Great thread guys. I love being able to read about all of your thoughts on religion, and the para-normal.
I have many thoughts on the topic, but I'll keep most of them to myself for now. I just wanted to make a few comments that should share some light a few of the debated topics. I work at a mission agency, meaning our purpose is to send and support missionaries overseas. Just last Friday, we had some missionaries return from a middle east country. While they were in the home office (where I work), they were given a time to share with all of us how their ministry had been going over the last few years. They explained that there were a number of people that were coming to Christ, however, it wasn't through the missionaries. Many were coming to Christ after having dreams and visions about Him. Now, understand that the mission agency I am with is not charasmatic, and is very conservative. However, God is not bound by culture, and in the Middle East, dreams are a powerful and recognized way of experiencing God. As such, God uses dreams there much more than He does here. The Bible says, "Seek and you will find." So, at least in some cases, it is very clear that even people who have not had the opportunity to hear about Christ from another person, have still been given the opportunity to meet Him and know about Him. Another story is of a missionary that traveled far into the wilderness in South America to witness to a hermit. The village he came from had largely come to know Christ through the missionary, however, this hermit left the village long before any of them had every heard of Christ. Anyway, when the missionary found the hermit and told him about Christ, the hermit explained that he already knew about Him, and that Christ had appeared to Him several times. In essence, the only thing the missionary was able to tell the hermit about was that the God he had met was named Jesus. There are countless stories of this kind, but most of them don't get communicated here in the US because they sound so far-fetched. Even I, who believes in an all-powerful God who wants more than anything for us to know Him, have a hard time believing these sorts of stories. But, when I hear these stories from first and second hand accounts, how can I not believe? These religious experiences by people who have never heard of Jesus give credibility that all will be held accountable by God. I believe that we all are born sinners, and that we are all born with an intense desire to find and worship God. We spend our lives trying to find Him, and often people end up worship the wrong god. Sometimes they turn to the wrong religion, or settle for worshipping something finite (though they wouldn't admit they are making it their god). This would include being controlled by things like: money, success, relationships, alcohol, drugs, ---, and the list goes on and on. Many of these things are good things, but they can not effectively replace our need for the true God. All these things are an attempt to fill the void that only God can fill (this is referred to as the "God-shaped vaccuum"). The problem is that most seek for a god that suites their needs. True Christianity is not the religion for these people, as it is all about "dying to self." (Gal 2:20) We all want to know God, but we want it to be on our terms, essentially we want to be god (this is the most basic definition of sin).
Fishman, you are right, believing in God really does come down to a theory, as it can not be proven to the masses (yet, that day will come, when Christ returns, but that too is my belief, not fact). What I find annoying is that those who do not believe in God, but instead the religion of Evolution, and secular humanism, or athesism (yes, athesism IS a religion) refuse to admit their beliefs also come down to faith, and are also theory. The Big Bang is also only theory, and essentially requires believing that the universe is eternal, and basically the universe itself is god. However, these religions and theories are taught and treated as fact. In school, evolution is the basis for much of the science taught. It is taught as a fact, not as a theory. There is so much debate about separation of church and state, and while Evolution and its corresponding beliefs may not have a church, they are certainly a religion. Evolution/Big Bang/etc requires just as much faith as believing in God. I, for one, think it takes too much faith to believe in evolution, that all this happened without divine intervention. I can't look around at the world and swallow the theory that all this came from nothing, and by complete chance. Therefore, my only option is to believe that God must exist (this is called the Cosmological Argument which was popularized by Thomas Aquinas in the 1200s). The question then, isn't "is there a God?" But, "who is God?"
