Does God exist: A hopefully civil and fruitful debate

I'll try to work with what I consider to be the reason behind your beliefs.

A god that created the universe in 6 days and jots down notes of every aspect of everyone's lives? lol, no... definitely not. Religion is just an end result of people's ignorance, fear, or quest for power.

Now, as for an intellectually superior alien race? sure I can get around that

Barring the metaphysical nuances (God existing independent of our understanding), this is an acceptable claim. As I understand it:

- Religion claims that God exists.
- Religion was not founded on that good faith, but out of 'ignorance', 'fear', or 'quest for power'. (*)
- Therefore what religion claims cannot be true.
- Therefore God does not exist.

(*) seems like a huge claim. Any defense for it?

-----------------------

God, by many would say, is a creation of our own mind. A sense of self-security that if one has done unjust they can re-affirm themselves in religion. Religion is a counterbalance to our day-to-day lives that can help one with their stressful moments of life.

So we can affirm that the book is the proxy that gives us these thoughts of stories that can change our selves so much that we believe the book to give us enough insight that we could believe it to be, and so some of us do.

Again, I'll first try to reformulate this into an explicit form, bear with me.

- God's existence and religion help us positively in our struggle during the stressful day.
- It is therefore possible that man invented the idea of God and religion to help himself get by.
- Thus God and religion are both fabrication. (**)

(**) A possibility being a necessity seems like a huge leap to me.

EDIT: [MENTION=4093]SaptaZapta[/MENTION]

Define "God".

If you want to discuss something with perfect rationality, first you must define it precisely. Then we can apply logical rules of deduction to prove its existence or the impossibility thereof.

I'm talking about the omnipotent, omniscience and omnibenevolent being. I'm not entirely interested in his Catholic teachings, or the teachings mankind attributed to him, or the whole history of Jesus Christ.