You would lose your bet. I was raised in the fundamentalist church. I've read the bible, start to end, multiple times, multiple versions. I've spent more years studying scripture than you would guess.

Why would you pray for such a horrible thing? Why would I ever want to shackle my mind with faith? To be brainwashed? Why would I ever go back to being a christian? Why would you ask that someone tell me how to think about the bible rather than let me read it on my own and see in its full uncensored horror.

Like so many Christians who are under the false impression that their god is kind and benevolent, you probably never have read the entire bible on your own without having someone hold your hand and tell you how to think about what you read.

A pleasant lie is still a lie. It is empty and hollow. There is no fulfillment in faith, only denial. Maybe one day a rationalist will sacrifice some of his time to tell you what I have told you. And inspire you to take a long hard sobering look at your faith and allow yourself to free yourself of its shackles and see the world unencumbered by the burden of superstition.

These suppositions fundamentally come from the Axiom that being harmed is bad. Assuming you are a masochist of some kind, and do not accept that Axiom. It can be reliably and reproducibly tested. All you have to do is harm a lot of people and ask them if they think that was bad. A statistically relevant percentage of them will say that it is bad.

There are whole bodies of philosophical thought on that topic, I don't really need to regurgitate it here.

You would lose that wager. I have made every attempt to purge faith from my life and what I believe. It isn't completely gone. It is after all a lingering illness that is prone to flare up in times of weakness.

This isn't bullshit. I care more about truth than you can possibly know. If I didn't care about truth, I could have blindly fallowed the religion of my father. I would not have put in the relentless effort to purge the lies, contradictions and untestable elements from I believe.

Feelings are not falsifiable. They can not be reliably or reproducibly tested. Proving love is impossible. All you can do is measure the balance of acts over time. The more kindness you show and the less hurt you inflict creates a trend that appears to correlate strongly with love to an independent observer. My family does not have to have faith that I love them, the preponderance of evidence supports that conclusion.

Faith is only required in large quantities for marriage if you are marrying a stranger or someone who has shown inconsistent or worse indicators of trust, affection, compatibility and compromise. Again, feelings are not falsifiable. Faith means you can marry a gold digger and expect her to not spend all your money in spite of the indications she will. Faith means you can marry a sadist and expect him not to beat you in spite of the indications he will. No. Faith is harmful to marriage. Trust rather than faith is the basis of a sound marriage. Trust is earned, and not granted so easily as faith.

Yes, the majority of people are or have been mentally ill. Just like the majority of people have been infected with the common cold.

guns are not the only thing that kills people.

If a rapist or killer has a physical advantage (or an advantage because he ignores the gun ban) he can strike with impunity against unarmed people. If the law abiding people had guns, every time he attacks he risks forfeiting his own life. That prevents deaths, either by preventing the crime or stopping the criminal.

No. The right to own a gun comes from property rights. Or more specifically material rights. It is based on the right to own an object that can be possessed.

The right USE a gun for self defense is based on the idea that your life and body are yours and someone attempting to take that from you justifies forfeiting their own.

Treyvon Martin could have legally defended himself from the man who chased and attacked him if he was armed. So yes, Treyvon Martins death is exactly what happens when an insufficient number of law abiding citizens are armed.

No.

The minister who believes all gays should be jailed believes that because his faith in his religion demands that he condemn homosexuality.

Where do your morals come from?

Do they have an objective rational basis?

Or do you believe them because someone or something you are not permitted to question told you to believe them?

Morality dictated by authority is not moral. It is just as likely to be abhorrent as it is to be good. It is arbitrary. It is the exact same thing if it causes you to believe as the minister you mention, or to respect your parents, to not eat pork, to not kill, or blow up airplanes.

My morality is a superior morality. It is formed from an objective rational basis. Justice, liberty and equality are not well served by irrational thought based on the crumbling edifice of religions built on a mountain of skulls.

Why do I say that faith is a mental illness? Because it is. It behaves exactly like a virus The mechanism of infection takes over the mental machinery of the host and modifies it to ensure that it propagates throughout the population, just as an organic virus infects a cell and takes over its genetic machinery to propagate itself. The faithful are strongly compelled to spread their faith to others.

Faith itself is belief in the absence of reason, belief in the face of contradiction. It makes it easier for someone to believe in things that are objectively and morally wrong. And these sometimes malevolent and violent memes follow in the wake of faith like secondary infections follow the compromised immune system of an HIV victim. These memes con often not be separated from the basis of faith and they form a complementary complex that further spreads the infection (often by eliminating the uninfected or those infected by a competing vector by violent force).

I used to be very religious. I was a fundamentalist christian once. The more I learned about God, the happier I became to realize that he was nothing more the dark specter of a fevered mind.

They are not dumb. They are victims of an virulently infectious and devastating mental illness (faith). They can't really help it and they should not be insulted for it any more than a kid with polio should be insulted about being in a wheel chair.

Yes. it really is far sillier.

It was mothers day, I didn't get to pick the restaurant.