Anyone on here who is pushing for religion to be respected and deemed true needs to ask themselves these questions:
1. If religion is based on truth, then why does every religion champion faith (believing in things without evidence)?
Because religion, by definition deals with the supernatural, the spiritural , the philosophical,the moral and matters beyond the physical. Morality does not have 'evidence' either. What is your proof of 'good' ? Does 'good' exist? how can you prove it? Belief in the spiritual does not depend on the kind of evidence you are likely demanding. Faith is the conscious judgement/choice to believe which will be based on personal experiences and interpretations of the world (physical and non-physical) around them. In many cases those experiences are very profound. I could also expand this answer to include a list of things that non-religious people also have 'faith' in without evidence but I keep away from that digression.
2. Do you follow the same religion as your parents (indoctrination)?.
You suggest religious people are wrong in their belief, not by proving the belief itself is wrong, but rather that because it was taught by a parent it is not credible. This is largely an ad hominen argument.
Does a student believe the teacher who teaches him physics? Why? Chances are 75% of everything he taught has changed in the last 25 years - infact there are highly conflicting schools of teaching in physics that cannot be reconciled. Does that discredit all science? Does that mean no truths can be found there? All human knowledge is passed down! That it may coalesce in community groups is interesting anthropologically but it does not talk to the merits of the pursuit of truth itself.
3. If god created the universe, who created god?
I cant really speak for Hindus and others; but Christians believe that no-one created God. God has always existed. This is probably your weakest proposition in this group of questions: Scientists cant explain the universe before the Big Bang either... and curiously now, a number of quantum physics scientists are now suggesting the universe is indeed a kind of construction - a hologram or programme. If you explore Hindu beliefs, there is an even stronger correlation between their mythic descriptions of the universe and quantum physics. My personal conclusion to this is that there is probably a limit to our capacity to understand the universe - whether approached from a scientific or religious perspective or whether applying religious or scientific language and frameworks to construct that understanding - and that the longer that Science has to build up its particular framework, the closer it seems to edge to a parity with religious understandings.
4) Why is there no evidence for the existence of Jesus outside the bible when there were historians around at the time of the so called mirarcles?
Poor effort. please refer the contemporary Roman historian Josiphius who provides exactly that.
Please also refer to the historical verified contemporaries of Paul, Peter, James, John et al who's historical existence is firmly established and
who themselves gave personal testimony to the existence of Jesus as a person who lived at that time.
5
) How is the bible reliable when it was written decades after the so called events took place, not to mention the chopping and changing that kings did to it over centuries
As Im sure you know, the bible is made up of a number of books split into two major collections (and 2 or 3 sub sections within those)
If we consider the old-testament books, then there are copies of these that date from centuries apart with barely a single comma's difference over that time. There is compelling physical evidence that the transcribing of those books (from their admittedly oral origins) were meticulous and that there has been practically no meaningful change to them in 4000 years.
In regards to the New Testament collection, the books that pertain directly to telling the narrative of Jesus's life, well our earliest surviving fragments date from 22AD and there is broad academic acceptance that these were probably first written within less than 10 years of his life. No, its not twitter, but its hardly 'decades' as you have implied. The remaining books of the New Testament make no claim nor have any dependence on being written contemperous to Jesus's lifetime - they are not narratives on his life, but books of teaching based on Jesus's teaching and the practical things that early Christians were dealing with being a banned religion within the Roman Empire. Most acdademics consider most of these to have been authored between AD 20 and 70, with a couple as late as AD90-120.
In regards to the assertion that there was 'chopping and changing by Kings' - I think you would need to cite your evidence of this. There were a series of major reviews of the content of scriptures in the 3rd and 4th century - where the main purpose was to remove the many dubious items that had slipped into common usage in the previous 2 centuries- books of dubious authorship and focus in only on those they could be confident on. These books were canonised and from this we have the New Testament as we have it today. The only meaningful change from this date has been the differing qualities of translations from the original Americ, Greek, Latin to new languages. These have sometimes been poor -but never catastrophic to the central message .. that man, through his actions is separated from God, and that there is a means for reconciliation to him, not by mans efforts, but by God's.
6) As an overall rule, why does religion appeal to the less intelligent and less educated?
I guess this was more a general insult you wanted to throw for fun than a serious point, but taken as its written - 4,000 years of human achievement across all human endeavours argues against this assertion. Where does one even begin?
Adams, Darwin, Keynes, Mandela, Luther-King, Churchill,.. I give up.. try this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_Nobel_laureates and a 100 other very easy searches that clearly makes this a very dubious claim.
Also while Christianity has its fair share of villains (as any group dominating history would) - including the occasional Pope - they are nothing compared to non-Christians/atheists and those without religious motivation like Stalin, Mao, Pol-Pot, Hitler, Genghis Khan, Japanese in World War II, the Vikings, and other. Being religious is no guarantee of intelligence, or even of 'goodness' - and religion has never claimed it is. But neither is non-religion. . At its core Religion is an admittance of human limitation, frailty and failings and the search for connection to a spiritual source for addressing this. As many stupid things are done in the name of ideology, tribe, race, nation, class, geography - as are done in the name of religion
