(January 6, 2016 at 3:10 pm)Old Baby Wrote: I will answer as someone who recently believed.
The answer is no.
My primary reason for following God was self preservation, i.e. fear of Hell.
I'm not going to say that I didn't consider God's rules to be truly moral. I did. I just failed time and time again to live up to that standard. Had I learned that there would ultimately be no consequences for my "dirty thoughts", I would never have put so much pressure on myself to be what I couldn't be. Instead, I would have probably rationalized God's standard as his way of just showing us how hopelessly corrupt we are and how tolerant and longsuffering He is for letting us be that way.
I think this is true for all a lot of people, but they'll never admit it, naturally, for shame of being thought of as cowards and not true believers even by fellow Christians/Muslims. They believe in it because they're fearful, that is. And this is very hard to get out of in a world where 1)your beliefs are not challenged on a regular basis because of (FUCKING) P.C. 2) You were raised in this system of thought which taught you that to doubt is impermissible. When you take these two facts into consideration it's no wonder such a surprise that a lot of people believe in this crazy bullshit. What we can do, as non-believers, if we care enough about our fellow citizens, is first of all identify as such and then help them understand there's no good reason to think these preposterous ideas are even true. But to attack people for being the victims of a religious upbringing and for living in a vacuum of irrationality their whole lives is particularly unhelpful.
