Also, Zachariah, I appreciate the genuine question and honest curiosity/uncertainty. It's a hard/tricky topic to navigate, even for Christians! There are some things that just don't make sense and life is hard. Christians are told that life on Earth will be difficult for us, even though we are the ones that are also promised hope and joy in Christ! Personally, I can say that Christ has definitely brought hope, joy, peace, and so much more in the highs and lows of life. I'm still young (24 y/o) and have much more life and hardship to live, Lord willing, but looking back, I can be see that He has continued to lift me up... and that provides so much confidence as I continue living through uncertainty that life brings.
Zachariah and everyone else that is wrestling with the idea of God being a loving God, I want you to hear (or in this case, read) that He loves you so much. ... Adam and Eve went against God's word and brought sin/imperfection into the world. Being fully perfect, God literally couldn't be in the presence of such imperfect beings. This created a gap between us and God that, again, could only be bridged by the perfect sacrifice. God came down to Earth as Jesus, fully God and fully human, to live and die for us, then conquered death. So, to answer, we brought it upon ourselves with our sinful nature and God-revolting desires/actions.
The problem is that whatever Adam and Eve did shouldn't determine whether a child in a Romanian orphanage gets a brain tumor. Nor should that child's well-being be tied to whether someone in that orphanage is saying enough prayers (or any).
God should understand that that 6 month old child is not responsible for Adam and Eve and that 6 month olds can't pray. As such, giving her a brain tumor does nothing to help her build a relationship with God because she will die before anyone can talk to her about God or how to correctly worship God.
There is a reason philosophers and brilliant minds can't reconcile "God" with reality...
Nowadays, christians tell me that God doesn't serve us by granting us wishes. In fact, Christians tell me that we shouldn't expect to even experience a pleasant existence or feel like life is easy at all.
Basically, we need to dine on death and feast on pain. We need to be masochists for god, priests praying for war (spiritual war), as Gunnery Sgt. Hartman said
literally. I've had Christians of all colors and shapes tell me this. Like, we're not even meant to enjoy this life.
I didn't read every single word in this thread but my questions regarding "Is God real?" are pretty simple. I don't consider myself an atheist but with all the tragedy around us that happens daily, how can you truly believe in God? My wife who is pretty religious beat cancer, but another member of her church past away from a cancer that came aggressively leaving his wife and kids without a father?
Why did that highly religious family have a kid murdered?
Why do kids (and good people) experience tragedy or extreme misfortune?
Why do bad people (say Puff Daddy as an example) get away with heinous crimes?
Why did God allow 9/11 and similar events to happen?
Why does God allow certain products to kill us?
Why does God allow preachers/pastors/people highly involved in church to be abusers and molesters?
Why does rape, murder, abuse, scams, etc. happen to good to good people/families who believe in God?
Why do people who don't believe or or care about God/religion whatsoever get away with horrible stuff or live long, prosperous lives without penalty?
Great people are taken away everyday? It can't really be it was their time, they need to serve a bigger purpose in heaven, or their time on Earth set them up for the afterlife?
I know no one truly has these answers, but if God is so great (speaking in general, not my person opinion) why does more bad than good exist in our society today?
Most people shrug their shoulders at seemingly undeserving people facing hardships
The idea is that God does this to test us, basically because in the long run, this experience on earth is an infinitesimally small span.
I wrestled with faith a lot age 7-15 and then called myself an atheist 15-22, then came back fairly devoutly 26-28, and now at 29, I am once again a lot more on the fence. But I do say now, I believe enough to say that I believe, but I mainly do so because I like the idea of there being a loving God who created a horcrux of himself, for lack of a better term, to face the sin of man himself, since of course, an omnipotent God doesn't have to enflesh himself and face the suffering and sin he allowed to happen to his creation. That's Jesus, of course.
i still have hard feelings about faith. I have problems with Christians telling me that life is essentially masochistic, embracing pain, living entirely for something outside of ourselves. We are inherently subjective, biological, self-motivated beings, so the thought of living entirely for God is not only an impossible bar to reach, but also it brings into question the goodness of God, it seems, that he would expect that of us
I am genuinely curious about this, please don't use this to mock religion. If you give all glory to God for all the great things in your life, that is fine by me. But what about when things aren't going right, why does the goal post move to 'God is testing me, making me stronger'? Like why can't God be wrong sometimes and called out for it? I just saw a friend on Facebook had the winning bid on a house and they thanked God for answering their prayers. What about all the people who didn't get the house and they might've prayed too? I just don't understand why God works for some but not others. And then if the house goes into foreclosure he is nowhere to be found.
Prayer is not an asking machine where "if I do x, then God owes me y", so your figurative goal post was likely in the wrong spot to begin with.
I am genuinely curious about this, please don't use this to mock religion. If you give all glory to God for all the great things in your life, that is fine by me. But what about when things aren't going right, why does the goal post move to 'God is testing me, making me stronger'? Like why can't God be wrong sometimes and called out for it? I just saw a friend on Facebook had the winning bid on a house and they thanked God for answering their prayers. What about all the people who didn't get the house and they might've prayed too? I just don't understand why God works for some but not others. And then if the house goes into foreclosure he is nowhere to be found.
Your time is better spent making your wishes a reality then hoping some omnipotent being does it for you.
The fact is, God never answers any prayers. The entire idea that "God answers prayers" is an illusion created by human imagination. How do we know that "answered prayers" are illusions? We simply perform scientific experiments. We ask a group of believers to pray for something and then we watch what happens. What we find, whenever we test the efficacy of prayer scientifically, is that prayer has zero effect: It does not matter who prays. It does not matter if we pray to God, Allah, Vishnu, Zeus, Ra or any other human god. It does not matter what we pray about. If we perform scientific, double-blind tests on prayer, and if the prayers involve something concrete and measurable (for example, healing people with cancer), we know that there is zero effect from prayer. Every single "answered prayer" is nothing more than a coincidence. Both scientific experiments and your everyday observations of the world show this to be the case every single time.
Also, Zachariah, I appreciate the genuine question and honest curiosity/uncertainty. It's a hard/tricky topic to navigate, even for Christians! There are some things that just don't make sense and life is hard. Christians are told that life on Earth will be difficult for us, even though we are the ones that are also promised hope and joy in Christ! Personally, I can say that Christ has definitely brought hope, joy, peace, and so much more in the highs and lows of life. I'm still young (24 y/o) and have much more life and hardship to live, Lord willing, but looking back, I can be see that He has continued to lift me up... and that provides so much confidence as I continue living through uncertainty that life brings.
Zachariah and everyone else that is wrestling with the idea of God being a loving God, I want you to hear (or in this case, read) that He loves you so much. ... Adam and Eve went against God's word and brought sin/imperfection into the world. Being fully perfect, God literally couldn't be in the presence of such imperfect beings. This created a gap between us and God that, again, could only be bridged by the perfect sacrifice. God came down to Earth as Jesus, fully God and fully human, to live and die for us, then conquered death. So, to answer, we brought it upon ourselves with our sinful nature and God-revolting desires/actions.
The problem is that whatever Adam and Eve did shouldn't determine whether a child in a Romanian orphanage gets a brain tumor. Nor should that child's well-being be tied to whether someone in that orphanage is saying enough prayers (or any).
God should understand that that 6 month old child is not responsible for Adam and Eve and that 6 month olds can't pray. As such, giving her a brain tumor does nothing to help her build a relationship with God because she will die before anyone can talk to her about God or how to correctly worship God.
There is a reason philosophers and brilliant minds can't reconcile "God" with reality...
I agree with this. On the one hand, there’s no reliable evidence for a personal god and on the other, there’s so much cruelty and suffering among innocents that it’s impossible for me to believe that there’s a being of infinite power who’s standing by and letting virtually all of it happen. Children should not get cancer. Children should not get sexually assaulted. But it happens every day.
Add to that the fact that we know how the Christian Bible came to be, that the contemporaries of Jesus thought that he was going to expel the Romans from Judea and establish the Kingdom of God right there as a new King David and when that didn’t happen, the Kingdom of God changed from being a physical place on Earth to Heaven. This change is clear between the themes in the Synoptic Gospels compared to the Gospel of John, which was written much later and is the only of the four in which Jesus claims divinity.
I don't mean to be dismissive of all the pain and suffering on earth. The level of it all is a problem for believers, I admit. But, here is the big picture.
Something went seriously wrong long ago. Immediately, God set about repairing things, so that, through time, things will be set right. Things will be set right, but not completely in this world, but definitely in the next. We (even believers) retain our sinful nature, but do have the Holy Spirit to convict us.
None the less, Jesus did say we should be able to see the kingdom now, even if it is still clouded by sin.
As for this world? It is God's creation, after all, as as things work well - whether it be a Christian or atheist plying their trade! - then God says it is good. That is my Lutheran (not Baptist!) take. Everything in the world was once good, but somethings went seriously wrong, and many things are a corruption of what was once good. None the less, we should embrace the world, and look forward to a world to come that is a much better version of what we have now.
As for prayer, the Lord's prayer is a good reference point for how we should pray.
The idea that we are to live a life of depravation, being an ascetic, living on top of a pole perhaps, as St. Simeon Stylite once did, is false.
I've had prayers irrefutably answered by a higher power. Not all my prayers have been answered. Lack of faith leads to an absence of hope which leads to darkness.
I am genuinely curious about this, please don't use this to mock religion. If you give all glory to God for all the great things in your life, that is fine by me. But what about when things aren't going right, why does the goal post move to 'God is testing me, making me stronger'? Like why can't God be wrong sometimes and called out for it? I just saw a friend on Facebook had the winning bid on a house and they thanked God for answering their prayers. What about all the people who didn't get the house and they might've prayed too? I just don't understand why God works for some but not others. And then if the house goes into foreclosure he is nowhere to be found.
God isn’t obligated to answer prayers. He does, because he loves us and wants the best for us. But that doesn’t mean we get everything we want.
I didn't read every single word in this thread but my questions regarding "Is God real?" are pretty simple. I don't consider myself an atheist but with all the tragedy around us that happens daily, how can you truly believe in God? My wife who is pretty religious beat cancer, but another member of her church past away from a cancer that came aggressively leaving his wife and kids without a father?
Why did that highly religious family have a kid murdered?
Why do kids (and good people) experience tragedy or extreme misfortune?
Why do bad people (say Puff Daddy as an example) get away with heinous crimes?
Why did God allow 9/11 and similar events to happen?
Why does God allow certain products to kill us?
Why does God allow preachers/pastors/people highly involved in church to be abusers and molesters?
Why does rape, murder, abuse, scams, etc. happen to good to good people/families who believe in God?
Why do people who don't believe or or care about God/religion whatsoever get away with horrible stuff or live long, prosperous lives without penalty?
Great people are taken away everyday? It can't really be it was their time, they need to serve a bigger purpose in heaven, or their time on Earth set them up for the afterlife?
I know no one truly has these answers, but if God is so great (speaking in general, not my person opinion) why does more bad than good exist in our society today?
I've had prayers irrefutably answered by a higher power. Not all my prayers have been answered. Lack of faith leads to an absence of hope which leads to darkness.
Ok, now that is just plain silly. "Irrefutably answered"?
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