Is there anything that troubles you personally about the belief system you adhere to? What is it and why is it troubling?

Atheist View

The Atheist Perspective

Mortality and injustice (natural and human) are the only things that trouble me about the absence of God.

Because there is no wise and compassionate overseer to battle and suppress injustice, the world is full of it, and humanity must struggle on its own to rectify this defect. But humanity lacks the wisdom and powers of a god, so it realizes justice imperfectly and incompletely and only at great cost. We evolve our society into a better state so slowly most of us will never live to see the better world we strive to create and leave behind for those who will succeed us. We battle crime and disease and corruption and tsunamis and ignorance and insanity and every natural and human injustice, and we would all be rid of these things at once if we could, and the world would be wonderful without them.

The greatest benefit of a world with a god in it would be that none of this would plague us. That it does plague us proves this world has no god in it. Eventually, we will be able to create our own worlds, and through trial and error we will create on our own the better world that a god would have created in the first place, had there ever been a god. But that is still a long way off. In the meantime, we continue slowly building a better world out of the one we're in, so that each generation leaves a world behind that is at least a little better than the one before it.

Unique among these evils is death. Which is unique because of its finality, thoroughness, and irreversibility. It is annoying that I will cease to exist in a few decades. I still don't lose any sleep over this, since after I'm dead I won't be around to worry about it, and when I'm around, I'm not dead, and thus have nothing to worry about. I enjoy the life I have precisely because it is all I will get. But I would very much have liked to live a great deal longer, to accomplish and experience a thousand things I so much wish to, but know I'll never have time for. Through technology we will defeat death ourselves eventually, and although I'm not likely to live long enough to be among those who enjoy that triumph, I am very happy for those who will. But once again, a world with a god in it would not have death in it to begin with.

Though these things trouble me, they trouble me only because I know they are true. Accepting reality for what it is, instead of hiding from it in delusions of magical salvation and eternal life, is fundamentally required of anyone who intends to actually make the world a better place, and their own lives better. The sooner you acknowledge the defects of the world, the sooner you will be motivated to roll up your sleeves and get to work fixing it, while making the best of what you have.

Technology of Eternal Life

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Christian View

The Christian Perspective

The most troubling thing for me personally, and indeed this must necessarily trouble every Christian in some way, is that according to the Bible I am a sinner, deserving of death for my sins (Romans 3:23, 6:23).

This does not trouble me because it seems to be untrue, but rather because it is so plainly true.

All Christians must be troubled by this, because if they are not, there would be no motivation to repent and ask for the forgiveness of their Creator. If any person does not repent and ask for the forgiveness of their Creator, then they are not a Christian. Therefore, every Christian must be troubled by the reality of their own sinful nature.

However, if the intent of the question is to find some area of Christianity that seems to be factually or logically inaccurate in my view, there is none that I am aware of.

Indeed, Christianity alone provides for the possibility of rational and logical thought.

Under atheism, there can, in the ultimate sense, be no rational justification for anything. Everything, including our own conclusions, are nothing more than random accidents.

Under polytheism, there can be no rational authority to guarantee the agreement of the definers of reality. With a plurality of definers of reality, reality itself cannot be guaranteed to be coherent. There is then no justification for presupposing that contradictions are false, thus denying the basis for rational thought.

Under pantheism, God is equivalent to the universe. As a result, God consists of multiple parts, each of which is equally ultimate. Like polytheism, there can be no rational authority guaranteeing universal truths when there is no authority over the various ultimate pieces of the universe. Again, there ceases to be justification for claiming that contradictions are false, denying the basis for rational thought.

Under all unitarian views, such as Islam, Oneness Pentecostalism, and the view of the Jehovah's Witnesses, God cannot be said to be His own reason. This demonstrates the unitarian God's irrationality, again obliterating the rational basis for human thought.

Since these religions are demonstrably false through this simple argument, any worldview that claims that all religions are valid is also demonstrably false, such as Sikhism and the Baha'i faith.

Modern Judaism accepts the legitimacy of their own ancient prophets, yet rejects the legitimacy of those same prophets' prophecies of Christ, again denying the validity of the laws of logic.

While there are things that are troubling about Christianity, such as my sinful behavior, there is nothing rationally or logically troubling about it. In fact, Christianity alone allows for the possibility of logical thought.

As the late Greg Bahnsen so eloquently stated, the most basic proof of Christianity is that if it were not true, you couldn't prove anything at all.

Proof of Christianity

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