Questions for theists

Reader consoledreader asked yours truly to prepare a set of questions like the one in the previous post addressed to theists. We promised to do so and while we don’t think, as the author of the questions I have mentioned wrote, that these questions cannot be honestly answered, we believe it would be a great discussion to have.

The questions that I am going to post below are a joint effort by the followers of this blog. They are collated from a post we did a year ago.

I apologize in advance that most of the questions are not as brief as those meant to stump the atheists. This is because we want the questions to be as clear as possible.

1.  Why was eating a forbidden fruit such a great sin? Why and how does a human sacrifice make up for this sin?

2. If the bible/koran/ torah is the word of god as you claim, why so many interpretations as there are believers? Was it impossible for your god to be clear?

3. If your god is spirit, incorporeal, was Jesus born with only his mother’s 23 chromosomes?

4. If there is a creator god that knows all, that he would have to kick Adam out of the garden, that he would have to destroy the Earth with flood, that he would have to sacrifice himself to himself to redeem anyone at all… why did he create the universe full of failures? Was he unable to stop himself?

5. if there is a creator god that knows all, and Adam & Eve screwed up, why not immediately send Jeebus to clear things up right then and not wait some thousands of years with many failed “covenants”, changing languages, “laws”, etc?

6. When we see today a man walking down the street with a long beard, saying we have to repent because God is watching/coming to Earth/will punish us if we don’t, etc, we call them loonies. Some 2,000 ago they called them prophets (or Jesus). If these guys were indeed prophets – as they claim – who is to say the ones standing outside the metro today aren’t prophets too? What’s the difference between them? And if a guy called Jesus appeared today and said the exact same things he said back then, would anyone believe him?

7. If you are Muslim, do you believe the heavenly language is Arabic?

8. Each of you claim your religious text is the right one, does it occur to you that not all of you can be right, so how do we tell who is right?

9. Why aren’t Catholics born to Muslim parents if we are born religious?

10. If your god is self sufficient, immutable and unchanging, what happened at the point it decided to create the universe or it became unchanging after that?

11. If free will is cherished by your god, that it created us with it so we can love him, wasn’t the free will of pharaoh important? Why harden his heart?

12. What god kills the children of slave girls to free his ‘chosen’ people?

And a bonus question.

Classical theists define god as possessing omni-capabilities, is there a thing that god could will and not actualize? How do you know this? Could your god have willed there to be no evil on earth but it didn’t materialize.