@prothero

the notion of god plays a part in telling them how to live

I think that you’re getting off on the wrong foot here, humans know how to live because we have a moral compass. We do not need God to live well nor do I go into the street to kill and maim because I don’t believe in a god. People are hardwired to want to be good and yes maybe some people do bad things and don’t have remorse but aren’t some of those people Christians who believe it’s okay to be bad as long as you apologise to god?

I am referring to the known and proven laws of physics such as gravitational attraction. Basically what we know is possible and not possible if you can prove that the existence of a god is POSSIBLE and likely then sure there may be a god however with our current knowledge there cannot be a god.
Regarding your last question. Really? Do the laws of physics change? A law is something that IS not might or could be so no the laws of physics don’t change they’re just discovered giving the illusion of change to a person who beleived something was and know knows something is because it was proven however the latter always was and always will be. Furthermore I would like to invite you to create a new discussion on the proscriptive vs descriptive question as I would like to go into more detail with you on this topic page on which it is more relevant to the question.

Eventually you just have to go to which side has more hard, scientific evidence. Nothing can has or will happen outside the laws of physics, this is a basic fact of life. Until someone shows me hard scientific evidence of a god then I am an atheist. Also on the basis of the argument of evil; the theist's argument is that 'god gave us free will' but if your argument against the Big Bang is cause and effect then you believe in cause and effect and therefore not in free will. That leaves two options :
1: there is no god
2: your god is not omni-benevolent
Due to god designing the world to create evil

No I am definitely not saying denying evolution is a mental illness I was referring to religion as a form of denial and I gave two examples and I must have forgotten to write ‘among others’ I was referring to religion as a denial of scientific evidence rather that a mental illness. I thought this was implied. I also stated in the same passage that theism was a denial of scientific evidence and not a mental illness. We have evidence of the Big Bang http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2014/06/gamma-ray-burst-after-big-bang-just-reached-earth.html
Furthermore if theism is a mental illness due to distorted reasoning then all people are mentally ill
You’re not ill because I disagree with you.

I completely agree and apologise for how vague my comment was. However on the flags and anthems section I completely disagree I never claimed anything of the sort and I don't think you can compare religion to an anthem. Religion is an attempt to understand the world without being crushed by sadness that we don't matter that much and when we die we just die, but an anthem is just having pride in an empire. I don't see how one can believe they're at all similar. If I've made any mistakes here please comment.

most theists deny that evolution occurred and also deny that prayer cannot scientifically allow you to communicate with anyone or anything among others

People have the right to post and believe what they want to in the USA. Because people get upset the British isles do not condone hate speech and that's how it should be but no hate speech was spread all that was on there was propoganda. How is that different than posting on Facebook 'come to my bakery' they're both trying to be persuasive.

Let's be honest donald trump has committed several racist acts and gotten away with more than the met police did. We need to be frank and call him what he is, racist.

Please can we stop using 'miracle' as a word meaning very rare or random occurrence. Even things like birth have been described as miracles and it's crazy! A miracle is an occurrence that cannot be explained by any of the sciences and therefore cannot happen. This is where theism came from because of the lack of scientific development in the ancient world as people saw something cool and assigned it to a god because humans have always had the desire to understand everything but haven't had the resources or were not developed enough to do so

I suppose that theism could be viewed as a mental illness however we must remember that theism rooted from a want of understanding of the universe. Now that we have technologies to discover the facts rather than stories from constantly edited books, I would say theism is more a type of denial verging on Luddism than a mental illness.

I've been thinking a lot lately about utilitarianism and how to accurately determine the 'goodness' of an action therefore I have decided to spend my Christmas break (I'm in year 8) to try and solve this problem. I present the Joel Bingham utility equation: U=HSP-HSN where U is utility H is hours affected
S is one to ten severity P is amount of people affected in a positive way and N is amount of people affected negatively.
If the answer comes out positive it causes more good than bad if it's negative it causes more bad than good. In my opinion this is one of the best ways to determine wether an action should be taken or not according to utilitarianism