Nor does it mean your criteria are right, obviously. If your criteria and their criteria are contradictory, clearly
someone is wrong, if not all of you.
If God doesn't care if we believe in him, and he imposes no negative afterlife repercussions on non-believers, okay fine. Then this whole conversation is sorta irrelevant.
Trail:
that's a self-imposed limitation on God's part, is it not? Is he not all powerful? Did he not create us/the universe? If so, he
chose to create a situation to prevent himself from directly communicating with us.
Which for the 8th time, is...absurd, friend. And is 100% his choice and his fault.
So you actually have better communication skills than your own deity. And yet you think your deity created this whole situation by design. Again, that's...say it with me now...
What does the age of a religion have to do with whether you should give it up? It's irrelevant if your religion started 5 minutes ago or 5 millennia ago. You should give up your religion if you dont have rational reasons/strong evidence to believe it's true.
And your religion is no different in that regard.
Then God is not all-powerful, and yet he chose to create this silly situation where his ability to communicate would be limited to middle men.
Again there's no evidence they've "always" existed. Yes, obviously, religions have founders. As I said before, men claiming they are needed to be mediators of the divine is exactly what one would expect in a godless universe.
Before that, you would need to demonstrate your God exists in the first place.
You just got through telling me you believe there have "always" been divine messengers, even before we have written evidence for them, because Baha'u'llah told you so. How is that not blind faith?
Yes. The process is called theocracy.
I've already done so, right here. We both have a lifetime of experience seeing that directly communicating with others is the most effective way to do so. As small children we play the game telephone to learn exactly that.
There. Your search is over, Trail! Congrats!
Of course not, because all you've said is, "well he's spirit, he just can't." Lol, that's not an argument or a rationale, it's just a declaration. And again,
God invented the game, which means he's responsible for the rules.
Believe it or not, this isn't my first rodeo, either. I used to be a theist myself. I've
also spent years listening to and talking to people of different faith backgrounds re: their reasons for believing. The more widely and deeply I allowed myself to read and study, the more liberal and nuanced my theological views became, till I realized I had no good reason to believe any of it other than as a kind of metaphor. So, the blinders are off. I can't put them back on again.
But I continue to be fascinated by religion and continue considering what religious people have to say and encouraging them to think critically. Which is why I'm here.