i think there are answers out there, but that most people aren't actually looking for them (if you are, I will repeat the immortal words of ADELE and say go to the botans on LSD) and furthermore, that christianity is a deliberate obfuscation of both the questions and answers with the intention of concentrating knowledge and power in an upper stratum, namely the priests, but that over time they first lost the knowledge and then the power. the basic paradox that keeps people comfortably trapped in christianity is that the christian God is both ineffable and unknowable, and immanently knowable as love. priests teach people they cannot know or understand God, but that they can feel his presence and be ethically guided by it. this essentially amounts to: don't trust reason, trust your feelings, at which point all they have to do is use emotionally charged rhetoric to instill the feelings they want you to have so they can manipulate you to do what they want you to do. this is not necessarily bad as long as you have 'priests' whose goal is to bring peace and happiness to everyone willing to work cooperatively. the problem with christianity is that since it is so ambiguous and self-contradictory, it can be used as a veil for less-than-noble intentions. for this reason i think it's preferable to turn to clear and transparent philosophical religious systems, such as plato's, spinoza's, or hegel's. their notions of god are still abstract and elusive, but it's very hard to hide unethical intentions behind their ideas.
reading over the thread i was pretty amused to see that it reflected by sudden shift in perspective from "i have no beliefs" to "we are all god." basically, if you haven't experienced God, then any belief you 'have' is merely a hypothesis, and to fully understand it you have to go out of your way to fully understand all the alternatives. if you have, you don't really need me to tell you anything, you just need to keep working on perfecting yourself as an individual. noone can say 'i am uncertain, therefore you have no right to be certain.' at the same time, however, it is just as ignorant to say 'i am certain, therefore you have no right to be uncertain.' neither certainty nor uncertainty are inherently bad. what is bad is false certainty, which is uncertainty filled in with a belief that has no justifications other than its ability to fill in this uncertainty. false certainty is the only mode of thought that can become truly destructive.
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