TEOTWAWKI wrote: Sure it might be a scam,
It might be a scam? There have been tens of thousands of religions. All claiming to be the
right one. But the problem there is that they cannot all be right. In fact, they can all be wrong.
Let's say that some god were to come down, reveal itself, and then say "
Greetings, humans! I am your god! One of the religions on your planet is in fact correct. I can guarantee you that! Ok! See you later"....even if we knew with certainty that one of these 10,000+ religions is correct, you're still likely to be doomed to an eternal pit of torture. What are the odds that you happened to be born in precisely the correct time period, in precisely the correct geography, to the precisely correct parents who happen to have been indoctrinated into precisely the correct religion? And how unfortunate everyone else is to have been born in the wrong geography, in the wrong time period, to the wrong parents who were unfortunate enough to have been indoctrinated into the wrong religion?
Beyond that, christianity - which I assume is your lottery ticket - is nothing more than older mythology rebranded with new names added to the mythological characters. It isn't even original. There are older religions that speak of a god taking human form, being born of a virgin, turning water in to wine, walking on water, dying and then coming back to life. Christianity didn't build that. They just took already existing mythology and added new character names. To anyone with even a faint ability to think critically, that should raise bullshit flags all over the place.
Then we can look at the actual scripture and see that it is completely and utterly immoral and scientifically ignorant. Cultural and moral values are constantly changing and evolving over time. Being that the case, the moral code of the Bronze Age - which is when the bible was written - is completely barbaric in contrast with our moral standards of today. Slavery, sexism, racism, homophobia, etc, etc. We have definitely evolved past or are still in the process of evolving past most of that. And what else would we expect from uneducated people from the Bronze Age? They didn't even have a shred of the knowledge that we have today.
There are people living today who also claim to be prophets of virgin birth. There are people living today who many claim perform miracles and have an undeniable tie to the supernatural. Why is it that those claims are absurd, but if we take the exact same claims, place them in a setting of 2,000 years ago, and then all accounting of those events was written decades later...it all somehow becomes believable? Why is it that all of the tens of thousands of religions - but yours - are absurd and yours happens to be the correct one?
And assuming that there is a god and that one of these scriptures among the thousands is in fact true. Isn't it a ridiculous request of us? A god creates us, never reveals himself to us...ever, and demands that we miraculously discover and believe in him/her on terrible evidence. And if we don't do that, we are to be tortured for eternity. It's almost breathtaking to see grown adults, who seemingly are capable of functioning in the real world and are productive members of society, view that proposition and feel that a sense of morals somehow emerges from that.