I believe in God, and as others have state, a higher being. Its hard for to believe in religion. Its hard for me to follow any path that believes in just one path, and thats the end all.

I do not believe in God and guess what...I have morals. I know the difference between right & wrong.

There's also a problem with being one heartbeat away from finding out if he is real or not......once we die we can't tell anyone....

After death, Henry Houdini was supposed to give us a sign, a subtle hint or something from the afterlife, but we got nothing...

...if anyone could've escaped for a few seconds to come back and enlighten us all, it would have been him.

...

That's the whole purpose of FAITH!

But why is faith a good thing? Why is it good to believe something without evidence?

Faith is neither good nor bad... Its just a thing we do when we're blind to the whole picture... which is pretty much ALL of the time.

Makes no sense at all to be in this physical/human realm without a distinct possibility of this "blindness" being on purpose.

Just stumbling around...

My ethics, my morals and my belief structures, are mine.

They are the accumulation of all that I have experience, all that I AM, and all that I know.

I had faith once...

Faith that santa clause was real...he wasnt
Faith that i would be protected from things as long as I believed...i was raped several times, almost burned alive in a fire...hit by a car...

sorry I don't fly on faith, I fly on proof. Please don't give me the "he was with you the whole time" routine. The only thing that helped me survive was me, now the only thing I have faith in is me because I have proven time and again that I'm the only person i can fully count on.

I'd like to add, that I have never once, condemned anyone for their beliefs and will support my family and friends for their beliefs, but those beliefs are not for me.

You realize that this quote is a biased point of view right?

I agree, as I do not believe in god, yet still live my life with the morals that my mother instilled in me. When I do something I feel guilt and pay for it. I am a normal guy and live my life as good as i can.

Faith by definition is belief without proof. You expect to convince a rational human being to not believe in.....say UFO's because there is no proof. Yet expect them to believe that there is a man in the clouds that will let them in the pearly gates if they have followed his rules, yet there is no proof of him/her either? Where is the logic?

Faith in God does not come thru Logic.

Faith in God comes from the Spirit , not the mind.

(intelligence and logic are of the mind, which are part of the soulish realm ).


Faith Comes By Hearing.......

and Hearing

By the Word of God.

(Not thru comments on a forum).

Why?

Because there is Drawing Power in that Word of God.

And Faith Comes as a man Hears.....

and then God begins to draw that man unto Him....

and Not until then will Faith Come

There is Wonder Working Power in God's Word.

God and His Word are One.

Open up that Book Called the Word of God, and Begin to Read.

And Watch and See What God Will Do.

Here we go with the "Word of God" again. It's not really the word of God. It's the word of disciples who claim to be writing the word of God. It's mans word.

I suppose folks would be happy if they just had rock solid evidence that God exists...I suppose then they'd feel okay about believing and giving creedence to the bible.
The problem with that is that God's wisdom is infinitely more logical than our own...
If God revealed his presence beyond a shadow of doubt, it would rule out free will...
Who denies the existence of the sky? Who doesn't believe the sun exists?

God wants relationship with us... He doesn't want automatons... The angels in heaven know beyond any doubt that God is real...

God's plan is that we grow to see beyond the phisical realm and experience him and each other in spirit. His desire is that each of us come to him as a child...With an open heart, with a yearning spirit to experience him as he is...a pure spirit and as our creator who knows our every thought even before we think them.

If you need proof, you're only considering the phisical realm. If you had that proof without the requirement of faith, you'd not have free will in the fullest sense because again...who doesn't believe in the sky?

Everything we experience in this realm has been puposely created to give us the opportunity in every passing moment to see with our spirit beyond the veil that seperates us from God's kingdom.

imo

Once again, how does anyone know what god wants, if indeed such a being exist? And how do you know his plan without ever being told?

And yes, I do believe in the sky, but I see it on a daily basis. You are comparing apples and oranges here.

Clearly this is false MorningSong. There are many people who have read the Bible throughout many times, and even studied it in great depth only to come away from it totally convinced that it's nothing more than the feeble words of a very crude and often rude culture.

Isaac Newton was certainly one of these people. Scholars say that Isaac Newton actually put more effort into studying the Bible than he put into creating modern science and inventing calculus. Yet his conclusion is that Jesus could not possible have been the son of the God of Abraham.

Albert Einstien also rejected the Bible and the Torah as being the obvious works of mere mortal men. Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman and many other brilliant men have rejected the Bible as not being Godly in the least.

All of these men read the Bible and studied it only to reject it as being clearly the works or mortal men and not the work of any divine being.

I've personally read the Bible many times and I'm even currently lisiting to Bible CD's with professional speaking reading it to me aloud. In all honestly it sounds even more fake than ever when listed to in his manner.

The TRUTH is that we have absolutely no reason to believe that this book is the word of God, and we have EVERY reason to believe that it is merely the words of an over-zealous culture who needed to use God as an excuse to murder their enemies, and convert and control the masses. In fact, when their Story WASN'T convincing what did they do? They took up the sword and DEMANDED that people either believe it or DIE!

And you think that's GODLY?

I don't need to even apply logic to the Bible MorningSong, the book is a hateful book about a jealous egotistical God who lusts for blood sacrifices and threatens to toss the vast majoritity of humanity into a flaiming hell fire where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.

I reject the story on INTUITIVE and EMOTIONAL grounds every bit as much as I reject it for the obvious inconsistencies and logical contradictions.

Proselytizers try to appeal to emotion, intuition, and even pure BLIND faith when people point out that the book makes no rational intelligent sense. But that's utterly silly because the Book is nothing more than words. EMPTY words I might add.

Jesus was quoted by Matthew 21:22 as saying, "And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.

Well, Christians are always asking for things in prayer and not recieving them! This is so common. They even often make "prayer requests" of others because they KNOW how futile it is to pray on their own, and the TRUTH is that even when they appeal to others for prayers the results are just as empty.

It simply isn't TRUE. It doesn't work the way Matthew claims that Jesus said.

Also when Jesus predicted his 'return' he was predicting it to the very people to which he spake and he said the following:

Matt.24
[34] Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.


Mark.13
[30] Verily I say unto you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done.


Luke.21
[30] When they now shoot forth, ye see and know of your own selves that summer is now nigh at hand.
[31] So likewise ye, when ye see these things come to pass, know ye that the kingdom of God is nigh at hand.
[32] Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass away, till all be fulfilled.


Jesus didn't say to write this down for future generations. He was speaking directly to his deciples and the masses LIVE. And he was saying when ye see these things.

So unless Jesus was implying that these people will be reincarnated for future generations to come, clearly he was predicting that everything he said would come to pass within the current generation.

Now you keep asking people to READ THE BIBLE. Well, I've been doing just that MorningSong, and what I'm discovering is that the Bible CLEARLY STATES that Jesus promised the people he SPOKE TO that all of the things he SPOKE OF would come to pass in THEIR GENERATION!

Clearly it didn't happen.

What more do you want?

You ask me to read the Bible and I do. And the Bible tells me that all of these things that Jesus spoke of would come to pass within the generation of the people he was speaking to!

That was over 2000 years ago MorningSong!

If I'm going to BELIEVE the Bible then I must BELIEVE that it never happened and either Jesus was delusional, or Matthew was making it all up. I personally believe that LATTER!

But the bottom line is that even the BOOK ITSELF never even claimed that Jesus would come back in some future millenium.

If you're going to READ the Bible MorningSong then READ IT! And you'll see that there is absolutely NO REASON to believe that Jesus would come back after the generation that he spoke to had passed away.

That's what the BOOK SAYS!

What more can I say?

You ask me to READ the Bible and I do. And the more I read it the more I realized that the Christians of today have it ALL WRONG.

The book simply doesn't say what they claim that it says. Jesus never promised to come back in some future millennium, he promised the people he was speaking to that he would come back in BEFORE their generation passed away.

That never happened. At least not in the way the gospels predicted.

It's a done deal. The story is over. It passed away with the generation that it had been promised to happen in!

What more do you need?

Mordern Christianity is totally absurd. It doesn't even go by what the gospels actually STATE!

Truly, no God or angels or faeries or any Holy Spirit ever told me that the Bible was the word of God.

The only people who have ever told me such a thing have been Christian Proselytizers who, to be quite honest about it, seem to be highly irrational in so many ways and even refuse to acknowledge HARD CORE EVIDENCE that the Bible can't be true when it is presented to them.

So I'm supposed to beleive that the Bible is the word of God when the only people who are trying to convince me of this are Christian Proselytizers who obviousely can't even READ!

Even the Bible itself doesn't back up their claims!

The Bible clearly has Jesus stating to the people to whom he is speaking that everything he is prophesizing will come true before their generation passes.

What more do we need. Even if we accept that the Bible is true it has nothing to do with us! Supposedly the rapture happened 2000 years ago.

Maybe we are the left-overs who were abandoned by God?

Maybe God already harvested his crop of humans from this planet and we're the decendents of the rejects?

Did the Christians ever think of that?

They better LEARN to READ BETTER!

They're living in a fantasy world. The book doesn't even say what they think it says.

Actually - you've got your facts wrong. There have been more people killed under the name of "Atheism" than all of the religious wars combined.