I feel that many people on this forum are not so much searching for God, but actively hiding from Him.
History shows that the human race has been given awareness of God, but despite all the evidence for His existence, they turn away and try to believe that He does not exist. They use their God given gifts of intelligence, perception and free thought to think up ever more complex explanations for why He can't possibly exist.
Turning away from God and trying to hide from Him is a human trait which we are all susceptible to. There is constant media pressure and peer pressure to conform and do what most modern thinking people do and give up any belief in God because He does not exist. The inevitable consequence of this is that we become separated from God, getting farther and farther away from Him, ultimately ending with spiritual death along with our physical bodies.
So how can we avoid this dreadful consequence?
God wants us to turn back to Him, and we can do this by allowing Jesus to take the consequences of our failures upon Himself. Jesus died, taking all our sins upon Himself so that we might live!
And then resurrection changed the course of human history, giving hope to all mankind.
This is the essence of Christianity.
By a remarkable coincidence, Alan, late last night and into the early hours, on one of the Sky channels there was one of those fact-based true-life films that in the old days used to be known not so much as straight to video as straight to taped over. Be that as it may or be it not as it may not be, it was as I say based on the true story of a couple accused of sexually abusing their children, for which they were tried, convicted, sentenced and jailed. Jailed for years, of which they served over a decade if memory serves - twelve years, I think. In that period psychiatrists placed tremendous pressure on the couple to confess to their crimes (they denied it strenuously), saying that they were in denial of ever having raped and otherwise sexually abused their children. At one point it was even insinuated by one psychiatrist that if they stopped being in denial they would be able to see their children again - a supervised visit, of course. But nevertheless, the implication was clear: give up the denial and you can see the kids.
You can probably guess the rest, Al. There never was any sexual abuse. Never happened. Never took place. I won't go into specifics as that would take me too far astray from the import of this post but years later it came to light that there was no sexual abuse and that the couple had served twelve years in prison (are you aware of how child abusers are thought of and treated in prison, Al? Not just by fellow inmates, either, I might add) for absolutely nothing. Cue happy ending, tearful reunions all round, end credits.
You remind me of that psychiatrist, Alan - you are so insistent on the correctness of your beliefs (and that's all that they are) that instead of principled, rational disbelief you see denial. Since you don't scruple to psychologise the stance of your ideological opponents, I'll join you. It seems to me that you
have to take this stance (that people who don't believe as you do are in denial - are "hiding" from God
) because it's a defence mechanism - it's a means of avoiding the fact that people are simply not convinced by your clownish parade of flat assertion, logical fallacies and other desperately bad non-arguments. People don't "try" to believe that God doesn't exist - they actually do not. They are wholly and entirely unpersuaded by the feebleness of arguments for some supposed entity which is, amongst other things, poorly defined at
very best, unevidenced and which bears every hallmark of being exactly the sort of thing that primitive and superstitious ancients concocted for various reasons easily explicable principally by both human psychology and anthropology. That is the essence not of Christianity specifically, about which I couldn't give a monkey's, but the essence of theism in general. And that's why people reject it, Alan; not because they're in denial of what you believe to be the truth, but because they can rationally appraise the feeble pseudo-arguments that you and your lot come up with and reject them as the specious, man-made, anthropocentric nonsense that they are. Psychologically interesting in many ways, I have no quibble there, but corresponding to no objective reality which can be demonstrated to be the case by any means.
People aren't in denial of the truth, Alan; they're unpersuaded by your lamentable efforts to persuade. They see no evidence for God as there's no very clear or coherent definition of the concept, and definition has to come first in these matters before you start talking about evidence; what they
do see are all the bad arguments for God as advanced by yourself and all the clear, cogent, logical arguments against such a thing. Your woolly uplift is clearly very important for you and that's great. Nobody is trying to separate you from your beliefs. But they will however not forbear from pointing out how slipshod are the quasi-intellectual arguments you try to employ in support of a purely emotional attachment; you err grievously if you lose sight of the fact - it is one - that what you consider to be true is purely and entirely a matter of your own personal belief, and not knowledge or a fact. You don't place any premium at all on logic and rationality, Alan, preferring to hold it to be true that your ardent beliefs are a synonym for demonstrable fact, but many of us do.
