The Premise of This Blog

There is no bigger question that man faces in his life than whether this universe has come in to being as a result of a mindless and random set of natural forces, or whether a supernatural creative force spoke everything we humans can see and comprehend into being.

This debate has many, many facets. Thus when approached in other places it is difficult to keep the thread of the debate limited enough to make progress. The goal here will be to create various threads of the debate, and try like crazy to contain each of those threads to the topic at hand.

As we see lines of thinking that don't fit within existing posts or combinations of posts, we will break off into a separate topic. At some point, it is possible that this blog will be broken into several more specific blogs, or that we will recreate the site as a full-on forum.

I will attempt to get leading thinkers on both sides of this debate to come and give their views, but getting the opinions of lay people commonly provides a much more interesting dialogue. At least initially, I prefer to keep this discussions limited to the Christian God vs atheism and agnosticism. As things develop we might want to consider various other "gods" of various other religions. Also for now, this will not be the place to debate the various differences within Christianity.

Please help make this site even more valuable by providing me with links to websites, blogs, forums, books, TV programs, etc., that we can list here. I will be the final arbiter of which resources will be referenced, but I will not unreasonably fail to note any such resources from all sides of the spectrum of thought on this issue. E-mail me at Quixote77@sbcglobal.net.

The first 5 topics will be:

What are the practical advantages of believing in God?
What are the practical advantages of not believing in God?
Why do Christians feel so compelled to convince others to believe?
Why do atheists want so badly to win the debate?
How should evidence be "weighed" in this subject area?

I will create set-up posts for each item over the next few days. However, you may use the comment section of this post to offer your own topics or to suggest things which should be included in the set-up post of any of these threads.