Belief in God is a choice. You either choose to believe in Him or not. I chose to believe in Him. It's that simple.
To avoid the confusion that has mired many a thread on similar topics, are you referring to "belief IN God" or merely belief that God exists.
I would certainly struggle to have "belief IN" anything that I didn't also believe existed, but I don't "believe IN" most things I believe exist. So which are you referring to, so as to avoid confusion?
For my part I am referring to the existence of God. And in this matter I do not think it is simply a choice, any more than I could choose to believe in the existence of a yeti, for example. I find that, based on one's experience and processing make-up one either simply believes or not, but there is little choice in it.
We could choose to expand our experience which we then process, to better inform ourselves, but the eventual belief (or lack of) is still not even then a choice but rather an outcome we can do little about.
I have to start by knowing something. It's like in mathematics. If you are not willing to agree that 1 + 1 = 2, then how are you to build thousands of complex proofs? You have to start with some axioms.
Sure, I can accept the assumption of premises, or postulates, for the purpose of exploring scenarios, but the soundness of those scenarios is only as sound as the veracity of those premises.
We could explore further reasoning around there having been a virulent plague in 2015 that wiped out 90% of the population. But as you can surmise we'd be talking fiction, as that postulate is demonstrably false.
With the existence of God the postulate can be accepted as true for the sake of further reasoning, but unless it can be demonstrated, the conclusions of any argument predicated upon that postulate are necessarily conditional.
So, IF God has existed, did he command us to "Be Honorable"?
I am not aware of any such direct command, although please do state your case for it, you did say that it could be argued, right?
But don't for one moment take any conclusion conditional upon that postulate as being therefore an implied reality, unless you also wish to prove the postulate true.
I simply chose to believe that there is Perfection and that Perfection is Being. How can you have Bravery without Being?
Whqt exactly do you mean by "Being"? Do you simply mean existence itself? Is that how you define God?
If you want me to convince you that Frodo was a ringbearer, then I could take an intra-literature approach and point out the page number in Tolkien's book that declares this. Should I deny that Frodo was a ringbearer? Any Tolkien lover would just point out the passage where it says he is. Yet, in there real world there was never a Frodo or ringbearer as described by Tolkien.
But you perhaps think there was a great flood across the entire earth?
As far as texts that declare what God says, there are some things I believe without the need for texts as a prerequisite for belief.
Such as? And why do you believe those things?