A friend of mine posted this comment on my Belief blog, so I wanted to take a moment and respond to it, since it opens the door to a dialogue, and I figured, hey, door open – time to walk through it. 
Here’s what my friend wrote and my responses are in italics below each section he wrote.
Well, time to answer some questions I guess…
1. I don’t know if I understand this question because for at least, believing in God isn’t competitive with believing in other people or in myself. As for what it does for me, I think it does do the same thing for me as believing in other people does, and since it’s not competitive, I have no problem believing in God and believing in the people that I do. If anything, the more people that you believe in, the better the chance that life can be more fulfilling.
Since you said you don’t know if you understand this question let me put it this way – If it does the same thing for you as believing in other people, then why even bother believing in God? I mean if you are putting your faith in something bigger than yourself, let’s say, why not simply put that faith in humanity? At least we’ve seen that in action.
2. I have absolutely, positively, not one single piece of evidence, but that’s the point of faith. Think about it, if there was actual evidence, you’d feel kinda silly being an atheist, right? But the fact that you get to make your own choice, evidence or not, is kinda the fun part of choosing to have faith or believing in something else.
Well, of course there’s no evidence. If there were evidence I wouldn’t have written the blog. 
3. Ah, you can take the boy out of Shul but you can’t take the Shul out of the boy… you see, my Jewish friend, my view of God is that he ISN’T vengeful. Yes, he comes off that way in the Torah/Old Testament, but I’m not foolish enough to think that’s a literal story. Sometimes, in a story, you gotta have a bad cop to keep the kids in line ’cause lets face it, some of those Israelites were up to some crazy shit. It’s like Lewis Black says, the reason the bible says marriage is between a man and a woman is because sometimes guys would come home with a goat and say, “this is my new wife.” Oh, the good ole’ days…
Don’t get me wrong, I think Lewis Black is hilarious. Bad cop? What? Why should god be a cop at all? I mean, isn’t it enough of a threat to say “steal my cow and I’ll fucking have you stoned.” Ah, simpler times.
Don’t think we have to worry about guys marrying livestock at this point, except maybe in the deep south. And my precept here is that OTHER PEOPLE believe god is vengeful – reference Southern Baptists for instance. I don’t believe god exists, therefore since I have no belief in god I have assigned god no personality traits. However, I am really glad to know you are part of the minority demographic of those who believe god is not vengeful.
4. No I don’t. I believe that human beings have free will, and as such, we have the choice to either help other people or fuck them over. But that choice is on us. If God does intervene, which he may, he sure as hell isn’t going to make sure people know about it, ’cause otherwise, he takes about your free will and now you can no longer choose not to believe in him ’cause with proof, you’re forced to say, “okay, he/she/it is real” and that’s not faith. But to specifically answer your question, I think God usually doesn’t intervene because that’s our fucking job. The problem is, sometimes we do it for the wrong reasons…
So we can surmise from this line of thought that God is not intervening because he/she/it doesn’t want us to know he/she/it exists otherwise we wouldn’t have faith in he/she/it. This is preposterous. Why would an all-powerful, all-knowing, omnipresent deity possibly care if we believe in it? It would be afraid of taking away our free will? Even if we knew god existed we’d still have free will because if we don’t then we’re back to the logical fallacy of a vengeful omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent god. And if people don’t believe god intervenes then what exactly are they getting from prayer and what purpose does it serve to believe in an absent and indifferent entity?
5. First, all the accomplishments you named have only taken place in the last 100 years. So all those advancements in one century out of 200 means that lets face, in the scale of the universe, our asses just got out of the damn cave. We can’t cure the common cold, but you want us to be able to prove that God exists? Hell, somedays’ I’m happy when people learn to tie their shoes right. But, just so you know, Thomas Acquinas, someone who is considered to be quite the intellectual, actually took a few years of his life to prove the existence of God. Of course, he wrote it in a matter that most people barely understood what he was talking about because it quite the metaphysical piece of work. So, people have tried, few have understood.
Let’s not forget about discovering fire, inventing the wheel, the bronze age, the iron age, etc. We’re pretty smart. No, we haven’t cured the common cold, or any other virus for that matter. We have come up with vaccines for a bunch of them, like polio, rubella, tetanus and HPV, among others.
St. Thomas Aquinas proved god existed? Our professor certainly didn’t mention that in philosophy class. It sounds more like he came up with an ontological proof that fit the criteria of his era and used it as a convincing argument as to god’s existence. A logical proof however is not the same as physical proof.
To conclude my points, you can choose to have faith, or you can choose not to. That’s the beauty of it all.
Very true. I have lots of faith. I even have faith in you. I don’t have much faith in the folks who believe god is vengeful. They’re all killjoys in my view.
