What keeps you from agreement with DeCart who found the preponderance of evidence in favor of Gods existence, or Pascal who finds all the risk of the question to be on the "anti" side?
Descartes said that God exists because he had a sense within him that God exists. That is a fucking cop out. He may not have believed it himself.
Of course, Descartes knew that if he claimed that God did not exist, and the word got out that he has written this, he would have been seriously tortured by the Holy Office. As it was, he arranged for his Research on the Method to be published. AFTER his death. Read up on Descartes.
Pascal was a mathematician and said that one should believe because if one was correct, one would be rewarded, whereas if one believed and God did not exist, then there would be no penalty.
Of course, Pascal postulated that if there was a God it was the one he had been indoctrinated with as a child, and that God punished nonbelievers with Hellfire and Damnation.
Of course, if your entire belief structure is predicated on a lie, then the penalty is that you cannot be taken seriously.
He also assumes that believing is a conscious choice. To be a believer, all one has to do is to force oneself to believe and to reject all logical indications that point to disbelief. It does not work that way. One cannot force oneself to believe. At best one only gets a neurosis that way.
No matter how hard I try, whiskey tastes just awful to me. Scotch, Bourbon, makes no difference. I can accept that others like the taste, but I cannot. In the same way, I cannot see Christian theism as anything but a poorly constructed hodgepodge. I cannot bring myself to believe that Pigs are capable of independent flight, either, and for the same reasons.
One thing is belief in a God, another is to believe that said God fits certain perimeters and has various attributes. Christian Theism has a whole bunch of illogical features: Original Sin, which states that Adam and Eve's snack has doomed every descendant forever. We no longer punish people for the sins of their fathers in civilized society. We would not execute John Wayne Gacey, Jr for his father's crimes. Svetlana Stalin came to the US and no one suggested that she be held accountable for what her father Josef did. We are smart enough to understand this. But we think God is not.
The Bible has God declaring, I thy God am a JEALOUS God, Jealous of what? Zeus? Baal? The Great Spirit? His Noodliness the FSM? How fucking omniscient is jealousy?
The entire doctrine of the Trinity is nonsensical, unless you see it for what it is: a fusion of Christianity with several popular mystery religions, done to win converts.
