unstoppablegod-nogreaterthings

[unstoppablegod-nogreaterthings]

You are loved

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‪God’s not dead. ‬

[unstoppablegod-nogreaterthings]

God is not real

That’s your belief, but I’ll stick with mine. You’re entitled to your beliefs, God has given you the right and the choice to believe in Him or not. But that doesn’t mean that your beliefs should be forced on anyone else. The same goes for the beliefs of me or anyone else in this world. You have the right to believe what you believe, and so do the rest of us.

As for me, I believe in the God of Israel. The God of Jacob and Issac. The God who rose Jesus Christ from the dead. The God who loves us unconditionally, who made us simply because He wanted relationships with us. It makes far more sense to me that this world was created by Someone who is far more powerful than we could ever imagine. Because I look at the science of this universe and see just how impossibly small the chance is that we would be here without our Creator. It makes far more sense to me that the recorded life of Jesus Christ is the truth. Because why would the apostles suffer and die for something they knew to be incorrect? Why would Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection be the most well documented thing in antiquity? Who am I do disbelieve the evidence that God has given me? 

You can not believe in God if you like. I understand that sometimes it’s really hard to believe in Him, to feel Him, to accept Him. But as for me, I will serve the Lord with all my heart because my heart was created by Him and for Him. I will be praying for you and your journey through this world. God bless

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See, it’s posts like these that make me sad.

Because I know the people writing them have been hurt. They’ve been hurt more than is fair. They feel like there can’t be a God, because if there was he would have helped them when they were on their knees screaming for help.

But sometimes the answer is no.

You say these are all just stories. They’re not.

And what about the soft tissue in supposedly 65 million year old dinosaur bones. Bones, not fossils. Soft tissue can barely last ten thousand years. That’s the very maximum.

Also, we haven’t watched bacteria evolve all that much. We’ve watched it change, sure. Different segments of DNA get separated and you get a new bacteria. Except it’s just different combinations of the bacteria before it, so it seems like it evolved. Scientists lie. They twist the truth to make you hear what they want you to without flat out lying.

And what about this.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i8SCjn1hubc&t=3s

Is that not enough evidence for you?

What makes you believe the idea that god doesn’t exist? I was spiritually abused growing up and as a result have become very anti Christianity but I consider myself agnostic because I can’t quite make up my mind as to whether or not god exists at all in the first place. I think you you’re good at expressing your thoughts so I figured I’d ask and maybe it’d help me come to terms with what I do or don’t believe myself.

I’m sorry about the abuse you dealt with. That’s terrible and I hope you’re in a safer place now.

I’ve just never been presented with evidence compelling enough to make me believe that gods exist. Anything that people have presented to me as proof of a god or gods seems at best like philosophy with no grounding in reality and more frequently like grasping at straws.

My catholic godmother liked to argue that a single eyeball was too complicated to evolve alone, isn’t that proof enough that things must have been made, not evolved, and that always seemed remarkably silly because you can watch generations of bacteria go through tremendous evolutionary changes in real time so with *four point five billion years* of course very complicated things could evolve.

Almost everything that people point at that is seen as spiritual or supernatural has some perfectly mundane, reasonable, usually scientific explanation so it seems like MUCH more of a leap to believe there’s an ineffible spirit illuminating humans that carries on to an afterlife that we’ve got no way of testing for or exploring and no trustworthy accounts of even from people who have temporarily died than it is to simply believe that we’re alive and when we die that’s it, we’re gone, we end like trees and rabbits and stars do, no further magic or mystery than that.

Also people describe their religious miracles to me - eight nights of light, transubstantiation, rising on the third day, floating through focused meditation - and it all feels like hearing about the labors of Hercules. Neat. A cool story. Pleasant if it helps someone find meaning.

And utterly impossible to literally prove or verify.

And I really, honestly do not begrudge people for believing in these things, and I was not joking when I mentioned my friends who literally believe in the Norse pantheon - I don’t begrudge them and I don’t begrudge modern Hellenist practitioners or witches or what have you. That’s all fine. So long as the beliefs don’t hurt people then I don’t have anything to say against them.

(And before we get into it with atheism: yeah, atheist states that subjugate religious minorities DO exist and I think they should stop sending their Muslim population to reeducation camps and should stop persecuting their christians and should stop imprisoning people for political speech)

But I really don’t have a good, compelling argument for you because I don’t feel the need to prove a negative. I’ve never seen any positive evidence that would prove the existence of the supernatural and until I see such a thing I’ve got no need or desire to update my position.

These are literally all just stories to me. A lot of them are beautiful stories, all of them are culturally relevant to someone, many of them are important in ways that I see as good and many of them are important in ways that I see as harmful.

My mother in law likes to tell me about miracles all the time. “And then, even though no one thought it was possible, the little boy walked off the stage.” “And then the woman who had prayed to the saint was cured of her illness.” “And then the little girl came back from the dead and said that she was surrounded by a white light and the love of christ.”

Those. Those sure are stories. I’m glad if they help comfort her, I wish she’d stop telling me that me and my partner would be healed of our illnesses if we’d just go to church because it is harmful to hear that you’re sick or chronically ill or in pain because you just don’t believe enough or you don’t believe the right way.

I know it’s a lot harder to walk away from a faith you were raised in. I know that you were taught miracles as miraculous and were presented with these stories as self-evident, but if you find yourself asking how it’s possible to NOT believe these things I’d say to play with that thought a little. Ask yourself why you DO believe these things. Ask yourself if someone came to you with a claim that no, that wasn’t a flood the god of Abraham wrought, it was pralaya and the destruction of the lower ten realms, if you’d believe that and why or why not (deluge myths are an interesting way to play with this concept because so many cultures have them).

My grandfather was a magician from the 1930s until the 1990s. Sometimes I feel like that explains a lot about my worldview, sometimes I feel like it explains nothing at all. But what it meant to me is that I grew up knowing that magic was something that people could make. You could make people believe a lot of things with thread and mirrors and silk scarves, so if you wanted to know if something was REALLY real, you had to poke it and prod it and ask it a lot of questions and look at it from different angles.

The supernatural doesn’t really stand up to that scrutiny. You poke it and it falls over, you look from a different angle and you see the plywood behind the mirror.

And in spite of all of that I do believe that people in general are good and courageous and wonderful. There are miracles that I *do* believe in but they’re all the very mundane, provable kind. I believe in the RMS Carpathia shutting down hot water to the ship to make it to the survivors of the Titanic just a little faster. I believe in people leaving water in the Arizona desert to help people trying to find their way to someplace safe. I believe in divers swimming in the dark to save some little boys in a cave. I believe in Jonas Salk saying the patent of the polio vaccine belonged to the people because you wouldn’t try to patent the sun. I believe in handing out sandwiches in the park and helping your neighbors.

Laying on hands to heal the sick is a nice story.  Doing all that you can to help the people around you is a miracle. And I don’t really need the nice story if I’ve got that.

[unstoppablegod-nogreaterthings]

Nothing shall be impossible

Your kingdom reigns unstoppable

We’ll shout your praise forevermore

Jesus our God unstoppable

Unstoppable God let your glory go on and on

Impossible things in your name they shall be done

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What more do you need than this to know that there is a God?

Can you really look at that and think that it came about by complete chance?

What more evidence is needed than the beauty around us?

Every time you speak. Every time you blink. Every time you move. You prove the existence of God.

Do you have any idea how complex DNA is? You can stretch it out in a line, and it seems randomly organised. But when it’s rolled up in a ball, you can see how all the different pieces interact with each other.

Imagine writing a 600 page book. But it’s only 75 pages long. When you get to the end, you flip it upside down, and it’s the next bit of the story. Then you fold the pages in so the ends touches the middle, and read it that way. Then you flip it upside down again.

That’s how complex DNA is.

You really think that mutations, things that can’t even add information to the DNA, could have made that intricate, complex structure? The structure of which we have trillions of inside us, and each one of us has different ones?

All you have to do is look at the world to know there is a God. And to know that he created all this beauty for us. He made the most beautiful piece of art in the world, and he said “alright humans. Here you go.“

And then we denied that he had created it. We, instead of giving him credit for his wonderful works, said it must have all come about randomly, through a very long process.

Why do we do that?

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True happiness never comes until you find God. Trust me. Maybe you have it all.

Maybe You have wealth, a super hot girlfriend/boyfriend, popularity, anything anyone could ever ask for.

And yeah, it feels like it makes you happy, at least for a while. Trust me, I know.

Maybe you don’t have any of those things. Maybe you’re in a bad place right now.

But God loves you.

I know it sounds cheesy. You’ve heard it a million times. But it’s true.

He hung on a cross and died a painful six hour long death, previewed by days of torture, so that you could spend eternity with him in paradise.

And if that isn’t love, I don’t know what is.

And he’s sad.

You know why?

Hes sad because of how broken the world is.

You don’t walk into a children’s hospital and say ‘there can’t be a god, and if there is, he’s horrible.’ You walk into a children’s hospital and know that human‘s sinful nature caused that. God made a perfect world, where there was no death, no suffering, no disease, no pain, no tears.

And then humans messed it up.

And if God is offering us the chance to be with him in a place where all of the hurt in the world is gone? All the death? The sadness? The guilt? The fear?

Why would you want to pass that up?

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