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Originally posted by Rihinvention
Fair enough. I still believe all those paths are completely made up though. And most people who belong to one religion would reject the notion of religious pluralism and claim that all other religions are false except their own.
There's just too many cases against religion for it to make sense to me. Like I said, I was raised Catholic, but never believed it. Noah's Ark was scientifically impossible. The entire earth can't be flooded. And how did every single animal in the world fit on an ark that small? And how did they go 40 days with no food with out the 2 lions killing the 2 pigs? And how did the kangaroos get to the middle east?
And the story of Adam and Eve...where did black people and Asian people come from then? And I can't believe in talking snakes. And if Eve never ate the apple then there's no such thing as original sin. And if there's no such thing as original sin, then we're not born sinners. And if we're not born sinners, then Jesus never needed to absolve us or forgive us of our original sins and ALL of Christianity comes crumbling down.
It's not just Christianity though, it's every religion. I just can't seem to believe it. They just sound like fictional, magical stories to me. And when asked "why should I believe this?" all I get is "because it's been written down for centuries and people before you believed it." But people before me lived in the dark ages. They thought if they prayed for their sick relatives, that would save them, and it never did. Only doctors and modern medicine do. Billions of people before us have been prayed for and nothing happened. They still died.
Not to mention evolution has been proven, as has the existence of dinosaurs. And I know everyone's going to reply to me saying "you can still believe in God and evolution/dinosaurs" but I don't think you can. Again, I'm only experienced with Christianity. But I know that in past versions of the Bible, they thought the earth was flat, and stood on four marble pillars before God, who LITERALLY lived in a city of clouds in the sky, where everyone's dead relatives lived as angels. The idea of heaven being this nice city in the clouds and hell being this firey, underground, volcanic layer aren't just conceptualisations of heaven and hell. They're what people over the past few centuries actually believed heaven and hell were. That was, until science proved there earth is round and there's no city in the clouds at all.
I think what happens to us is the same thing that happens to all other mammals when they die, like dogs, cats, gorillas and elephants. We cease to exist and our bodies just decompose.
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The Bible doesn't provide specific answers for everything and no human being understands the entire Bible. Not all passages in the Bible is to be taken literally. We must be careful not to superimpose our own interpretation on the scriptures. There are rules and methods in exegesis and biblical hermeneutics or critical interpretation of biblical texts that one must follow because the Bible contains much figurative language and symbolism. This was a common communication style in the Hebrew culture.
The theory of evolution or any other scientific theory never contradicted Christianity. In fact, a Catholic layman was the first one who proposed it. A Jewish scholar was the first to propose the Big Bang theory; a Catholic priest made a second proposal about it. Most of the groundwork for modern science were actually developed by Catholic scientists. The Catholic Church was and still is a staunch advocate of science. And the world is full of Christians who accept evolution and other scientific theories. Antievolutionism and opposition to science is peculiarly an American Protestant fundamentalist phenomenon. Any Christian who is not a fundamentalist can easily accept all the things about nature that modern science teaches because the Catholic Church itself was the first one to support the conception and development of those scientific researches.