Quote Originally Posted by JunkYard
Try Proverbs, or Psalms, or 'some' of John, 1 John, 2 John, theres alot of good stuff if you look, man but you won't find it w/o a willing attitude, sorry.
I've read a lot of that stuff. God is great, yay for God, help us Lord, we're evil sinners, but we try to be good...yaaaaaawn... Don't tell me I haven't looked for something good in here. I keep reading and reading and it's just so boring and uninspiring. There's no plot structure, the characters are all so one-dimensional, and it repeats itself over and over again. Besides that, so much of it is really really hard to derive any actual meaning from. Even expert theologians can't figure out what this stuff is supposed to mean, because they're all interpreting it in their own way due to extremely vague wording.

If you choose to believe that....btw, he never interferes with 'choice' it was man's choice to portray God in that manner.
How do you know he doesn't interfere with choice? I myself find the idea of an all-powerful all-knowing being to be logically incompatible with the idea of free will, but that's a whole nother can of worms I don't want to get into right now.
I don't need him to prove himself, but I guess others are different. Like I said, I don't think it matters if you 'believe', or not. It's your 'choice'.
I can't help it, but my brain operates according to the rules of logic. I can't get it to accept an idea for which there is no evidence. It just won't fit in there. It's like trying to convince myself that unicorns exist. I'd have to actually see real evidence of a unicorn for my brain to accept that idea. Unicorns are things that should be very hard to miss.

As far as I'm concerned, there cannot logically be a God who does not interfere with our universe somehow. Anything that does not have a measurable effect on our universe is by definition non-existent. If God doesn't interfere with our lives, doesn't change things in our universe, then it is impossible to get any information on him and he cannot be said to exist in any meaningful sense of the term.

On the other hand, if he does interfere with our lives, there should be some objective evidence for that. His influence should be demonstrable somehow, and obvious to us. We are lacking in such evidence. I don't see why a God who supposedly loves us would keep himself so hidden.

I exist, I see a beautiful creation, I see life, birth, death everyday. Why would I need anything more?
Exactly. Isn't that enough? Why delude yourself with fictitious supernatural sky wizards? Life is beautiful; appreciate it for what it is: the magnificent product of Darwinian natural selection over billions of years, with no driven purpose in mind, a mosaic of the natural laws of our universe working in an inconceivably complex fashion. Physics, chemistry, biology and astronomy are all far more inspiring than the Bible. Give me Hawking, Dawkins or Sagan over Jesus anyday.
Yup, man twisted it up pretty good, huh?
I didn't twist it up, I opened up my Bible and that's the kind of stuff I read in it.
I respect all who value these things. I believe the Church had an agenda when pushing the whole fire and brimstone issue...
Actually, the fire and brimstone bit has been around since the earliest Christian writings. In fact, the Apocalypse of Peter (not the Gnostic text of the same name) was removed from the Biblical canon before the Council of Nicea established the modern Bible as we know it. Why? Because it was too gruesome in its depiction of what happens to sinners in Hell (it also described the pleasures of Heaven). In the early days of Christianity it had just as much validity as the other New Testament books we know today; it just seems the early Christians didn't like it too much and decided to do away with it.

I agree, the Bible in the hands of the fearful and true believers can be a dagerous thing.
What other book can you say that about? Mein Kampf maybe? Any book that says "This is how you should live your life, because this great powerful being says so" is dangerous when it becomes popularized, because it will get into the hands of people who take it too far. That's the problem with bowing down to higher powers, be they heavenly or earthly; people will always fight in the name of their chosen higher power against other higher powers.
Because it will be 'his' message that helps change the world...The Bible is going nowhere, man. People want to believe in Jesus. People need to believe in Jesus, and his words truly inspire. So does Ghandi, the teachings of Buddha and others of the like mind...
What's so inspiring about it? It's such a bland, nonsensical message. A few basic moral rules everybody pretty much already agrees to, a couple superstitious claims about the supernatural, and a whole bunch of vague parables whose meanings theologians can't exactly agree on. Give me Carl Sagan, Bertrand Russell, Emma Goldman, Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry David Thoreau, someone who writes clearly with powerful arguments and impeccable logic, who can inspire you with the real world, not the imaginative superstitions of times past. Give me someone who writes a scathing social critique, crying for justice in the face of tyranny, condemning the evils of the day, instead of telling everybody to turn the other cheek and hope for better times in an afterlife that will never come.