Is God a delusion?

Work with it, with evolution. It knows what it’s doing :wink:

Little children don’t have trouble with thinking their lives are meaningless. (They get taught that later.) We are to be childlike before our heavenly Father – he created for joy, his and ours.
 

Lol no I am not a tripper that is just a randomly generated username that I chose to keep and thank you for your replies

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A Christian should have confidence, and maybe if they don’t, they are not being childlike. (A child should be confident in a loving and strong father, and Christians have the ultimate Father.) Since we (Christians) are told that we are to be childlike, there may be disobedience involved if we’re not.

It’s understandable that you have a problem with it, though, with no experience and not being familiar with how and why Christians can be.
 

 
A particularly pertinent one:

…in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in him.
 
Ephesians 3:12

How does one become confident? I have never had a drive to read the Bible at least not in great strides, about I may have read a verse or two from different books within the Bible but other than that I never had the drive and till this day I am not sure on how to obtain the drive to read it.

Experience is a sure way. Desire and pleading for God to show himself to you might be significant in that, and recognition of need can be a factor, as well. Take Maggie – she was in desperate straits and knew she needed help. Those who are content and comfortable, not so much.

I can’t project how God will work in anyone else’s life, of course. I’m sure for some it is just a matter of the heart, and no external empirical events are required for faith to grow, but there is assurance nonetheless. I am frequently reminded (and now is again such a time) of the end of Tim Keller’s book, The Reason for God:

During a dark time in her life, a woman in my congregation complained that she had prayed over and over, “God, help me find you,” but had gotten nowhere. A Christian friend suggested to her that she might change her prayer to, “God, come and find me. After all, you are the Good Shepherd who goes looking for the lost sheep.” She concluded when she was recounting this to me, “The only reason I can tell you this story is – he did.”
 
The Reason for God, p.240

A daily devotional isn’t a substitute for the Bible, but it is easier in small doses. One that I like a lot is Spurgeon’s Morning & Evening. Another one is Joy & Strength. In several places, Spurgeon talks about desiring God’s experimental (nineteenth century English for ‘experiential’ or ‘existential’ :slightly_smiling_face:) working in your life.

C.S. Lewis makes a sound point about this (longer excerpt available here):

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

I was struggling with that too, although, I didn’t even realise it until my struggle ended in faith. There have been some really helpful comments from others on this. Ask God for help. But I just wanted to add, I found help in the book of Ecclesiastes.

Nearly the whole book is devoted to denouncing everything in our regular lives (‘under the sun’) as meaningless and futile: ‘“Futility of futilities,” says the Teacher, “futility of futilities! Everything is futile!”’ But then right at the end of the book we find out where true meaning lies: ‘Fear God and keep his commandments, because this is the whole duty of man.’

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I would have thought the pertinent part of being childlike would be trust, not confidence. Personally, I never thought swagger looked good on a kid. Humility is better.

They go hand in hand, or are two sides of the same coin, aren’t they. If God is not trustworthy then we can have no confidence in him. If he is, well… And we could talk about epistemic humility, if you’d like.

I don’t think so. Trust with humility looks one way, trust with a smirk is something else.

We have. No point.

I think you raise a great point Mark. However, I also do not think that confidence always = arrogance. I would hope my boys have confidence in my deep, abiding love for them, but I would have firm words to say if they were strutting about at school, picking on a kid who (for sake of argument) doesn’t know who his dad was.

Similarly, the Bible calls out selfish pride and arrogance as sin every time. And no wonder, my confidence in God’s love for me is not based on my own track record or meritorious behaviour - if it was I would have plenty of reason to swagger about. No God’s set his affection upon me because of his good pleasure flowing from his unchanging character, and my right standing before him is based on the faithfulness of another, namely, Jesus.

So on the one hand, I can have profound confidence in God’s love for me, and yet, since I have done nothing to earn it, that same love is deeply humbling. The more that confidence grows, the more humble it ought to make me.

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For me personally I think it’s a matter of faith. To be more clear I don’t believe that there is any solid proof of Yahweh’s existence. Not historically, scientifically or anecdotally. This paradigm of mine often makes both atheists and other Christian’s upset. They want you to make the claim you have evidence of God and when you are upfront that your faith is truly faith, and not just evidence it angers and baffles some.

But it’s not quite as black and white but it does hinge on my statement of solid proof. I believe that there is evidence, just evidence that requires faith, to justify a belief in God. By that I mean that with all the evidence there is a bridge and that bridge is faith. It’s either faith that it’s just pure coincidence or either it’s intervention. I choose to place my faith into the intervention and I’m confident enough in that belief that it shaped my entire life and worldview. I’m not agnostic. I don’t think maybe there is a gof or maybe there is not. I believe 100% in God. I’m just also self aware enough to realize that as unlikely as I think it is, everything could coincidental and in delusional. But I don’t interpret it like that.

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Agreed. I’m confident enough that I need to be cautious about accusing others of arrogance. But then you haven’t repeatedly pressed the same cherished anecdotes on me while insisting I should drop any opinions I may have in light of your revelation. Those like the mods here who can balance confidence with humility have all my respect. All I can say is I am trying to do the same regardless of my results. Please bear with me.

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Christian faith is not a blind faith and a brute force decision to ‘just believe’, as it sounds like you are implying. I’m reminded of the anecdote about the Christian and the impending flood – it even has its own Wikipedia article: Parable of the drowning man - Wikipedia.

He had empirical evidence that God was caring for him. Yes, it’s just an anecdote, but it exemplifies (not very well, actually) the real experiences of many with respect to God’s providence and guidance in their lives. I won’t cite my favorite so @MarkD doesn’t gag :wink: (although repetition is a good learning tool, not always successful), but I will reference Rich Stearns again. It is a better example than the aforementioned fictional flood anecdote, because the ‘co-instants’ were real and more remarkable, and they constitute empirical evidence of God’s providential guidance. Some will not have seen it yet, so I won’t apologize, and it is a whole set of co-instants, disparate except for the infused meaning common to all of them:

All I’m saying is that ultimately it comes down to faith. There is also the possibility that it was just a coincidence. After all incredible coincidences happens all the time. We just choose to either side with faith in it being divine or faith that it is coincidences. But it always requires faith. Without faith, there is no believing because you could always believe something else.

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Rich already had faith. The account would be silly if he weren’t already a Christian. If he hadn’t been a Christian, they would not have been recruiting him to head a Christian NGO.

(Believing something else is still a kind of faith. It is a matter of what kinds of evidence you accept or decry.)

You have 2 options. Either God exists and is evil or he doesnt and believing in him is an actuall delussion.

These are the only 2 unbiased options i can think of.

Well in conclusion yes… mostly

I hate when Christians try to justify why God allows suffering etc etc.

All they need to say “we dont know” . Anything else beyond that is making their god look bad. No real arguments from their side