Heres another side to Pascal's wager. Say you just live a good life. Help others when you can and generally be a nice person? But you don't believe or worship god. Then here are the possible outcomes when you die:
There is no God - Well you were a nice person and loads of people turned out for your funeral and when they think of you in years to come, they smile.
There is a God - But he/she/it is a nice entity and lets you into heaven anyway. After all, you are a nice person. Plus you get the benefits previously mentioned.
There is a God - And he/she/it is all of the vindictive, narcissistic, vengeful things that the bible says. You will spend the rest of eternity in torment. However, the alternative is spending eternity with the aforementioned vindictive, etc he/she/it. In he/she/its version of paradise. Tough call?

"I would bet that less than 10% of the Bible can actually be verified and proven."
In my view, you're being way too generous as the entire collection is fictional.

Has any theist given you objective evidence that a god is real? Any evidence that hell is real?

You have to remember you were indoctrinate and were never given a taste or view of what else did, could or would exist!!!

When you spent years under a roof and only see the daylight and the nightlight, yet never see or view the sun and moon, how could you see and comprehend that light comes from many different sources which we ofent can not see by ourselves!!!

In Germany a whole generation was taught to be part of a murderous death cult, the Hitler Youth in which they never were aloud to think or see the light from different angles and sources!!!!

You are doing great!!!

Do not give up!!!

Good for you keep it up

The world is such a marvel. The universe in so vask. I will always wonder how did it all begin? The answer maybe God. I need more #evidence.

You made the right decision!!!

In addition to the many great factual points made below and in many writings, you can also consider this to help with that pesky fear of punishment reflex:

You don't have to be correct about everything you think in order to be okay. The Hell and damnation is itself so oxymoronic as to disprove itself. Consider the Christian premise. "God is Love," capital "L". "God is all-powerful," meaning everything that happens is allowed by God, therefore, essentially made by "him" to happen, including the existence of the Satan character. "God is omniscient, knowing and understanding to an infinite degree everything that ever was, is, and ever will happen. Nothing escapes "his" awareness. That means, when "he" set the world up and set things in motion, "he" knew precisely how it all would come to unfold and why. "He" knew/knows our flaws, our ignorance, our temperament, and precisely why everyone makes the choices and mistakes we do. ....aaand, he allowed it to happen, indeed set it up in such a way that "he" knew from the beginning it WOULD happen.

All of that makes it literally impossible that the creator of the universe could be angry with us as the term anger is understood. Anger is a negative emotional response to having ourself or something or someone we care about threatened, damaged, or destroyed. It requires that something surprises the one getting angry. You would never get angry over something you willfully made happen and fully understood in advance would happen exactly as you set it up to happen. You, as the all-powerful epitomy of LOVE, would never torture your hapless children of creation for all eternity for acting precisely as you programed them to act, with all their flaws. Eternal fatherly love? Yeah, right.

The entire paradigm is cracked, so contractictory as to disprove itself as I just laid out. Therefore, if there is somehow a consciousness attached to the forces that run the cosmos, a consciousness even aware of little-'ol you, it most certainly does not follow that Christian fear based paradigm, and you can let go of any notion of eternal punishment for being you as you were made. That includes punishment for honest disbelief. You consider evidence, you make an assessment of reality. What is there in that to be punished? Exactly nothing.
(I say all this this as someone who was raised steeped in heavy-handed Pentecostal fear-based bullshit religion.)

I apologize for the length of this. I couldn't stop adding to the post once I started.

I've done a lot of research and developed a strong opinion based on logic; so if any of this helps or points you toward any research that can help alleviate your concerns, here you go:

There is no evidence to prove Christians are wrong, but the absence of evidence that should exist is remarkable. There is however evidence that

The bible is the foundation of Christianity, that foundation begins to crack with biblical contradictions such as the different versions of Christ's biography in the four gospels. That's just comparing books of the bible to each other. Picture Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as four key witnesses who disagree on basic events that they "saw."

The stories of bible have an look far worse compared to known history than they do when compared to each other. We have millions of years of hominid fossils to contradict the creation mythos. The great flood was at most seasonal flooding of the Bosphorus Strait, and the story was stolen from earlier Assyrian myths. The garden of Eden story has similar origins, but in the original Tiamat, a Mesopotamian serpent goddess was the creator. Of course, Judaism had to demonize the older deities in it's reconstruction of the tale.

In addition to the contradictions there are some major omissions from historical recorded that could not be explained if the bible were factual. The Exodus would have been a significant event in Egyptian history, but the Egyptians, who kept detailed records of their own history, never mentioned the loss of massive numbers of slaves, the Red Sea miracle, or the massacre of a large army.

The Romans were also diligent record keepers and dedicated historians. The existence of Jesus is never mentioned by Roman writers until long after his alleged crucifixion. His mention then was known only through the gospels. There are no independent accounts of his existence.

Finally, my biggest argument against the bible/christianity is my view that if you read the bible and really think about what it says rather than what you've been told it means, god seems like the villain. Adam and Eve were basically imprisoned in the garden of Eden and kept ignorant. The supposed deity of this story gave them everything, but knowledge and freedom. It's also clear he favored one, the man, over the other. He played favorites and created the woman so his first creation wouldn't be lonely.

Contrary to bible god, the serpent; he's never referred to as Satan in the garden story, goes to the woman first. He introduces her to the knowledge her master denied her. This is the key to their gaining freedom and useful free will. They allegedly were created with free will, but until Eve ate the forbidden fruit and shared it with Adam, they didn't have the intelligence to exercise their autonomy, and understood only enough to obey blindly. For this the just and loving god sentenced every human who would ever live to death. Then this benevolent and omnipotent created hell to torture every man, woman, and child who didn't love, worship, and obey him forever, but he knew which of us would go to hell long before we were ever born. He then went on to slaughter every human being other than Noah's family because he was pissed off that people, who he always knew would disobey him, did what he had known they would do because everything is part of his plan.

I've never been a believer myself and if I actually had to choose between worshipping a tyrannical monster or eternal suffering, I sincerely believe I would choose hell. However, I cannot force myself to believe in god, the devil, or heaven. As a final point in my very, very long and rambling diatribe, hell is never mentioned in original biblical texts and was not included in christian dogma until it was described by Dante Alighieri.

I got out of the church I had been affiliated with all my life at 39 but it took nearly 10 years to fully divorce myself from religion. It was long before the internet and most of the books that I read were religious but in really reading them I came to the conclusion that all religion was pretty much the same BS. I also was interested in science and that was in direct conflict with what I knew about religion. Now you have the opportunity of watching debates on YouTube and reading hundreds if not thousands of books pointing out the fallacies of the Bible and religion. Keep your ears and eyes open and keep discovering who has the truth, who is moral, who cares about people and the earth and the future and. . . . .If you are using your mind and not simply emotions you'll have a straight path away from religious belief. Like you said listening to religious folk will actually strengthen your resolve if you keep that open mind. I'll climb on down from my soap box now!

I believe the first mention of any kind of hell ocurrs in ancient Mesopotamia. I know this because I grew up surrounded by books and even though I went to church and a private christian school, was able to recognize the clear pattern of mythology that's evolved through the ages. I began to compare what scientific and historical facts I'd discovered against the teachings of the bible and by the time I left that school at 8th grade, I was a solid skeptic. I'd listen to the teacher's and pastor's b.s. and just mentally shake my head and tune out.
Despite that, when it came to teaching my own children about religions I realized in the very back of my mind, I still had this definite tie to my christian programming. I felt this profound sadness, like god was real and he was crying because I finally had to cut the tie for good. It was then I realized what programming can do to a person, even when you think it doesn't affect you.
So just keep sn open mind, continue to research and educate yourself. And engage in a lot of discussions. It's good to talk about this stuff.

You probably wouldn't sing praises to Poseidon out of fear that he wil release the Kraken. You know it is silly and you wern't taught it true as a toddler.

I know the wolves will rush in as soon as I leave, not sparing the flock
Paul of Tarsus

pastors,
501 ( 6 )
c3 ( 6 )
1023 ( 6 )

"the faith" as a noun, lol. pastors, huh? (:rolleyes)