Despair Over the Future

For God to show mankind the greatest extent of His love, and so be glorified to the fullest extent, He would need to die for His creation...greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends..

My point is that being a Christian does not make you a better person, nor does it make your life in this world at all better (if anything, it just makes it worse). All it is is that it's an afterlife contract, nothing more. People don't genuinely change. They only find excuses to behave. The longer I live and the more I see, the truer that gets.

You are going into areas that are certainly worth exploring, but the answers you find will never satisfy you if you don't first begin with God and His motivation.
You are clearly dissatisfied with the answers you have found to this point, I'm merely trying to give you an alternate look.

All I've seen is that Christianity has not made the world a better place. It's only given us an excuse to behave. No matter how much we work to cure people, or try to stop human trafficking, death and desire still remain supreme, and they always will.

I did originally begin with God and his motivation. And it didn't satisfy me. To return to my analogy, no matter how much good I did in the world, if I knew a worldwide bomb was gonna go off, and I had a button in front of me to press to turn it off, but didn't, I would be labeled a war criminal, and rightly so. I would be hated, and rightly so. I would be blamed for the deaths and suffering of millions, and rightly so.

Woe to that man by whom the son of man is betrayed. It would have been better for that man if he had not been born.

Indeed, I daresay it would've been better if none of us had been born.

I did originally begin with God and his motivation. And it didn't satisfy me. To return to my analogy, no matter how much good I did in the world, if I knew a worldwide bomb was gonna go off, and I had a button in front of me to press to turn it off, but didn't, I would be labeled a war criminal, and rightly so. I would be hated, and rightly so. I would be blamed for the deaths and suffering of millions, and rightly so.

My point is that being a Christian does not make you a better person, nor does it make your life in this world at all better (if anything, it just makes it worse). All it is is that it's an afterlife contract, nothing more. People don't genuinely change. They only find excuses to behave. The longer I live and the more I see, the truer that gets.

Not for much longer. Rapture of the Church coming at ya.

My point is that being a Christian does not make you a better person, nor does it make your life in this world at all better (if anything, it just makes it worse). All it is is that it's an afterlife contract, nothing more. People don't genuinely change. They only find excuses to behave. The longer I live and the more I see, the truer that gets.

Simply stated everyone, as I've stated before, the longer I remain a Christian, the harder it is for me to defend the popular/traditional concept of God in which a world of mass rape, genocide, slavery, etc. could possibly be allowed to exist. Do not give me that BS heretical doctrine of original sin. That was an invention of Augustine. People are not born evil. They learn it. I know it, and you know it. Nor can you blame Satan. He doesn't force people to sin.

I want to love God, but I don't like the way he runs the world. It's easy to defend him when you don't have to deal with what victims of the previously mentioned crimes have been forced to endure. Trying to defend God in this fashion is like trying to defend someone who could've pressed a button to stop a world destroying bomb but simply chose not to. All of the good they did does not erase the fact that they allowed that to happen.

Then again, I supposed I'll just be denounced by everyone here and maybe even by God himself as nothing but a proud b*tch.

I agree with that to a very large degree. For example, when I entered the world of dating, I found myself constantly being encouraged to let go of my "christian principles" about behavior. The girls were very eager to take the relationship into the bedroom; and I was ridiculed for standing up for what I believed in. It would have been easier to give in, and just do what the girls wanted me to do, and I'd probably be married now with a bunch of children running around the living room. Instead, I stood up for what I was taught as a Christian, and the girls said "okay, if you won't do it with me, then you don't love me, goodbye". So here I am, alone, and lonely. Did I do the right thing? If I did, then why do I have nothing but loneliness?

There are many in the more traditional wings of the church that don't subscribe to rapture theology.

If I may offer something that helped me.

Until we are satisfied in God, no relationship will prove satisfying. We were made to find our satisfaction in God. When we don't find it in Him, our longings don't go away. We merely look for substitutes to find our satisfaction. Since only God can truly satisfy, these substitutes will fail. In relationships this is particularly harmful because we are in effect asking another to do something only God can do. We remain unsatisfied and we tend to blame the other person for their failure to meet our needs. This is why so many people are in unhappy relationships and marriages fail.
Psalm 23 is about finding in God all we need...The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall NOT WANT.

Fact of the matter though is not everyone is satisfied with God, however hard we try or whatever we do. I tried it all. I did it all. And I ended up with nothing. There are plenty of people who are satisfied without God. To say they aren't is to delude yourself.

I'm sorry but I find the Bible to be full of overinflated promises. We live in the modern world and we need modern solutions. We don't need to hear, "Well, Paul did this." We're not Paul. We're ourselves. We all have different experiences.

God is all that He says and it is possible to be fully satisfied in Him. I would encourage you to read Psalm 23 and ask God to be all He says He is to you.

But before you do, know that God resists the proud but is near to those who are of a broken and contrite heart.

I have. Nothing happened.

Except those of broken and contrite hearts could be considered proud simply because they didn't gladly accept the undue punishment dealt them.

God is all that He says and it is possible to be fully satisfied in Him. I would encourage you to read Psalm 23 and ask God to be all He says He is to you.

But before you do, know that God resists the proud but is near to those who are of a broken and contrite heart.