To learn how to spell “religious”?
No, in all seriousness, as a non-believer, I don’t think that there are any compelling reasons to think that supernatural religions (like Christianity) are true. I can think of some good reasons that individuals might want to be religious: because religion provides them with a sense of community, because they love people who are religious and they don’t want to stir up any problems, because they think the rituals are kind of cool, etc.
But true? There’s really not a good reason for thinking that. As other posters said, you can try asking God to reveal himself to you, but if you really want to be thorough about your approach, you should ask each god of each religion to reveal himself (or herself) to you, one each day. That will keep you pretty busy, since there are hundreds of religions and thousands of different god-concepts within those religions.
After long periods of praying, meditating, fasting, yearing for an answer, you may actually succeed in brainwashing yourself into having an “experience” of some kind (voices, bright lights, visions, etc.). If this happens, you may want to ask this “god” – whichever one responds – why he only seems to reveal himself to people through extremely dubious means of coming to knowledge, like “personal experiences” of hearing voices.
Honestly, if I ever started hearing voices or seeing white lights, my first thought would not be “God is communicating with me!” My first thought would be, “I need to get to a doctor!”
I can’t really think of any compelling reasons to be religious other than it is a healthy thing to help keep things in perspective in life, and be thankful for what I have in life.
Obviously, those are good things, but you don’t need religion to keep a perspective on life and to be glad that you have the things you have.
I don’t think I could ever take the catholic religion seriously because I don’t think it’s possible that someone knew all of the answers so many thousands of years ago and science can put so many things in question in the bible blah blah blah. Just some random thoughts.
Well, you’re already getting a taste of the answers on here: no matter how many contradictions one can find in a religion’s doctrines or holy book – and the Bible is chock-full of contradictions, both internal and external (i.e. it just gets so many things wrong about what we know about the world) – the true believers always have an answer to explain away the contradiction and make the whole thing internally consistent. The same is true of every religion.
But the thing is, it doesn’t matter if an idea is internally consistent or even if it’s consistent with some of what we know about reality: consistency isn’t sufficient to determine that an idea is
true.
For example, I could, if I wanted to, write a long book with a complicated story that is completely internally consistent and contains elements from reality, but the moral of the story is that I, NonServiam, am a superbeing whom everyone should worship.
That right there ought to tell you that even if someone can argue that the Bible is internally consistent and doesn’t necessarily contradict reality – and that’s a tough argument to make – but even if someone can argue that, it still wouldn’t come anywhere near demonstrating that its claims are true.
That’s why it’s a waste of time to try to ask the true believers about contradictions because there’s always an answer that (attempts to) resolve the contradiction.
Anyway, I sense from your tone that you probably know all this already and that you’re just here to see what wacky responses you can get or what kind of “lulz” you can get out of the folks from around here…good luck to you.
I’ve got to stop answering that one in my backyard.