Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
I'm an atheist myself. I respect peoples beliefs, of course, and I'm not going to force anyon to believe what I believe or anything. But I don't believe that God exists because there's absolutely no evidence to prove that he does. The only things indicating that God exists are the bible, which is a book written by man, and a ton of people who put their beliefs in the bible and simply repeat what it says. I've had many people come up to me and get me into a discussion about God, and I always tell them that the reason I don't believe in God is because the bible raises far, far too many questions and provides no answers. (Also, the Bible has been rewritten, translated and mistranslated so many times that I doubt the current book we call the Bible is anything remotely close to the original.) Atheism is, to me, the right "religion" (if that term is even applicable here) because the only thing that then exists is science, and though science may not be a complete replacement for a religion, it is a sufficient one. Science has theories, nearly all of which are backed up by evidence and experimentation. Very little of science is purely based on belief; the majority of it is based on methods that have been proven to work over thousands of years. The scientific method is probably the oldest method of learning and understanding that exists, and yet it proves its efficacy all the time. If you use the scientific method and you get incorrect results, then you did something wrong, or didn't consider something critical. But you can't blame the method itself for the problem.
Religion, on the other hand, has no such method and is purely based on faith alone. I, for one, am unwilling to put all of myself into something as flimsy and unstable as faith. Faith is purely based on the beliefs that one holds at a given period of time. It is just as volatile as emotions are, and to say that this or that is true because I believe it is so doesn't actually make it so, especially given the fact that that very belief can change at a seconds notice. I've seen some people categorize the bible as fiction, and I can see the sense in that because there's no evidence that anything in the book ever happened; if some of it did happen, then its been warped to fit the narrative of Christianity. But the final reason I don't believe in religion -- particularly Christianity, which is probably the most pervasive religion in existence today -- is because every time people say how wonderful God is, I can never get an answer to questions like "Why would God allow us to develop weapons and devices capable of completely destroying the entire planet if someone got trigger happy" or "Why would a beneficent deity who has absolute power over all things allow humans to slaughter each other for corrupt and unjust causes". There's free agency/free will, which is one thing, but that's only reasonable to a certain point. There is a point where freedom must be restricted, if not entirely eliminated, because the actions that one would undertake with that freedom would be destructive and dangerous, and the lives of the people around them must be taken into consideration. That's why we have prisons and jails. That's why we have laws. There's freedom, and then there's too much freedom. And I don't think a deity who truly cared and loved all of us would give us unlimited freedom. There would be points where they would need to intervene, for the good of everyone.
So yeah, that's my take on things. Maybe God does exist. But if he does, I've yet to see any proof, and saying "God will only show himself to you if you believe in him" is nonsensical, for if God truly did exist and he had created the universe and all within, I imagine God would show himself to all, not just to those who believe in him.
Beyond that, there isn't much more I can contribute to this discussion. I used to hang out with a friend who was Christian who prayed for God to cure my blindness, claiming it was a curse in my past life. That cure has yet to happen and its been over two years since then. Furthermore, I find it entirely unreasonable to suffer a punishment for something that I don't even remember doing. It doesn't matter if the memories of whatever I did are in my physical mind or my soul or whatever; the point is, if I get punished for something, then I better remember it, or I'm gonna raise hell. And I can't imagine a deity like God happily punishing us for something we don't even recall. If he's willing to do that to me, then tell me why exactly I should believe in him at all? Why should I trust him? Because that doesn't sound like a deity who's kind or perfect at all. It sounds a lot more like an autocrat: "I'm God, and you did something in your past life, and so in this next life you shall suffer blindness. Oh, and I'm not going to even tell you what you did wrong, nor will I allow you to remember it. No, I'm God, and so I'm going to make you suffer because reasons."
Finally, don't even get me started on "hearing" God in your dreams. Sorry, but if God spoke to you in your dreams, I'm a lot more inclined to believe that it was just a dream, a figment of your (creative and illogical) sleeping imagination, than something that really happened. After all, it is well-known by neurologists (and those who study hypnopedia and friends) that, when the brain is sleeping, you tend to make really odd connections (and tend to come up with the weirdest ideas) that you would not normally be able to come up with while awake because of how the brain works when its awake.
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