Well Sergeant, it's hard to define a specific event or moment.

I didn't have an epiphany, like near death experience. I'll tell you what, there was no
magic. Just kind of a nagging feeling over the years.

Is this all there is?

The deaths of my mother and father played a large role in getting serious though; about defining myself as either having faith or not. I realized, my own life is finite as well. I didn't want to die sitting on the fence....just going through the motions of faith.

I chose hope, I chose God.

in it to win it

Thank you for the question.

What I want theists to realize though, is that when they choose to have faith in something, it is not the same as it being true.

Belief in God is not knowledge, but rather a lifestyle. You choose to live as though there is a God. You do so not because there is evidence of such an entity, but because you consider life pointless and stark otherwise, and thus you might as well assume it to be true. In other words, you don't care if you're wrong, because if you were, the world would be pointless.

I made a similar assumption one time. I decided to live as though I were going to live forever, because in my view, the limit to life makes so many things people do in life... pointless. This assumption is actually countered by evidence from science: I have a virtually 100% chance of dying at some point in the future. However, because I considered it pointless to live otherwise, I decided to live as though it were true.

The problem with this though... is that I will ignore death completely when I could otherwise spend time investing in, say, life-extension research.

A theist lifestyle may have similar opportunity costs. Just an observation...

Personally, I hope there is an afterlife. Honestly, not the one described by the Bible (neither heaven nor hell seem very pleasant to me), but I do hope there is one.

This however is not the same as faith. Simply because I hope there to be an afterlife does not mean I will life as though there is one.

Thank you for your answer.

I do not consider myself religious, and I do not like organized religion. I do however have a relationship.

And, please my friends call me Matt.

__________________
Someone hijacked my sig again.

There are fundamentally two paradigms to human existence.

Good
Evil

They exist whether you believe in the tooth fairy or Santa Claus or a salad fork as your God, or believe in nothing at all.

Plenty of atheists were rounded up and thrown in concentration camps and Gulags along with the faithful.

An atheist could be robbed and killed on the way to the grocery store just as easily as the Christian.

What faith does, is helps you identify these paradigms, it clarifies the fog.

Without faith, rationality alone does not distinguish between the two.

To Stalin, the Gulags were a very rational way to deal with political opponents.

To Extremists, flying commercial airliners into buildings was a very rational way to wage a war against "infidels".

To Nazi Germany, killing the Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and mentally ill was a very rational way to achieve Aryan supremacy.

To the abortionists, ripping the unborn from the womb is a very rational way of dealing with an unwanted pregnancy.

God is ALL THAT IS GOOD.

Take care my fine fellow, and have a pleasant evening.

Godspeed to you and yours.

I think this is hugely different, however, from many of the ideas brought forward by Herk. I'm not an atheist. I'm agnostic with spiritual leanings. Do I believe something is out there? Possibly. I don't believe, however, that Christianity is the answer (for me, at least). I am incredibly cynical about religious organizations and religious books.

I have done enough research that I strongly doubt I will ever again be religious. That does not mean that I don't believe there is more than what we can see in front of our eyes.

__________________
Catz Meow
Badly behaved.
Hedonistic Lemming.

************************************************** ***
JW Frogen, my new favorite noob poster:

If you are such a weak jellyfish you can be bullied on a forum where you can ignore any poster you do not want to read than I suggest you move to Tibet, convert to Buddhism, protest the Chinese occupation, be killed as you will by the Chinese and hope you come back with some form of backbone.

Thank you Matt,

I understand and respect your point of view, as well as anyone else's on this board.

Yes I am the bad guy.

The persecuted Christian.

Puuhhlease.

I can totally understand that.

I was raised Catholic. I left the church just before confirmation, because it just did not feel right. I then as Herk says "sat on the fence" for a long time, but something kept calling me back (not to the Catholic church). So I explored many different religions through study and what not. But something told me that none of them were for me.

A lot of people instantly think of an organized religion when they think of Christianity. That is not what I think of when I think of it.

I believe that Christianity was never meant to be an organized religion. To me it simply means what the definition states.

Following the teachings and manifesting the qualities or spirit of Jesus Christ.

For me it does not require a preacher, a priest or anything else to study, worship, and praise. It is an individual and family thing for me. That is what I mean when I say I have a relationship.

__________________
Someone hijacked my sig again.

You are defining God to be everything which is good. First of all, good and evil are determined on a personal basis; they are not absolutes. Second, even if they were, defining God as such isn't very useful. People think of God as some kind of being, a metaphysical, all-powerful person, not simply another name for "good".

Now, on the subject of good and evil. "Good" refers to anything morally decent. "Evil" on the other hand refers to the extremity of immorality. So let's refer to the two sides of morality in general as "right and wrong". Morals are merely formalized rules which attempt to encapsulate personal feelings of what's right and wrong, of what you feel proud about doing, and what you feel guilty about doing. And of course there are morally neutral things, which leave no feelings either way.

You'll notice that there are tendencies for people to share similar views on what's right and wrong. One could blame this on evolution, culture, or God, but it doesn't really matter: They are merely tendencies, not absolutes. One does not need to believe in the existence of a God to have a moral compass. However, one does need to have a centralized system, such as a church or government, to enforce moral codes of behavior (such as the ten commandments or a nation's laws) in order to impose uniform standards of right and wrong.

Rationality is essentially making choices that are in your best interest. If you do not value the life of a child, then murdering children is not irrational, although the person with such morals would probably be considered a sociopath. For instance, if a person does not consider a baby alive at the time of abortion and thus doesn't feel guilty about it, abortion is certainly not irrational. Rationality is dependent on the person's sense of right and wrong, and more generally, on the person's desires.