1. A choice informed by faith, yes.
2. The One True God is the right god to worship.
3. No one will ever have infinite understanding, and I agree that this is unfair.
I've chosen my words very carefully and I hope they are of some benefit. For obvious reasons, I can't answer every question you might have. I'm not qualified to be any kind of teacher or mentor or guru. I'm just a fellow traveller.
1) But faith can cause you to believe anything -- any god, any fairy in your garden, any monster under your bed. People in the world believe different things depending on where they're raised for the most part; are you saying that in order to reach Heaven we have to be lucky enough to be born in a Christian country? Because most people who are not born into Christianity do not end up as Christians.
Why would God use such an inefficient system to save people? Isn't something
wrong there? Does it unsettle you that mostly only Anglo-Saxon Westerners are entering heaven if what you say is correct? Don't you think a God can come up with something
better to save more people from Hell? Do you really believe this is happening... or is that just the answer you feel you think you should give?
I don't mean to ask 1,000 questions but it literally just blows my mind how someone can
truly believe that God sends most people to Hell simply for "accidently" being born into the wrong culture and learning about the wrong gods. Does this question ever bother you, really? (I don't mean for my incredulity to be offensive either, it just really concerns and bothers me on some deep level that it could be that way).
2) So how do you arrive to the conclusion which God is the true one? If you take 100 people from a given area, probably 95 of them will tell you that the dominant religion in the area is the "true" religion and their god is the "true" god.
Are you really telling me that only Americans, some Europeans, a handfull of Chinese and groups of Africans are the
only ones to get into heaven? Everyone else goes down the tubes because they just happened to be born in the wrong place and learned about the wrong gods?
3) Nobody needs "infinite" understanding; but it would be nice to have some actual evidence from the "right" God. I mean... think about it, just really stop your life for a second and really, truly, think about it.
We enter this life knowing next to nothing, and as children we're so malleable with our beliefs that if someone tells us a fat man in a red suit goes around the world once a year to give good children presents -- we believe it hook, line, and sinker.
Couple that with the fact that depending on
where you are born, you're taught about different kinds of gods and beliefs from your parents or general society from the moment you enter it -- usually beliefs that aren't compatible with Christianity in its entirety.
If Christianity is the only "correct" religion, why does God make it so difficult for these people to understand that God exists? On top of that, why is it possible for skeptical atheists to exist -- and no, I'm not talking about prepubescent whiners who raise their fists to the heavens and say "I hate you God, I'm not listening to you anymore" but the true,
bona fide,
de facto atheists like myself who just don't believe any of the religions in the world because there isn't evidence for any of their truth?
How can atheists like me exist if God exists? Wouldn't He want to make His existence known to EVERYONE so that they can make an
informed decision to be with Him or not? I would most certainly be with God if I only knew that He existed, or had a rational justification for believing so! Doesn't He know that?
What kind of a psychotic jerk locks himself in a room, radios someone else to be his "prophet" and says "Tell the world to believe I exist, and if they don't believe you I'll let 'em burn" and then offers practically NOTHING to verify the story -- leaving reasonable people unsure of whether to believe it, to their (apparently) infinite pain and suffering for failing to believe something they never had
any reason to believe?
Does that ever bother you? Do you ever think of it like that?
I know this post reeks of emotion, but that's only because I just fail to understand how anyone can believe that a loving God would do such a thing and never be able to really explain how that's still a "benevolent" thing to do. Can you explain it? Do you
agree with it? If you were a god would you do the same thing?