I'm skeptical and confused about God...is God even just?

Question

I am in the middle of the road, leaning towards agnosticism. I want to believe in God, but I think I'm afraid to. First of all, I find the whole idea hard to take in. I am a realistic person, and I have millions of questions. I am scared and confused about the idea of Hell. A just God couldn't possibly send that many people to Hell, right? What about Ghandi? What about isolated tribes in say, Africa who have never even heard of Jesus. According to the Bible, those who do not accpet Jesus into their hearts will all go to hell. What about the mentally retarded who can't make the decision?

I can't grasp the idea of life after death. I think I can believe in a God who created us, but the idea of the spirit after death is so beyond me.

I want to believe in God, but really think I just CAN'T. Any suggestions? I just can't do it...it's like me telling you to believe in Santa Claus. I want to, but I think it's too late, and I also don't agree with who goes to Hell.

Answer 1

You sound like me while I was growing up. I still don't believe in any of the gods I've read about. It just shows me that you know the difference between right and wrong. That you have better morals than the god of some book written thousands of years ago. I hope that this confusion and skeptisism gets backed up by some honest research into the subject. Once you learn the similarities of the previous religions, you'll discover the current beliefs to be the same as those that believed in Zues, or Horus, Attis, etc.... It's time people like us stop the passing down of inane beliefs and start spreading the power of investigation. The feeling you get from being honest with yourself, and finding answers that suit them, is beyond what the self hypnotized Christians feel when they pretend Jesus is in them. They are no different than the way the believers felt about Mithra, or Dionysis had touched their souls.
You are on the right path. Keep investigating and grow past the desire to have a God look over your shoulder and make you immortal. You know it's not true. Good luck.

Answer 2

Hey sandy, i hope that i can answer some of your questions... :) ok here i try Lord please help me!

I just want to start off and let you know that hell is indeed real, and is not the place you want to be. Hell is a place without God and the bible has a few scary descriptions about it, that make it not plesent to go to for eternity.

Next... God is 100% just... thats why He gave us freedom of the will. He has given us many signs that show His glory and His truth... He sent Jesus to die on the cross for your sins and He rose again, He has given the Holy Spirit to His true belivers, life all around us, the old testiment and the prophets etc... the list goes on...

Hell is an expression of Gods love... now hold on 1 second and let me explain lol. God loves us so much that he gave us freedom of the will, to choose to believe in His Son Jesus or not. If we choose not to accept him in your heart, then out of Gods love for you, he will let you choose that (he may keep trying, but he will let you choose that if you truly dont wanna belive it). If a person doesnt choose God, they will go to hell, because thats what the deserve and what they chose, and God will is just enough to give them what they chose.

God is aware of all the handicap and retated people, and I think all people that never hear of Jesus will be judged based on what they have heard. If they never knew what was sin, how can God accuse them... so im sure God will work something out in those rare cases.

God created us in his image... he is a spirit being, and we are spirits too, but cased in a flesh body. When we die, our spirits will live on, i know its hard to grasp, im even a little freaked out too by it, but i guarentee you that heaven will be AWESOME!!! God has even given me a few visions of its beauty :)

Have you ever read the bible before... biblegateway.com is an excellent resource.. i would recommend starting at John or ephesians and reading those short books, and you will learn even more about Jesus and what He did for you :)

alright well God Bless you :) feel free to email me and ask any more questions ya have... talk to ya later and i pray that God would help you understand Him more:)

Answer 3

Well the best thing i could say to do is go find the NIV bible and,read Revaltions it is an intersting piece telling how the end will come written by a disciple of Jesus,John.And in the bible it says children who do not and can`t understand" the word"(bible),will go to heaven and thats what the mentally ill would do be cause in they`re mind they can`t really understand God so they would be like a child who can`t understand and would go 2 heaven.But 4 you just talk to a preacher and, if you want 2 believe in God read your bible daily and,Pray to God.If you need to talk just send an e-mail=)L:ndsay

Answer 4

You think too much. If you want the easy way out, just turn off your brain and become christian. That way all the thinking will be done for you and you just need to believe what they tell you to believe.

Or, you can follow your own thoughts, which seem pretty intelligent, and become agnostic or athiest. There is no reason for anyone to believe that any of the organized/established religions have any truth at all. They are all based on man-made books and stories, and more often than not, were created (by man) to control and manipulate their people.

Have a nice day!

Answer 5

I totally understand since I often feel the same way. I tried often to believe but I can't. I believe in Jesus because he was a human being just like Nicholas Claus, the first Santa. BTW dyslexic people could confuse Satan with Santa easily ;-)

Some would say that someone must have created the universe but then who created him???!

Answer 6

I am glad to hear you asking honest questions. I hope I can give you some honest answers. I struggled with a lot of the same issues you are asking. What made the difference for me were some people (an older couple) who took the time to listen and to "love" without criticism. They gave me the courage to make the step of faith in which I asked God to take control of my life. It was like night and day. Once I made the decision to believe, all the rest was easy.

Can I answer every question you have, probably not. But I can assure you that God is a righteous Judge. He does not condemn the innocent. Someone who has never had the chance to be saved, or died as an infant, or has limited mental faculties, will of course come under His mercy. He is trying to get people IN - not keep them OUT.

The ones to worry about are those who do hear, who have the truth presented to them a thousand times, and they knowing and deliberately reject it. Please do not place yourself in that group.

The apostle Paul writes the Jesus has come to bring freedom to those who all their live have been in bondage to the fear of death.

If you would like to talk, I am available...
You are in my prayers

Answer 7

darling, you don't need any christian counseling or anything. The thought of god and hell has baffled me ever since i could think for myself, and i mean myself, not what other people have told me to think and believe. The whole concept of religion should have been abolished the moment humans discovered the fossils of dinosaurs, b/c god, dinosaurs and evolution does not mix. Unlike some of the coincidences we see correlating actual reality with god is rare, but the fossils and prints of evolution is very real. We can see, touch it, study it , and make true sense of it. Religion howver, are like stories that i can pull out of my *** and ask you to believe in it, no matter if it defies evolution, which is the only remotely factual evidence we have to explain this world and humanity.

Answer 8

One of the final steps in my turn to atheism was when I went travelling around Asia. I met many wonderful people there, and I gained many close friends. Seeing the world from that new perspective inspired me to reevaluate what I previously believed about life after death. Soon, the very idea of a hell didn't make any sense. Yeah, God supposedly let her word be heard by people all over the world, but statistically, more people in certain parts of the world are going to believe the local religion than are going to believe in Christianity.

So, according to Christian doctrine, God favors people born in Europe or America. That seems more than a bit of a racist idea, or at least a nationalist one. I've seen the sentiment echoed by prominent (among some strains of Christianity) theologians, even. J.P. Moreland, fundamentalist idol, said outright in a lecture (I was there) that Asian civilization is inferior.

Well, I saw it up close, and I can say that it's not inferior.

The even scarier Calvinist idea is that God knows who's worthy and who isn't and therefore puts the already-damned in Asia, where they have virtually no chance (according to God's rules).

It's all a bunch of baloney. Hell absolutely cannot be fair in a world of diverse opinions.


Later, it occurred to me that the idea of a soul is baloney, too, since I learned quite a bit about how the brain functions at the cellular level. It's just like a machine, and it can be precisely modelled. There is no room for a ghost in the machine, especially a ghost that can move things around. For there to be a ghost in my brain, there would have to be parts where atoms would disappear and reappear elsewhere, and that ghost would have to know how to do that systematically on a large scale (trillions of synapses in the brain). Not likely.


Edit: Another thing that always bothered me about religion was how the world looks exactly like we'd expect it to look if there were no gods. Not only can we see evidence that evolution is a very messy operation, we can even look at the cultural level. Religion is just how we'd expect it to be if it were just a bunch of prescientific attempts at explaining the world. The religions that survive are the ones that threaten people the most, therefore making believing in them a more attractive option (for people back then) than not believing. We expect the Old Testament to have scientific blunders and nationalistic and racist blather (with a couple of literary gems, of course). We expect 1st century C.E. writers to think Jesus can fly into heaven like Superman, since they thought the Earth was flat and heaven was whatever was past the final Ptolemic Sphere, where all the stars were painted. We expect people to believe in magical healers, since people back then thought that disease was caused by a combination of sins and evil spirits.

We expect most religions to look pretty much similar, if you ignore the details, and they do. They all look like folklore and myth, as long as you look at them with a detached viewpoint.

Some people will question how anyone would have followed Christianity initially if there weren't really a magical carpenter wandering around, but that's a silly thing to wonder. You'd think people would know better about $cientology, too, but they don't, and those are modern, educated people.

Answer 9

Ofcourse God would never send people to hell when they can't make the decision...if they are mentally handicapped or have never heard of His Message....God will be the Ultimate Judge and will place them accordingly.Infact, God is so merciful, he will even save some destined for hell out of his Mercy...
That said, if you are worried about believing in God, why not read His Book? Pick up a copy of the Quran, and read some of it, I'm sure you will find it illuminating...

http://www.islamicity.com/education/understandingislamandmuslims/
In Islam, we believe that God loves us 70 times more than a mother loves her child. That kind of love you can not find in another human being. But, if we purposefully disobey him, don't you think we are worthy of his anger? Some sort of punishment must be told to us so that we can be more obedient. It is a warning.
One thing you should take note of--when something horrible happens in your life, who do you call upon? Whose name comes to your lips first? "Oh...GOD!" It is in our nature and instinct to call upon the One who has created us--the only one who can hear our prayer and know our needs...
May God guide you to the straight and righteous path, as well as to the truth!

Answer 10

Yes GOD is just He gave His only Son to us, would you give up your family for anyone? I also believe those who heard the word of JESUS must follow, If you were a child or isolated from "THE WORD" you are o.k. How do you know who is going to hell? I
hope there is a hell for the Saddam Husain's of the world, child molesters hilter etc.