I appreciate your lengthy and thoughtful response! I know you said you didn't want to argue, but I can't help but add a few thoughts of my own. After reading the New Testament, I wondered why Jesus would devise a fake personality. I mean, he knew he was going to get crucified, what he preached back then was crazy for an average person to do. At the same time, he wasn't Jim Jones, he preached such a loving message.
God gives us free will, and I don't know of anything more valuable than freedom. If we want to imagine how wonderful things can be and strive for them, why wouldn't there be the horrible alternative at the other end of the spectrum. Sounds fair to me. Btw, I don't think hell is meant for every person who hasn't verbally said they believe in Jesus. I think it's meant for the worst of us....those who make a lifestyle out of being horrible.
I think the Bible is pretty good evidence. The New Testament has several accounts told by Paul, John, Ringo (jk), Mark, Matthew, and Luke. And they all seem to be pretty close to the same story. Don't ask me to explain Noah's Ark, I think stories like that are figurative.
I think Jesus intentions are pretty clear. If you want to go back to Old Testament dietary laws and such, it gets confusing and I think Jesus ended a lot of that.
I think God is logical and compassionate, I just don't think we are. As someone once said, "Hell lives in the hearts and minds of man".
The Old Testament seems to be one story after another of the Jews making mistakes and God punishing them. I think it's all a part of free will, and the maturing of a race. Look at the Jews now, I'd say they're doing pretty darn good!
Anyway, thanks again for your comments, and hope you don't mind mine.
Yeah, no problem. Since I was about 12 I kept having questions about christianity that had no real answers. I kept seeing major contradictions. I just pushed this down and kept going, telling myself I still believed. I was terrified of even questioning my faith because I didn't want to go to hell. Later after seeing a lot of the world and maturing a lot, I had even more questions. I contacted my old pastors, talked to new ones, on and on, but I always got the same ambiguous answers. At one point I just decided I need to do some exploring of my own. I started reading a lot of books, and I found some that really, really resonated with what I had been thinking since I was 12. The biggest book that shaped that was "Why I Believed", which was written by a former missionary turned atheist. The book is directed at people like me that grew up christians. He goes through and logically refutes most of what I was taught growing up.
I'm not necessarily trying to start a debate about these topics here, but a few of the questions that bothered me so much that I had to leave were:
It all comes down to the fact that I'm a man of science, and I believe in the burden of proof. If I were to tell you there's a flying spaghetti monster, you wouldn't believe me until you saw evidence. This doesn't change simply because I was raised to be christian. I am an atheist, but if I discover any evidence that proves that assumption wrong, I will shift accordingly.