since each individual must decide for himself what is right and wrong. Even if you think your morality comes from a transcendent source, it is you who must decide that your moral code comes from a higher authority, and it is you who must decide to live by that code (whether for that reason, or for some other.) There is no getting around that fact.
You're apparently missing the point. There is most certainly a subset of atheism where the believers define quite strictly what God is and then, because they don't see reality reflected in that definition, they become satisfied that God does not exist. You, for example, believe that because prayers of certain people are "not answered" that God does not exist.
History has shown about a billion and one times that bad things do in fact happen to seemingly good people. It is clear that if one accepts God then they must accept that bad things happen to good people. Take the case of Jessica Lunsford. If you believe the world consists solely of Jessica Lunsford and her barbaric killer, then it might be reasonable to believe that God does not exist. However, we should all be quite aware that the world is well beyond simply two people. God cannot answer every prayer. If God does indeed have a hand in human affairs, bad things may ultimately lead to great things.
Your naive and fatalistic view on the world is troubling. We do not have anarchy and chaos. Clearly, you again define God as a celestial puppetmaster, since "free will" to you only means that we are alone. I suspect that in a truly chaotic and random world, nothing we do or say means anything. Our thoughts and words are merely the result of millions of years of improbable evolution. Of course, in such a world, I find it hard to believe that kindness, mercy, and compassion have any place, yet they do exist in our world.
My first comment on this thread was how atheism was perfect for those with a God complex. You seem to be defining God left and right in a neverending attempt to disprove him - or, at the very least, comfort yourself that His existence is meaningless to you. This speaks to the self-refuting nature of atheism - to disprove God, one must in fact be God himself. This is why you so desperately search for contradictions in the Bible and ultimately end up creating for yourself a patchwork God that you can comfortably "disprove." The fact that there are things in this world that you don't know or understand is apparently terrifying. What it all comes down to is a fear that there is something beyond ourselves.
"Her prayers weren't answered. "
That is only if you presume to know whether G-d has decided the only possible answer to a prayer is yes.