@Jo: RE: How do you know that? I simply trust what Jim Jones said and the actions that followed. To not believe Jones was a real Christian following the guidance of the Christian God is to fall into the "No True Scotsman Fallacy."

@Jo: RE: "How has science checked" Simple, it tests all god claims; miracles, the power of prayer, the laying on of hands, talking in tongues, the handling of snakes, and more. Any time a religious claim has an effect in the real world, it can be tested. (We will get to absence of evidence next.) At no point has any miraculous claim stood against science and skepticism.

@Jo: RE: "Absence of evidence is an argument from ignorance. " You obviously do not understand the "Argument from Ignorance Fallacy." The fallacy states "Something is true because it has not yet been proved false." EX: God exists because you can not prove he does not exist.

I have asserted "There is no evidence for god." I have asserted "Absence of evidence is in fact evidence of absence." This is scientifically and logically sound. Were this not the case, scientists would be stuck doing the very same experiments over and over and over again while expecting different results. The fact is, we can come up with a hypothesis, conduct an experiment, and then state that our hypothesis was not proved by the experiment. There is no reason to continue doing the same experiment a thousand times over.

Hypothesis: God exists.
How do we know this? Pick a measurable influence god has on the world. "Prayer Works."
What kind of prayer and how.
Intercessory prayer in cancer wards. Praying for others will help them to recover more quickly.

Hypothesis: God exists because praying for other will help them to recover from cancer.
Experiment: Conducted by PEW Research.
Hypothesis rejected. It was found that people who knew they were being prayed for did far worse than people that did not receive prayer.

We can reject the hypothesis that god exists based on intercessory prayer.

There are thousands of times theological claims have been debunked and thus demonstrated the God hypothesis failed once again.

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Go back to the Bear Cave Analogy: This has been clearly explained. 10,000 years with no evidence at all that can stand against critical inquiry IS IN FACT "EVIDENCE" for the non-existence of your God Thing.

@Jo: RE: "There is no evidence for any god." That is a factual statement. If you think you have some valid, empirical evidence that can stand up to skeptical inquiry, please post it. We would all love to hear what you have beyond your personal delusions and blind assertions.

I wouldn't go as far as saying "death throes", but yes, we are indeed witnessing the start of a decline in religion. For the past hundred years or so, we have learned and found out so much about nature and the laws and regularities it follows/exhibits that we can explain a vast array of phenomena that in earlier times were attributed to a god or gods, as well as phenomena that noone in the ancient pre-scientific world even knew existed. Lightning? Not Thor or Zeus, but electrical discharges. Tsunamis, floods, etc? Not Poseidon or any other water gods, but the result of submarine earthquakes and weather. Droughts and bad harvests? Not caused by any angry gods, but a result of dynamic and chaotic weather patterns. And so on and so forth. We are literally watching the gods being squeezed into progressively narrower gaps as the science results keep coming in. And the space available for gods and supernatural beings is converging towards zero.

Further, history and bible research makes it more and more clear that this Jesus dude that so many people treat like a deity is in fact no more than literally a dead guy on a stick. The consensus among bible researchers seems to be that this Jesus guy was no more than a regular person from the boondocks of today's Israel that ended up as a relatively unknown (in his days) doomsday prophet. But sheer coincidence then made his particular doomsday cult end up "winning". Other historical researchers argue (quite convincingly, imo) that the whole Jesus affair is a myth, and that what today is Christianity started as a jewish doomsday cult that based their theology on manuscripts with similar ideas.

Religion and theology has contributed to exactly nil when it comes to actual knowledge about things that matter, i.e. the actual observable world we live in. No scientific breakthroughs or great inventions have ever been made as a result of religious scriptures. Religionists like to claim that their particular holy scriptures (the Torah, the Bible, the Quran, the Book of Mormon, the sci-fi of L. Ron Hubbard, etc.) is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, even when contradictions and factual errors are present on practically every page. They claim that there is no morality except what their particular kind of religion expresses. But they fail to mention (they "forget") that people had morals long before the current religions popped up in any recognizable form or shape, and that basic rules for moral behaviour (like no stealing, no killing, no maiming etc) exist all over the world, in societies that have lived in relative isolation for tens of thousands of years. Without the influence of these so-called "moral" religions. These rules just make sense for the survival of the family group/the village/the clan. No superstitious bullshit jesus-on-a-stick nonsense required.