Missed a couple of posts as I was typing that I want to respond to:

Daigonite, a couple of things. First of all, you're asking a question that has plagued theologians for centuries, and if it helps, the Christian answer is not as unified as you might expect. Some believe there is an opportunity for redemption after death, others go so far as to say that all are automatically saved by Christ's work, while others believe that one can be an "anonymous Christian" by responding to whatever degree of light and grace God has exposed to them, and others adhere to the traditional model that only by an explicit expression of faith in Christ can one be saved. Just wanted to mention that to say that Christians are wrestling with the same question you raise here.

As for your point that you would rather focus on the here and now than some possible far-off problem, that's a fundamental misrepresentation of the Christian faith. Christianity has at its core the belief that humanity was created as stewards of God's good creation, and that Jesus came to redeem all of creation, and that His church has been entrusted with participating in the reign of God here on earth, right now. Christianity, when it's done right, is seriously concerned with human flourishing on earth. Consider the role that the church has played in history. How many orphans would have died on Roman trash heaps if not for people following Jesus' example? How many plague victims would have been condemned to solitude in their quarantines with nobody to care for them without Christians who took seriously Jesus' command to be where the poor and sick and needy can be found? How many poor of the earth would have starved or died of exposure if not for those who share their material goods because of the influence of Jesus in their life? Yes, plenty of bad has been done in Jesus' name, and plenty of good has failed to be done by those who claim Jesus' name but don't live out His commandments. But that doesn't underscore the dramatic utilitarian benefit that the Christian faith has provided, nor does it negate how much more good would be done for the world if more Christians were to actually live out their calling.

Going back to our a priori assumptions, think of it this way: as a Christian, I believe that I have been called by an infinitely awesome God to steward His creation, which He declares as good, and to take as my example for life the example of one who would lay down His life for His enemies in order to bring them life and healing. Does the secular humanist have a motivation for human flourishing more concrete or compelling than that?

Seconded, @Joseph Westhouse and post 251 and 252.  the power that drives us has not, we believe, come from within and of ourselves, else we would bost about it and ourselves, something we hope we have not done on this topic and do not wish to do anywhere else.  How many people are left standing in an argument if the general consensus is against those who argue it?  We know our faith and our beliefs are not poppular, yet here we are, against the overall majority, arguing for something that, methinks, it would be much, much easier for us to just, put away.  Wouldn't I love to just say, forget it.  You're all right and I'm absolutely and entirely wrong.  Who, in their right mind, joins in a tug of war match on the sidethat clearly seems to be losing?  Who, with reason, would join that side if practically everyone else thinks him mentally ill or bereft of said reason?
Are we fanatics, you ask?  Nope, we are believers.  the difference between faith and fanaticism is straightforward; faith is believing there is a god, while fanaticism expects everyone else to believe it, too.

Dark and Daigonite: I forgot to include this in my last response, but since we've again raised our question about why a God so vast and so loving would be bothered by our little sin, I wanted to address it from a Christian perspective. Again, this is a perspective that starts with the assumption that God is revealed in Jesus Christ, and in Scripture. I don't think the following is something that can be gleaned by personal experience alone.

The Christian conviction is that, while love, omnipresence, eternality, and so on are all essential characteristics of God, so too is holiness. In fact, I waffle back and forth on whether I'd say love or holiness is the dominant characteristic of the God of the Bible. God being holy means He is altogether set apart from sin—a totally holy God cannot, by His nature, tolerate sin in His presence because He is altogether other from it, and His very nature is such that it demands the eradication of sin. Whether or not hell is literal fiery torment is a matter of considerable debate, but the basic Christian conviction is that all whose sins have not been punished in the person of Jesus must receive the punishment for those sins simply because punishing sin is part of God's holy nature, no more or less fundamental to Him than is His love or His mercy. Again, we as humans don't have a way of balancing all of these attributes, and to me that's part of what's so amazing about the cross—it's the only way that God's intrinsic nature as the one who punishes sin and the one who forgives it could both be fulfilled—and could be fulfilled in a way that demanded nothing of us, but rather demonstrated His own self-giving nature. So where the debate rages among theologians is how exactly that atonement is imparted to sinners—as mentioned above (does it require an explicit confession, is it automatically extended to all, is it available to all and eventually all will accept it, etc.)

So it kind of sounds like a cop-out, but the simple Christian answer is "God punishes sin because that's what God is like." But thankfully, God also bears the punishment for sin in Himself, because that is what God is like.

Edit in response to Nocturnus: Thanks for the reminder that we are not to boast in ourselves. It's actually kind of ironic—the Bible says that ultimately, faith is a gift, and without those to whom it is given, the gospel is nonsense. And yet here we are trying to explain the gospel logically...because from our worldview, the gospel is the most logical thing there is (though it's also still mysterious). But we know it's not in our power to persuade anybody by clever reasoning, nor is it our job—we are, I hope, just trying to present as faithful a view of our position as possible, especially since so many professing Christians, today and through the ages, have failed to do so.

eI hope this isn't a tug of war .

So long as nobody is promoting hatred, I  always appreciate listening to a well presented perspective even if I do not necessarily agree, indeed the art of amicable disagreement is a necessary skill for the study of philosophy, since if people in a university philosophy department started  to attack each other everytime there was a disagreement the places would be war zones .

I'm personally not trying to convert anyone either, I just find exchanging these sorts of views and tallying experiences interesting, and after all this is a discussion! forum (emphasis on the discuss).

I think the form of christianity posited here Joseph  a rather different one either to that I grew up with or that practiced by my lady, since generally the focus there was far more about loving thy than sinand , , indeed I was told about origan's philosophy by the vicar who confirmed me.

perhaps it's a matter of emphasiss or experience I'm not sure.
I rather liked Bishop spong's idea that the crucifiction was far more a matter of God's experience of human suffering and God's trascendence beyond death than  necessity for paying some sort of cosmic toll.

Dark: My problem with saying that the crucifixion isn't about paying some sort of actual debt that was owed is that this isn't how the Bible talks about it. So how we understand the crucifixion (as with most things in theology) depends largely upon whether our starting point is Scripture or experience. Do we start with the Scripture and bring it to bear on our experiences, or vice versa?

Daigonite: "What exists without evidence can be dismissed without evidence." In that case, we can dismiss the notion that there is anything worthwhile about pursuing the overall benefit of society, since the claim that the flourishing of human society is preferable to its extinction cannot be supported by evidence. (Just playing devil's advocate). Again, I don't disagree with the point—simply that no worldview, whether Christian, utilitarian, or anything else can lay claim to an identity that doesn't require a priori claims. Even the claim that only that which can be proven empirically is trustworthy rests on the a priori claim that empirical evidence is trustworthy.

Thanks for the kind words. As for my perspective on worth—my day job is as a worship leader. Worship = worth-ship, and so God's intrinsic worth is at the heart of everything I do and think about in that role. I appreciate your thoughtfulness in this conversation too, and I'm happy to try to offer my (limited) perspective on your questions:

- What distinguishes God the Father from God the Son? You just had to start with Trinitarian doctrine, which would make anybody's head spin, didn't you? :-P I would start with the Christian assertion that Jesus is the full revelation of God, and that God the Father and God the Son (as well as the Holy Spirit) are all equally and completely God, but all distinct one from the other. Yes, it is a paradox. Most creeds acknowledge that it can be comprehended only by faith and not by logic, and I tend to agree. I have some helpful examples if you want, but they all break down eventually. The answer for where the persons of the Trinity converge and where they differ is way over my head.

But to the heart of your question: does Jesus actually show Himself as more loving than God the Father? Jesus talks about hell more than anyone else in the Bible. Likewise, Yahweh exercises an absurd amount of patience and mercy to the people of Israel in the Old Testament. As I see it, the overall Biblical witness presents both God the Father and Jesus as a perfect picture of holiness, justice, and mercy coexisting. It's hard to address this in more detail because it's really a big picture question and a big picture answer, but if you are wondering about anything in particular, let me know.

- To your second point: I agree that neither Pascal's wager, nor any other logical argument, can prove the existence of the Christian, triune God. However, I'd go a step further and say nothing can be proven, period. See my above comment about the a priori belief in the validity of empirical evidence. However, I would say that there's some pretty compelling evidence for the resurrection of Christ, which stands as a pretty compelling vindication of His claims about Himself. But ultimately, the only proof that any Christian has of the existence of God as we know Him is the new life we have in Him, and unfortunately, that is only something that can be experienced, not described.

- You are correct that we haven't addressed Christianity's superiority as a moral basis. My main point, thus far, is that it is no more inferior than any other basis for morality. I think that's a necessary starting point, based on where the conversation was, before one then moves on to the question of, "What then should I believe?"

- I'm confused by your last point, so I'm probably misunderstanding what you're saying. Are you saying that because Christianity's claims about God's existence cannot be independently verified, it will not be an effective means of promoting human flourishing? Or that the means by which Christianity goes about seeking human flourishing is ineffective? I'm going to hold off on addressing this point until I understand better what you're getting at.

@Daigonite, I am not religious myself either, or at least not other than in the personal sense.
I was bought up a Christian, but with an emphasis on openmindedness etc.

"morals" or "morality" if you study it as a subject stands apart from Christianity or religion since it simply reflects on human conduct and can cover everything from the practice of science, the foundations of laws  the rightness of corporal punishment.

One problem with going too far down the "no universal morals, everything relative" path is then you ultimately end up in a situation where there is no overbearing force upon moral action other than force itself.
jack the ripper wants to murder people because he enjoys it, so he does because he can.
Other people don't like jack the ripper doing murders so they get together and linch him and there are more of them than there are of him murder is wrong and bye bye jack.

this is actually the rather unpleasant situation posited by Fredrich Nietche, that morality essentially comes from the weak collectively exerting force ove r the strong.

this also leads to the disturbing social Darwinist implications, since if the majority of people  decide cannibalism is good for society, well it doesn't matter if the minority object since the majority, and therefore those with might on their side have spoken, end of story!

I would also be very careful with throwing around scientific principles such as "evidence"
If you study the problem of induction or experimental regress will learn that science itself is essentially a set of assumptions based on other assumptions. Yes, probably the best assumptions we can make at the time, but unofortunately just that.

this is one reason why science will never negate personal religious experience since there are people who have experienced the presence of god, but nobody has experienced the presence of an electron, and it is only faith in the previously occurring scientific theory and that the effects of the experiment show that electrons exist after all, where as for those people who ahave a true connection to God that connection is something personally felt.

This is equally not to say we should all go around doubting the existence of the electrons running through our computers who's negative and positive charges make up this forum, just a note that the likes of Richard Dorkins who admire the almighty scientists for dispensing truth and hate the nasty silly religious people for dispensing lies are waaaay off the mark.
Indeed philosophers I know tend to be agnostics for this reason.

Myself I am not convinced the existence of god is something that one can prove logically, it's something that one experiences directly.

Joseph, I am afraid this is probably where we disagree. Since rather like Bishop spong did, while I do that the writers of the bible did! have a sense of divinity, I tend to believe that it is a set of historical documents written with the understanding and morality of the time that said divine revelation was interpreted by the writers of the bible with the views they had.
The idea of punitive justice and sacrifice was very much around at that point in history,  it is part  of Jewish ethics.

Likewise there is at least some evidence that some of the gospel writers had rather  audiences, for example Spong that John was writing primarily for Jews who had been directly condemned by the jewish authorities of the time, were being denounced in sinagogs as unclean, were thus looking for comfort and the knolidge that God wasn't going to reject them.

Of course this sort of interpretation and understanding of the bible is not compatible with the idea that literally every word is absolutely true, indeed that was the theme of spong's book.

I was never myself bought up with that sort of dogmatic belief, indeed most Christians in Britain don't tend to hold as much, so it isn't particularly important for me, I can quite accept the idea of the Bible as divinely enspired (indeed perhaps not the only divine revelation in the worlds' history), but don't need it to be literally word for word true.

Btw this isn't again intended as an attack, just a sharing of beliefs, though given where this conversation is headed we might be coming to hume's statement "I can reason no longer with him", ie, it's gone beyond a point where moral dialogue is possible since the underlying assumptions are no longer compatible enough for furtile discourse.

If it's happened anywhere else, I've not seen it, even on so-called Christian forums.

Okay, so most of this is way over my head at this point and represents a level of learnedness far beyond what I could ever aspire to achieve, so I have to mostly bow out at this point. but first:
@Andi93, while I do not wish to adversely alter the course of the topic at this point, I actually posted (directed at you) a few times on page 9 pertaining to homosexuality in nonhuman species. Suffice it to say that every! species that has been studied (thousands of them) has demonstrated that some portion of it is homosexual. Homosexuality is not! an exclusively human phenomenon. In fact it is quite to the contrary, as natural as sexuality itself.
I hope you'll consider going back to page 9 and answering the question that I specifically addressed to you -- not for my benefit, but for your own enlightenment -- and because I'm cureous to know what your view on it would be.
To summarize:
Why does God create sertain groups of people for the soul purpose of damning them to a life of condemnation (being "wrong"), and subjecting himself to the torment of their existence? Many people would call that "sadomasochism", which is contrary to love, patience and compassion.
If Jo Blow is wrong to be gay, then why did god make poor MR. Blow's brain work in a slightly different way such that he was born with same sex attractions? That's like saying that being blind is wrong -- unfortunate, but not "wrong" or "sinfull" -- when none of us have any say in the matter because, disabled animals and insects are born in the jungle too.
I'd be happy to take this to PM if you prefer, because at this point it's more for my own curiosity and probably to the detriment of the topic, but I just can't except a hypothetical god who would create someone just so that the rest of his creations can condemn them for how their creater created them.

fun times, Dark.  I sincerely appreciate the straightforwardness and honesty concerning your perspective on God and such.  This is part of the beauty and terror of free will from where I'm standing, and it places so many of those of us who care collectively about humanity as a whole in somewhat of a bind.  We can't be forceful, but our beliefs give us an urgency.  We don't want to shove Christianity down anyone's throat, but as I've stated before, we feel compeled to share the joy, the peace and all around experience.
If I may, I'd like to share two stories with everyone on this forum and reading this topic.  Once again, I'd like to stress that I don't take offense if you decide to ignore all of this and perceive it as utter garbage; you're entitled to that and more than welcome to dismiss it as such.  One of these stories is personal; the other is simply one that touched me immensely but which I feel is just as important.
Story 1.  The impersonal, but nonetheless important.
Marcel Sternberger was a methodical man of nearly 50, with bushy white hair, guileless brown eyes, and the bouncing enthusiasm of a czardas dancer of his native Hungary. He always took the 9:09 Long Island Railroad train from his suburban home to Woodside, N.Y.., where he caught a subway into the city.
On the morning of January 10, 1948, Sternberger boarded the 9:09 as usual. En route, he suddenly decided to visit Laszlo Victor, a Hungarian friend who lived in Brooklyn and was ill.
Accordingly, at Ozone Park, Sternberger changed to the subway for Brooklyn, went to his friend’s house, and stayed until midafternoon. He then boarded a Manhattan-bound subway for his Fifth Avenue office.
"The car was crowded, and there seemed to be no chance of a seat. But just as I entered, a man sitting by the door suddenly jumped up to leave, and I slipped into the empty place. I’ve been living in New York long enough not to start conversations with strangers. But being a photographer, I have the peculiar habit of analyzing people’s faces, and I was struck by the features of the passenger on my left. He was probably in his late 30s, and when he glanced up, his eyes seemed to have a hurt expression in them. He was reading a Hungarian-language newspaper, and something prompted me to say in Hungarian, “I hope you don’t mind if I glance at your paper.”
The man seemed surprised to be addressed in his native language. But he answered politely, “You may read it now. I’ll have time later on.”
During the half-hour ride to town, we had quite a conversation. He said his name was Bela Paskin. A law student when World War II started, he had been put into a German labor battalion and sent to the Ukraine. Later he was captured by the Russians and put to work burying the German dead. After the war, he covered hundreds of miles on foot until he reached his home in Debrecen, a large city in eastern Hungary.
I myself knew Debrecen quite well, and we talked about it for a while. Then he told me the rest of his story. When he went to the apartment once occupied by his father, mother, brothers and sisters, he found strangers living there. Then he went upstairs to the apartment that he and his wife once had. It also was occupied by strangers. None of them had ever heard of his family.
As he was leaving, full of sadness, a boy ran after him, calling “Paskin bacsi! Paskin bacsi!” That means “Uncle Paskin.” The child was the son of some old neighbors of his. He went to the boy’s home and talked to his parents. “Your whole family is dead,” they told him. “The Nazis took them and your wife to Auschwitz.”
Auschwitz was one of the worst Nazi concentration camps. Paskin gave up all hope. A few days later, too heartsick to remain any longer in Hungary, he set out again on foot, stealing across border after border until he reached Paris. He managed to immigrate to the United States in October 1947, just three months before I met him.
All the time he had been talking, I kept thinking that somehow his story seemed familiar. A young woman whom I had met recently at the home of friends had also been from Debrecen; she had been sent to Auschwitz; from there she had been transferred to work in a German munitions factory. Her relatives had been killed in the gas chambers. Later she was liberated by the Americans and was brought here in the first boatload of displaced persons in 1946.
Later, she was liberated by the Americans and was brought here in the first boatload of displaced persons in 1946.
Her story had moved me so much that I had written down her address and phone number, intending to invite her to meet my family and thus help relieve the terrible emptiness in her life.
It seemed impossible that there could be any connection between these two people, but as I neared my station, I fumbled anxiously in my address book. I asked in what I hoped was a casual voice, “Was your wife’s name Marya?”
He turned pale. “Yes!” he answered. “How did you know?”
He looked as if he were about to faint.
I said, “Let’s get off the train.” I took him by the arm at the next station and led him to a phone booth. He stood there like a man in a trance while I dialed her phone number.
It seemed hours before Marya Paskin answered. (Later I learned her room was alongside the telephone, but she was in the habit of never answering it because she had so few friends and the calls were always for someone else. This time, however, there was no one else at home and, after letting it ring for a while, she responded.)
When I heard her voice at last, I told her who I was and asked her to describe her husband. She seemed surprised at the question, but gave me a description. Then I asked her where she had lived in Debrecen, and she told me the address.
Asking her to hold the line, I turned to Paskin and said, “Did you and your wife live on such-and-such a street?”
“Yes!” Bela exclaimed. He was white as a sheet and trembling.
“Try to be calm,” I urged him. “Something miraculous is about to happen to you. Here, take this telephone and talk to your wife!”
He nodded his head in mute bewilderment, his eyes bright with tears. He took the receiver, listened a moment to his wife’s voice, then suddenly cried, “This is Bela! This is Bela!” and he began to mumble hysterically. Seeing that the poor fellow was so excited he couldn’t talk coherently, I took the receiver from his shaking hands.
“Stay where you are,” I told Marya, who also sounded hysterical. “I am sending your husband to you. We will be there in a few minutes.”
Bela was crying like a baby and saying over and over again. “It is my wife. I go to my wife!”
Story 2.  From my personal experience.
My wife and I and two of our children, the third not having yet been born, lived in an apartment complex a little over a year ago.  The place was not exactly the greatest, but not the worst, either.  Suffice it to say that we had everything we both wanted and needed.  One of the things we had which we cherished above everything else we owned which was physical and material was a braille bible in 36 paperback volumes, given that we still value braille as a form of reading, and the scriptures more than life.  It had a special place in our walk-in closet, where it sat upon something that we joked, practically resembled a bookshelf, even though the truth is that it wasn't covered by anything or protected from anything, not even occasional dustbunnies.
On January 26, 2016, we decided to take a nap as my wife was in pain owing to an enlarged liver, sometime around 3 that afternoon.  Thankfully, my mother-in-law was there and willingly took care of the baby while I did my best to comfort my wife and make sure she had anything she needed.  We fell asleep at some point and were woken up to find our house flooding, thanks to a broken pipe upon the third floor.  the people upstairs had gone to work and left their dish washer running, but had no way of knowing that particular pipe would burst on that day.  the water traveled from their apartment down through the second floor and thoroughly drenched that apartment, but the torrent continued making its way in and eventually started leaking in massive amounts through their floor, our roof, most noticeably, in our closet.
We lost tons of clothes and other belongings that day, ranging from toys we had just bought as Christmas presents for the children, to pieces of audio and computer equipment, to our bed.  The pastor of our church and his entire family came over before we all left and helped us throw tarps and the most protection we could find over everything, but there was just no getting around the fact that eventually the water was going to cover every inch of the place once called home.  Dripping wet, the pastor's daughters and my mother-in-law went back and forth between the closet and her van, trying to salvage as much as they possibly could.
All of that to say this: the one thing we should have and could have lost we did not; to this day, that bible stands as a testimony of everything of great importance we have ever had which is material, not damaged by a single drop of water, practically immaculate save for where it has been.  Every time I find myself reading it I'm reminded of the words of Malcom Muggeridge in the 80's, "We look back upon history and what do we see?
Empires rising and falling, revolutions and counterrevolutions, wealth accumulating and and then disbursed, one nation dominant and then another. Shakespeare speaks of the “rise and fall of great ones that ebb and flow with the moon.”
In one lifetime I have seen my own  countrymen ruling over a quarter of the world, the great majority of them convinced, in the words of what is still a favorite song, that “God who’s made them mighty would make them mightier yet.”
I’ve heard a crazed, cracked Austrian proclaim to the world the establishment of a German Reich that would last for a thousand years; an Italian clown announce he would restart the calendar to begin with his own assumption of power; a murderous Georgian brigand in the Kremlin acclaimed by the intellectual elite of the western world as wiser than Solomon, more enlightened than Asoka, more humane than Marcus Aurelius.
I’ve seen America wealthier and in terms of military weaponry more powerful than all the rest of the world put together, so that Americans, had they so wished, could have outdone an Alexander or a Julius Caesar in the range and scale of their conquests.
All in one little lifetime. All gone with the wind.
England now part of an island off the coast of Europe and threatened with dismemberment and even bankruptcy.
Hitler and Mussolini dead and remembered only in infamy.
Stalin a forbidden name in the regime he helped to found and dominate for some three decades.
America haunted by fears of running out of the precious fluid that keeps the motorways roaring and the smog settling, with troubled memories of a disastrous campaign in Vietnam and of the great victories of the Don Quixotes of the media when they charged the windmills of Watergate. All in one lifetime, all in one lifetime, all gone. Gone with the wind."
but after thousands of years we still have Christ, or, to put it as Ravi Zacharias does when he quotes these words, "Behind the debris of these solemn supermen, and self-styled imperial diplomatists, there stands the gigantic figure of one, because of whom, by whom, in whom and through whom alone, mankind may still have peace: The person of Jesus Christ. I present him as the way, the truth, and the life."  This is what he himself presented himself as in John 14:6, leaving, as far as those of us who have taken Christ seriously are concerned, no other way to interpret such an audacious statement, and wondering, if after the rise and fall of empires, after the many revolutions and collapses of kingdoms and nations and ideals, the one that people have pontificated for this long could possibly hold any grain of truth in it.  Those of us who have accepted Christ are ready to stand as the greatest evidence to God's existence, a testament to all he can do and all he has done.  If nothing else, my bible, to me, is a symbol of the greatest conviction I've ever carried and wished to present to everyone.
I'd like to, if I still have your attention this far down, conclude with some hopefully humbly asked questions: was it chance that made Marcel Sternberger suddenly decide to visit his sick friend and hence take a subway line that he had never ridden before? Was it chance that caused the man sitting by the door of the car to rush out just as Sternberger came in? Was it chance that caused Bela Paskin to be sitting beside Sternberger, reading a Hungarian newspaper?  Was it chance that on January 26 of 2016 my mother-in-law, who would have been gone long before our house began to flood, decided to stay just a little longer and, may have possibly saved our very lives?  Was it chance that of everything we could have lost we didn't lose even one of 36 volumes of something we've taken literally from the moment we accepted Christ?  Was it chance that two wonderful members of this forum were willing to give us just enough money to aford a deposit on an apartment, chance that that apartment complex did not work and that we now have a beautiful little house donated to us by a woman who couldn't bear to live in it after her husband died, chance that I'm sitting here writing all of this today?  Was it chance, or was it God?  You, wonderful readers, get to decide.

I'm going to share two things here, and at least some folks will probably be tempted to reflexively take a swing. Do try and resist the urge until you've processed. The first is an example of why I, personally, am turned off from most shall we say traditional ideas of Christianity, and the second is my opinion in general on this whole higher power thing (note: not religion, because you don't need religion to believe in a higher power - as one of my ex-girlfriends was more than happy to explain to me one night after we'd had a couple drinks).

Thing the first. I don't recall exactly where we were coming from, but this same ex-girlfriend (the non-religious one with the belief in a higher power) and I were going back to her place. It wasn't insanely late, but late enough, I think. This woman we'd never met before stops us on the sidewalk to ask us if we know how to get to this particular church. Now, I wouldn't know my way around that particular city if my life depended on it, but my ex had been there for years (still is, as far as I know). So I figure okay, this lady's probably new here and needs a pointer. If either of us would have a vague idea where in the hell she ought to be going, my ex would. She didn't, and she told this lady as much. Lady turns around and says, "Well, it's over this way and we have services in an hour if you're interested". The ex and I just looked at each other and must have looked like a couple deer caught in the headlights, but I think all we said was "Okay", at which point she went her way and we went ours. It's things like that that make me question exactly how close I want to be to the church. And I decided a long time ago that, uh, not that close.

Thing the second. The rough summarization of my opinion on all things divine approximately boils down to this. Doesn't matter, don't care. Now, before someone starts to brandishing the bible at me, let me explain. If you believe in a higher power, whether you call it God, or Ala, or the flying spaghetti monster, it doesn't matter whether or not that higher power exists. You believe it exists, therefore, it exists. If you don't believe that higher power exists, you very probably don't care. Not in general, but in the particular - about what that higher power's opinion may or may not be on your life choices. You've got your own things to deal with.

The true fact of the matter is this. The folks who believe there is a god may or may not be exactly right. Or they may be the walking, talking, preaching personification of completely and undeniably wrong. They don't know. Moreover, we don't know. The only one who knows for sure is God, and if he's out there, he's not talking. Everyone else, from the Pope on down, is just guessing. And we're not going to find out if we guessed correctly or not until we're long dead and gone, which - in my case, at least - I hope is still a great many years down the road. Since none of us is there yet, all we can do is live our lives, in whatever shape and form those lives take. And if in the process some of us are well on our way to hell, at least we'll have a couple politicians holding the door for us.

@Trajectory, thank you very much for reading; I respect your belief even if I myself cannot hold to it and accept it with that same respect.
@quanin, I think it actually takes a bit more faith to go on believing as you do in some senses, since those who do truly believe in a higher power bask in the comfort of conviction rather than in notion or contemplation or even guesswork, as you might think of it.  Being convinced is the difference here, the one between you and I.  You guess at what you perceive as truth, where as I'm convinced without doubt that what I believe is true.  Having been on the other side of the coin, I can honestly say and must concede that, unless you have been numbed to not caring, possibly by people who are disrespectful or whatever other means might have numbed you, you will secretly go on looking for truth or will fearfully live in wonder if anything you've heard in the past might hold any grain of truth in it.  If you have overcome everything I've just pointed out above, my hat goes or would go offf to you if I had one to take off, as you would be one of the most fearless people I know, period.  Regardless, as I have no hat and cannot physically display jjust how much I do respect your stance, have yerself a thumbs up.

@Nocturnus: likewise.
Just out of curiosity, what is your theory on why one person (such as Bela) was granted such a profound miracle by the hand of god, but just a few short years prier Hitler was permitted to exterminate approx. six million jews, none of whom were shown even a fragment of the kindness shown to this one man and his wife?
While it's true that he faced more than enough calamity to be more than deserving of some divine compensation, what made his parents and so many millions of other people less deserving than he was? and what about all the children who either died or were orphaned during that period, perhaps too young to understand God or what was going on in the world to cause there to be no one to hold them when they cried?
Are we perhaps just puppets and it's all a game?