Is it up to us to believe in God?

[Remiel]

It seems like a pretty mean spirited deity who would create people in order to have a relationship with them, and give them a choice - choose me and do what I want or I'll punish you for eternity. What kind of choice is that? He then sets it up so that everyone disagrees about what it is he actually wants, so no one knows with any degree of certainty that what they are doing is even going to lead them to that relationship he claims to want. The illogic of it all is stunning.

You're right, this is only if he exists. I don't believe he does, but if I'm wrong, I don't think I'd want to choose him anyway. Anyone who would punish someone for eternity for choices made in a short human lifespan, with inaccurate and conflicting information, isn't someone I'm interested in knowing.

Given this conundrum, why is your first instinct to disbelieve in God, and not disbelieve in Hell?

I believe that there is a God, but I don't believe in Hell. In fact, I had heard that Hell was actually just a construction of the Church used to scare people into converting " back in the day " .

God need not be good nor evil, he need only be. I think he is perhaps benevolent, but it is an benevolence that is alien to us, perhaps that we could not even comprehend given all the necessary information.

[Frankie]

Don't make the assumption that I haven't read it. I have spent a good deal of my life reading it, and have found it to be contradictory and uninformative. I'll agree with you when you say it is simple history - it is a simple history of a people trying to make sense of their world with limited knowledge and a lot of superstition. The only relevance it has in today's world is to detail the mythology of a long ago time.

I'm not sure which Bible you're reading, but I'm talking about the Christain Holy Bible. In case you were reading something else. But if you read it all the way through, like a timeline of history, there's is no contradictory. That's something I have figured out for myself. And people weren't trying ot make sense of their past, it was just events that happened, and people wrote what happened.

The Jews were the ones who caused all the confusion, they were messing up all that God asked them to do for their own greedy ways.

I don't want to accuse you of bigotry. Suffice to say that Eve, in the Garden of Eden, was not Jewish. That started many "begats" later, with Abraham.

Yah you're right, but I was talking about the confusion they made with the set of rules and laws God gave them afterwards. And it is the fault of mankind that we are fallen. And I also don't mean to say "jews", because they weren't called that back then. But when I say that I'm refering to the nations of Isreal and Judeah. Although the descendants are Jews.