anon - if i had been you in this thread & the topic were pornography, i would have been spanked by the administration & the thread shut down.

just want to point that out. i think it's interesting. you had nothing edifying to add to this thread or the author's request for prayer (i mean, anon - why not just stay silent? did you really need to say "no" & explain why? do you do that in other threads??) - you just wanted to spark some controversy & assert your opinion regarding God's existence into a thread where it wasn't solicited or applicable.

but nevermind that.

anon. i like your initial questions. they were darwin's questions that he was never able to resolve. he wrote in a letter to a colleague that the notion that the human eyeball, in all of it's wonderful complexity, could have come into existence by chance mutation of random cells (which is the fundamental argument behind darwin's theory of evolution) was ridiculous.

but when he looked at the world, with all of the evil, pain, and suffering, he simply could not accept that there was a benevolent God in control.

so darwin swallowed & propagated his own self-admittedly ridiculous theory - not because he believed it, but because he couldn't accept the alternative (existence of God).

i find the same is true for all agnostics. their beliefs are not based on what they've discovered to be true. their beliefs are based on what they have been unable to resolve.

that being the case - and not to make this personal - but you, anon, are on much shakier ground than would be a subscriber to the christian faith, like this poster, regarding your grasp of reality.

your reality is your own creation. and it is based on faulty understandings and unresolved questions. you said yourself, if God existed, why would this & that...

each of your questions has an answer. but you either haven't found the answer or you're unsatisfied by the answer - so you've adopted your own reality that makes you feel better about those issues.

you live in a small box, anon, where the walls are painted with whatever color you need to see when you look around you in order to stay comfortable. that's not inner strength, anon. that's just self-imposed blindness. if you shelter yourself from the questions & answers that trouble you, you can create your own answers, then go back to sleep - believing you have somehow tapped into some source of inner strength.

i'm reminded of young children who believe that if they close their eyes while they're being scolded, they will become invisible & the problem will go away.

God exists & good people suffer horrible, painful circumstances.

you don't like that, so you've denied God's existence & created your own, alternate reality that is more palatable to you.

no big shock, anon. you're one of an overwhelmingly large group of lemmings. there's nothing revolutionary about your denial of God's existence. it's our tendency as humans to try to make our own rules & then name them "reality".

but i do think it's interesting that you would criticize someone's commitment to a belief system, when your own is so flimsy.

it's fine for you to reject a religion - or any religion - but to attribute it to strength is just silly.

it is strength that allows you to accept things that are discomforting & hard to understand, to operate & behave in ways that sometimes deny you gratification of your passions.

it is the opposite of strength - weakness - that causes us to turn away from the truth when it troubles us & build our own "truth", custom-tailored to fit the way we like it.

many of us, when we're young, close our physical eyes & pretend our problems will vanish. as we grow older we develop the strength to leave our eyes open & face the circumstances before us, no matter how difficult they are.

sadly, most people never develop the strength to open their spiritual eyes.