Trump campaigned this time like he was genuinely on America's side. He actually made me want to vote for him. I really wanted to vote FOR a president since Reagan. I held my nose and voted for every Republican nominee president until John McCain ran. I finally had enough and left the Republican party and joined the Constitution party.
I didn't vote for Trump in 2016 and I don't think he was a great president in his 1st term. I thought he was about average but at least he was and is pro America, something Democrats can't honestly say since Woodrow Wilson (with the exception of JFK). Democrats now call anyone who wants the country to prosper a "nationalist" because wanting Americans to prosper is somehow a bad thing.
I did vote for Trump in 2020 but I was mostly voting against Biden. But this last election we saw a completely different Trump. He was saying all the right things. He sounded like he had some long conversations with the founding fathers about what they wanted for this country.
But now that Trump is president again he's gone from being one of the greatest to just same Trump we saw in 2016. At least he stopped his tax cuts, from when he was president the 1st time, from expiring so he's got that going for him, which is nice. And he's not a total and complete idiot like Kamala Harris is.
It's just a news story. No one takes Hunter seriously. And he's wrong. It was not at all about party loyalty. It's about the Democrats not running on anything. Their only strategy was "vote for me, we're not Trump". They didn't read the room because everyone wanted Trump. That's why he won in a landslide.
Plus everyone is sick and tired of you guys calling us haters because we don't want school officials mutilating our children behind our backs. We don't want biological men destroying woman's sports. And we know very well that men cannot have babies.
They lost the election for a lot of reasons but party loyalty isn't one of them.
They had no message to run on. They've been the "we're not Trump, vote for us" party for so long they forgot what that stand for, which isn't much.
Plus Trump showed the nation that we actually don't have to put up with all of the insanity coming out of that. Most of it so far away from any form of sanity. The left is very good at creating false accusations to brow beat people into following along.
Trump just steamrolled all over that and America woke up.
"It could equally be argued that believers are being less honest or showing more arrogance by adamantly claiming they *do* know."
I cannot speak for all Christians. People are people and arrogance is a human failing even among Christians. But to claim that just the fact that knowing the answer to a question is arrogance is absurd. Apply that reasoning outside of the question of the existence of God. Does just knowing the solution to an algebra problem make you arrogant? Arrogance comes from how a person acts upon learning a truth. But there are plenty of people who are just as arrogant believing misinformation or false theories as truth. There's an awful lot of smug atheists who cling very tight to the theory of evolution and just do not understand that 1) it is just a theory and 2) it has absolutely nothing to do with the existence of God or not.
"Is there a God or isn't there? I don't think it's quite that black and white. First, you need to define "God". You're a programmer, so you can appreciate that. If you don't first define/declare the term, the code won't run. I *have* spent a lot of time on this already."
Ha ha ha!!! You got me. Yes you have to define a variable in many programming languages before you can use it.
But atheists have already define and initialized that variable as Boolean and initialized to as false. Many of them won't even accept something as vague as Aristotle's "unmoved mover". When the concept of Intelligent Design came out a few decades ago, it was denounced by the scientific world as being too "Christian". It had absolutely nothing to do with any religion or any proof of God.
There are about as many definitions of what a supreme being, unmoved mover or intelligent designer are as there are people.
So let me simplify all of that. Just ask God if He exists. Then ask God who He is. Then ask God what our purpose is. There is only one God, not many. Read the Bible, not with the intention of proving it wrong but in it's proper context. It is a religious history of the Jews (Old Testament) and a history of Jesus Christ and his disciples, plus a lot of letters that the Apostle Paul wrote to Christians in different parts of Asia Minor and Rome (New Testament).
The process is simple but the work behind finding out is not easy. Some people search their entire lives to know. Some know immediately.
Like I said before, the existence of God is the most important question in life.
"That the concept of eternal damnation is illogical. And if God endowed me with reason, He can't very well hold it against me for using that reason to question it and then punish me forever."
Is the concept of failing a class in college illogical? Damnation is a misunderstood concept by most people. It is not burning in a lake of fire. It is a cessation of learning. This life is a test. It is for us to find and choose to follow God or not.
God does not hold anything against anyone of His children. He is a loving father and loves all of us. But the most important part of our life is the right to choose. We are entirely responsible for our actions and the consequences of those actions. God will never stop a person from rejecting Him or from doing all sorts of reprehensible things. That is why bad things happen to good people. It is also why good things happen to good people and good things also happen to bad people. God is not a dictator and He will never try to control or micromanage your life.
He has set laws in place and it is up to us to adhere to those laws or not but we choose the consequences. Those consequences were never about endlessly burning in a lake of fire. That was used throughout the Bible as a metaphor and a warning because bad actions lead to bad consequences.
"But saying "I don't know" is not about a copout; it's about honesty and, dare I say it, humility in the face of an ancient, vast Cosmos that we have just started to understand. I *don't* know. That's why I admit I don't know."
There are just so many people out there who are content with the question. They don't want an answer. This isn't just about the existence of God but nearly every question in life. They hide behind the question because if they found the answer it will require them to move out of their comfort zone and they don't want that. There are some who even think they are intellectually superior as long as they have the question without an answer.
The answer to the existence of God is not impossible. I think it is a copout that soooo many atheists (and the more intellectually honest ones who call themselves agnostics) just do not want to deal with the change it would require them to make. I think that goes all the way up to the most intellectual atheists. Change scares people almost as much as truth.
