A Question for Thesists

[Napoléon]

Shit, I thought this thread was for people who like writing theses. I am disappoint.

[professor]

I came to a place in my life when I placed all the good things on one side of a balance scale and all the bad on the other side.
 Looking at the results logically, it was no contest.  To exit this place was a no brainer.
But what if there is a hell? Is God real? Then, there is the pointlessness of life, if this is all there is.
But we have an intrinsic drive to live.

I determined to find out- "What am I doing here and where am I going".
This led me to investigate several spiritual paths, I read the bible, I read books on astral projection, ghost encounters, occult things.
I saw the occult went nowhere- no answers there.
 
The words of Jesus began to bother me, especially where He said, "He that is not with me is against me".
As I drove home from work late at night, the thought haunted me- "Where will you be in 100 years?"

I was taught Catholicism as a child and left it later, but a couple of prayers stuck with me- the "Our Father and the "Act of contrition".
One night I came home laying in bed, pondering the evil in the world and in myself, I decided to pray those 2 prayers, I felt like I was on a tree branch and sawing the branch off at the trunk.
 I did not fall.
I instantly woke up and it was morning, with no recollection of sleeping, and with a stunning innate knowledge that God is real. I knew that I knew.
The above was in 1972.

[KUSA]

a stunning innate knowledge that God is real.

Thor is real?

[Ravenshire]

That's a fun little positive of being an atheist: You can recite when, where, how, and why you became one. Most theists will always have to wonder about that. I know I couldn't tell you when I became a Christian.

I'm calling bullshit. Most theist will never waste so much as a nano-second wondering how they became a theist. They were, after all, born that way!

[Foxaèr]

It never boils down to logic or reason, from what I have discerned. It is just a feeling they have based on no evidence whatsoever. Anyone can believe in absolutely anything so long as one can illogically state that faith must kill all of one's brain cells in order to believe that something is real when there is no evidence of its existence. Theists are delusional to the highest degree, and it sometimes makes me sad that I exist in this world damaged by religion.

[robvalue]

A theist on here did pretty much admit she is in her religion simply because she was raised in it. She was honest enough to admit she would probably be a Jew if raised Jewish. Not many theists can be that honest. For every 100 theists who think they would end up in their current religion regardless of the kind of indoctrination they receive, probably 70%+ would be wrong.

This didn't seem to bother her at all though, she was still convinced she is right while admitting it's also an accident of birth.

People are either deluded into thinking they'd have found their own religion regardless (statistically they wouldn't) or that it just happens to be the right one anyway (handy).

[Foxaèr]

It is delusion either way.

[robvalue]

If I was raised religious, I think this would be the fact that broke me. When I discovered the correlation between geography and variations in "the truth" of religion, something would have to give. My mind, or my religion. I'm hoping it would be the latter.

[ignoramus]

a stunning innate knowledge that God is real.

Thor is real?

Pretty sure he meant Zeus.
He's the god of all Gods...

[Buzz]

To the theists who frequent this board, Why do you believe in god?  Is it a simple matter of continuing the tradition of the way you were raised?  Is it the result of scientific research in which you determined that religion answered your questions about life and the world more accurately than science?  Something else?

As a follow-up question, had you been raised atheist, what do you suppose the chances are that you would have found your god and converted to your religion in adulthood?

I was raised as a believer in God via parental rearing. I continue to be a believer in God from a combination of intuition and intellectual pursuit. 

If I had been raised in an Atheistic environment, I would have become religious eventually, with intuition being the starting point.