The Martian has already commented on a great comment (!) from a thread in the God Is For Suckers blog, so I won’t repeat what he said; he’s obviously right. 
However, another comment caught my attention as well. It’s the 2nd one, by Lynda:
And if she does fail she blames herself for not having enough faith in gawd or Jeebus. She will set unrealistic goals based on fairy tale expectations because some book promised that she would succeed if she just has enough belief in the “all powerful”. The end result is self-loathing and mistrust of her own abilities. She won’t be able to rejoice and take pride in any real accomplishments because they won’t measure up to the “all things are possible” standard.
See the problem? God is supposed perfectly good and all powerful, and the Bible says that “faith can move mountains”, that “with enough faith, all things are possible”.
So what if you pray for success in something… and fail?
Christian fundies will never doubt the existence of God. Nor his omnipotence, or his goodness. What remains, then? Lack of faith. With all the guilt it implies.
Say you have a sick son and pray for his recovery. He dies. But… how could that happen, since the Bible states that “God notices even the fall of a sparrow”? What about the promises of our prayers being heard? And aren’t all things supposed to be possible to God, and therefore to anyone with God on his/her side?
If you don’t doubt God, then only two explanations remain. One, “it was God’s plan” - which would make God an evil sadist, worthy of contempt, lower than most human beings, if he existed. The second explanation is “your faith wasn’t enough”. Or, in other words, “you deserved it”.
A lot of Christians say that they don’t think they could go on through life without their faith in God. Yet they’re the unhappy ones, always feeling guilty, because if something bad happens to them, their lack of faith - their “wickedness” - is to blame. After all, God is perfect, and he promised… if only you had enough faith…
(Now, some people will say that “God helps those who help themselves.” It’s an improvement… but it’s a modern interpretation, absolutely contrary to what it says in the Bible. I thought it was supposed to be the word of God?)
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The Martian sounds like a very free thinker, a smart individual, yet close minded as well.
When you say that “God is a crutch, plain and simple.” Then you’ve closed out a possibility, one that can’t be proven or disproven. You’ve just made up your mind about it and will never think “What if?” again. Much like staunch, religious people like the one in question.
As far as all of that bible interpretation… come on. That’s absolutely childish, and we shouldn’t pick on people that stupid. Did you stand outside of the short bus at school just to make retarted sounds while the disabled stepped off?
I hope not… that might be a sin.
Being a religious person, I have to explain a few things to atheists I gues. We’re not all this stupid. Sure… a lot of us are… but you never read about MOST of us. You read about THAT stupid girl. Who actually doesn’t believe in free will.
Anybody with 1/100th of a brain would know that the bible was written by PEOPLE. And those who don’t, are STUPID. People… make mistakes. Lots of them. The most frequent (I think) is imposing our own beliefs upon others. GAY PEOPLE ARE BAD PEOPLE. That was the popular view at the time, and if you were writing the bible, and believed that (Much like believing that God is a crutch) you may just impose that belief upon others.
If people want to be religiouse (Especially Christian I guess) and don’t want to think for themselves AT ALL… well as a religious perosn, I think they may have a lot to learn.
My question is: Why is that such an interesting surprise?
The Bible doesn’t say, “God helps those who help themselves.”
Jesus DOES say, “In this world you will have tribulation, but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”
All this to say, if you pray for your son’s life to be spared, and it is not, it does not mean God is a sadist or powerless. He took your son home to a better place; He could have saved your son but chose not to. He is God, we are not, and as I told Martian before he banned me from his blog, God is not a vending machine. You pray; he answers yes OR NO. If all He ever did was say yes, we’d be God, wouldn’t we?
Marie: you’re showing signs of having a belief like this. You believe the world is evil, that any good comes from God, and hate life and existence.
If you didn’t believe that, you would never believe the “home to a better place” excuse - even if it was true, life is life, and it’s ours, it isn’t insignificant, nor does it belong to anybody but ourselves.
In a way, you act like the leaders of the Inquisition in medieval times: “kill them all, God will know his own”. Because saving souls is the only thing that matters, right? Life in this world doesn’t - the world is evil anyway, full of temptation and suffering… Oh, if only suicide wasn’t a sin, I’d leave this devil’s world right now, and be with God, where I belong…
By the way, I seem to remember parts in the New Testament where Jesus did say that, with faith, his followers could do anything. But if you see it as in “it’ll happen if God already wanted it to happen”, then praying is irrelevant… not to mention that you can never know if it worked, right? But a Christian is great at counting the hits and ignoring the misses: when things go his way, “God is great and merciful”, and, when they don’t, “God knows better and has a plan”.
Now tell me HOW that is different from living in a natural universe, where there is no God.
Indeed, and I’ll let Ebon Musings save me the work: