Member Since: March 7, 2006
Answers: 1
Last Update: March 10, 2006
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I don't want to offend anyone with my questions but theres just so much that doesnt make sense about god and religion. i really do want to believe but i dont understand somethings and it makes me think god cant exist becaus of these things that dont add up.
firstly evolution. humans evolved from apes, there's been loads of scienctific evidence and documentries about it and you learn about it in science. But the bible says adam and eve were the first man and woman, so according to religion evolution cant have existed, well not in humans anyway.
If god is so great and loves us all, why does he make people suffer? i mean even highly religion people. the pope sufferd loads before he died and he's about as religios as people get, so why would god make him suffer?
Also, if god is so great and loves us all, why does he send people to hell? i know some deserve it but surely he wouldnt want anyone to be sent to hell for eternity?
This last point is not something i thought of, it's something that was talked about on the radio but it makes you think. There are lots of religions, but if any, only 1 must be true and the rest of them are lies. people must have made some religions up because some say theres only 1 god, some religions have many gods and all different types of beliefs, so they cant all be true. i hope someone can help me, because its so confusing and i honestly do want to believe.
sorry, if i offended anyone, i really dont want to. its just so confusing.
thank you x (link)
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As somebody else said, nobody's proven that humans evolved from the same ancestors as did Earth's other primates; that's not something which ever can be proven beyond a doubt, because we don't have the power to go back in time and see it happen.
*However*, every genuinely scientific (as opposed to creationist/intelligent-design-ist) interpretation of the available evidence points toward the gradual macroevolution of one species into another, and there's no reason to think we humans are any more special than sea slugs in that regard. I think a lot of the creationist moral objection to the concept of evolution springs from the idea that humans are somehow apart from and superior to nature just because we have overlarge forebrains and opposable thumbs.
As for matters of religion, Evolution and Christianity certainly can coexist; the Roman Catholic church manages it just fine. As far as I can tell, the only real trouble comes in where people decide to take the words in Genesis literally.
For that matter, even Darwin was a Christian, and he didn't see any conflict between his theory of natural selection and the teachings of whichever sect he belonged to (I forget which one it was). Who's to say that God didn't rig up the whole universe in utero to behave how it has, and then kick the whole thing off with the Big Bang and sit back to watch it unfold? In that scenario, it could still be literally true that Adam and Eve were the first man and woman -- whoever wrote Genesis just opted to leave out the generations of Neanderthal precursors.
With regard to your question about why people go to hell if God loves us all, the unanswerability of that question is one of the main reasons I no longer believe in the Christian god. My reasoning on the subject goes like this:
If God is infinitely powerful (omnipotent) and infinitely loving (omnibenevolent), then God could not countenance permitting anyone to suffer eternal torture, and no one would go to Hell. God therefore cannot be both omnipotent and omnibenevolent, and given the choice between believing in an incompetent god and believing in a sadistic god, I'll take neither.
Bear in mind, I don't say this to say you shouldn't believe whatever gets you through the day. It's just the reasoning that did it for me.
As for only at most one religion being true and the rest being lies -- who's to say even one religion is true? The Baha'i folks believe that all religions are sort of like funhouse-mirror reflections of the one True Religion which no human can know, and thus all religions are equally inaccurate and equally valid; that seems about as sensible as any kind of religious belief, to me.
I'm sure I've completely failed to answer any of your questions and in fact only added to your confusion. Welcome to the world of religion! It just gets more bewildering from here. Hope this helps!
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