Let’s take a few minutes on the couch.

[jester710]

As the only person in this forum who is still undecided on the God debate (or so it seems), I feel like my two cents might be of some use here.

First, some background info: if asked, I will still identify myself as a Christian. This is largely because I inherited my faith ("force-fed" is not applicable here, and I find that term insulting), and I still like the idea of God. That is to say, I would prefer that God exist. Clearly, that is a psychological factor in my "belief," if you can call it that.

If you really examined my life, however, I think you would find that I'm a practicing agnostic. I live my life without any real consideration of God at all, even though I still nominally believe in Him. Over the past few years, I've been scrutinizing my belief, to see if I should take it more seriously or abandon it completely. I still don't know, but this forum is occasionally helpful to me.

At this point, I don't see how abandoning my belief (weak as it is) could be all that helpful to me. I'd still feel bound to do the right thing by my personal morals, even if I didn't have a religious faith that required moral acts. I suppose the only benefit is that I would lose the occasional guilt I feel over not taking my faith more seriously.

Also, I don't see how the atheists can deny any sort of psychological aspect to their non-belief. Granted, many of them can make a fine intellectual case as well, but many of the posts to this thread have been from atheists who say religion makes them angry because of religious people. That is not the religion's fault, and if you don't believe in order to spite people, then that's certainly a psychological factor.

One last thing, for what it's worth: from my childhood to my first few years in college, I was very active in church and Christian-related organizations. I read my Bible every day, things like that. I never "felt" God or anything like that, though, nothing like what other Christians said had happened to them. Midway through college, I decided that it would be more honest to just abandon the good Christian charade and see what would happen. I have since been living the practical agnostic lifestyle, which is more honest for me at this point in time. I can state with 100% certainty, though, that I was happier before, even though I was just going through the motions. I know this doesn't prove anything, and that it could be a result of completely unrelated factors, but I thought I'd throw it out there all the same.