I know a few who actually live the Christian faith they profess, but based on my own personal experiences as an ex-Christian of thirty years and what I experienced before that while growing up, I consider these caring Christians to be the exception and not the rule.
Moreover, their religion didn't make them good people. How could it? It just says be good and love one another, but it's version of love includes blood sacrifice, damnation, and various bigotries. We are told that these are all manifestations of God's love for man.
If we listen to satan's whisperings regards "the problem of evil", suffering and so on, we get hurt .. which is satan's intention, of course. his wish is to destroy our iman / faith.
It's the wish of your religious leaders that you not allow yourself to think like that. You are taught that your own reasoning and moral faculties cannot be trusted, and that its message of cognitive dissonance is a lie intended to steal your soul. You are taught to stop reasoning and to stop making independent moral judgments, which are the two pillars of strictly human thought. You are told that faith is a virtue and human understanding foolishness, and to accept that whatever thought or action is attributed to a god is good. If you agree to that, you are locked in.
When I was a new Christian, I agreed to suspend disbelief. I was already somewhat trained in critical thought (I had been to university for a while before dropping out and enlisting in the military), and was able to see the incongruency in the doctrine, but this did not cause cognitive dissonance, as I has agreed to suspend disbelief in order to test out this worldview and see if it became more coherent with time, the way a person might wear a new pair of shoes that don't fit quite right to see if they begin to feel more comfortable after being walked in a while. That never happened, and evidence surfaced that this religion was false, so I left it with great difficulty. I found myself praying to a god for a full year whose existence I no longer believed in for a sign whether I was making an error.
But I never lost the ability to evaluate evidence and make decisions based in it. If I had, I'd still be in that cocoon. If you know what an eggtooth is, this was my eggtooth, without which, I could not have tunneled out: "An egg tooth is a temporary, sharp projection present on the
bill or snout of an
oviparous animal at hatching. It allows the hatchling to penetrate the eggshell from inside and break free. Birds, reptiles, and
monotremes possess egg teeth as hatchlings."
I don't believe that heaven is what some Christians believe it is, floating around on clouds worshiping God for all of eternity. I cannot imagine anything more boring than that.
I know, right? This is why I chuckle when people say that without a god belief, life has no purpose. Can one even imagine a less meaningful existence? And why would one define their purpose according to what another sees as their use? OK, this god might be a black hole of need requiring constant praise like a certain recent American president, but one wouldn't define his purpose in terms of satisfying that need. Christian revisionists tell us these days that hell is separation from God, that's how I live now, and it's preferable to being part of that cheering section.
It is awkward at best for a Baha'i to socialize with Christians
And vice versa. They will see you as spiritually deceived and lost, needing redemption. A few of the more prolific Baha'i on RF are telling us how these religions are one happy family, with Baha'i being the more evolved form, with the Christians disagreeing. You might have already seen this comment at
Christians- How do you know Jesus and the Bible are true? (first two quotes and responses)
They cannot convert me to believe in Jesus since I already believe in Jesus, although not the same way they do.
And that's damnable to them. They will perceive you as deceived by Satan and be praying for your redemption. And yes, what you wrote is why they will not see you as one of them the way the Baha'i in the link above see them as a less evolved but compatible form of Baha'ism.
if God is all-knowing God knows everything, period.
There is some mathematics that speaks to this - Russell's Paradox and Godel's Theorems. I realize that for many, in theology, there aren't any rules and anything goes - that one just proclaims God exempt with the wave of a hand and a possible mention of transcending reason - but such ideas are incoherent (internally contradictory). Nothing transcends reason. Violating it is what leads to incoherence. Identifying the incoherence is identifying that there must be a violation of reason.
God is not subject to any rules
There's an incoherent comment now. Isn't that a rule? Furthermore, if God is subject to no rules, then nothing is preventing him for dissipating into chaos, and he has no constant qualities. Do you ever make the fine-tuning argument for God? Those who do are subjecting their god to rules that it must discover and conform to in order to create a universe hospitable to life and mind. Do you ever say that God cannot sin or lie, or abide being with sin? Christians often do. If you agree, then there are more rules for this god.
God does not have behavior
So is that unless one wants to agree that God is nonexistent. Santa doesn't have any behavior, either (the character in stories does, but that is not Santa himself).
God does not 'do' anything. God wills things to happen and they happen as He wills.
And that is an incoherent comment. Willing things to happen is doing things. I will things to happen and they often happen. I can animate this body just with will alone and modify reality, as when it types out an RF post at my beck and call.
