So now I'm going to tell you all my thoughts on god. Well, not all of them. If you aren't interested, best skip this one. Well, that goes without saying on everything I guess.

So, starting recent. I had some friends from one of those Christian sects that's on the outs with mainline Christianity (think mormon, JW, etc.) tell me that I'm not actually supposed to like hear the voice of god. Well, excuse me! I thought we were told from a young age to keep listening for what god is saying, what he calls us to do, or something. Well, not a sausage. I tried as much as a disinterested young person can to hear The Voice and no. But that goes for "feeling a presence" as well. You can hear about psychological attempts to understand why we might evolve to have that experience, or what social function it serves. But I just never got the "spirit" if you will. So a lot of the discussions on spirituality don't make sense to me. Like, why replace religion with a vague notion? To me, none of it has effect.

There's the whole birth-affects-true-religion issue as well. Not surprising and not original to me, but you have to wonder about the folks who are born in a religious household, adopt the religion of their parents, and think "wow, good thing I adhere to the religion that is correct!" and there's no thought spared for the identical experiences of their potentially religious "opposites".

What do I mean religious opposites, anyway? Such a thing obviously doesn't exist. But lots of folks find one idea comforting in all that -- maybe we're all seeking the one True God and that we're all accepted by that one True God, we just got our wires crossed on exactly how to seek its approval. (Did you hear about that church in England going for female pronouns or something for god because it doesn't really have a gender? Maybe I'm misremembering.) But here's the thing, different religions may tell you to act differently. They have multiple gods, or one god, or call us to defend, or not, or maybe don't have any gods per se? I'm no expert, but I can say the easiest argument to this effect that's pretty obvious is the descriptions of god in the Christian bible. Like, it's full of contradictions. Is he quick to forgive? Should his chosen people be killing, or forgiving in the old testament? Does he ever change his mind or is it permenantly set? Now, if you want argument, you're absolutely correct that these are different contexts. Or maybe the authors of each individual book had different points to make. Or maybe entire sections are apocryphal, or allegorical. Now, that's great.

If you're going to decide that some parts of the Bible have contexts or points, or different meanings based on something else, or even different verses that you want to associate together, you're not taking it at face value. And that's fine! You can still be Christian, and right! But, you also have to recognize that if such contradictions exist, and if you can explain them away by picking and choosing, or just ignoring, then your interlocutor can, too. The classic points being the prohibitions in Leviticus or whatever. Don't do homosexual things, but also don't eat shrimp or have garments of mixed fabric. Heaven forfend! I guess this is to say, if you believe there's one god that we all somehow pray to and are right about, then you're automatically forced to pick and choose beliefs even more so, just by the maths of it. You have like, thousands upon thousands of new claims to rectify.

Historical critical interpretations of the bible do call into question some of the miraculous claims... if you believe in an inerrant bible, or that its divine inspiration ensures its inerrancy, you necessarily have to close your eyes to the contradictions.

Oh, and there's no basis for arguing from science or whatever. If you can prove that there had to be some creator in the universe, great. Whether or not he created it via the Big Bang and evolution, who knows. But you literally cannot look at the world and say, "hey, wow, cool that this book fell into my lap and it has all the correct answers!" There's no "foreknowledge" mechanism that can be used as a "gotcha". So far as I'm concerned, any such scripture is all equally likely and also basically unprovable as that's the whole point.

so astrology, dowsing rods, bigfoot and whatever supernatural else is all a bunch of hokey to me. I'm sure that's fine. Once we can prove things, then I'm golden. But maybe this does make it easier to watch horror films.

The real closing point is just that you can pick and choose whatever you want from a religious text. If it's long enough and relevant enough for you to be confident you've found something that supports your opinion in a situation, odds are you've got plenty of passages to tell you off. but if it brings you sociological, psychological benefits, doesn't hurt other people? Good for you. Especially good if it leads to charity and stuff

I could be wrong ofc