The most important reason I'm xtian

[Jacob(smooth)]

It just depends on whether you value believing true things, versus believing comforting things. Frankly, I find your outlook here very perplexing: what is it that you gain from believing in a claim that you can't confirm as true? What benefit has believing false things ever given anyone?

Well, if you take christianity as being false, then I have. As I said, I was doing a very bad job of being a human being, then started believing and following "false things" and subsequently started doing a much better job of being a human being. Now I'd be the last to say that the same effect could not have been acheived any other way, but still there was a clear benefit.

And understand that when I say you should abandon some beliefs, I'm not just saying it as a question of a cost/benefit analysis either. I'm saying that if your religious beliefs follow from this idea that you feel better with them, if you've got no reason to believe beyond that, if you just find them useful... then they probably aren't. In that case, my suggestion to you would be that the benefits you're finding that cause you to stay with your religion have nothing to do with the religion and its god, and everything to do with you and the mental adjustments you can make given the correct set of stimuli.

That seems entirely plausible. In this case, the correct set of stimuli was Religion. It has continued to be so.

Religious folk would have you believe that going atheist reduces your life, somehow. But there's nothing to subtract, because imaginary goals that offer nothing real have never been of any use to anyone; you leaving your religion, if you only believe for the reasons you've stated, isn't going to take away the capacity for good, or the purpose you have. It's just going to allow you to take credit- and responsibility- for those actions yourself.

You may be right, but why chance it?

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I don't share your faith. Most Christians don't, as well. It would seem to me that you've chosen to dismiss so much of the Bible that what remains might as well be a completely new religious faith.

Could be, especially if it would get me tax exemptions! I'll look into that.

You seem very self aware in this and that makes you one of only a handful of intellectually-honest Christians I've seen on this forum (the rest either lie and claim to possess evidence or insist that evidence isn't important). You also have not shown an inclination to insist that the morality of your personal interpretation of the Bible is absolute and condemn those who don't share in it.

Meet my Penis. Its lovely, and I'm very happy with it. But there is no need for me to ram it down your throat (unless you want me to) . My religion is very similar.

I respect your candor and I wish more of your ostensible coreligionists had a tenth of you integrity regarding the lack of factual capacity of your faith and frankness to admit that you understand it. If your attitude towards your faith was mainstream, I'd have much less reason to think of Christians, in a general sense, adversarially.

I think there are a good many of us out there. However as in most things, the loudest ones are not always the best ones.

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I would like to ask you more about what you see the role of Jesus to be. Some will say that he took upon himself everyone's sins and thus made everyone worthy of being saved. Some take that in quite a literal way. To my mind this is reminiscent of human sacrifice to appease the gods.

When I believed in God, my bible belting father was away frequently as a navy guy. We didn't read the bible and my mother didn't talk about it, and she sure wasn't going to drag the seven of us to church. So I didn't have anyone intent on pounding a set interpretation into my head. As a result, the meaning I created for myself was pretty idiosyncratic. I just saw Jesus as an older peer, a kind of benevolent older brother. I didn't have a clear idea of God as such, nothing person-like. I just had this idea of Jesus as an interpreter of the good rather than as the mouth piece of God. God was something abstract having to do with what is best; Jesus was an accomplished practitioner of that. When I imagined an after life, I imagined hanging out with Jesus .. there was no God character in the picture. My only hope was to be a worthy companion, not by directly copying him but by figuring it out for myself and being that.

I enjoyed the mindset but by late adolescence chucked it all as not fitting in with the world/life as I found it. Now I don't find myself inclined to try and go back. I probably leaned on rationality as hard as anyone else until early adulthood when I got some insight into the totality of myself and the proper place of rationality.

I guess I could still think of Jesus as an esteemed ancestor/peer. What I can no longer do is imagine spending eternity hanging out with the guy. Afterlife no longer seems at all plausible to me. I wonder what you think about that. For me, eternity is more a desirable state of mind involving present moment than it is a span of time. Also, I wonder if you think of God as person-like or in more abstract terms.

This is a tough one which I shall come back to later. But I'm not ignoring it.