Flake

Distinguishing between a root cause and a symptom is difficult because a symptom may be a root cause for some other problem. You can try taking a symptom then asking what caused it (to avoid confusion we'll call the answer to this one A), then ask what caused A (the answer will be B), then ask what caused B (answer C), and ask what caused C. Keep doing this and eventually you'll reach a point where you don't know or start repeating yourself and then you'll have some idea of what the root of that problem is.

In a way I agree with the original post. Why isn't Atheism just a sub-forum of Philosophy?

You realize you are asking what Statists ask us anarcho-capitalists to do right? Theoretically a voluntary government is possible, I provided a thought experiment which showed this, just as we anarcho-capitalists have shown how a anarcho-capitalist society is theoretically possible. If theoretical thought experiments aren't enough to prove that a voluntary government is possible then it also wouldn't be enough to prove that a anarcho-capitalist society is possible.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you haven't read my last two posts. You need to give a compelling reason why government must always be involuntary.

We may associate certain things with a government but that doesn't mean that those things must apply to all governments. All that is required for something to be a government is for there to be a group who is governed and someone to govern them.

I'm sure you can imagine a small group of people which decide to make a few members of the group the leaders. Those leaders are now their government and the whole thing is voluntary. You could also imagine the government of that small group allowing people to leave the group, does them letting those people leave make the leaders any less of a government, you could say that the government is making a bad decision in allowing people to leave, but as long as the group listens to the leaders the leaders remain their government. You can call this a free market arrangement instead but it fits with the definition of government.

Definitions of government don't preclude the possibility of a "opt-out" government.

I can't speak for Stefan but the answer to your question has been alluded to already. Just not made explicit. (I haven't read all the responses carefully.) Parents have a strong incentive not to screw their kids up. Despite this many parents still do. Social leaders on the other hand have little incentive to use restraint when exercising power. (This doesn't make them incapable of restraint. They just don't have enough incentive to stop them from abusing their power.) If parents, who are informed that their actions may screw their kid up, sometimes can't help themselves, then it doesn't bode well for social leaders.

I don't think we know yet. Disparity of power is usually a problem, but it isn't the reason that the very idea of government is inherently flawed. Government must by necessity have control otherwise the government won't be the government. The government is a system, like all systems it does things which are necessary for survival, and this conflicts with what is best for the people who live under it. For example if you want to control someone, making sure they are dependent on you would be a good idea, but this certainly wouldn't be good for the person you want to control.

You need to learn the difference between informal conversation and formal argumentation. If you can't answer the questions I posed, only offering a cheap shot instead, then I don't see the point of continuing.

You're accepting a position called Essentialism when you say "But they were wrong that it was a god." There is something intuitive about things having a "essence" some thing that makes them part of a category. In this case you think that a god must have all those awesome powers to be a god. Just because it is intuitive doesn't make it true. I once believed what you believed as well until I dug more into philosophy. While digging you will see that Essentialism has some serious problems. Problems that were pointed out by Karl Popper, among others, more recently Saul Kripke, and illustrated by the Theseus paradox. A simple question is enough to demonstrate it. Every cell in your body is replaced every few years, your beliefs change over time, etc., so what is your "essence"? What is that thing that makes you, you? Good luck answering that question well. If you can't pin down what makes you you then how can you pin down what makes a god, a god? You can give your opinion of what makes a god, a god, but you won't be able to provide a sound reason why that is how it must be. Believe me, many people have tried, all have failed. Edit: Powder makes a excellent point.

If it were so simple then there wouldn't be a heated debate in modern philosophy on this very subject. Later tonight I'll respond to your response

What those people believed is irrelevant. A person can be completely wrong about the properties of a object, that doesn't change the fact that they are talking about that object, when they use the object's name. Once people believed that tomatoes were poisonous, when they talked about them they would say they are poisonous, they eventually realized they weren't, does that mean that tomatoes ceased being tomatoes? The word tomato still referred to the same thing, they just realized that one of the properties they atrributed to it, poison, wasn't one of its attributes.

There are plenty of philosophers who do a decent job arguing against that. They would make the point, that whatever was referred to when people uttered the word God, is what is meant by God. That if we discover that what was called God is actually a alien, then that alien is God, because that's what the word God was referring to all along.

Your position would more accurately be described as ignosticism. Which brings up the point you are making here, that there is no way to nail down the definition, meaning that debating its existence is meaningless in the philosophical sense.