... Bent1
Obviously, since you are very likely reading this at a computer, you too can look up in a matter of seconds any names or events that aren't familiar with. So google up Wayne Bent, and be sure to read the letters between Bent and his Seven Young Virgins who devoutly want to lie naked with him and be Consummated by the Son of God. 
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... Universe2
Lest there be any semantic confusion, let us make it clear from the beginning that the word ``Universe'', in English, means ``everything that exists''. To avoid temporal confusion, we will use the word in a strictly time-independent way, one consistent with the modern concepts of e.g. relativity theory.

If any set of ``things'' has objective real existence anywhere, anywhen, anyhow, it is a part of of the Universe. A more complete definition will be given later in the section on the premises of the theorem but this will suffice to avoid misunderstandings in the preliminary sections. 

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... religions3
In particular, the variants of Vedantic Hinduism and Buddhism, to the extent that Buddhism is a religion at all. 
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... dolls4
I mean ``action figures''... 
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... up5
Seriously. In an informal survey, some 80 or 90% of all young men who ever played with these particular dol- ahem, I mean ``action figures'' stretching all the way back to the 60's, if pressed, will admit to dousing at least one AF with gasoline and blowing it up with firecrackers sometime between the ages of nine and thirteen. Younger than that, they're unlikely to have access to either one. Much older than that, they no longer care and besides, their Joes and Cobra Commanders all got blown up when they were younger! In that narrow window of opportunity, however, the temptation to stage a real war with action figures is apparently just irresistable.

Sure, I'm male - I'll come clean and admit that I did it (along with literally all of my friends often in the course of whole-neighborhood Joe wars). The rest of you, you know who you are, stop pretending!

Nowadays, of course, this may no longer be true, because kids go online and simply blow each other up in virtual reality in games like Call of Duty. These games do, however, have an important lesson that games with dolls lacked. The mean survival time of players in most tries is somewhere in the ballpark of one to two minutes. No matter how carefully you play, there are too many places and ways somebody on the other side can - and does - kill you with a gun, a bomb, a grenade, even a tactical nuclear weapon. In the natural course of events, they teach all of the players one very important truth: your probability of survival unmaimed in a real up-close and personal ambush or firefight is basically very, very low, no matter how good you are, no matter how lucky.

It may well be that MMRPG war games in which no one ever wins because the game never ends may bring about world peace in a generation where two thousand years of abstract moral instruction failed... 

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... are6
If Satan is the father of lies, hermeneutics - the science of lies - is the mother. According to the sound principles of hermeneutics, no written scripture ever means what it says, and no interpretation the scripture is ever given, however violently that interpretation is enforced for a century or three, cannot be further shifted into something else entirely if the interpretation turns out to be incorrect or morally repugnant - again. Today Genesis is literal truth. Tomorrow (once it is positively proven to be a myth) is is poetry, it is figurative truth. Once the poetry is shown to be horrible and wicked, falsely portraying man as a fallen being where in fact he is merely evolved and hence ``unfinished'', it shifts somewhere else, perhaps it is a secret code, perhaps it is ``metaphor'' for the human condition or life cycle.

The one thing Christian hermeneutics and exegesis will never, ever do, however, is to conclude ``Wow, this whole book is a bunch of baloney. I'll bet hardly any of this ever happened. It makes no sense at all.'' 

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... faith7
Defined in this context as ``Believing something for no good reason at all, believing something for actively bad reasons, reasons that should convince you that the opposite thing is true.'' 
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... logicians8
See e.g. Mathematics, the Loss of Certainty by Morris Kline, 1980, who does a brilliant job of communicating this point. 
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... Universe9
It is also immediately quite obvious that God cannot have created the Universe - if God existed to do any such thing, so did the Universe, as the set of everything that exists, existed, or will exist. 
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... exist10
Note well that the exact same reasoning applied symmetrically the other way suggests that if there is a non-empty, non-God part of the Universe, then there is no God (that satisfies the standard model properties listed above). Believers in a dualist ``creator'' would do well to contemplate this. 
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... rule11
Although the Beatles did seem to suggest otherwise in the song ``Revolution Number 9'' off of the White Album, which I'm listening to as I type this. Cosmic! 
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... number12
Imagine, for example, that I take 9 and divide it by 9 to make 1, then use 1 in an infinite series for the inverse tangent to successively approach the value of $\pi/4$, then after an infinite number of steps divide by $\pi$ and multiply by 292. Voila! 73! Or if you prefer a Hitchhiker's view, one can decode the entire visible Universe into the number 42. A badly infinite number of ways. 
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... process13
It is precisely this sort of thing that makes information theoretic estimates of a priori probability so dicey and makes Bayesian priors so important - when estimating the probability of rolling the number six on a single die, it really helps to know a whole lot of things about the die and how it is to be cast such as how many sides it has and whether or not it we possess complete data on the physics problem that its casting represents (an argument due to E. T. Jaynes). It all comes down to the fact that the existential Universe has zero self-encoded entropy - its state is its state, period and questions of the size of that state space in the abstract are irrelevant. Any partitioning of it followed by restriction to the non-empty sub-Universes introduces relative information entropy into both sub-Universes in a manner completely independent of time or process. I am deeply tempted to wax poetic about open and closed systems in physics and the Nakajima-Zwanzig Generalized Master Equation and its tremendous importance in metaphysical philosophy but I'll do that later in Axioms and besides, I just did. 
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... know14
It is quite certain, for example, that it takes many many neurons to encode just the word ``neuron'', and far more to encode the general properties of neurons, and still more to encode the particular functional state of one particular neuron out of the entire brain, and a truly vast number of neurons to encode the particular state of the molecules, atoms, electrons and quarks and photons and gluons at a single instant in time. Indeed, it probably is quite literally beyond our capacity to ``know'' the full microscopic detail of a single instant in the history of a single neuron in the human brain using the entire brain's high level capacity to encode it!

Note that the same thing is simple engineering as far as information storage devices are concerned. A single bit in a computer memory chip requires many, many atoms, let alone elementary particles, to encode. The amount of quantum state information in the projective subspace of the Universe represented by the physical matter of the single-bit storage device is vast, and the large numbers are necessary to achieve macroscopic state stability and reproducibility in the face of inevitable and unknowable entanglements of its state with the state of the rest of the Universe, the inevitable bleed of entropy from whatever is not it into it. 

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... equivalent15
It is worth noting that those that do not consider mere existence of something in contrast with compete and utter nonexistence as evidence of God shouldn't be particularly bothered by this theorem either, given that is a conditional theorem beginning with if God exists... The atheist and pandeist alike can agree that whether or not one names the Universe ``God'' hardly matters. Either way, it is what it is, the foundation of our being, awesomely complex (and yet simple), and the source of individual awareness in the form of ongoing discovery. 
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... plausible16
This is the one place where empirical probability estimates are very, very difficult as we lack even the possibility of formulating a sensible Bayesian prior. The mere fact of our existence is the moral equivalent of reaching our metaphysical hand into an even more metaphysical urn and pulling out a physical Cosmos, ourselves included. What can this tell us about the contents of the urn and the process that prepared it? Only that the urn was not empty - it contained at least one ball. Mind you, there is a truly staggering amount of information encoded in that one ball - and none of it has the slightest bearing on whether or not the urn is now empty, whether or not we will ever have the opportunity to draw another ball, whether or not the urn itself is in any sense alive, and whether or not it is possible to construct an even more strained metaphor given that there is no urn. 
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... hard17
I promise! After all, I've already had my rant against Abrahamic theisms above... 
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... unbelievers18
Note well that the famous passage about ``casting the first stone'' is known to be a late addition to the New Testament, probably in response to this very verse, as it is not present in the earliest manuscript copies of the New Testament. 
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... Hotel19
Look it up on Wikipedia, of course. Why do you think Wikipedia is there? 
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...work20
And, because by and large they are pretty sensible suggestions, they do work for quite a lot of people, completely without supernatural aid. 
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... enlightenment21
Where I cannot but agree, although I would couch it conditionally - if one believes that God exists, then the attributes assigned to him in any theism are obviously anthropomorphic projections of humans on God, not the other way around. The only path that flows the other way comes from studying the Universe itself using reason and giving up on divine revelation altogether. 
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... messenger22
And while I'm at it, let me promote Galileo, Descartes, Newton, etc. to sainthood in its list of messengers. Anybody can have a good or bad idea about the Universe, and reason exists as a means of sorting out the good from the bad on the basis of evidence and consistency with the entire Bayesian network of human knowledge. That is, I'm at least as qualified to offer up a provisional truth about All Things as the next guy - perhaps more qualified than most given that I've spent my life studying philosophy and physics and mathematics and computing - and I'm not asserting it as any sort of divine revelation, only as something that I think makes sense, offered up so you can consider it and see if it makes sense to you as well. 
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... pretty23
...and your little dog, too! 
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... develop24
According the National Institure of Health's website on the condition 
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...humans25
The line is in Deuteronomy 12, requiring that the blood of slaughtered animals be spilled out on the ground and not eaten, probably because in those days bloodborne parasites were commonplace and because this ensured a compassionate slaughter of the animal in question by having its throat cut, a practice that continues today among both Jews and Muslims. It prohibits eating blood ``as the life'' of the animal and asserts that they must not eat ``the life and the flesh''. Of course a transfusion isn't the same as eating, humans are supposedly not the same as animals, the transfusion recipient hardly ever ``eats'' the blood (product) of an anonymous donor and their flesh, and the donor in general was not killed during the donation so it is difficult to assert that they are (not) eating the donor's life, but once some prophet wannabe gets it in his head that he alone has the right interpretation of obscure lines in a religious text and creates what amounts to a new text that a group of poor fools buy into, no abomination is impossible in ``the name of God''.

Even more amusing, in a sick rather than ha-ha way - Jehovah's Witnesses don't follow any of the rest of the dietary restrictions in the Old Testament, so pork and shrimp are perfectly OK, they don't bother to ensure that the leg of lamb they eat didn't come from a firstborn lamb (prohibited in between the two sets of verses that prohibit drinking blood), and I'm reasonably certain that they don't require their women to sacrifice two turtledoves after their period so that they can become clean in the eyes of God once again. 

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... religion26
If you want to really piss off an atheist, call atheism a religion. Bear in mind when you do so that you're just being silly, for two reasons. One is that the term ``religion'' and the term ``worldview'' don't mean the same thing - religion in the context of theism clearly references a supernatural axiom, where worldviews can include a religious axiom or not. So it is not true that any set of personal beliefs constitutes a religion; they rather constitute a worldview, one that may or may not be religious. Beyond that it is like calling a person who is aspectic (sterile) infected, it is like calling a person who is broke wealthy, it is like asserting that a thing and its opposite are equivalent. Which is just plain silly, Q.E.D. 
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... short27
According to Wikipedia, life expectancy in pre-Columbian North America (yes, they have an explicit entry for just that) was 25-30 years. Even at that, it was longer than life in the Eurasian Bronze Age (18). 
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... Universe28
Note well that this usage is not in complete accord with conventional usage, which would identify pantheism as the idea that God is the Universe and make pandeism the more complicated belief that God created the Universe by becoming the universe. The problem with the former terminology is that it conflates a pandeity - a God that is everything, with theism, which has been consistently used in the context of this work strictly to reference religions that assert God and have an associated theistic dogma, sacred scriptures with divine revelatory truths contained therein.

Deism has commonly been used to connote rational belief in God in the absence of any specific (necessarily irrational) scripture or creation mythology, and "creation" is not a necessary attribute of God; rather the opposite. As we have noted, the notion of a God that ``creates and becomes the Universe'' is self-contradictory because the Universe is everything that exists, including God if God exists, and the statement ``the Universe existed and at some particular time created the Universe'' doesn't seem to have any sensible meaning. 

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