Reddit mentions of All God Worshippers Are Mad: a little book of sanity

>Face it, you feel this way because somewhere deep in you is the belief that god exists, a creator of some sort.

No. I might be wrong in this line of argument, but that isn't why. I don't see why yet.

>>If something gets to have significant effect on your life by using otherwise unknown laws of physics, it's a god to you.

>No, it will just be something that have significant effect on my life by using otherwise unknown laws of physics, but not god.

I left out the requirement that something only gets to be called God if it's intentional - there has to be some sort of personality and goals behind the thing that's fucking with you.

But we don't need a definition because these god video games are an example. In god video games, the player is a god to the simpleminded inhabitants of the simulated world. We can't say the most basic claims of the theist of your choice are self-inconsistent when we have an example right in front of us.

Granted, theists generally screw up the history behind their religious documents enough to fail there. But that's just messy paperwork, not the essence of religion.

In the cases I'm aware of, the simpleminded automata in the god games even have souls in the sense that the mechanism running their mind is not a natural continuation of the mechanism that runs the world they live in.

Arranging for brain damage and drugs and FMRIs to have the observed connection with how people think, while simultaneously having them think with their souls, would require some clever deception but would still be possible for a God in principle. In any case, souls are not an essential part of religious belief -- a God who does miracles in a world where everyone thinks with their brains would still be a God, and believing that a God does this would be a religious belief in the absence of souls.

I suppose my point is that Occam's razor is the only valid argument we have against the essential claims of a theist. IMO it's a valid argument, but it bugs me when people come up with other bogus arguments when they experience a failure of imagination and then project this so it appears to be an error on the part of the theist. That happens clearly in "All God Worshippers Are Mad" and it happened in exactly the same way earlier in this thread when you quoted Epicurus' valid proof that any existing god is malevolent and said it was an example of the illogicality of god.