Sure it's based on unsolvable logical flaws. That's what happens when you take a metaphysical concept; demand it be a material, sapient, entity; and then claim it's totally metaphysical when you get challenged on it. Atheism isn't thought-terminating. Religion (all institutional religion) absolutely is because it requires you to stop asking questions regarding moral dilemmas and appeal to authority.
"God allows evil so he can't be all powerful" for example isn't a logical flaw, it's a petulant tantrum by midwit children.
The problem is that theists have never had a good answer to the existence of evil. Normally it's just a cop-out about "mysterious ways" and "plans" and "well that one wasn't God that was evil", all while still claiming that God has a everyday interest in personal matters. Fundamentally, the problem is with omnipotence and omnipresence, and then claiming a perfectly moral God who doesn't make mistakes.
If you don't want God to make mistakes, then you can still have omnipotence, but not omnipresence. If you want God to use evil as a test of faith or a training mechanism for each person to become better, then you have to abandon the idea that he's all-knowing (because he already knows that some people will fail the test, fail, and be sinners). Whatever excuse you want to use, Omni-presence, Opmni-Potent, and Omni-Knowledge means that your character will be evil. He has to make an evil choice if the world exists in the way that the real world does.
It makes sense that all those could be true in the garden of Eden or some other utopia. But it doesn't make sense in the real world unless he is willfully choosing to abandon one of those powers so that humanity can develop.
Christianity sees God as a kind of Father figure. Your dad isn't evil when he lets you suffer in a safe environment. But your dad also isn't omnipotent so that if burglars break into your house and kill your sister, your dad didn't allow that.
Reality happens, and you can't just keep coping about "God's plan" yadda yadda. Sometimes bad shit happens and you have to deal with it, God's input in the matter simply isn't relevant.
There are more times and places in history than just in the US where religion held social fabric and order together, not government force. It has been self-evident throughout history that law and morality are separate. Religion can preserve the latter, government cannot.
No, it isn't. Despite the screeching about the Separation of Church & State, it really is part of the American Enlightenment project because it helps keep the state out of the Church. Moral issues are supposed to be settled among the people and among moral leaders before a law is made. This is almost never done because the allure of making a law to coerce people into your moral thinking is always too strong. The US is one of the only countries that has ever tried to do this. Most of the time it fails, and most religious Conservatives don't agree that the state shouldn't be a moral arbiter. Every other country in history asserts morality from the state, because the state and the religion are unified by one mechanism or another (or they are just the same thing).
Again, your understanding is flawed. Humanity as we know it wouldn't exist without free will. There is no flaw in saying that god is all knowing and that humans still retain free will.
If people weren't allowed to make choices despite some of those choices being bad, they wouldn't be sentient, they would be nothing more than complex machines.
You are judging god based on your own pettiness for not personally stopping all evil. Would you prefer slavery to free will, if that slavery was comfortable?
There is plenty of law that has been recognized as being wrong by the citizens under it, law and morality haven't been considered to be the same by all previous societies. States have tried to assert themselves as moral arbiters, and ignorant statists have gone along with that, but that doesn't make it factual that law and morality are one and the same, and the force that kept order wasn't the state. Weak states can't maintain order, social forces like religion do that. Strong states maintaining order through force just inspires rebellion, not morality.
Law and morality can correlate to a degree, and law is necessary, but no intelligent person would argue that law is the whole of morality or that morality comes from law.
Sure it's based on unsolvable logical flaws. That's what happens when you take a metaphysical concept; demand it be a material, sapient, entity; and then claim it's totally metaphysical when you get challenged on it. Atheism isn't thought-terminating. Religion (all institutional religion) absolutely is because it requires you to stop asking questions regarding moral dilemmas and appeal to authority.
The problem is that theists have never had a good answer to the existence of evil. Normally it's just a cop-out about "mysterious ways" and "plans" and "well that one wasn't God that was evil", all while still claiming that God has a everyday interest in personal matters. Fundamentally, the problem is with omnipotence and omnipresence, and then claiming a perfectly moral God who doesn't make mistakes.
If you don't want God to make mistakes, then you can still have omnipotence, but not omnipresence. If you want God to use evil as a test of faith or a training mechanism for each person to become better, then you have to abandon the idea that he's all-knowing (because he already knows that some people will fail the test, fail, and be sinners). Whatever excuse you want to use, Omni-presence, Opmni-Potent, and Omni-Knowledge means that your character will be evil. He has to make an evil choice if the world exists in the way that the real world does.
It makes sense that all those could be true in the garden of Eden or some other utopia. But it doesn't make sense in the real world unless he is willfully choosing to abandon one of those powers so that humanity can develop.
Christianity sees God as a kind of Father figure. Your dad isn't evil when he lets you suffer in a safe environment. But your dad also isn't omnipotent so that if burglars break into your house and kill your sister, your dad didn't allow that.
Reality happens, and you can't just keep coping about "God's plan" yadda yadda. Sometimes bad shit happens and you have to deal with it, God's input in the matter simply isn't relevant.
No, it isn't. Despite the screeching about the Separation of Church & State, it really is part of the American Enlightenment project because it helps keep the state out of the Church. Moral issues are supposed to be settled among the people and among moral leaders before a law is made. This is almost never done because the allure of making a law to coerce people into your moral thinking is always too strong. The US is one of the only countries that has ever tried to do this. Most of the time it fails, and most religious Conservatives don't agree that the state shouldn't be a moral arbiter. Every other country in history asserts morality from the state, because the state and the religion are unified by one mechanism or another (or they are just the same thing).
Again, your understanding is flawed. Humanity as we know it wouldn't exist without free will. There is no flaw in saying that god is all knowing and that humans still retain free will.
If people weren't allowed to make choices despite some of those choices being bad, they wouldn't be sentient, they would be nothing more than complex machines.
You are judging god based on your own pettiness for not personally stopping all evil. Would you prefer slavery to free will, if that slavery was comfortable?
There is plenty of law that has been recognized as being wrong by the citizens under it, law and morality haven't been considered to be the same by all previous societies. States have tried to assert themselves as moral arbiters, and ignorant statists have gone along with that, but that doesn't make it factual that law and morality are one and the same, and the force that kept order wasn't the state. Weak states can't maintain order, social forces like religion do that. Strong states maintaining order through force just inspires rebellion, not morality.
Law and morality can correlate to a degree, and law is necessary, but no intelligent person would argue that law is the whole of morality or that morality comes from law.