To want to make myself believe in god?

[HopHopHopSkip]

I have always been very logical and so despite going to a Christian primary school, having a very religious mum(though not in a pushy way) and reading the bible when I was younger(the story version I was a bit of a book worm) I have never really got my head around how god could be possible.

But I really wish I had the extra "something" that some people seem to find by believing in god. I'm probably not making much sense, but I wish I could get myself to feel like there's somebody watching out, that there's something after death, that everything happens for what'd ultimately a good reason/what's meant to be so on.

AIBU to try going to church for a bit even though I don't believe in god? Or am I just being silly, is it something you can't 'make' yourself feel?

Should read And if this is headinhands way

I also find it sharpens me up, and keeps the thread going, so that other people may dip into it to read even just a little bit.

Feel I need to write something else. Not sure what.
I would love to talk about God with humanists atheists, whoever. I dont care what label they give themselves. They are still human beings with the capacity to end up loving God.
To me, I dont want to write off anyone.

I am always aware, that in the bible, Paul was persecuting Christians, and was the most sinful person at that time?
But who was it who ended up doing the most brilliant Christian work? None other than Paul. He had been acting as he had, through ignorance.
Once he had the on the road to Damascus experience, and knew that God existed, that was it for him. He was in. Big time.

Not meaning that you are Paul, headinhands!
But I have no idea whether you could be a great Christian in the making, for all I know.

Claig, that's interesting. So you see the New Testament as the rolling out of the actual real god whereas the Old Testament was just man made religion to fill a need at the time? I thought Jesus said he hadn't come to change the law. And he referred back to the OT testament himself. Bound to cause confusion. If I was the real god visiting earth for the first time I would have done something to have distanced myself from the OT a whole lot.

Like Saul, it'll take some pretty special evidence before I can accept it again

Roll on Damascus!

Actually if he went to that effort to convert me I'd be mightily bemused that he couldn't be bothered to directly meddle in actual important stuff.

HeadinHands, the mainstream Christian understanding of the relationship between the Old Testament and the New Testament is that there is only one God -- the God whose name is 'I am', the God who created everything, whose name means 'all' in the language Jesus spoke.

The Old Testament tells the story of how the Israelites came to see that there is only one God, and became the first monotheistic people -- this was their religious genius. Over the course of the OT, through their history, and through the prophets who interpret their history to them, they come to see that God doesn't desire sacrifice but worship, and that he wants them to be a holy people.

The New Testament tells the story of God's revelation of himself in Jesus Christ, his fullest revelation of himself and his purposes for humanity. Jesus's own message is that the Law is fulfilled in two commandments love your God with all your heart, mind and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself putting love rather than justice, which is the centre of the ethics of the OT at the heart of his revelation of God. The rest of the NT shows how, after the resurrection, Jesus's followers came to see that his message had to be taken to the Gentiles, and that the whole earth not just the Jews -- could be God's holy people.

The Bible isn't divine in the sense of being written by God. (Now answering point made by you yesterday.) It was written by human beings, and tells of their experiences God. God can only reveal himself to us through the medium of human perception, imperfect as it is, and the Bible is, among other things, about the way that a particular group of people, over time, came to have a truer idea of what God was telling them. To understand the OT properly you have to see it whole -- simply focusing, out of context, on a few shocking episodes gives a false and distorted picture. And these shocking episodes need to be understood in the light of their context, the history of their composition and their literary genre before we can see them clearly.

Maybe if you had a direct revelation of God as Saul had you'd be too overwhelmed to be bemused.

PramelaAndherson. I do have to disagree with you when you said "and you matter not a jot in the grand scheme of things".
I believe exactly the opposite. That people matterly hugely to God.

headinhands, I believe there is a God. I don't believe everything that humans beings have said about Him, and that includes Church leaders and Emperors such as Constantine who excluded certain Christian Gnostic Gospels and other Christian sect beliefs from what they established as official Christianity with the branding of any Christian dissent as heretical.

Humans are fallible and have sometimes used religion for political purposes.

You are right to ask questions and use logic and reason and try to understand how evil and suffering can be allowed to exist, and some possible answers can be found in philosophy and in different interpretations of spirituality, both Christian and non-Christian.

The Gnostics have an explanantion for evil and why it exists. They were early Christians. Whether they were right and closer to the truth, who knows. That is part of the journey of spiritual understanding.

Asking questions is what it is all about. Seek and ye shall find!

Still wouldn't make it okay though would it?

So why didn't god just tell Moses this on Mt Sinai. That he didn't want sacrifice but love?

HeadinHands, did you actually bother to read my whole post? I wrote it carefully and thoughtfully I explained how the OT shows a developing understanding, and that it is filtered through human language and culture. But all you did was snap back a snarky one liner a one liner which sounds clever but which I have already answered.

Lots of people have put thought and care into composing posts in answer to your questions. It would be nice to see evidence of you engaging with what people say, rather than reaching for the snark button every time.

Think of it like this. You've reasoned that a lot of the Old Testament isn't true, and that it was a man made religion built up over years on hearsay and folklore because people wanted to feel like they could reach god, yet you can't extend those fine reasoning skills to the NT?

Yes I did read it. What you call you snarky I call direct and getting to the point.

I didn't say those things about the OT -- you are twisting my words and deliberately misinterpreting what I did say. I don't know how useful it is to keep on spending time trying to explain carefully and thoughtfully to someone who isn't prepared to respond in kind, but simply makes aggressive and deliberately obtuse one-line responses.

So what in the OT actually happened? Did God give the 10 commandments to Moses? Why couldn't he use that opportunity to roll out Christianity. It's an entirely logical question?

It's impossible to know, at this remove, 'what actually happened' on Mt Sinai. It's impossible to know, at this remove, what kind of revelation Moses had, and whether it involved literal tablets of stone. The Pentateuch has the most complex history of composition of the whole Bible, and it was written and re-written in times and places and by people who had a vastly different idea of what constitutes history from us. Rather than seeing the events in the Pentateuch as history, it is more useful and accurate to see them as the Israelites story of their origins as a holy people, and of the covenant between themselves and God.

After the Pentateuch it gets easier to verify the historical events that the OT refers to. OT scholars (of whom I am not one) have done lots of work on the historical dimension of the OT.

Why didn't God 'roll out' Christianity to Moses? Well, because the world wasn't ready for it. Moses's revelation is that God is one, and that the Israelites had to become holy, to worship only him -- instead of running to the pantheon of local deities that featured in other religions of the ancient Middle East. Only once they had become truly monotheistic could the revelation of Jesus Christ take place.

headinhands the 10 commandments were given by God but not for the purpose of trying to make themselves "good enough for God" by their own merit like some people mistakenly think.

There were only 10. That doesn't suggest they are the only rules to keep, or that they are God's most important rules. They simply were 10 little laws given to prove to people that couldn't keep them - not even just 10!

His point was to show people who thought they could manage to stay perfect themselves, that they couldn't even keep 10 laws. All of us have broken at least one, if not all! So all of us are in the same boat: imperfect humans loved by a perfect God. A perfect God who has made a way to put everything right, despite the consequences of our wrong doing (death, alienation from God, enduring sickness and sorrow, all the negative consequences of a "fallen" world).

And it links to what I said earlier about God offering us a free gift of completely forgiveness. No strings attached. Believing in nothing other than 'Him', not believing in our own good works.

That was his constant message through the old and new testaments. Everyone is in the same boat but human pride will want to try and be holy and acceptable to God (believing in themselves/their goodness/baptism/charitable-giving/church-going etc, rather than trusting in and relying upon HIM) when they can't achieve that perfection.

I thought the Israelites were quite disobedient after the 10 commandments. If the world was ready for Jesus why do other religions prevail. If you can take and teach a child within 21 years degree level Mathematics through clear instruction why couldn't god do similar at the very beginning of humanity.

As niminy says, the Old Testament evolved. Near the end of it, God does indeed say he is fed up of sacrifices.
They didnt work. Or at least not properly. Or at least, they didnt work for God enough, or for enough people.

Oh, if only I knew why God didnt make the bible easy!