Hmmmm.
I believe that there is a God. IF he has a name or what that name is I have yet to discover. However, I do not believe in him in what I percieve to be the method of other "christians". As thus:
I figure God wants us to choose being good. He gave us free choice and hopes we do the ethical, not moral thing. Morals are a creation of religion. I have no faith in religious doctrine as a whole. It did lead me in the direction of my current beliefs, but has the appearance of being a bit shallow; an unavoidable consequense of it's man-made creation.
I think God, such as he is, wants to reward us all for doing good for our fellow man, not for God himself. Once we know that each individual should strive for the good of his fellow men (and women), God's "work" is done. I put this in quotes because unless you ask God for help, he won't. Help, that is. It is a lesson of reliance on yourself to make a decision and sometimes a reliance on others to help us bring our decisions to fruition.
I think that Jesus is, in some cases, clearly misunderstood. The way it appears to me, God was all fire and brimstone until Jesus came around. So we say God is all knowing, but what if he didn't truly understand the limits he placed on us? He would know what the limits were, but who's to say he truly understood them. So he was pissed most of the Old Testament because it seemed like we as a race were trying to piss him off. Then he bocomes human (jesus) and a light dawns. He says to himself, "Damn, kiddos, I'm sorry. Bad comunicando here." He then asked us to believe that Jesus died on the cross for us because it was his bridge of god and man that he built. He learned of our pain and became less prone to immolate cities and such. In short, he was all knowing and loving but not on the same wavelength as us.
This all relies on the idea of a God not as perfect as the church would have us believe. A being definitly higer, but not always "right". He is not perfect; he is all knowing, all seeing and all powerful, and embodies love. He is not all understanding or without fault. He can see all possibilities and probabilities, but not the absolute future, just the path that would most likely be the best.
So why worship an imperfect God?
Hell, the Norse, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and many more had imperfect gods. This one I seem to have found a foothold in just seems to be several of their gods at once. They worshiped them because they were freaking gods. And he promises one hell of a retirement package, too. As for Satan, he's just a pissy bitch who's sore that he lost a fight
he picked. And he'll push people towards the unethical and unreasonable path whenever he gets the chance to with fuzzy logic and shallow promises. Sounds an awful lot like most churches, doesn't he?
