Opinions and conclusions about Religion and God.

Nice topic Phat. I'll give it a shot.Now let's see.... What have I learned about religion?Well I'm pretty sure I said all this before but just to reiterate, I grew up in a household with a strongly religious mother (Jehovah's witness) and a pretty non religious (though not atheistic as far as I am aware) father.I went to church (or meetings as they were called) several times a week and read the bible from cover to cover a number of times.I have always had a rather scientific kind of way of looking at things and as I grew up I began to discover what appeared to be inconsistencies of logic in everything related to the religion which I had previously thought was to be my life.
I started asking the questions (you know the ones. Who made God? How could A&E know good from evil before eating the fruit? and many others.) and got smacked down at every turn with excuses and vaguaries. It quickly became evident to me that my teachers didn't have the answers either but unlike me they were quite content to live in denial that there were even issues.I checked out a few other christain religions but they were all the same or worse so I stopped going to church at all and concentrated on my education.
During this time I became quite fascinated with other religions of the world and read everything I could about them. I soon noticed a trend. They all claim to be the "one true religion" and that all others are false. Funny you should say that because that is exactly the way I felt when it finally hit me that maybe they were all wrong. Not only that but maybe there wasn't a God at all. It was like a massive weight had been lifted from my shoulders.
The following years of scientific reading and research just served to deepen this feeling. Without God in the equation, everything just fell neatly into place. For a while I became a strong atheist and actively believed that there was no God.During the last few years and particularly since joining the EVC comunity, my position has shifted to weak atheist. I no longer believe that there is no God. There very well might be but I am just indifferent to him/her. I see absolutely zero evidence of his/her existence and absolutely no need for him/her to exist yet I also know that science cannot rule him/her out as a possibility. Totally agree with your sentiment here and since realizing that God is unnecessary, I am now able to be 100% certain that the love I show to others is utterly unmotivated by self interest in some promised afterlife which is dependent on the things I do in this lifetime.

Got to agree with crash here. This outlook on life depresses the hell out of me.

I have no desire that my sins should be forgiven or that anyone elses should be either..
If I have done anything wrong then I should be judged and punished accordingly and so should Hitler.
Good things should offset bad things so that the overall balance is what counts. If we all get forgiven then I might just as well be a complete asshole for my entire life, as long as I have "faith". With absolute forgiveness there can be no justice.And I don't for one second buy into all this crap about "everyone is a sinner so we all go to hell by default".
Perhaps we all are sinners but I would imagine there are degrees of sin that would be treated differently.This is all assuming that there is actually anybody there to judge us anyway.

If somebody else pays then it isn't justice.As for being "saved", you make it seem like only God can actually save us anyway so where is my free will and choice in all this. I can't save myself if I can only have faith after God gives me it. It becomes his choice not mine.Anyway I think we are starting to stray a little OT for this thread so let's call it a day on this one. We have been here before and not achieved any reasonable agreement.

So when you get arrested and convicted of a crime that you did not commit, you will be quite happy that justice has been served will you?
I don't think so.
Do you think that justice would be served if a convicted killer walks free because his brother (an innocent man) volunteers to take his place on death row?
That is a miscarriage of justice, just as it is if Jesus can pay the price for me.
Justice is by no means blind. It demands that the person who comits the crime is the person who pays the price. The people who administer justice may well be blind but that is just their failing, not the failing of justice as an ideal. Just as I thought. I have absolutely no say in the matter. If he chooses to save me it is 100% his choice so I might just as well go out and do exactly what I want for the rest of my life until he decides to "save" me then after that I can ask for forgiveness. I find it hard to believe that if God reaches out to someone in a way that (to them) is absolutely obvious. In a way that leaves them no question as to his existence, that they would attempt to struggle free.
What if he never does so? Then where is my free will? Am I condemned to hell still? If I am then it is as the result of an arbitrary decision that I have absolutely no influence over. Or are you saying that he will reach out to everyone at some point?The only slippery slope we are on right now is towards an OT rebuke by the Admins.

No I am not misunderstanding it as such, I am just applying my resoning to the concept of it that Iano is putting forward.
He says specifically that "justice does not care who pays the price, just so long as it gets paid."I say that it most certainly does care who pays. In fact justice demands that the guilty party (the person that the justice system deams to be guilty, not necessarily the real guilty party) pays the price and specifically will not allow an innocent party to pay it instead.That is justice

Not in any court of law that I have ever heard of. Maybe in some second rate kangeroo court where the officials are so corrupt that they can be bought off but not in a halfway decent court.
If you really consider that to be justice then the two of us are so far apart that we might as well just start ignoring each other's posts. We are never going to agree on anything whatsoever. ROFLMAO. Right. Like that is going to happen in the real world. Did he tell you this personally? Remember I don't accept that the bible is the direct word of God. I view it as a bunch of somewhat related parables (some of which may possibly have been inspired as my position will not allow me to rule this out entirely) as seen through the eyes of a conglomeration of sheepherders and various others and written down a couple of thousand years ago about events that even then were second or third hand information and myth.
If God said this to you personally then you should believe it I guess but if you are inferring it by reading between the lines of a very vague document of questionable authenticity then it is only really your own interpretation of the real situation. This is good news to you ??? I prefer to think that (just as the bible says) we were made in the image of God and that we share his sense of justice. If we don't then, again, we might as well live our lives exactly the way we want to and to hell with our court system since our definition of justice means bugger all in the eyes of God anyway.
To say that God is just is utterly meaningless if his justice is nothing like ours. It obviously requires a different word entirely since the word "justice" has already been taken and is very well defined in the dictionary Don't be silly. Of course he could. It wouldn't affect free will one little bit if God came and rode around the sky in a flaming chariot every day. Oh wait some other religion already took that one. Sorry Apollo. No offense meant.
Seriously though, if everyone on earth physically saw God every day and knew full well who he was there would still be free choice. Some would undoubtedly still choose the other side. A & E did (and that was before the fall) so why would we be any different? Oh that's OK then. I certainly have a conscience and regret all the petty and nasty things that I have done in my life (even if some were justified). Sounds like I might already be in the process of being 'saved' then without even realizing it.

Jar. I have absolutely no problems with the views about God which you portray.
In a way I even hope you are right.
I like to think that I at least try to do what is right all the time and I am quite certain that I am going to fail on numerous occasions. I can't even live up to my own expectations so what chance would I have of meeting Gods (if he indeed happens to exist). I think you could safely remove the "probably" from that sentence and get no arguments from anybody except the truly arrogant.I think it is likely that I will continue to be a weak atheist until such time as God makes him(her)self known to me in a way that is utterly unambiguous to me. Personally, I don't think that is ever going to happen since I strongly suspect that there is no God there but that cannot be proven. Either way it isn't going to affect the way I live my life.

Not at all. Nobody gets convicted just because they walk into a police station and claim to have committed a crime.
Before the judge can pronounce the defendent guilty the evidence has to be presented. If the defendent did not commit the crime then there will be no evidence and the judge will pronounce him innocent and kick his ass out of court with a warning against wasting the court's time.
Yes justice is blind in that it deals only with evidence but that does not in any way mean that an innocent man with no evidence against him, can pay the penalty for a crime that he did not commit. No matter how much he protests, he will be refused if the court is just and not corrupt. So you keep saying. What I would like to know is where it is written in unambiguous black and white text, from a proven source, the exact method by which this happens. What the heck has disbelieving that he exists got to do with it? That is just being willfully stupid and deliberately avoiding the real issue.
You still have the choice to do what is right or wrong whether you know he exists or not.
You know he exists. Right?
Do you still have free will to do what is right or wrong? So how the heck did A & E manage to disobey him then? All you are doing is pointing out yet more inconsistencies in the bible.
If you are correct then Genesis is total BS and vice versa. I don't view Jesus as anything except some guy who people wrote a bunch of mythology about. That a massive religion grew out of it is just testament to the gullibility of people in general and their pathelogical need to belong to something bigger than themselves. It probably stems from insecurity due to a fear of death.

Yup. that's pretty much the way I see it too.

Only problem is that the God you portay seems to be pure evil as far as I can see.One of the following is most likely true.
Either

1. You have been badly decieved and are now unknowingly working for the wrong team
2. You are knowingly working for the wrong team.
3. You are working for the right team but suck at explaining what is going on in a way that makes sense to anybody else (me especially)
4. You are working for the right team and don't really understand anything much at all yet try to explain it anyway.
5. Everything you say is right in which case God really is a nasty bastard and maybe the other team would actually be a preferable choice to any decent person.
6. God doesn't exist at all and you are delusional

No I don't think I'm ready to find out the answer to this question for sure. I think options 4 or 6 would be my preferences. The evidence (or lack thereof) as I see it leads me towards option 6

Yes I suppose your #7 is also valid but it again raises the issue of free will.If I am physically unable to understand how to recognize God then I really have no choice whatsoever.
He has to first change me so that I can see him before I am able to make any choice at all.Take your blind man analogy. Is it fair and just to tell him that if he cannot see "RED" for what it is then he will be punished for all eternity. It is obvious to anybody that he can't see it and never will until his blindness is cured. If the cure is freely available yet it is denied then the blind man has zero choice in whether he sees "RED" or not.
If the cure is given so that the man can see "RED" then he has the choice to see it or not. At that point, a refusal to do so can legitimitely be held against him.If your point 7 is the correct option then I am that blind man. It is unfair to judge me for not seeing what I am incapable of seeing due to the way I was made. To be judged fairly I need to able to see it, do I not?
the passage 1Cor 2:14 Appears to condemn the "natural man" for nothing other than his naturalness. The passage appears to be just another excuse to explain away the reason that this "natural man" thinks that the aleged "spirit of God" is about as real as the tooth fairy.So let's assume that your option 7 is correct and that I am (quite obviously) one of the "natural" people mentioned.
Do I still get a chance? or is it forever denied me through the accident of being born this way?
Will I still be judged fairly? or will my in built blindness condemn me to hell regardless.Corinthians seems to be silent on the subject.

But what if he is right?

I don't see a contradiction there.I really don't. the two sentences (barring the formattting error) appear to be perfectly congruent.
(thats the third post in this thread that used that word )
Maybe this is one of those things that I am blind to

All questions seconded Crevo.I would like just for once to get a straight answer to these question.This is just more of the same evasiveness that made me abandon religion in the first place and makes me more glad that I did for each passing day.