Hi christianperson.
When you said you would rather go fishing than do religious stuff, you had us at hello. We would, too.
But here is the problem. You claim to believe in an all-powerful being who watches your every move and keeps it all in a giant golden book to judge in the last days. Or some version of that.
If I really, truly, in my heart believed that (and I would not say I was a Christian if I didn't) I would never knowingly do anything wrong. I would join the most strict, severe, Amish-like religious community I could find and spend every single waking hour doing god's will. How could I not, if god was watching me and judging me every second?
Now compare this with what the vast majority of Christians do. Like you, they would rather go fishing, watch tv, chase tail, surf the internet for nekkid pictures, shoot the breeze with their homies, work overtime to pay the bills, play with their kids, learn to speak Chinese, etc than devote their entire lives to the worship of god.
In fact, the everyday life of the average Christian is not very different from the life of the average unbeliever. Most of us are undercover atheists to avoid being hassled.
And guess what? Nobody can tell.
Moreover, the higher percentage of self-described Christians there are in a region of the US, the worse off that area is. Higher rates of every social ill seem to dog the "bible belt"-- more teen pregnancy, more divorce, more family violence, more meth use, lower education levels, higher infant mortality, higher unemployment, higher percentages in jail. In the less religious states, all sorts of terrible sinning is allowed like belief in evolution, sex education in schools, legal abortion and gay rights. And there is less divorce, higher education levels, less teen pregnancy, less family violence, longer live spans, better health, etc.
I saw one report that said that the highest rates of "porn addiction" was in the more religious states, like Utah and Arkansas. Could be that we athiests don't consider looking at porn a bad thing, and would not report being "addicted". But that begs the question: why would a Christian with god watching every move, ever open a porn site to begin with?
So I guess my question is, what is the point of being a Christian if a) people don't act like they really believe, and b) it does not seem to make people any better off by any measure than atheists? In fact, it seems to make people worse off, and at best turns them into secretly sinning guilty hypocrites. What gives?
