I used to believe, unconditionally, in Yaweh when I was small, simply because people said there was a god who controlled everything, and, being small and open to suggestion, I just said "Oh. Cool." and went on with my life. Then I got to an age where I just thought, "Hmm. When you actually think about it, it becomes dead clear that there is no god.". That was my story, anyway.
Yeah, I can see how you came to that conclusion... The stars, mountains, DNA, birds, the fact that our planet is uniquely setup to support life, and every other complex and beautiful thing in nature are just an accident by blind, unintelligent, and disordered naturalistic processes rather than created by an orderly and omnipotent God ... it's all becoming clear to me now too. I wonder why I even believed in God...
While I am clearly joking, your statement does not follow through to your conclusion as my above paragraph illustrates.
If god is real why make other religions? Having opposing religions has always been a bad thing!
Religions are man-made belief systems that attempt to reach to God by doing rituals or things that may just, if we do it well enough and enough times, allow God to prevent throwing a lightning bolt our way.
The origin of religion is not God, rather man. That said, what a religion is based on may be that of God, i.e. Christianity being based on the life, death, and resurrection of God incarnate human flesh. It is interesting, all the major world religions are about us doing something to get to God, yet Christianity is about God doing something to get to us. That, I believe, is a major and critical difference. But I won't get into this now.
And I find that when you try to tell a christian that according to science, they're wrong they just go "But you must have faith.". Thats like believing the moon is made of cheese when science says its not.
Actually, when I'm confronted with someone who uses "science" against my faith, I am more than able to refute them with evidence that is based in fact, or show them how their interpretation of the evidence is false or based on their unprovable precepts. Christianity is not just some religion that requires blind faith without evidence ... no, no, no, we have reasons for what we believe and should always be ready to give an answer for what we believe (1 Peter 3:15).
I would also readily point out that science as we know it only really began to accelerate in the West when the scientists believed God as creator and the Bible as His infallible revelation. As one example, I submit George Washington Carver (1864-1943) who based his work in agricultural chemistry on the Bible and the promises and insights therein. He said, "Without God to draw aside the curtain, I would be helpless."
Further more, when Paul says that we "live by believing and not by seeing" (2 Corinthians 5:7), I believe that it is more in reference to believing the promises of God that are unseen and in who He is more than believing in doctrines by faith and having no reason for what we believe. If you look up this passage, it is in the context of our future glorified bodies that the Lord Jesus has promised us. We must be confident and believe that these will happen because Jesus has promised that they will, even though we cannot see these things and have no real physical or tangible basis for believing them.
And also... I think they make the debating section right at the bottom of the page in small letters so that not many christians will go here for the fear of losing disiples. C'mon prove me wrong!
I think that your mind is already made up and nothing that I or anyone else will say can convince you other wise unless you become more open to our responses. It is my experience that those who create such threads with the statements "God isn't real" or "Why I don't believe in God" or "Science has proven..." are not interested in discovering truth, because you believe that you already have it, and hence, anything that goes against it must be "lies" to you, such that you are not even willing to give it a fair and unbiased hearing.
The Bible tells us that we will be held accountable for what we have heard and see. Paul tells us that on the basis of looking around at what God has created, we stand condemned if we reject the existence of God. How can you look around at everything that you see in the natural world and not see its beauty? Not see its complexity? How can you honestly, and intellectually, think that blind and unintelligent unordered and random processes can create such beauty, complexity, and order that we see in the world today, in ourselves? It is just so overwhelming that, to me, it is intellectual suicide to continue to reject a creator God.
What happens to your room if you don't act on it? It soon gets dirty, filled with dust, spider webs, clothes everywhere, and so on. No matter how much time passes, it will not reorganise itself into an ordered and tidy room. So you decide to go in there and randomly chuck everything everywhere without giving it any thought of what is happening. What will happen? All what you'll do is just create just as much mess as clothes and what have you are tossed in any direction. No matter how long you do that, your room will never be clean or ordered. The only way to get an ordered and beautiful room is if you, an orderly and intelligent being, make it that way. You take the books off the floor and place them up on the bookshelf in chronological order if possible or by categories, fold up your clothes, do the dusting, and so on. Similarly, since we see an orderly and complex world, we have every reason to believe that it is created by an orderly and intelligent creator, not by unordered, and unintelligent, and completely blind and random processes. It is absurd to suggest that order can come from unorder, IMHO.
Respectfully,
CIE.
