Quote:I think the real key to whether you decide there is a God or not is to decide if you need a God or not. Frankly, I can barely handle existing WITH a benevolent God and a human Saviour. I cannot imagine my despair if I did not believe. That's part of why I, personally, will never be an atheist. I certainly have doubts, but I would never have enough FAITH to be SURE there was no God.
Isn't that more hoping that God exists rather than actually believing God exists? One of the reasons I can't just become truly religious is because everything to me seems to point away from God or similar divinities. I could go to church and pay my tithes, I could preach the capital w Word, I could swear on a stack of Bibles that I believed the messages within, but I wouldn't really think it was all true. Even if I desperately wanted, say, Christianity to be true*, that wouldn't affect my judgement of whether Christianity's premises are valid or not.
In any case, I can certainly understand why you believe given your mindset, but I don't understand your mindset itself. What about the lack of God would turn you into unimaginable despair? If God doesn't exist, then he hasn't this whole time, and you certainly haven't been in unimaginable despair as far as I can see. Obviously things like motivation and hope can take hits, but there are certainly ways for atheists to have high levels of these.
Also, I think your quote
Quote:I think the real key to whether you decide there is a God or not is to decide if you need a God or not.
sums up religion pretty well, IMO.
Also, an interesting thing I just saw on reddit, via FB:
http://www.reddit.co...ssure_you_i_am/
It has an interesting point, although I would ignore the last two paragraphs. They explain what the point is (if you didn't get it while reading), but they have bad word choice (e.g. "hypocrisy") and a pretty unfairly harsh tone, and they kinda distract from the point.