@FinalWarrior

I don't think i misread you. God is merciful, and He never planned the human for suffer. It was the human that brought the purgatory to themselves, when they ate the forbidden fruit. But He still love the human, that's why He sent His son, Jesus Christ, to this world to pay for our sin, at the cost of believing in Him. There comes the free will. You're gonna believe it or not?

P.S: It was also human free will that they choose to be purged by eating that fruit.

I like gwanky am catholic. I, like gwanky believe in

(God was begotten not made)-->(God makes the Big Bang)-->(The Big Bang under God's guidance is responsible for Earth)-->(God has us evolve in the manner that we do)-->(Humans are formed)

@Miah: Yeah. The worst I've ever had is the flu. Well, as far as illnesses go. I've had a pretty bad allergic reaction to some medication before, though.

@azurozeta: God is also all-knowing. Kinda makes you wonder why He/She/It let the whole "forbidden fruit" thing happen if He/She/It knew that all this suffering could be prevented by simply removing the object of temptation.

-- Griffinhart

God is all knowing and all powerful, however because humans have freewill he cannot predict the future. We act of our own accord.

But in being all-knowing, God would know exactly what we do, how we do it, how it affects the future, etc., otherwise He/She/It wouldn't actually be all-knowing.

-- Griffinhart

No, knowing exactly what we will do implies fate. When someone acts God may know exactly how it is going to end, but humans have free will. He will not directly intervene with that.

From my point of view of "Free will", God indeed know what will happen. What would we choose, what would we do. But He will never try to stop us. Warn us He would, stop us He wouldn't. God warned human not to eat the forbidden fruit, knowing human will betray that warning.

What's the catch? Why He make a temptation that He know that would make downfall of His creation? Just as you programmers do. Make algorithm to solve a problem, and program to implement that. When you create it, it looks so good, error free. When it's shipped, you realize you lack something, but you can't do anything until the next version available. This 'next version' is the Christ salvation.

Another thing of reason why He make that temptation. God want worshiper that worship Him on their own accord. If not, surely human is no use to Him, as His angels can sing all better than us. But angel only act on God's order; we don't. C'mon, you know it better than me, to be applaused by a girl is way better than to be applaused by a hundred of robots.

You want to find true religion? It's here, go in the forests and pray with honest intent, ready to accept whatever truth is

Want to follow Christ? Follow *his* words, his actions, his model. Following a sect is no different than following a political party at the base of it all. A true Christian should be someone who tries to align their own path closest to what Jesus said and did. Pushing forward the agendas of religious sects and not Jesus himself is dedicating yourself to someone who made their own interpretations and inferences, for unknown EDIT: motives.

I was raised Roman Catholic but have studied many others. In my travels, prayers and healings I've found a mixture of Catholic mysticism (mostly adopted from European pagan groups to assimilate them into the Catholic empire), hinduism and American indigenous wisdom closest to both what I've received personally and Christ's words

A couple quotes:

Saint Bernard:

"You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters. "

And this one for fun, by Charlemagne, who was crowned by the third Pope, not that it means he was divinely inspired.

"Let my armies be the rocks and the trees and the birds in the sky"

You may remember that one from Indiana Jones III, spoken by Sean Connery

I'm a follower of Miah.

All nonbelievers will be exterminated.

First of all, I've grown up Christian until around high-school. Freshman year, I turned towards atheism and that's run strong until around now... I guess I'm agnostic, however, it's not an easy transition.

The cause of this is philosophy. Anyone hear of Summa Theologica? Or the Ontological Argument by St. Anselm?
Such as

1. All motion derives from a previous motion. Motion cannot pass through an infinite amount of time. Therefore, time has a beginning. If time has a beginning, something must have initiated the first movement. This, we know as 'God'

and

2. Think of the greatest possible thought. Sentient, omniscient, omnipotent, all loving. Now what would make this greater? Existence. A sentient, omniscient, omnipotent, all loving God that exists.

I do a poor job of explaining the latter but the original text is much more confusing.

---------------------------------

My strifes with Christianity lay here...

Yes, it seems natural for humans to believe. Most of us realize that because you believe in something doesn't make it true. Greek and Roman mythology are dead religions because we HAVE come up with answers for why natural disasters happen or that most bad things happen to us for a reason.

So for the Fundamentalists, I don't think it's necessary to explain why they earth being 6000 years old is incredibly improbable. Even impossible.

So therefore, the Old Testament is wrong. It's a moral guideline (e.g. Ten Commandments, etc) to follow. However, the problem is that it is the basis of the New Testament.

Why did Jesus die? To rid the world of Original Sin and to open the gates of Heaven. What is Original Sin? The Sin that came from Adam and Eve for eating the Forbidden Fruit, but we've established that had never happened.

Jesus, according to modern theology, is 100% God and 100% Human. It seems contradictory, but let's roll with that. God is omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient. If God knows all, Jesus knows all. If Jesus knows all, why couldn't he say that the Old Testament was false?

All-loving. Holocaust. Burning babies, slaughter and rape, genocide. It's all bad.

Some of you argue that, "God does love us. He gave us free-will and it is our bad decisions that lead to our own misfortunes". I believe that's contradictory to the idea of all-loving.

Imagine yourself as a parent. You have a child. Of course you give him/her free will. You won't control every aspect of their lives. You give them simple guidelines to live by, for example: "Don't touch the stove. It's hot."
And although you already told them so, what if they reach for the stove? Do you let them suffer third degree burns because you want to teach them a lesson?

You say, be careful with the table saw, it's sharp. Do you let them lose a hand to teach them a lesson? No. Because you love them, you stop them.

--

Donnie, an atheist is someone who denies altogether the existence of God. You're an agnostic. An agnostic is someone who believes that there can be no proof of the existence of God, but does not deny the possibility that God exists.

I'm a fan of Chi'enism. Don't bother looking up the sect on wiki; it doesn't exist. Yet, anyway.

The tenets are as follows:

1) God (called "Kel" meaning "important" or "greatest") is omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient

2) To be any of the above, Kel must have existed throughout all of time

3) To be omniscient, Kel must see or exist in all possible timelines, from the big bang, to one of the possible endings of our universe; an infinite number of possiblities, sometimes rendering a similar outcome, sometimes not. The mere fact that I misspelled "possibilities" in the previous sentence is one branch of time, and in another, I corrected it. In yet another, I did not point this fact out, but I instead use a different example. The outcome is either the same point laid out, or a similar one. In either case, it is small and insignificant in the grand scheme.

4) In order to be omnipresent, Kel is the universe, we exist thusly as an extension of both the universe and Kel. In addition, in order to maintain omnipresence, Kel must thusly exist in all possible universes, not just ours. Whereas our universe already is infinite in the potential time branches possible, other universes may be governed by a different set of rules not so affected by time; such as the impact of gravitation or the like. In one universe, there may very well be no stars nor planets because matter acts with quintessence rather than gravitation (repulsion force, rather than attraction). Omnipresence implies existence in all these universes.

5) In order to be omnipotent, one would only need modify the chance of things happening. For example, if I were to punch my monitor right now, I could be reasonably certain, given my strength, that I would break it, and in the mean time, cause quite a bit of harm to myself. At the same time, I am also reasonably certain that I could not punch through a three foot thick brick wall. Or even the wall in front of me. However, most anything is, quite literally, possible. I need only modify my conditions. I may, for example, work out the muscles in my arms, or I may put on spiked brass knuckles for an extra edge. One branch of the possible timeline would also indicate that I could get lucky and punch a nice sized hole in the wall without exerting a terribly large amount of effort. This applies to the world at large. I affect all of you, whether you like it or not. Having read this post, I have made a different impact on you compared to if I did not. This can be done on several levels of life, and would also apply to the universe at large. A very slight change in something, say the orbital time for the earth to travel around the sun, could have very large consequences for what is rendered here. However, because Kel is omnipresent, this result must have happened somewhere. Therefore, omnipotence is merely another word for omnipresence.

There's more to it than this, such as the roles of Jesus, Mohammed, Confucius, Krsna, et al, but I'm sick of typing and cannot be certain under any means that people are even interested. If you have questions about the tenets or their implication, feel free to ask. It's not a concept many people can tell you about.

The irony of Chi'enism is that it is somewhat agnostic in nature; in point four, some would argue that in order for every version of a universe to be met, that would mean that in half of the infinite number of universes, Kel does not exist. Rather, there is only a certain CHANCE that Kel exists.

An almost quantum argument. But I digress.

I found myself laughing aloud to this one. A rare gift.

I don't understand the contradiction. If Kel exists in all universes, why must he exist in only half?

And the argument itself seems awkward... Half of infinite universes? That's still an infinite amount of universes.

That's kind of the point. The main anchor of Chi'enism is the idea that if there is a supreme being/god/kel, then as humans, we are in no position to fully understand its existence and can only speculate on its nature.

We humans have a hard enough time understanding the world that is presented to us as it is, let alone something far from our grasp.

You might want to look at Taoism. They hold a similar belief as above, but seldom say it so upfront. The Sage (like a "monk" in taoism) understands the Tao (like "Kel" in chi'enism) only so much, and is aware that the most important thing to know about the Tao is that you can never fully understand it. To assume one does is (for lack of a better word) selfish.