Why do you(or don't) believe in God?

[Miserabilia]

I believe in God for a simple reason: I've been personally changed by him.

I grew up in church as a kid. I knew all the Bible stuff and had heard all the religious stuff. But I was still rotten on the inside. I still cared about pleasing myself and no one else. Being religious did nothing for me.

But it was one hiking trip when he found me. He gave me this weird understanding (because nothing actually changed besides something on the inside), and I became a person who began to care less about me and more about other people.

If I had never been changed, I would rely on science and common sense for an explanation about God. And I would end up doubting his existence like many of you, because our rational science will never give us the answer to this question, as many of you have written.

But because I was changed on the spot like I was, I knew that everything I had heard about God was true. Because it added up. Not that God's requirement is for people to be good. But that God requires people to be perfect.

And because every one of us messed up, none of us could stand before God and say we earned a relationship with him. And because God is just and fair, that meant separation from him. Because he was infinitely perfect, our imperfection deserved an eternal punishment.

So we all, no matter how "good" we are, or how many rules we follow, are in a very dire situation. It seemed like we had no hope. But our Creator pulled out a crazy plan, a final hope. If someone could be perfect, meeting the standard of God Himself, and then give up his perfection to us, we could be saved and restored to him.

But who would sacrifice that position? Everything I live for focuses around the fact that Jesus was that perfect one, actually God's son in person, and when he was killed he traded his perfection to us while taking our imperfection and punishment of separation from God. He took our punishment and offers us his perfection.

I still ask myself why he would do that. And that is why we say God loves. Because he sacrificed his perfect position for our punishment, a trade we never deserved. A trade we didn't even know we needed until he taught us. A trade we reject until he meets us on that hiking trip.

You ask me why I believe in God? It's because I know him.
All that story I just told I only realized after I got to know him.
*It's a story that makes much more sense to me than life and things coming from nothingness.*

You may say, "How can you 'know him' if he doesn't exist physically." And that is where I can't explain to you much more. Because when I pray to him and he answers me, and when I feel comforted by him, and when my heart is changed by him, these things are not easily explained to people who have never met him.

It isn't about rules or special phrases or being a good person or knowing how to explain it perfectly or how much you pray or how miserable your life is in quest for him.

I guess there comes a point when you have to either believe I am a maniac and so were the hundreds of men who saw Christ alive after he had been killed (they all went to death telling everyone they possibly could about this Jesus guy), or you believe that something awesome actually did happen to me and the countless others who have given their lives to become like Jesus while accepting that trade offer of death and shame for perfection and God-acceptance.

It is a personal thing that's happened to me, why I believe in God and all. Not something I learned or read about all my life. I don't imagine that 1 percent of people will think me to be rational. But I honestly speak from what I truly have experienced on my own.

And I don't expect to make anyone else feel a different way, but to give a small testimony. Don't call me bigoted. I don't think lowly of you all who say there is no God. I thought that way once, trying to explain him to myself through logic.

The only problem is that I've found out that God is far beyond logic that our brains can muster up. So keep searching. Many of you have run into the wall of "we can't prove there is no God but we can't prove there is one either." Perhaps just by reading my story, you think me as an idiot.

But I honestly couldn't care less. When you come to know a God as big as the one who calls me "son," you tend to think very little of anything besides living to please him.

I fixed the spacing for you ;)
Also, okay good explanation for your beleif.

* that's debatable

[Bleid]

And this is the crux of the entire situation. Different people have different ideas about what reasonable evidence is, and they make a judgement based on how they perceive these evidences. The whole atheist/theist back and forth is a waste of time due to the differences in what is considered acceptable evidence to believe in God. The problem I see with atheists though is they have a tendency to say "no evidence" when they should say "no evidence acceptable to me". Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus is perfectly acceptable and reasonable evidence to me, which is one of the bases for my belief. I have many bases for belief, anyone who says it is "baseless" doesn't even understand what the term means. And the term "evidence" is simply something put forth in support of something else, the term itself should not imply any particular type of evidence, but atheists redefine the term to mostly mean "scientific evidence". And so on and so forth.

That's true. It's also often assumed that evidence must be able to be shared, when, sometimes the only evidence for something is personal evidence.

Such as, if my mother dies from a very painful disease and I'm crying - someone might immediately take this to be evidence that I'm sad, when really it could also have been that I am relieved and happy that my mother is no longer suffering from her affliction.

The 'evidence' that I'm sad is not actually evidence, however, my own personal evidence that I'm happy is in fact, evidence, since I am the one whom knows what I am actually feeling.

[green white]

I believe God, because I believe it.
In new science, your life can better if you belive a God or super power. Your mind can peacefull.

[gothy]

Is there a specific reason you believe in a deity? Do you agree with all his(her?) teachings? Do you fear him/her? Or do you just not believe in one and why?

To me, god is made up by humans for two reasons (reffering to organized religion gods)
1. To provide an answer for the unanswerable. To satisfy human curiosity
2. To creat fear and thus control the population

In my view, there may be a god. But as far as i can see. God isnt doing much for this world today. I feel betrayed.

[dakota1998]

I do believe in god but there are something I don't agree with, which is the homosexuality deal and the fact that we need to be as perfect as we can be. I truly believe that god has lenience, not that if we screw up once that it should be ok.That's what confession is for but still. But I still do believe in god even if science says it's not true.

I have same feelings. I cannot understand if I live to be 100 it is a long time. But as I am taught if we ask for forgivness we will be saved. But to live for eturnity is ??????????????????I do not understand, So in a way I hope there is reincarnation to do your life over again as a human, maybe differant sex? who knowes?

[LuciferSam]

1. DNA, heredity, and behavioural studies have shown that things like mentality and one's moral choices are encouraged more by one's surroundings than heredity. Thus, the whole "Original Sin" thing is crap. Jesus was sent to save us from "Original Sin", but since "Original Sin" has been shown to be scientifically and logically impossible, that nullifies this belief.

2. But for the sake of argument, let's assume that the whole Adam and Eve thing is true. If the fruit on the tree held all knowledge of Good/Evil and Right/Wrong and the fruit was forbidden, it then follows that God created humans w/out morals, which in itself is asinine of an omnipotent being. Also, without knowledge of Right and Wrong, A and E would have no understanding of why disobedience was wrong, so a god would be punishing his creation for his oversight.

3. If god is omniscient, then he would either know about all of the suffering that would come to innocent people, or he personally orchestrated it. Some may say that this is to test our resolve, but if god already knew the outcome (predicated by the omniscence), then an allegedly loving god knowingly created avoidable suffering. The same goes for "sinning": a god punishes people for doing what he already knew they would do (sometimes because of poor influence on the individual), and then criticises them for doing it.

4. God is said to be just, but finite acts of immorality do not justify an infinite time of punishment. ("Christian Fundamentalism: Where Jeff Dahmer goes to heaven, but not Gandhi")

5. A God who knows the future is powerless to change it. An omniscient God who is all-powerful and freewilled is impossible.

6. *Insert mountain of science here*

In short, religion creates too many paradoxes, logical fallacies and scientific violations for it to be believable.