To preface: I am an atheist. My entire family, mother, father, sister, aunts and uncles are all theists with the exception with my father's sister and her husband. The theists in my family are either Christian or Catholic.

I had a conversation recently with my sister and her boyfriend about the existence of god. She did not know before this conversation that I was an atheist. She was surprised and asked why.

I said that there were many reasons, but that the main one was that there were too many bad things that happened to people that god could be able to prevent.

She replied with something like "you won't believe in God until you see him in some light." She explained to me the car accident I had recently been in, my fault, that I had (obviously) survived, along with my good friend, the lone passenger, and how lucky I was that I had survived. She called it "a miracle."

I said, "a miracle is only a bit of luck that something worse didn't happen." I told her that had there been a god, then there never would have been an accident. My car never would of crashed and no lives would have been put in danger. I told her that I took full responsibility for anything that occurred in my life, bad or good.

She didn't get what I was saying. She would tell me, your life was spared, hence God. And I would say, well if god could of spared my life, he could have spared my car. And even if he couldn't have, he could spare millions of other lives dying from things only science that hasn't been discovered yet could.

Both her and her boyfriend agreed that "You won't believe in God until you are put face to face with him." They did not mean that I wouldn't believe in god until the moment that I died and was face to face with him literally, if he exists, but rather that I would not understand god until I was presented with some miracle.

Another example of this is when I was having a conversation with a friend of mine, an anarchist, who is also a theist. I could not comprehend how she could reject the idea of a government running things, but accept a religion that governed the morals and ideologies she lived by (she is a Christian, just so you know).

A friend of hers had just died when his car collided with a train, so I might have been out of line with questioning her beliefs (as I believe in times of great grief that questioning ones religion is rude, for that person may simply need something to give them hope and it may also further their grief). She said "it is something I just don't question" and asked me not to continue the conversation. I didn't, for I did not want to have a conversation that may be construed as questioning the fate of her late friend.

However, the question still lingered in my mind. "How can a person who does not believe in the idea of government, mostly because it controls people and governs their moral code, not understand that religion does the same thing and yet still blindly believe in it?"

I don't really want to get into a discussion about whether or not a god of any sort (Christian, Judaical, Muslim, or otherwise) exists, but rather why do people who do believe in a god often believe in it/them even though their religion may have some, but not necessarily all or even a lot, of beliefs that directly contradict or disprove their own.

None of you seem to understand what constitutes a rational argument (hint: a god can exist regardless of whether or not bad things happen). This part really got me though:

So in one breath she tells you that you need to experience a miracle in order to believe that a god exists, and in the next is telling you that you have already experienced a miracle. Yet you are still an atheist. That does not lend much credence to her claim.

You can only know God in the same way you open your hand, you can't explain it but just do it.

Yeah, in the same way that my neighbor 'just knows' that the past four dogs she has had were actually the same dog reincarnated every time it died and she got a new one.

This is only a problem if you assume being "controlled" (kind of a loaded term, but whatever), at least to the extent of being under an external moral code, is in itself a bad thing. When other human beings try to impose their man-made morality on you, that is indeed a bad thing. However, you can't just extrapolate this mind-your-own-business principle to directives from the Creator of both the universe and you.

God already said in his Word that he will (future tense) "wipe every tear from every eye".

that was justin Bieber actually

Does that include everyone sobbing and wailing in hell?

What about everyone that died starving and crying? Will he revive them and symbolically carry out his promise?

What about all the people he drowned in the flood? How's he going to tell the dried salt water from the dried tears?

That's easy. Tears contain gycloproteins, salt water doesn't.

Anarchism is definitely contrary to the plain words of Scripture - one example, Jesus said "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" - and there are several more proof texts in the NT.

Not just for Christians or religious people, but for humans in general, there exists a network of beliefs. I like Craig's illustration of a spider net - our most fundamental and precious beliefs are at the center and those beliefs are close to what is called revisionary immunity - it takes a nuclear bomb to shake them. But there are many beliefs that are not central to us - they form progressively less important parts of our overall worldview, like the strands of a web. The outermost strands can be stripped away without affecting the more important ones.

So, either your Christian anarchist friend isn't aware of the contradiction or she places her political views towards the outer rim of her web.

I hold a belief as a Christian that most conventional Christians would consider contradictory to the Bible. I don't believe God punishes people in hell forever. But I also acknowledge I could be wrong. That belief however is not at the core of my worldview. That God is just IS at the core, so if it turns out that people are punished in hell forever God can do so without compromising His justice. I have no idea how that is possible but I believe it's true. So if I knew for certain I am wrong about hell, all else being equal(God is just), then I would look forward to the explanation.

Exactly. I'm a universalist but if the view I agree with is wrong then God is still just.

Even on entry into the Land of Canaan God was just as the land belonged to the Israelites. God gave it to Abraham during his dispute with King Abimelech. In Genesis 21 the Philistines had stolen the well of Abraham at Beersheba. Abimelech apologized and made a covenant with Abraham. At that time Abimelech should have fully recognized God made Abraham the heir to the throne of the land of Canaan because by doing so he would have been submitting to God but he didn't.

Annihilationist here.

Some believers feel that human governments are, in effect, trying to take the place of "God" by putting human-derived laws over natural law. For example, many goverments feel they have the natural right to take human life when that should rightly belong to "God" only.

When several of the opinions along the outer web contradict each other, the central themes of your web should be put into question. For the web analogy to make sense, all ideas in the web should trace to each other without a severing contradiction occurring.

In regards to OP: It's very comforting for people to believe there is a God looking out for them. A government's control is much more tangible than that of religion. Plus, religion uses this pretty word called "faith" when talking about control. The government uses "patriotism".

Personally, I prefer the sort of theism that is based on one's personal experience. I may not agree with it, I may not think it is rational, but if someone simply believes to their bone, based on their own perceptions and experiences, that there must be a God, I can't really argue with that. It's their experience. I especially respect it if the person makes no attempt to convince other people of God's existence.

In contrast, the people who think that you can "prove" God's existence because some ignorant people wrote a bunch of contradictory, vague books making implausible claims years ago, or the people who think you can use pseudo-science and slight-of-hand and rhetorical tricks to "prove" it, or who think that it can be proven simply by shifting the burden of proof to the nonbelievers-- and who are constantly trying to convince the rest of the world that they are right-- are much more problematic.

I Agree with law dude

I've been listening to Kuhn's Closer to Truth series. Just heard the discussion on the afterlife with Plantinga and was surprised to find that Plantinga doesn't discount universalism. He said he doesn't believe it but doesn't disbelieve it either, citing Lewis' The Great Divorce (which I also like a great deal). He said that Christians can at least hope that universalism is true, and cited some Bible verses that can be interpreted in favor.

I found this significant because Plantinga calls himself a Reformer, or Calvinist, and before he went to Notre Dame he taught at Calvin College, and occasionally references Calvin in his work. I'm pretty confident in saying that Calvin would have rejected universalism out of hand, as will most Reformers. So even a weak though non-negative position on universalism by a Calvinist is interesting.

No way the god of the bible actually says that ceaser line...one of the most glaring examples of men making the bible up iyam.

If I can't conceive of a way I might accept a deity, then there is no way I would accept a deity.

Perhaps government control - coinciding, and conflicting - with preconceived religious dogma... causes cognitive dissonance.

2011 damn lol