Throughout time humans have sought answers to how they came into existence, and have created Gods from their own imagination, and still do to this day. Believers hold the view that God created humans, and the world over there are monuments that testify to those beliefs. The Acropolis in Greece is a striking example, built five centuries before Christ. Few now believe in those ancient gods that the Greeks worshipped, but they clearly did so back then.
The paradox of belief in God(s):
An omnibenevolent God
would want to eliminate evil.
An omnipotent God
would be able to eliminate evil.
Yet evil
still exists.
God is willing to eliminate evil but not able. Therefore he is impotent.
God is able but not willing. Therefore God is malevolent (lacking goodness).
An omnibenevolent and omnipotent God must not exist.
The definition of 'faith' is an unshakable belief in something without proof or evidence'. Believers will say 'you can't prove God doesn't exist' but that doesn't hold water because the absence of proof isn't proof itself. And if there is a creator who has existed for all time and does today, who is so talented as to have been able to create everything that exists, then how, and by whom, was that creator created?
Unfortunately, despite monotheistic believers claiming that their own religion is one of peace and tolerance, throughout time, their religions have been, and continue to be, a source of intolerance and wickedness. The more devout that believers are, the greater their intolerance is towards non-believers, to the point that in many countries around the world, heresy, and blasphemy carries the death sentence, and did throughout Europe not too long ago.
William Tyndale's translations of the Bible were the first English Scriptures to draw directly from Hebrew and Greek texts, the first English translation to take advantage of the printing press, the first of the new English Bibles of the Reformation. It was taken to be a direct challenge to the hegemony of the Catholic Church and of those laws of England maintaining the Church's position. The work of Tyndale continued to play a key role in spreading Reformation ideas across the English-speaking world. In 1536 he was captured By the Catholic Church for heresy, strangled at the stake and his body burned. He translated the bible into what he called the 'language of the ploughboy' so that ordinary people rather than Latin or Greek scholars could read the bible. He had a profound influence on the English language, more so than Shakespeare.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tyndale
The persecution of Galileo:
The
Galileo affair began around 1610 and culminated with the trial and condemnation of Galileo by the Roman Catholic Inquisition in 1633. Galileo was prosecuted for holding as true the doctrine of heliocentrism, the astronomical model in which the Earth and planets revolve around the Sun at the centre of the universe.
It wasn't until 1992, that it was reported that the Catholic Church turned towards vindicating Galileo:
"Thanks to his intuition as a brilliant physicist and by relying on different arguments, Galileo, who practically invented the experimental method, understood why only the sun could function as the centre of the world, as it was then known, that is to say, as a planetary system. The error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the Earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world's structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture...."
Good people do good things,
Bad people to bad things,
But to get good people to do bad things - that takes religion.
