Prove that God exists

[Final-Fan]

Umos-Cmos said:

I believe you misunderstood some of my post.  To clarify your confusion about the "heartbroken" text I will define the word.  Essentially I'm saying that someone would need to approach God with humility.  Substitue heartbroken with humility and it should make more sense to you.  After all, if someone already has their mind made up while "searching" for God what kind of answer do you think they will get?  It takes humility and sincerity.

Also I am curious about your quest to prove if there is a God.  What kind of "exposure" did you have to holy texts?  How did you think your answer would come?

Well, I'm not sure you can blame it on me if by "with a broken heart" you meant "with humility", but anyway. 

Basically, I grew up Catholic and had no reason to go against what I was taught, no rebellion against my parents etc.  But as I got older the whole thing seemed like it made less and less sense to me.  I realized that if you take the Bible word for word, it just doesn't hold up; and if you start throwing pieces out or "interpreting" them fairly loosely so that it all still makes sense, then it opens you up to questions about how reliable it all really is.  It left me wondering how much of the stuff in the Bible is actually accurate.  It was all written by fallible men, after all. 

The position I ended up at was that I don't know for a fact God doesn't exist, but I don't know He exists either, and if He does I don't know how much He resembles the (seemingly contradictory) descriptions in the Bible.  If, after I die, I find myself in some sort of afterlife, I'd certainly hope that if God is there He will understand that my doubts were reasonable and sincere and not send me to hell just because He elected not to make things more indisputable in this day and age (unlike in the Old Testament where Godly intervention happened all the time, allegedly).  Why should Doubting Thomas be the only one to get evidence? 

If you want something more specific, I don't know how much I can tell you about what specifically changed me over the years.  I do remember one thing:  reading the Book of Job, it seemed to me like God would have to be a humongous dick to act as depicted.  Gets in a pissing match with Satan, why?  Pride?  To prove how incredibly loyal his followers are?  It's not easy to reconcile this with the loving God we know from Sunday school. 

I did enjoy the Superbook cartoons as a kid though.  Couldn't get enough of them.