For those of you who insist on being close-minded and stating your opinions as facts (i.e., 'God doesn't exist, so this thread is pointless'), where's your proof that God doesn't exist?
If such an entity ('he/she' really don't apply to God, for God is something that far surpasses the limits of human understanding) does exist, you should consider the consequences of living in constant rejection of this possibility. I'm not saying that any religion is right pertaining to its beliefs about heaven and hell and how one ends up in those places, but to assume that you have the cognitive ability to dismiss the existence of God is not only ignorant, but vain.
Consider this:
Every age, every generation has its built-in assumptions--that the world is flat, or that the world is round, etc.--there are hundreds of hidden assumptions, things we take for granted, that may or may not be true. Of course, in the vast majority of cases, historically, these things aren't true. So presumably, if history is any guide, much about what we take for granted about the world simply isn't true, but we're locked into these precepts without even knowing it sometimes.
The brain processes 400 billion bits of information a second, but we're only aware of 2,000 of those... that means reality's happening in the brain all the time. It's receiving that information, and yet we haven't integrated it.
Take a look at an atom. We think of it as a kind of hard ball. Then we say, "Oh, well, not really. It's this little tiny point of really dense matter right at the center surrounded by a kind of fluffy probabitlity cloud of electrons pooping in and out of existence." But then it turns out that that's not even right. Even the nucleus, which we think of as so dense, pops in and out of existence just as readily as the electrons do. The most solid thing you can say about all this insubstantial matter is that it's more like a thought; it's like a concentrated bit of information.
When you are not looking, there are waves of possibility; when you are looking, there are particles of experience.
These statements are merely some basic premises of quantum theory stated in the movie What the 'Bleep' Do We Know, a movie that questions everything about human perceptions of reality. The point is, what we assume to be real is based on our limited perceptions of our surroundings. We are composed of atoms, and the laws of physics on that level are completely, radically different from the laws that we observe with our senses.
So before you say that God doesn't exist, realize that you don't know anything.