God, come out, come out wherever you are!

[Black Chakram]

Good questions. I can't go too much into the first one without going on a long "personal testimony" kind of thing, which I believe is against forum policy and never does much to help most people anyway. I can always PM that though if you really want.

No thank you.

Essentially, though, I believe that He created the Universe. I would say that life is pretty sweet overall. I'm usually happy, and this meatsack body seems to do what I want most of the time. If a person is willing to assume that there is a God and He's the architect responsible for all these things, it seems that He HAS earned my worship.

Sure, life is great. I guess all the people currently suffering feel the same way. You believe that he is 100% omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. If so, why does he allow all this pain and suffering to go on in the world? Apparently, you want to worship a being who created a world in which many people suffer.

Oddly enough, there are lots of examples of places where people live in suffering yet embrace religion all the more. Happiness does not correlate to religious fervor. If anything, the richer you are, the LESS you feel you need religion.

The other question is easier. God allows all the pain and suffering because He's given us this world to make and choose as we will. As a whole, though, we don't do the best job at being "good". At least not all the time. If God were to step in and put a stop to all the bad stuff, it would invalidate and cheapen the entire point of giving us free will. If He's given us the freedom to make our own choices, He's going to respect that, even if the choices we make sadden and pain Him.

On the second point, most Biblical scholars agree that Satan is in fact not all powerful or omnipresent. But IF he was, and IF he wasn't evil, I'd worship him too, assuming I could make the same assumptions about him that I made for God in the paragraphs above.

If God was evil, I definitely wouldn't worship Him. Not unless He somehow literally forced me to. Given worship is a form of respect and homage, I would feel no desire to worship some all powerful jerk.

How do you KNOW that God is good and Satan is evil? You could easily be wrong. You can't worship someone because they are good without truly knowing who is responsible for the good.

A rose by any other name...

Whichever the good one is, that's who I'm worshiping deep down inside. If I end up having the names wrong, that's just a matter of semantics. All that matters here is that I believe there's a being responsible for all that good and I'm betting everything that it's the entity known as "God" described in the Bible. (I'm happy to discuss the reasons WHY I chose Christianity in another, much longer thread. No one ever has simple answers for that one.)

I would ask you this: What would some hypothetical God have to do for you to earn your worship? I get the feeling here that you and I have very different ideas of what kind of being God is (or is supposed to / idealized to be.)

I wouldn't worship him. If he is the kind, perfect being you believe he is, then why does he need my worship? He should be satisfied knowing that he created the universe and gave me life.

I've heard it said that the core of Christianity is that the Bible is love story between God and mankind. It's not that God NEEDS our worship or approval, it's that He created us to be in relationship with Him. He made each and every person out there with the hope that they'll look at Him and say, "Cool! I like what you've done! Also, I'm dealing with X, Y, and Z. Can you please help?" And God will be more than happy to.

I can probably explain some of this better, but not at this late hour. More than happy to take a stab at it again another day though.

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Hey, Black Chakram, you seem to be conversational enough, would you mind perhaps answering these two questions?

1. Is it entirely a person's own fault he goes to hell? (or non-existence, or whatever you think exactly hell is. I know you have different views on the matter).

2. Is it wrong for a Christian to *not* witness to someone?

If you answer yes to both questions, you're going have to explain how you're not contradicting yourself, as I show here: http://atheistforums.org/thread-12571-po...#pid279128

Thank you.

I would be more than happy to take a stab at those two questions. However, please give me a day or two to read the other thread and see if I can whip up something both concise and compelling, as I'd rather not rehash something you've already heard.