I believe that God loves us but does not control our actions, so of course there will be unfairness. What matters is that God's loving presence can strengthen us and bring good from horrible situations if we allow it.
1. You contradict yourself with your next point that you have experienced God yourself. This has clearly influenced your life, therefore God does have a degree of control.
Where's the contradiction? God is present in every life. I am more aware of it than some people, in part because of how I am wired, in part because of my exposure to religion. My awareness does not prove or disprove either God's existence or God's control.
Surely if you experience God in some way it can affect your actions. I am unsure whether you believe God has any power to physically affect this world or not? If not, it wouldn't matter if God was loving or not. But if God can affect the world, that power is used very unfairly.
2. It seems to me that a neutral observer would see the idea of a God as your minds easiest way of trying to cope with horrible situations. That you have a need to feel that the suffering was not in vain in order to move on, and that a "loving presence" is the minds invention.
If my awareness of God's presence came only during or after a time of suffering, that argument might have merit. But I felt it long before that. I felt it before I had words to describe it.
It is not possible for you or anyone to have such a deep understanding of the complexity of the human mind to think you were genuinely experiencing the presense of a being from another reality. We are not intelligent enough to know the cause and effect of every electrical impulse in our brain.
I can't see that it was anything more than a guess based on what you had already absorbed from the culture you grew up in.
How do you know you experienced something outside of your own mind? How do you know your mind didn't make it up as part of its survival instinct? I don't wish to be demeaning, but the only evidence religious people can offer is their own personal visitations - and again using the neutral observer being visited by a spirit from another reality sounds like crazy-talk.
I can't prove to you what I experience. I can point you to the fact that many, many people of different cultures and religions throughout history have had similar experiences. To me, that indicates that there is a reality that can be perceived by those who seek it. It's not a "personal visitation ... by a spirit." It's not like reports of alien abduction. It is an inner knowing, an awareness. And how can you say that is not genuine?
I can say it's almost certainly not genuine because it has a very simple, scientific explanation. Rather than having to imagine this super being in another reality that somehow interacts with our own, what happened to you can be traced back to the origins of humanity, when intelligence was much less developed and new methods of competition and survival were appearing. The idea of gods was a way for early societies to function and organise themselves to be successful. Over time that notion has simply perpetuated itself in different forms, mostly as a method of control. The manner of faith is such that as human awareness expanded, the faithful would not move on from this ancient notion. It was so engrained into general life that the human subconscious would often create sensations based on these notions. The recipient would then fit these sensations into a conditioned religious world view and claim to have had a divine experience.
Why would you not consider such a simple explanation? To claim an "inner knowing" is to claim complete mastery of the human brain. This is impossible.
It's a dog eat dog world which is clearly traced back to our primitive roots as competitive animals. There is no evidence that this natural, scientific process has been influenced by a loving presense.
The world is what it is. But I do see the influence of a loving presence. This dog-eat-dog world has somehow given birth to incredible acts of love and compassion, acts that transcend selfish competition.
Again, the simpler explanation is that this is simply the result of our expanding awareness and of broadening our potential for having a fulfilling existence. In the primate world, time is taken to develop social bonds, to groom each other and to relax. We simply have more advanced ways of bonding and relaxing as you would expect from our larger brains. This is the inevitable result of increasing sentience. No fantastical being is needed to explain the good in our world.
This questioning may sound harsh but you have to understand that for a neutral observer what you are saying sounds as crazy and deluded as someone saying that balrogs really exist. I just cannot see where science fails to explain the world to the point that a divine being is needed.
Oh, certainly the world can be perceived in nothing but scientific terms. I have absolutely nothing against science. I just think there's more to reality. Why would you expect the creator of science to contradict it?
If you think that a "gut-level knowing" is enough to believe in something, then that DOES contradict science which explains the gathering of knowledge through the 5 human senses.
Yes, it sounds harsh to be told that I am crazy and deluded. I'm sure you would think it harsh if someone said the same of your insistence that there is no God. But I have seen the results of faith in my life and the lives of others. It is not a faith that I insist that others share. I do not judge those who do not believe. It would be good to have my own experiences given the same respect, though.
Actually, I said that a neutral observer would think it was crazy. I know you and I don't think you're a crazy person, even if I think these particular views are completely illogical.
I am confident enough in the logic of my beliefs that someone calling me crazy would mostly amuse me.
You say you've seen the results of faith in your life - this I believe, but it's the results of the faith itself, not proof that having that faith was based on anything truthful. I am glad if having this faith has positively affected your life, but again, that does not prove anything other than you finding a mental state that benefited your existence.
I am not judging you as a person, infact I can tell you're a much nicer person than I am.