I have never said that skepticism begins with atheists, but I will say that Christians spend much of their time thinking up excuses to suppress a very normal and natural skepticism about the tenets of their various doctrines. 

You mean answering them.

If Aquinas really did represent a logical and emotionally satisfying solution, you would not find such widespread rejection of Anselmian scholastic arguments.  That battle was fought and lost in the so-called Age of Reason.  And your concept of what it means to be considered a Christian is nothing more than a 'No True Scotsman' fallacy.  The best you can do is make demographic generalizations about the beliefs of people who consider themselves Christians, whether you agree with their doctrinal assumptions or not.

That people reject an answer has no baring on the actual answer. And inversely nor does people's acceptance. Scientist that tried to argue against the Bible once rejected the concept of a finite universe because it was stated as fact in Genisis. I seriously doubt you'll try to argue against the Big Bang. And inversely people accepted the Earth as being flat. That people rejected an answer that they didn't like and still don't like only shows Reason is not an attribute amoung them.

And no it is not a 'No True Scotsman' fallacy. It's a recognition that being a Christian means following some basic tenets as sntjohnny has pointed out numerous times. It is more than reasonable to question a person's sincerity when they reject it. That a person says they were a Christian then rejected Christianity means little if all they considered being a Christian was to simply go to church.

Therein lies the source of your error--a sweeping generalization fallacy.  You confuse the evening news reports of unusual events with what is mundane and normal.  The news media does not report everyday normal behavior, so you cannot use it to generalize across all of humanity.  Just because some wack job shoots up a classroom full of kids, you cannot leap to the conclusion that everyone in the world is inherently evil. 

Actually I take evil as being very normal behavior. Though my evidence of this stems from much more than simply being awake to the world around me. The mass amount of cruelty found in history backs me up. I can simply point out to the fact that you never have to teach a child how to break rules (that are within their understanding). The trick is to get them to obey them.  Not to mention cruelty can be seen within children as early as 1st grade.

It's your habit of dealing with this issue Cop. that I always shake my head and laugh when you talk about being skeptical.

It would if he had nothing to do with our creation or foreknowledge of how his creations would behave or reason for not creating us with better judgment.  Such illogical thinking on the part of religious apologists is what has led Einstein and a great many others to reject your concept of God.

Nice appeal to authority there.

It's that pesky free will issue your harping about. It certainly was an issue Einstein had trouble with, though he chose to believe we should proceed as such. No matter how great or loving a parent is, his kid can still make bad choices with the responsibility falling on the kid. What kind of God would He be if He felt threatened by anything we do? Allowing disobedience doesn't show any flaw. It shows God's confidence in dealing with that disobedience.

Once again, you have completely misrepresented what I said, even after you quote it.  Either you have a severe reading comprehension problem, or you feel no guilt at deliberate misrepresentation. 

No, it's just pattern recognition in the way you argue.

I didn't say that people who felt guilty were never guilty.  I said that guilty feelings do not always indicate guilt.  For example, a battered spouse may feel guilt for having provoked the violence, when her behavior was, in fact, non-provocative.

That's not feeling guilt so much as anxiety. As people have an unending habit for self-deception, people can have guilt staring them in the face, yet try to deny it or label another kind of emotion as guilt (I've heard "guilt is empathy" arguements). The notion of guilt is always associated with the notion of morality. It is not some benign thing. It's tied into our understanding of things that are right and things that are wrong. We feel guilty when we think we've violated a moral rule, an "ought". And that feeling hurts. It doesn't hurt our body; it hurts our souls.

The logic of scapegoating was used in both animal and human sacrifices.  Look it up yourself, if you don't trust me.  Wikipedia has a nice article on scapegoat that explains the concept with animals and ties it directly to the Bible.  Among other things, the article says "In Christian theology, the story of the scapegoat in Leviticus is interpreted as a symbolic prefiguration of the self-sacrifice of Jesus, who takes the sins of humanity on his own head, having been driven into the 'wilderness' outside the city by order of the high priests. Also see John 1:29 and Hebrews Chps. 9-10".  The concept of scapegoating is illogical, but it existed as a superstitious practice in the Middle East and elsewhere for centuries before Christ.  He was the last great scapegoat.

And what follows from this is...what? That this concept was recognized as far back as Cain and Abel somehow makes it false? That someone would willingly take a bullet for another, and can be called a scapegoat no longer makes it a morally intuitive good thing? That you try to make it be more aligned with pagan rituals only shows your failure with this issue. As you've seem to miss the fact that pagan human sacrifices treated the humans sacrificed like animals, while with Christ there is a marked difference. It's simply more generalization on your part.

You don't seem to understand what a "category error" is, but you could at least learn to spell it correctly.  I stand by the reasonableness of my remarks on God's "invisibility".

I know you do. The fact that you've completely brushed aside my weighing a chicken with a yard stick analogy, only shows the 'reasonableness' of your arguement. Utterly lacking.

I repeat:  you do not know what a "category error" is.  Bogeymen are as real as gods.  They can be immaterial, but they can manifest themselves as material beings whenever they want.  So can the Flying Spaghetti Monster, who might be classed as a sort of "bogeyman", I suppose.   

Unfortunately for you, those don't have any effects we can use to deduce their existence. You still have the problem that matter, space, and time were created things, and thus the source is immaterial, and not constrained by space (leaves the Boogeyman out if he's in the closet), or time. These are still characteristics of what created the universe, and they are still characteristics that define God in the Bible.

This is why your uttelry failing to show how I'm getting "category error" wrong and simply asserting that I am. Science and the empirical method can not disprove God's existence, or Boogeymen, or unicorns, etc. Science and empirical method are inductive and only speak to things that are contingent. One cannot know anything inductively with absolute certainty. However, I can know that there is absolutely no such thing as a square circle, not because I've never seen a square circle, but because a thing can't be circular and square at the same time.

However I can logically prove God's existence through the Big Bang, the Kalam cosmological arguement, objective morality, the design and balance of the universe, the ressurection of Christ as a fact of history, etc. So as I said before: atheists just grapple for alternative explanations to try to show these don't neccessarily prove God exists, but give no logical arguement for why God cannot exist, or why God should not exist or why it is logically impossible for God to exist. This is primarily why atheists will never see theism being removed from the world as they've long prophecied would happen.

That's true.  So what?  You can't be absolutely certain that God exists either, no matter how badly you might want to believe you can.  Science gives us an honest method for reducing uncertainty and doubt.  Religion gives us a dishonest method--blind faith.

Blind faith is an oxymoron as faith in the Bible is defined as having a reason behind it. Why did doubting Thomas stop doubting? Christ came to him and let him examine him, and thus was the reason for his faith. You can also read the apostle Peter's works that constantly appeal to a reason behind his faith. You can claim those reasons are bunk, but that's beside the point as a reason is there nonetheless.

And as I said since science can only know things inductively it can never absolutely know anything. So as it may reduce uncertainty, it never gets rid of it. I have stated reasons one can be absolutely certain to God's existence in the general theistic sense. Matter, space, and time are still created effects of something. You can deduce this and thus be absolutely certain that what created matter, space, and time has to be immaterial, and not constrained by space or time. And thus we call that source God.

Deductive logic can only give you absolute certainty of the validity of a proof.  It cannot give you absolute certainty that the bogeyman is nonexistent, especially if you make the mistake that he must always have a material body.  Sorry to inform you of this.  I hope you manage to sleep well tonight. 

Why? Seems I'll sleep very well with no more fear of the Boogeyman than any other human robber (people are evil remember?). Actually in the case of the Boogeyman (you can at least spell it right  ) deductive reasoning can give you absolute certainty of his nonexistence by the mere fact that there are no effects to draw from. With God, things like the Big Bang, and the creation of space, time, and matter are very big effects to deduce God's existence.

This may possibly be the most intelligent argument you have made in your entire post, especially the "blah, blah, blah" parts.   It gives us a very good idea of how you managed to turn someone who rejected belief in gods into a theist.

Always happy to impress you. Especially as every discussion with you I'm more and more convinced you simply don't want to be persuaded. And thus claims of being an honest truth seeking skeptic are more and more laughable. 

I think you may be beginning to understand why it was incorrect to characterize him as a "theist", although it would surprise me to hear you admit it.  I rejected your appeal to authority.  It is ultimately irrelevant whether Einstein believed in God.  I just was pointing out that your claim to use Einstein as someone who endorsed the existence of God was false information.

I don't see how as he often talked about being more convinced of a Higher Power the more he studied the universe. You seeing any concession on my part just shows how you can interpret anything you want someone to say.

Well, I think that the shoe is on the other foot in this situation. 

Of course you do.

You are the one stubbornly refusing to concede.  Einstein was quite clear about rejecting belief in any gods.  He carefully hedged his claim not to be an atheist, and he paid for his statements dearly.  It annoyed him to the end of his life that people treated his metaphorical statements as endorsement of a belief in God.  The calumny is still going on today, thanks to people like you, who carelessly ignore the context in which such statements were made.  You only brought up Einstein's name in the first place as a blatant appeal to authority, and you quickly got hoisted by your own petard.

"There are people who say there is no God," the physicist told a friend, according to the biography. "But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views."

Seems it annoyed him when atheists did the same. Only difference is he rejected a specific type of belief in God (Personal God), while he explicitly rejected the root definition of atheists=There are people who say there is no God. Doesn't seem like just rejecting a fringe sect at all, but you'll no doubt just say he was being coy.

By calling himself an agnostic and saying that religion and science did not overlap, Einstein was very clearly rejecting any claim to be an authority on the subject you tried to use him to endorse.  None of his theories had a thing to say about God's existence, and it would be absurd to claim that they did. Newton was different.  He did see his physics as proof of God's existence, and he came up with some pretty wacky interpretations of the Bible, including that Jesus was crucified in 33 AD.  He explicitly rejected Spinoza's hylozoism, which held that life was inseparable from matter.  You may recall Spinoza's views on religion were spoken of favorably by Einstein. Both men were authorities on the science of physics, not the existence of supernatural beings.

And appealed to their knowledge of physics to speak of the existence of God. Einstein didn't deal with God in his specific theories, but in a general sense (in context remember) "Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind." Newton of course speaks for himself, though I'd hardly call getting minor details wrong "wacky" so much as simply "wrong".