The Long and the Short of it.

[Paul the Human]

I had to go back a few pages to find it, but I didn’t miss your post, Godschild! I’ll break it down into easily digestible chunks in my response.

Paul Watson and fr0d0 have both given answers that are common among believers and are valid to us. Watson has said that experience comes from belief and belief from faith and when you start with faith, and you must, there is no evidence.

Yeah. I get that. Faith is required to believe something if there is no evidence to support the claim. I do not dispute that. My real question is: What difference is there, in people, that allows some to believe on faith alone, while others simply cannot do that? We believe entirely different things, even though we have access to all the same information. I find the fact that we come to different conclusions intriguing.

This is the point where freewill comes in and you are either going to accept what you have read and heard or you are not. With acceptance you believe and with out acceptance you do not believe and this is where the road splits the first time and some go on looking for their life in other things and others start there search for who God is.

See, but in my opinion, accepting something that cannot be verified as ‘true’, in the face of so much evidence that it is not, is simply not rational. If you remove all the magic and miracles from the bible(s), you are left with stories that have no historical accuracy and are obvious fictionalizations. How one can go from that to believing the parts about Jesus and god are true is beyond me. Again… same information… different conclusions. The real question is not whether or not it’s true… but why you believe it is and I do not.

Now at this point there will be those who find they dislike who they percieve God to be (controlling tyrant, uncaring, murderer and ect.) and there faith is lost and there goes their belief. This may take several years or even a decade or so before it happens but for some it will and IMO it's because they never reached out to experience God. So now the road has split again and they also become nonbelievers.

I do see that god is represented as a “controlling tyrant, uncaring, murderer, and etc.”, as you said, but that is not why I do not believe the claims that he is real. If anything, it makes me wonder why anyone would want him to be real… but I digress. You do not seem to understand that there are other reasons people might become ‘nonbelievers’.

I did indeed “reach out to experience god”. I used to fully believe that it was all true. I would pray to god, to Jesus, to Mary… asking them to bless this person or that person, to give me guidance. I invited them into my heart and asked them to accept my unworthy soul into the kingdom of heaven. I gave them credit for the beauty of a rainbow and the ‘miracle’ of life. All that. Then I began to ask questions, because I realized that most of what I had read and been told did not make any sense. Eventually, I stopped believing any of it was true. From my perspective, I finally opened my eyes and allowed myself the experience of reality, unclouded by superstition… and, without dogma, it all made sense again.

Now for those of us who decided to look for God and have an actual relationship with Him come to a point of experiencal belief that is so strong no one can shake us loose from God and this is a promise made by God. He gives us the resolve to carry on no matter what may come into our lives.

And I consider this to be willful ignorance and self delusion. I do not doubt that you believe it, but I happen to think you are quite wrong. Back to the actual question: Why the difference?

fr0d0 stated that the Bible does not try to prove God and it does not. This is where so many make the assumtion they can find proof of His existance, they want facts, evidience or what ever to believe and it's not there.

Agreed. Although, I dare say that most of us (atheists) do not expect to find proof of god’s existence in the bible(s). We might spend some time and effort showing how the bible(s) are most likely works of fiction and that they portray god in an unflattering light, but we never expect those books to hold evidence of his existence. If anything, we typically find those books to be evidence that the whole thing is a fairy-tale.

The Bible is written from the view that God has always existed and this is why I believe it's from God if man alone had written the Bible it would be stuffed full of supposed truths, facts and evidience. Mankind would have a need to prove a god and if man had penned the Bible on his own accord that is what you would see. God on the other hand has no desire to prove Himself as a reality just as you and I (or at least me) find no need to prove our reality. Like God we want people to know who we are and we know that experience is the best way for another to learn who we are. Like fr0d0 and Watson said this is why we have the Bible to guide us into that experience with God.

Honestly, and no offence to you (or fr0d0/Watson), I find that to be complete babble. You are only proving the point that we come to completely different conclusions based upon the same information. It does nothing to explain why that should be, in my opinion. We have all been very polite and friendly throughout this exchange and I am proud of us for that, but in reality, we hold entirely different views on the subject and I am completely baffled as to why that is. Overall, I have not been completely honest about my feelings and neither have fr0d0 and Watson. If we were to be perfectly frank, we would probably insult the hell out of each other. Heheh. You don’t want to know what I really think of the belief in invisible sky-daddies. Luckily, I am not the type of person to hold someone’s delusions against them as a person (and I don’t believe they are, either). *grins*