[August]

Originally Posted by heartc

Please define God (attributes?)....

God cannot be defined. The thousands of religions that man has created throughout history are but flawed attempts at defining a force that we as a race barely comprehend, let alone understand.

and then tell me where you got your information from that there is such a thing / being (and don't say "faith", because you do not have faith that God exists, you have faith in God, so God existing must be a prerequisite. You cannot have faith that something exists when you never heard of it = you never got information about it).

So if I understand you right you're saying that if I have never heard of God then I wouldn't believe that he truly exists? Is that correct?

If so that's difficult to prove one way or the other but one thing is for sure, regardless of whether I may share some of their various tenets, my faith in the existence of a supreme being is not defined by the proponents, or opponents, of any religion.

I feel what I feel because I feel it and I do believe that i'd still feel it even if organized religion didn't exist. Maybe it would be more difficult to quantify but the feeling that all of this just didn't spontaneously happen by accident, that there is an architect behind it all, would still be there,.. or so I feel.

Now no offense intended but you seem to me to have the same problem that religious radicals have. You are both so wrapped up in the details that it causes you to miss the big picture.

Religious books should not be taken as historical encyclopedias, they should be looked upon as a collection of stories designed to illustrate various morals. Like the fable "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" is supposed to teach (amongst other things) the moral that one ought not to ask for help unnecessarily lest it not be available when it's really needed. There was no actual boy, sheep or wolf. Arguing that there was, or in your case that the story has holes in it misses the entire reason for the fable.

You need to look past all the spin and the begats and the errors in translation introduced by thousands of rewrites over several millennium and see the underlying message of the Bible, the actual divinely inspired parts, like how we should treat others as we would have them treat us, and how we should not to bear false witness against our neighbors. Those are pretty good morals to teach, don't you think?