My naive questions

[robvalue]

Professor:

If you genuinely are hearing voices in your head, and are not talking metaphorically then:

1) You are deluded to the point of mental illness. I sincerely recommend you seek professional help for the good of yourself and those around you. I'm being serious, this is not an insult but concern.

2) Very few christians make such a claim, even fundamentalists. What makes you special?

3) If god told you to rape children, would you do it?

4) How can you distinguish between the voice of god in your head being truthful, and a lying or evil god deceiving you? Or the devil who killed god long ago and is impersonating him in a way indistinguishable to a mere mortal?

Piscinin: Hiya, yes it's a good point, one I've brought up before. There is a very high correlation between geographical location and religion. If christian X was born in a muslim country, the odds are that he'd be muslim instead with about 99% certainty. Hardly speaks to an "absolute truth". The reverse is also true, with slightly less certainty, due to more freedom of expression in some christian countries. Indeed, for something so important, you should spend your whole life studying absolutely any religion you can find to see which one is correct. Other analogies like you don't date everyone in the world fall flat, because you only have a limited amount of time to live, and the longer you search the less time you have to spend with the person. But with religion, we're talking about the eternity following this life. In that way, it makes this life next to meaningless. So if you're not spending every second you reasonably can researching all religions you can find, then you really don't care enough about your immortal soul. Actions speak louder than words. I hold that probably most religious people don't really believe what they say they believe. Their actions very often give them up.

Why would you take the risk? This life is nothing, it's like not staying until the end of a really important exam. Except infinitely more foolish than that. If I really thought my eternal soul rested on "picking" a religion, I would devote every possible second to the task of making sure I picked the right one. If you think you already know 100%, and that a false god wouldn't be able to deceive you, you're either misguidedly arrogant, infinitely lazy considering what is at stake, or you aren't very convinced that anything is actually at stake, much less infinite future time. You wouldn't believe even trivial claims on the "evidence" that is presented for religion, yet you accept the most important claim on that same scant evidence. Or rather, if you would accept the same standard of evidence for other things, you are an idiot. Analogy: you would hang someone for murder on the same level of evidence that you wouldn't accept to convict someone of petty theft.