Why we believe

[Losty]

It's not smart to trust someone who wishes to slay you. It will end up getting you murdered.

[The Grand Nudger]

I think I'm going to have fun with a comma and see what we might suddenly realize about that statement.

-Though he may slay me yet, I will trust him.-

-Though he may slay me, yet I will trust him.-

Which of those two do you see when you read it, and which do you reckon was the intended reading?

[strawdawg]

It's not smart to trust someone who wishes to slay you. It will end up getting you murdered.

I always ask God when praying don't do it like I want it, do it your way. I've had prayers not answered but I've had a lot of prayers answered and seldom is a prayer answered like I would have done it.

When it looks hopeless and like a prayer will not be answered it's usually the closest.

---

I think I'm going to have fun with a comma and see what we might suddenly realize about that statement.

-Though he may slay me yet, I will trust him.-

-Though he may slay me, yet I will trust him.-

Which of those two do you see when you read it, and which do you reckon was the intended reading?

Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.

[goodwithoutgod]

I grew up southern baptist. My father was a minister, I was saved, baptized and involved at all levels of our church. I was surrounded in its glory, saw the ins and outs...as a young married man both of my daughters were diagnosed with infantile tay sachs disease, a horrible terminal disease with no cure...slow death came to them, my family surrounded us, we prayed, we rocked, I cried, I dont think there is a human on earth that prayed harder than I during that year of sorrow..I beseeched heaven and earth to take me instead....guess what happened? they died in my arms three months apart...this was 1998. My wife committed suicide 2 months later..couldnt take the pain. I wanted to die, but unfortunately it appears I am extremely mentally resilient..never saw a shrink, never popped a pill, I cried, I moved on, one foot in front of the other. Now I know you are thinking Ah, that is why he hates god, no, I started researching, thinking, asking questions, starting with the obvious why...the ministers and leaders told me things like "we dont know god's plan", "It is not of us to question god", "god allowed this to happen to bring you closer to him" etc etc..i remember one night we had the church to ourselves, they opened it up, and a dozen preachers were there, we anointed the girls, prayed, and then the senior guy put his hands on my children and prayed, and shook and then looked at me and said, the power of jesus christ has healed them...you have only to turn your life to jesus, and believe and they are healed....yeah, no...they died. What kind of sick man tells a grieving heart broken couple that?

Anyway, I went through the stages of grief, and onto my trail of why...why did this happen, why would a god allow this to happen, then that started other questions...why was the 14 million jews allowed to be mass murdered...why this and that...what is this religion, what is it based on, I read the bible cover to cover, I started comparing it, learning the back stories, I started going to college and taking every theology class i could get my hands on, books, I own hundreds of them now, from all sides of the debate.....needless to say, the more I learned, the less I believed...all total nonsense. I expanded my search to other religions, the more I looked and read and investigated, the more ridiculous the story was....i didnt "turn from god" because my family died, but that experience gave me the drive to think, to learn, to read, to research, to discover that it is a clever, subjugative corrosive made up thing that the majority of the human race has embraced. When you learn that the gospels were not written by whom you think, that the bible is riddled with lies, parables, pseueipigrapha and interpolations...when you learn that moses, adam, eve etc were all complete fabrications, when you learn that the alleged miracles of jesus never happened, when you learn the most important lesson, that NO ONE who wrote of jesus knew him...it makes it all fall apart.

interesting side note, my parents later divorced, and remarried others, my mother is now a pentecostal preacher and my father converted to mormonism.

[strawdawg]

I grew up southern baptist. My father was a minister, I was saved, baptized and involved at all levels of our church. I was surrounded in its glory, saw the ins and outs...as a young married man both of my daughters were diagnosed with infantile tay sachs disease, a horrible terminal disease with no cure...slow death came to them, my family surrounded us, we prayed, we rocked, I cried, I dont think there is a human on earth that prayed harder than I during that year of sorrow..I beseeched heaven and earth to take me instead....guess what happened? they died in my arms three months apart...this was 1998. My wife committed suicide 2 months later..couldnt take the pain. I wanted to die, but unfortunately it appears I am extremely mentally resilient..never saw a shrink, never popped a pill, I cried, I moved on, one foot in front of the other. Now I know you are thinking Ah, that is why he hates god, no, I started researching, thinking, asking questions, starting with the obvious why...the ministers and leaders told me things like "we dont know god's plan", "It is not of us to question god", "god allowed this to happen to bring you closer to him" etc etc..i remember one night we had the church to ourselves, they opened it up, and a dozen preachers were there, we anointed the girls, prayed, and then the senior guy put his hands on my children and prayed, and shook and then looked at me and said, the power of jesus christ has healed them...you have only to turn your life to jesus, and believe and they are healed....yeah, no...they died. What kind of sick man tells a grieving heart broken couple that?

Anyway, I went through the stages of grief, and onto my trail of why...why did this happen, why would a god allow this to happen, then that started other questions...why was the 14 million jews allowed to be mass murdered...why this and that...what is this religion, what is it based on, I read the bible cover to cover, I started comparing it, learning the back stories, I started going to college and taking every theology class i could get my hands on, books, I own hundreds of them now, from all sides of the debate.....needless to say, the more I learned, the less I believed...all total nonsense. I expanded my search to other religions, the more I looked and read and investigated, the more ridiculous the story was....i didnt "turn from god" because my family died, but that experience gave me the drive to think, to learn, to read, to research, to discover that it is a clever, subjugative corrosive made up thing that the majority of the human race has embraced. When you learn that the gospels were not written by whom you think, that the bible is riddled with lies, parables, pseueipigrapha and interpolations...when you learn that moses, adam, eve etc were all complete fabrications, when you learn that the alleged miracles of jesus never happened, when you learn the most important lesson, that NO ONE who wrote of jesus knew him...it makes it all fall apart.

interesting side note, my parents later divorced, and remarried others, my mother is now a pentecostal preacher and my father converted to mormonism.

What a touching story. I have no answers.

---

It's not smart to trust someone who wishes to slay you. It will end up getting you murdered.

Your story was touching.

I've had all kinds of things go wrong too but I've never turned my back on God.

Like Abraham Lincoln......I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had no where else to go. My own wisdom and of all about me seemed insufficient for that day.

[Thumpalumpacus]

I always ask God when praying don't do it like I want it, do it your way. I've had prayers not answered but I've had a lot of prayers answered and seldom is a prayer answered like I would have done it.

Yeah, when I was a boy I'd twist the handle on the jack-in-the-box and ask him to pop up. He did with regularity, more regularly than god showed up in prayers.

What you're doing here is a fallacy called "counting the hits". You credit the answered prayers to your god's existence, but you don't use the same reasoning from the unanswered prayers.

You're seeing what you want to see.

[Losty]

I've had all kinds of things go wrong too but I've never turned my back on God.

I didn't turn my back on god. First, I grew up. I was 23 years old with 2 kids and another on the way. I was watching myself drown under the pressures of being a Christian even when it endangered our lives. Then I grew up and decided if no one else was going to take care of us, I had to. At that point I simply accepted that god wasn't going to help us and so I helped us myself. Eventually I realized that there actually was not one single reason to believe in god. None. No evidence whatsoever. I didn't turn my back, I just accepted that I had been lying to myself and there was no god.

[goodwithoutgod]

reminds me of my power of prayer musing...here I will share..

you hear the phrase "power of prayer" often from the faithful...and I was thinking...since there is what....8 billion ppl in the world, and 80%ish purport to believe in a god...so it is probably safe to say that at least 6 billion ppl believe in a god, lets just half that for argument's sake...so the world has 3 billion people that believe in a god, and most likely utter a silent prayer at least once a day..from the mild "please god let me get to work on time", to the frightening "please god dont let him kill me" type prayers. From mild to moderate to fervent, 3 billion people probably utter one prayer a day....just go with it for the moment...so out of those 3 billion daily prayers, how many get answered?

The very few that appear to be answered I posit it is due to the lottery of chance and coincidence. However, if you are the believer who say prayed "oh god let my numbers come in on the lottery pick" (just like every other faithful person who bought a ticket)...and one of those believers wins the lottery...he or she is going to think, Oh my god, he answered my prayer...I am living proof....no, no I say there was 3 billion pulls on the the one armed bandit of prayers game machine and it just seems like your pull happened to come up with the three lemons.....but the bible says ask and ye shall receive right? for example

"Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you." (Matthew 7:7)

"Again I say unto you, That if two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven." (Matthew 18:19)

"And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive." (Matthew 21:22)

"Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them." (Mark 11:24)

so think about it this way, the handful of prayers that seem to have been answered is not an indication that prayer works, rather we must look at it from the other angle, why didnt the other 2,999,999,992 ish prayers get answered? To me this is an indication that there is no power of prayer, rather it is just the lottery of chance and coincidence.

When it comes to argument from personal experience, I understand how this happens....lets say poor aunt phyllis is in the hospital, and the docs say it doesnt look good, so the family gathers and urgent prayers are made...suddenly the next morning aunt phyllis makes a turn for the better, to the family, this is proof of god's intervention, and answer to prayers...no, it is chance and coincidence, if not then all the billions of prayers on the behalf of sick family members would be answered as well.

Just my thoughts..

[robvalue]

Strawdawg: I'm very sorry to hear of your imminent operation, I wish you all the best and hope you come through it with flying colours.

It makes me very sad to hear how "God" has provided such false hope, and seemingly increased torment rather than helping. There is absolutely no evidence that prayer does anything other than a placebo effect. For those that don't know, it has been scientifically studied (read: studied properly) and it has been shown to have no effect. None. It only seems to work if you are already of the mindset that any response is acceptable continued evidence of prayer working. If it works, great! If it doesn't, it's God plan. God can't fail, with the bar set so low as to be actually on the floor. It preys (pun intended) on people's confirmation bias, and their desire to see patterns in everything.

It makes me sick the idea that if God isn't helping you, you're not "trying hard enough". I honestly think that what really happens is that a person gets so invested in the myths, so obsessed with the idea that it is real, wants so much for it to happen... Eventually they train their mind to just believe it, regardless of what actually happens. Maybe it's through hallucinations, dreams, imagined sightings, misinterpretations of perfectly normal events, assigning significance to random events... If the mind wants to believe something badly enough, it can find a way to convince itself. And once you're in that deep, anything that happens is acceptable continued proof of God. See the problem? If anything at all is good enough proof for God, then you can prove he exists even if he doesn't. That would be a concern to me.

Ironically, being told to dive into the bible and really study it is about the quickest way to start someone on the path to atheism. Especially if you take the time (as I expect almost no christians do) to study it objectively, to find out its history, gauge its accuracy and see if other sources can confirm anything it is saying. If you do that, with an open mind, you will see it is all utter tripe. Only a zealous desire to believe no matter what could get you through all those glaring problems.

[Alex K]

I have been in similar situations and I'm in one now. I have to go to the hospital. They are going to carderize a muscle in my heart. I'm not looking forward to it.

Wish you all the best for that! What an unpleasant idea. A friend of mine (*) and my uncle had such a procedure done recently (one was for tachycardia) and it all went over well, it seems to be pretty unproblematic nowadays.

(*) he's a doctor and his wife is a surgeon, so I assume they wouldn't have done it if they'd thought it was very risky