If you believe in God or a Creator what's your main reason for believing

There have been people experience God without ever reading a Bible. I would definitely believe if there were no scriptures. I have experienced God and have known him for the last 50 years. If I wasn't sure, I sure wouldn't have stuck with him for 50 years. There's no doubt in my mind God is real. I have seen miracles. I have experienced the Holy Spirit In my life. I have experienced the new birth, even before I knew there was such a thing. I was shocked that it was real, but I found out real quick, that it was. The Bible says that when we are "born again", that is, born in the spirit, when we accept Jesus as Savior, that God sends His Holy Spirit to live in us and guide us through life. I found out that's very true and that's definitely something that is fake. I didn't have an understanding of that at first. I watched people who claimed that they had the Holy Spirit, and I didn't believe them. I thought they were faking it and lying, because I had no understanding, so I reasoned that it was not possible for that to happen, but boy, did God prove me wrong. I experienced receiving the Holy Spirit, upon accepting Jesus as my Lord and Savior. I was just purely shocked that such a thing could even happen, and I'm still in shock to this day. Jesus keeps His word to send the Holy Spirit, when we repent and let Jesus save us.

Because God saved me when I was a child. In a second he showed me how Holy he is, and how sinful I was. (I had tested God to show me if he was real) Boy was I embarrassed when he saved me. I begged for forgiveness and cried and felt so bad that I had doubted his existence. I prayed please God forgive me, if you forgive me I will serve you everyday for the rest of my life wherever you want me to go I'll go, whatever you want me to do I will do. All I want is to make you happy with my life. And after 4 years he moved me to the USA, my Dad was a research doctor. So now I know English and can witness to the world daily! I miss my home but I will do what God wants me to do. I am a missionary now!

It gives me comfort. I grew up with it and find comfort in the traditions. I accept that it all could be nothing but I truly hope there is an accepting god that loves all of at the end. Either way, the comfort I find is enough for me. Be safe and be well.

I find it interesting that so few people can comprehend the complexity of reality. And what kind of effort it would take for a creator to exist.
The main reason god is connected to religions. The promise of an afterlife blinds people to the impossibility of it.

Using words like "God", "Creator", even "higher power" - all of them send the mind off into particular directions. Such words have to be used yet they can be pernicious in terms of any grasp of Truth/Reality (which are more words......😀)

Even the word "belief" can be problematic.

There is undoubtedly [i]something[/i]. We cannot doubt our own existence. Do we necessarily have to "believe" in anything in particular? Is there some sort of judgement of us based upon what we believe? Or how we act. How we think?

We simply need to let go, stop fearing the river of change. Let go and stand upon the firm ground of emptiness!

It is all there. The light shines in the darkness but the darkness comprehends it not. I think that it is when we start to believe that we have "comprehended" it that the trouble starts. The fear of being wrong. The judgement of others who disagree with us.

The wise and beautiful words of Thomas Merton, in his introduction to his "The Way of Chuang Tzu":-

[i]For Chuang Tzu, as for the Gospel, to lose one’s life is to save it, and to seek to save it for one’s own sake is to lose it. There is an affirmation of the world that is nothing but ruin and loss. There is a renunciation of the world that finds and saves us in our own home, which is God’s world. In any event, the “way” of Chuang Tzu is mysterious because it is so simple that it can get along without being a way at all. Least of all is it a “way out.” Chuang Tzu would have agreed with St. John of the Cross, that you enter upon this kind of way when you leave all ways and, in some sense, get lost.[/i]

I love being lost, far from the madding crowd with their absurd beliefs and their smug self-satisfied piety - what Merton calls "the intolerable flippancy of the saved." Saved? From what?

Over and out.

@SandWitch [quote] The inference you made of course, was that you're one who comprehends but few others do! 😆 [/quote]
Hardly. Axrobert it talking constructing atoms from scratch. Electrons, protons, neutrons.
Most people see gods as beings that simply will things into existence.
They also believe that gods have everything planned out in advance. Completely ignoring the billions of years the universe has been here.
God has a plan, and there are no surprises.
Creating atoms in itself would be a major task. Creating them for purposes that would not exist for millions of years, all without a blueprint seems highly unlikely.
I see a constructed universe as being far too complex for anything to do it deliberately. And of course, you got to wonder why would they do it.

@SandWitch
Not a surprise. Just meaningless.
Atheist, remember. I don’t believe in Jesus, Yahweh, or a un-named creator. I consider the whole idea of a living creator completely impractical.And ridiculous.
All of it is ignorance and superstition.

Demonic attacks brought me to God. When they were chocking me in sleep paralysis...I decided to use the name of Jesus Christ since other people said IT helped them...and IT did every time for me too. Then I started wondering who is this God Jesus with antidemonic powers 🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️Sounds weird... but that’s how it was for me. Ya, this was waaaaaaaaaaaaay before I got interested in scriptures. I don’t think I seriously opened a Bible before at that time.

Given a choice between good and evil..
I’d rather a pleasent surprise of heaven
Then ending up in the other…

I saw the Uncreated Light.

Matters where and when we were born.

When I was 10 years of age, I had my first awareness that a higher power than myself existed, despite being born into a blonde-rooted Scandinavian family who never once practiced religious teachings. This means that I knew nothing about people like Jesus nor those who held higher rank than he did at the time of his life on earth, because my family never once went to church on Sundays.

Asking about this non-religious family anomaly later on in life, I was told by my parents that "nobody needs to go to church unless of course, they feel the need to socialize with their neighbors every Sunday".

Eventually I learned that the concept of 'church' resides within the mind, not within the pre-assigned holy structure of a bricks and mortar building which comes fully equipped with an Alter cut from stone found at a local stone quarry by someone who is in the business of supplying Alter stones to churches upon request.

What you can probably gather from all this, is that my sisters and I were never taught that God exists, nor were we ever taught that God doesn't exist! That understanding became my benchmark from which I went forth to do whatever.

Unlike a so-called 'near death experience' many people often talk about, I'm qualified in saying that 'near death' is really nothing more than a near-brush with the guardrails of life itself in describing how we 'almost' went off the road and 'almost' got ourselves killed.

On the other hand and quite the opposite to those who've had a 'near death' experience, I incurred a bonafide 'death experience' at 10 years of age because of my own mismanaged stupidity at the time.

Managed stupidity for the record, is a derivative of 'mismanaged intelligence'.

Following that 'death experience', I immediately experienced Devine Intervention after I did in fact jump the guardrail of life and showed up at Heaven's Gate long before my scheduled arrival time and certainly without a dinner invitation.

Yes, I was accused of trying to crash their party apparently! The bouncer at Heaven's Gate even called the Authorities on me and I was denied full access! He let me peek through the bars of Heaven's Gate but he wouldn't let me help myself to the horderves I could see spread out in abundance on the 'other side'.

I was sent back to where I had come from only shortly after I'd arrived at Heaven's Gate, meaning I was literally denied entry through Heaven's Gate, basically getting myself kicked out of the line up at the door leading into the bar so to speak, before I even got in there to start any problems which I'm pretty good at!

But I didn't want to go back home to where I'd come from and nobody was going to make me go back either, I said with great defiance! 🤬

Why didn't I want to go back home? Because heaven is like sex. Once we've been exposed to it even once, we're no longer happy to just sit around speculating about what it must be like. But once you've experience Heaven even once, you're hooked like a cocaine junkie and there's no turning back.

Even to a 10 year old kid, once she's been to Disneyland, the annual county fair back home just doesn't cut it for her anymore, despite the hayrides. That's what I saw when I looked through Heaven's Gate. I saw Disneyland! No more county fairs for this little cutie, is what I decided for myself on the spot and I wasn't leaving!

Regardless of what I thought, I was escorted back to the accident scene against my better judgement by the bouncer at Heaven's Gate, despite my kicking and screaming and blonde-rooted little girl obstinance which always got it's way and which I must say had otherwise worked quite well for me in some pretty heated family issues involving my past! But not this time! That dude was seriously by-the-book!

In a sense, I've always wished that my 'death experience' could have happened to me when I was much older than 10, for no other reason than to say to you now that I could have attached greater understanding of what I was being shown at the time, rather than what I had otherwise garnered from that experience as a 10 year old girl with Scandinavian blonde roots and an attitude.

The good thing is, I was gifted from my time of birth with a photographic memory for detail, which means I can still recall every aspect of that 'death experience' as if it had happened to me right now at this time in my life.

From that recollection of 'detail' of which I now look at very objectively involving that 'death experience', I am able to see very clearly today what the details of that experience were truly revealing to me at the time.

I never questioned those details at the time but accepted them at face value, while storing the details of the event in my memory data for a future time in my life when I could look back at all of it with greater clarity, which I started recalling and documenting in my early 20's roughly 10 years ago.

Some people assign the name "God" to what they know as being a higher power.

What I've learned from my own death experience is that the name "God" is a very generic reference to an invisible energy source which bears no likeness whatsoever to humankind, nor does that invisible energy source have an ego, nor does that invisible energy source think like Santa Clause does about who's being naughty and who's being nice down there.

"Down there" doesn't exist in reality, but our perception of God (combined with the influence of church teachings), have us otherwise believing that God watches down over us like Santa Clause does during the off-season.

I can assure the reader of this piece that God is not an old man with a white beard who always wears ankle-length night shirts and leather sandals with bare feet. And no folks, God doesn't wear black socks with sandals either, thank Christ for that! God does not have human-form and never did.

As we all know, Santa Clause most definitely keeps notes. And don't I know it!

God Energy however, does not keep notes. We think God does, but what we know about God is only what we were taught by some guy in church. What does that guy really know for sure then? Nothing about God, for sure! Nobody does.

For those of you who read this far, here's a cookie for your gallant efforts! 🍥