I have avoided posting here because my beliefs can be somewhat abrasive on this topic. Kryst, you've made your beliefs clear. I will start out by saying that we will need to agree to disagree. But don't take my message as in any way personally attacking you.
To start with, I was brought up as a Methodist. However, at some moment after my mother became terminally ill, I started to read the Bible to her. It comforted her. But it made me ask more and more questions that I could not get answered. The answers made no sense. The claims were contradictory. Finally, in order to resolve this, I had to do a formal analysis starting a priori with what I knew of the Bible.
I'll spare you the deepest parts of the analysis. What I did was to look at the conditions under which the Bible was written and tried to be objective about it. In essense, I was addressing a cognitive dissonance.
I realized that the Bible was written based on stories told among uneducated, superstitious, nomadic shepherds and poor tradesmen in small villages. They were trying to explain the world around them by making up stories that made sense to them. In their world, it was OK to believe in magic, so they chose a magical solution for everthing and called it God.
I am reminded of Asimov's quote, which I must paraphrase: Any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic if you don't understand the science. Well, this applies to the facets of nature, too. If you don't understand science but you feel a need to somehow have an answer to the question of how things came about, you have two choices: Admit you don't know, or make up something.
I would like to think that folks were honest enough to say they didn't know - but we all know that NOBODY likes to admit they don't know something. Look at all of pantheons around Europe - including the Norse, Finnish, Greek, Roman, and Eastern Mediterranean groups. Then there was the Egyptian pantheon as well. Though they were separated by a vast ocean, the Mayans had their own little pantheon running around, including Quetzalcoatl, the Serpent God. The point of this is that EVERY culture made up their answers to how the world was made, how the "heavens" were ruled, what happened to the souls of the wicked and the worthy after death. There is no reason to believe that the nomadic shepherds were any different.
Here is where the realization hit me. There is no difference in concept between what the nomadic shepherds created vs. what the other cultures created. They are ALL, in my opinion, stories to amaze, amuse, and frighten children, told in a way that primitive and uneducated minds can handle. But they are no more true than Aesop's Fables or Grimm's Fairy Tales.
On another forum, I got involved with the question of why people believe in God. The only answer I have ever managed to find is that they were taught while little children. ("Suffer the little children unto me." And hoo, boy, is "suffer" an operative word in that case.) After that, you interpret what you see differently. The only way to break through that is to start questioning until you can see that the belief in question is groundless and an alternate belief makes more sense.
Trust me, it was not a pleasant - or fast - journey. But as each learned belief went under the spotlight, it faded. I have finally reached the point where I no longer "hand my life over to God." Instead, I have reclaimed control and with it, shed the burdens of shame, guilt, and fear of divine retribution that come with Christianity. I no longer wait for advice from an absentee landlord. I take matters into my own hands and make my decisions for myself.
OK, here is my opinion on a common question: What if the God of the Bible is real? The God of the Old Testament is a petulant, selfish, narcissistic, vengeful, mercurial child. (Had to be in order to keep children's attention, don't you see?) But if that is really what God is like, who would want to worship such an abomination? And if that is not what God is like, then what happened with Sodom, Gomorrah, the Great Flood, slaughter of non-conforming villages, etc. etc. What happened with all the blood sacrifices? What happened with stoning of adulterers and homosexuals?
Actually, I have answers for the last two anyway. If you look at the nature of small, nomadic tribes, they can't afford to have people who don't honor blood lines and don't procreate. Life back then was tenuous on a good day and not even slightly tenuous when it was a bad day.
In tribes with limited blood lines, it was a danger to the survival of the tribe to allow folks to live if they weren't going to honor family lines (which adultery disrupts) and if they were going to not contribute to the next generation of the tribe (which homosexuality doesn't do.) But that is a purely cultural explanation that didn't require God to get involved at all.
There is where we have the dichotomy. Believers tell me, "Look at God's wonder all around you." I say, "Look at the diversity of nature, brought about by natural scientific principles that don't require God's intervention." Believers ask me, "But how did life start?" To which I answer, I believe that abiogenesis is possible since the precursor experiments have already been done to get to the building blocks of life in "primordial soup" conditions.
We could discuss this forever and not reach a conclusion because it is a matter of what you believe and whether you were ever able to successfully start breaking down those beliefs that are in your way to finally seeing what I see as the truth.
But of course, the religious among you will see it differently. I expect that. It is all a matter of interpretation.
Speaking of which, some posts back, someone asked a question about what would happen if we discovered intelligent alien life. May I recommend a book on this subject? It is called A Case of Conscience and was written by James K Blish. It directly deals with exactly this subject, when Earth humans find an alien race that appears to be totally moral without an deity or deities. The central character is a botanical researcher who also happens to be a Jesuit priest. (They are, after all the scientific ones. Le Maitre, who proposed the Big Bang theory, was a Jesuit.) Anyway, the rest of the story is the priest's struggle with the impossibility of the situation according to Catholic dogma and the final resolution of the problem. I consider it an absolute masterpiece of walking the line between secular and sacred ideals in conflict. I enjoyed it tremendously.
) I thought I was, acknowledging wars that were fought unjustly on both the Christian and the nonChristian sides, and saying that I agree that violence is not the answer, but I won't allow someone to kill me...
