Quick Poll - Do you believe in God?

[pocaracas]

Hey man! Long time, no see!
Sorry for butting in... but I couldn't help it.

First, I appreciate greatly your honesty and transparency.

1.  If good and evil are subjective than you have no moral basis to deem anything good or evil apart from your own opinion.  This would even apply to judgment against God.  If there is no ontic referent by which to measure, than there is no basis for morality at all.  Yet logically, be honest, no one lives that way.  We all affirm there are objective moral truths.  If there are, morality is not subjective and must transcend.

Just to complement Astreja's answer.
You seem to have failed to notice the detail where she mentioned society.
From the individual's point of view the morality accepted by the society to which that person belongs appears as an objective morality. A morality agreed upon by the grand majority of people. A people that is always getting replaced, while the overall morality is mostly static.... even though it does change through time... slowly. A good example of this is the present-day agreement that slavery is not something that we accept, while 1000 years ago, it was completely normal throughout Europe.

2.  I would argue that our mere existence is a miracle.  I won't get in to the Cosmological, Teleological debates but suffice to say even the most hardened atheists and contemporary intellectuals of our time like Hawking, Einstein and Dawkins admit that space, time, matter had a beginning and the fine tuning for the possibility of any form of life is incredibly precise.  This makes in my mind miracles at least possible.

You are aware of the puddle comparison, right? The water finds that the hole in the ground fits perfectly for it to be that particular shape of puddle. The fine tuning argument may have some weight, but we have no way of knowing just how free those so-called constants could be.
All that science currently states is that the Universe was, at some point in the far past, reduced to a very dense, very compact state.
Then, the models (and they are just models, based on our perception of reality) fail. They fail because you get stuff dividing by zero which is indeterminate.... that when people bring up the notion of singularity... perhaps it was a thing with all the Universe's matter and anti-matter and energy and dark energy in a single dimensionless point, if that is at all possible... or maybe it was something different, something finite, something 3D or 4D.
What is assumed, however, is that the total energy of the Universe (and energy includes matter because of Einstein's E=Mc^2) adds up to Zero. It seems the distribution of what we call normal matter and anti-matter turned out not to be homogeneous. But, when you sum them up, there are equal parts of both and they cancel out... from nothing came the nothing that we are, even though we are locally not nothing.

3.  I appreciate this response.  As I said, this is one of the most difficult objections to answer.  Your comment about love not needing to be reciprocated is true.  In a world where God forces all people in His presence after they die is not love, but enslavement.  As you said, you don't want to go anywhere.  Including in God's presence.  Is it loving for God to put you in His presence eternally against your will?

I feel like the concepts of Heaven and Hell are coincident with the concepts of reward and a punishment which gives them a hint that they were conceived by humans in order to steer others into behaving "properly".

Like the internet quote attributed erroneously to Marcus Aurelius claims, just live a good life. If there are gods and they are just then they shall not care about how devout you were in life but reward you for a life of goodness. If there are gods and they are unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then your goodness will live on in the memory of your loved ones.

You comment about Christianity being evil and psychologically damaging is very profound because that is NOT the Christianity I know.  I DO admit that there ARE "Christian" churches that are reprehensible in teaching and actions and I would argue are frankly NOT Christian and against what Jesus Christ said.  Those were also known as the Pharisees and Sadducees in His time.  He admonished them for their hypocrisy.  I don't think the proof is close to zero, quite the opposite but of course this is a MUCH larger tiered discussion.

Part of the problem is that there are multiple "Christian churches". With one god and one set of teachings, how can the one kind and loving god have allowed mankind to devolve into so much chaos inspired by himself? One would think that this god would have managed to foresee this state of affairs and would have done things, 2000ish years ago, in such a way as to avoid it becoming like it is today.
And, just to put some more logs in this fire, the same argument extends to the existence of any other religion... one would think that god would have managed to pass down its message in such a way that mankind would receive it equally all around the globe... not just on the one spot in the Middle-East.
This provides a very good hint that religious beliefs are cultural constructs that sprung and evolved with human societies. Again, society informing the divine, just like in 1., where society informed morality.
Don't forget, Humans are social animals. Judging by how other great apes live, I'd wager that humans evolved from a previously social species of ape-like creatures.
Society made humans. Humans make up society.