AR wrote:While I am not into organized religion at all, I won't piss on believers.
I grew up Catholic. I find religious organizations as political as any other institution.
Live your lives and be the best person you can be. It will sort itself out in the end.
I do not pretend to have the answers, but those who are anti supreme being know no more than those who believe.
I think our existence is not so pointless that we just die and go into eternal darkness.
If there is a God, I can't say what he is, but I rest in reasonable certainty on what he's not. He's not what mainstream religions claim he is, and he doesn't do what they promise he will. #1, he's not a clear communicator by any sense of the word. If he was, and he truly wanted all mankind to know him, he would have made himself clear, and there wouldn't be any disagreement about his character. #2 - he's not all good, all loving, all merciful. Leviticus alone proves that.
People paint "God" into situations where he's simply not necessary. Just watched that movie "127 Hours" today about the rock climber who got his arm stuck underneath a boulder and had to saw it off just to escape and live. In one of the extras he said it was definitely a God thing, an answer to prayer, that he was rescued in the way that he was, with the chopper just happening to arrive when he only had 45 minutes to live. Nice thinking, but he'd already predicted the rescue effort earlier in the movie -- that once he didn't show up for work, his friends would report him missing, and the police would act 24 hours after that (or something like that). But if God was truly behind that, like I've said before, he'd have to get a D- for effort... could have prevented the accident in the first place, or sent someone sooner before he had to drink his own piss and hack off his arm with a very small, dull knife. So maybe God let it go that far just to teach the guy a lesson (which is hinted at in the film) -- not to be so selfish and withdrawn, to appreciate life and the people who love him, and most importantly, to return his mother's phone calls. If that's the case, then that makes God just about as creepy as the Jigsaw Killer in the SAW movies. Whether there is or is not a God, I've found most of the beliefs about him to be irrational and delusional, meaning, the believers will hold fast to their specific beliefs even in the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.
Anyway to sum that up, I can't say whether or not there is a god, but I feel reasonably certain that even if he (or
she, or
it) does exist, it bears little to no semblance to the descriptions given to us by mainstream religion.