(September 5, 2010 at 12:32 pm)chatpilot Wrote: dave4shmups wrote: "Thinking about converting, but what if I do go to Hell?"
First off dave I am sorry but we (atheist) don't have anything for you to convert to, we don't have churches you can attend, baptisms, oaths of non-belief etc. The fear of hell was one of the greatest hurdles I myself had to overcome when I decided to drop my theistic beliefs and practices. The deeper your commitment to theism the harder it is to let it go. It took me about 3 years to finally be able to call myself an atheist publicly and proudly and to once and for all be over the fear of hell. One thing that helped me was doing a very thorough study of comparative religion.
Once I realized that religious beliefs were an cultural phenomenon then I was able to make the connection that it was man made and baseless. If God had truly revealed himself to mankind why is their no uniformity in the so called revelation? Why did he not inspire people from every country on the face of this Earth to produce a bible in their own languages that was essentially the same message? The answer is simple, because each culture put together beliefs based on their society and environment. One characteristic of religious beliefs that is uniform is that every culture that creates a religion always seem to favor their race as "chosen" by the deity they have created.
Good points, but what about the argument that human life has no meaning unless that life has been created by a god??