Re: reading the OT: That is one bizarre suggestion! For one thing, you are hardly going to understand the context in which Malachi, Zechariah etc were written without having already read the historical parts of the Bible. Secondly, many of the minor prophets and large sections of Isaiah are among the oldest parts of the Bible, several centuries older than Genesis and the Hexateuch.
For a broad historical basis for the Judaic part of the Bible written with a single voice, I'd recommend reading the Chronicles and then Ezra and Nehemiah, skipping all the genealogies of course. The central event here, the Babylonian Exile, is in fact the central event in Jewish history, and myths like the Exodus were devised to reflect it.
Now to SKULLZ:
I know how i come to not believing in god,but im wondering:
if there was a god wouldnt IT try to convince me im wrong.I dont see why im that much different to anyone else,and part of my life path ive chosen to tread has been partly due to the fact i dont believe in god.So in fact if someone proved otherwise or i saw a sign id not be the same person.
Well, you're impugning God with human motivations. Not for nothing has the phrase "God moves in mysterious ways" achieved proverbial status. According to what I would refer to as Christian "best practice", God is waiting for you to discover him and come to him. Going out of his way to show you directly would be a denial of free will. God wants you to use the Free Will he gave you to discover Him and enter His kingdom. As an atheist I never use the absence of evidence argument, except to explain my personal viewpoint and how I arrived at it.
If there is a god,why do some "know" he exists,while others think otherwise?.
Some people carry on the same beliefs, unquestioned, that they were given as a child and have grown up with. Other people have had what they would term spiritual experiences. As a child I myself had one of these, the ineffable realisation that Jesus loved
me, that he was alive and knew about my presence and totally unconditionally loved
me. That was a powerful experience. As a rationalist I rationalise it away - it was only my realisation, and it made me feel good, how could it not? But I wouldn't denigrate the experience that other people have had and prefer to regard as a personal contact with their God.
That leads me to something else,if thats the way things work and god does exist then isnt it "his will" that some people believe while others do not?
Well, different religious denominations have differing views on this - some feel that those who don't believe are condemned to hell fire, some believe that good works are good enough for God even if you're not signed up for the specific religion, and others believe that one of their holiest duties is to convert non-believers. So there isn't really a consistent answer to that question.
Even if god does exist why are people convinced he even listens to you,is it not possible to have a creator who cannot examine his creation in microscopic detail?
But what would be the point of such a Creator? The modern concept of God
has to include omnipitence and omnipresence. Anything less would surely not be worthy of action. There are mathematically logical things you can construct that God "could not" do but since he doesn't directly interfere with Earthly events he cannot actually be put to the test. For example, there's a famous thought experiment. God is sitting in a box and can foretell the future. If you write a future event down on a piece of paper and post it into the box, God will either light a green bulb to indicate that the event will happen, or a red bulb to indicate that the event will not happen (God having, of course, perfect predictive powers). To flummox God all that is necessary is for you to write on the piece of paper the following: "In answer to this question, the red light will come on." God is incapable of answering this question correctly, since if the red light comes on, that indicated God's opinion that the red light would
not switch on - but it did, but if the green light comes on, that indicates God's opinion that the green light
would switch on, which it didn't.
Is it not possible to lead identical life to a christian without praying?
in fact identical to the point of being the same,if so why bother?
If you read various tracts like Gideon bibles and the like which contain good prayers to use in certain situations, I've discovered that those prayers are often written in ways which probably enable the prayer to look at the problems in his life in a different way. So prayers are really for the people who utter them, rather than literally for God's ears. Praying or not praying is a personal choice. I don't believe in God, but faced with the desire for an easy painless death of a seriously ill close relative, I have in fact prayed. But like any good Christian, I believe I did not pray in the
expectation that God would do whatever I asked of him. It's simply an expression of deeply held feeling, and for some an expression of their closeness to God.
Believing in things i do not feel,see,hear or generally sense is hard,a bit like radiation...you know i only know radiation exists if i have a gieger counter,so is that it all christians/religous people are born with that metaphorical gieger counter in thier head that senses what i dont.
Again i dont see why you should be born with this sense and me without it.
People develop this sense and i dont understand that either.
It's a matter of being open to those kind of thoughts. You are not open to those kinds of thoughts or ways of thinking - about God, or about spirituality - and neither am I. But different people have different thoughts and different feelings, and everybody must resolve their meanings for themselves. If some people believe they are sensing the closeness of God, why not let them? The Christian answer would be that you have to change, you have to be the one who opens up to God - it's not an innate sense you are born with.
Is religion a psychological virus?like a brain program error,im begining to think so.
Religion is the opiate of the people! To my mind it is hardly a coincidence that belief in God (at least in the Western world) has decreased exactly in tandem with the advance of education and literacy. People with no knowledge of the world other than the certainty of death have the need for something there to give purpose to their lives - particularly in olden times when the vast, vast majority of humanity lived in poverty and worked like slaves for very little. But in the developed West, those problems (poverty and hard and harsh working conditions) have largely been solved - seemingly without God's help, only Mankind's own efforts. But the continuation of religious belief (not to mention belief in various pseudosciences as astrology, crystals, chiropractism) indicates that for a great number of sapient beings there
has to be something more than the world we see - something other than day to day lives to give our lives some meaning and purpose.
