Why do you believe in God and why don't you?"

It sounds as if you believe in God because you always believed in God, at least from childhood.

But my question is: why do you believe in God? I'm not asking when you learned about God, or when you started believing.

People often say they were brought up to believe in God, which means their parents and others adults taught them their religion. Then I say that I was taught lots of things as a child, some of which turned out to be correct, and some of which turned out to be wrong. And I ask again, why do they continue to believe something they accepted decades ago as a young child? What convinces them that this childhood belief is correct?

Or they will tell me about reading the Bible or the Quran (one person) or something. And again it's, yeah, well, I've read lots of things that were true and lots of things that were false. Why do you believe this book (or whatever it was)? What convinces you that it's true?

= = = = =

For me, it went in the opposite direction. I said this all before - - raised Catholic, accepted what I was told as a young child, but by the end of high school any sense of belief or faith had faded to nothing. I can think back and remember some of the stupidity I heard in Sunday School or Confraternity classes, and that was probably part of it, but really, it just sort of evaporated. I didn't use the word "atheist" for a long time. I had stopped being religious but hadn't started anything else, so I just said "none" on the rare occasions when asked about my religion. ((( That's according to old memories, which may be fairly accurate, or may not be. )))

If limited to a single word, I say I'm an atheist. More precisely, I do not believe in God because I see no evidence that God exists. Note that I do not say "I believe that God does not exist," because there is no evidence of that either. I take the default position of "don't believe in something for which there is no evidence," keeping in mind that evidence might appear some day.

I was raised Catholic. But the true believing came when I had an accident when I was five. My cervical vertebrae became misaligned and according to xrays were on the verge of snapping the spinal cord. I was scheduled for surgery in the morning.

The doctors told my mother that I would either die during the surgery, or that I would survive but be paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of my life.

My mother sat up all night praying to the Blessed Virgin.

I was up all night too. I couldn't sleep because I was afraid. I was five -- in a children's ward, without my parents and I couldn't move my head. During the night --- I felt a "presence" by the side of my bed but I didn't see anything. Then I felt waves --- the closest thing I can describe it to is as if you were at the beach and standing in water and getting hit with waves of water. But this wasn't water --- it was just waves.
And then -- after not being able to move my head since the accident -- all of a sudden I could move it again.

The next morning, when they came to get me for surgery -- they found me running around the children's ward - playing and moving my head. They put the surgery on hold and took me back into xray. Everything cervical vertebrae was anatomically in the perfect position. They cancelled the surgery.

The doctors had absolutely no idea how this could have happened. They called it a "miracle".

And that's one reason I believe in God.

I have, since then, had God show His presence in many ways.

--Debutante