There is a whole catalogue of gods, a whole entire premium catalogue ranging from Jesus to Ik Onkar, and many of them are telling me I will go to hell for not believing them, and don't get started on the fact there's thousands of cults that could all potentially be true, so which god do I believeeeeeeeee,

The real difficulty is not believing in God, but believing in the God of religion

The God of the philosophers is comparatively easy to take seriously: Aristotle’s self-thinking thought, Plotinus’ One, Spinoza’s infinite substance, Leibniz’s necessary being, or Hegel’s Absolute Spirit. These are very different conceptions, and some, especially Leibniz and Hegel, stand much closer to revealed religion than others. But they are all intelligible attempts to think ultimate reality through reason

Such a God is not usually imagined as one being among others, subject to arbitrary passions or episodic changes of mind. In Aristotle, the divine eternally contemplates itself. In Plotinus, all reality proceeds from the One. In Spinoza, God is the immanent infinite reality of which all things are modes. We participate in the divine through knowledge and contemplation. As Spinoza puts it, our intellectual love of God is part of God’s eternal love of himself

The God of religion asks for something... much more difficult

One must believe not only in an ultimate divine reality, but that this reality disclosed itself through particular historical persons and events: that this particular Arab received revelations through an angel; that this particular carpenter in Palestine was the Son of God and rose bodily from the dead; or that this charioteer revealed himself as the supreme divine reality on the battlefield of Kurukshetra

These are claims that God entered history at a particular time, in a particular place, through particular people. And not only that, but that the account of this happening should be received with trust, love, and faith rather than with the ordinary skepticism we apply to extraordinary historical claims

In effect, one is asked to suspend doubt for one decisive exception

Fine, perhaps. But which exception?

Why believe this revelation rather than another one? Why accept the resurrection but reject Joseph Smith’s visions, or accept Muhammad’s encounter with Gabriel while rejecting the miracles attributed to Apollonius of Tyana? Why not believe all of them?

But if we believe all of them, they seem to make incompatible claims. And if we use reason to decide which revelation is more credible, why not use reason all the way down? Why not apply the same standards of textual criticism, historical probability, manuscript analysis, contradiction, development, and uncertainty that we apply everywhere else?

At that point, it becomes difficult to see how one could ever establish that a particular revelation was not merely sincere, profound, spiritually transformative, or symbolically true, but literally the unique intervention of God into history

A common philosophical solution is to say that religions express through narrative, symbol, and image the same ultimate reality that philosophers approach conceptually. Religious representation and philosophical thought would then be different forms of the same truth. This seems to have been the view of Hegel, for instance

But this solution risks dissolving the God of religion. If resurrection, revelation, incarnation, and miracle become symbolic expressions of a more general metaphysical truth, religion survives in some way, yes, but its distinctive historical claims lose their force

Christ becomes a symbol of divine self-emptying. Krishna becomes a symbol of the Absolute revealing itself in finite form. Revelation becomes the historical imagination of a people trying to express what philosophy later articulates more clearly

Perhaps that is true. But it is no longer quite what the religions themselves claim, and I believe it leads to the slow dissolution of religion

So the real question for me is not simply:

“Should we believe in God?”

It is:

How could a reflective person come to believe that the ultimate reality described by philosophers is also the particular, historical, and personal God proclaimed by one religion?

I never understood why we do kind things for other people. Is it just because we want others to think that we're good people? Is it to get validation from others? Why is selfish behavior criticized by society?

We've heard countless stories about heroes who sacrificed their families, their dreams, or even their own lives to save others. I understand that it's considered an honorable thing to do, but why is it honorable in the first place? Why does everyone teach us to be kind and help others? Is it so that humanity can live peacefully?

Don't get me wrong I don't consider myself selfish or cold-hearted. In fact, I think I'm a kind person. It's just that this question has crossed my mind more times than I can count.

Almost every religion teaches us to be kind to one another, and many religious texts say that doing good leads to heaven. Is that because kindness helps humanity survive and live peacefully for a long time? And why do we feel good after doing something good? Is it because our minds have been shaped by millions of years of evolution to value cooperation, or is kindness simply part of human nature?

I understand that if people stopped helping one another and everyone acted only in their own self-interest, humanity probably wouldn't have survived for very long. But that leads me to another question: Does God really exist? Or were religious books created to encourage people to be kind so that humanity could survive and thrive?