question for religious people

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A generous no charge dispenser, of course. Certainly no-one humble.

What I am trying to say, of course, is that you should think carefully about what you say. When a neighbor's dog leaves a free donation on your lawn it is not above criticism nor is anything else whether given free or at great expense.

I wouldn't say that because I doubt there is a god, but if you believe in an all seeing all controlling being you don't have much choice unless you consider Him an idiot -and looking around at the general mess, you might have a point there.

God didn't so much create hell as mankind decided to turn away from God. In turning away from God, mankind experience His absence. The absence of God is torture. If this torture becomes eternal, we call it hell. You shouldn't try to argue theology if you have a poor understanding of it. Hell exists as a place of punishment because we cannot escape punishment for our misdeeds *UNLESS* we ask God for forgiveness. If God forgives us, the sin is expunged. If we do not repent, it remains on our permanent record.

For people who consider God so unimaginably superior as to be totally inscrutable it continually strikes me as most peculiar that people find this overwhelming mystery easily penetrated by human reason so as to give answers as to what He is and is not responsible for. You cannot posit a being totally in control and then attribute the natural horrors of everyday life to forces He cannot control. Beyond that, assuming that He can control them but refuses to do so makes me wonder what kind of frightful Thing you hold in such high respect.
Your God, of course, is obviously a piece of childish nonsense and Einstein had it perfectly right in his letter recently put on sale characterizing the concept of God as unfortunately simpleminded.

And you must be extremely happy with yourself so as to dismiss totally Einstein's evaluation of the nature of current religious belief. To be in agreement with Einstein does not imply any intellectual equality although that would be nice. Since you seem to feel you are in agreement with God I wonder how you place yourself.

For those of you who are interested, here is the text of Einstein's letter.

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Letter to Eric Gutkind (partial)
Albert Einstein (1954)
Translated from the German by Joan Stambaugh
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...
... The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them.
In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew the priviliege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolisation. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.
Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, ie in our evalutations of human behaviour. What separates us are only intellectual 'props' and `rationalisation' in Freud's language. Therefore I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things.
With friendly thanks and best wishes
Yours, A. Einstein.

It seems you misquoted me. I never wrote : hkjhkjh. I wonder what you are trying to imply.

Einstein never claimed to be a prophet or a theologian. He spoke as a reasoning intelligent human evaluating what obviously seemed to be to him childish nonsense. On that level I find his letter completely acceptable.
Since you more or less state that reason has nothing to do with your beliefs there is no point whatsoever in my attempt to reason with you since you seem to have abandoned that capability totally.

It's just a matter of how each one of us faces the world.

In my approach I gain belief in understanding by constructing mental patterns on how things function and testing those constructions against actual behavior. If my mental approximations match the way the world acts I accept that in my belief system until I observe that the system ceases to function properly and then I continue my modification of my mental systems until I regain a good match. It is a progressive system under continual modification. When someone with a more acute outlook (such as Einstein) suggests better approximations I test those approximations against my own experience and if they function properly I temporarily accept them until they prove non-functional again and require further modification. I never merely totally believe in any pattern permanently and so my mental stance is always prepared to be modified.

It seems that you do not require the mental flexibility that I find essential to my viewpoint.

It is not that, it is if I or others give "proofs" or "examples" you will find ways to criticize it and "debunk" them. That is vain talk and I shun away from it.

In the end it is purely an emotional issue.

In other words, you don't like being criticized. I can sympathize with that. Especially if the criticism is unanswerable.