Why Do You Believe In Deity?

scaredtolive said:

I stopped believing when my grandmother died. I still haven't made peace with the big man on that one. Probably should. Not to offend anyone but the problem I have when I look at the world is that if there is a god, how could there be so much evil in the world? People starving, people killing each other over ethnic and religious differences, women and children sold into slavery. I look at these things and I think (not to blaspheme) but if I was God I wouldn't allow these things to exist. So if there is a God why does he/she whatever allow these things? Shouldn't his/her sympathies far exceed mine?

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His sympathies do far exceed yours or mine. We have free will though and our individual and cumulative choices create a lot of suffering in the world. We're allowed the consequences of our own actions, but we have the free will to make different choices as individuals and as a whole. I began to believe even more strongly when my mother passed away. Since then I have lost my father and my husband as well. I'm much more at peace with death since watching my mother die. It was kind of a spiritual experience with her, and though it was extremely painful, there was something beautiful about it as well. I'll never be able to convince anyone who doesn't want to believe, but I have no doubt in my mind that there is some sort of God and some sort of life after this. I don't feel completely separated from the people I love who are gone even though they're dead by our definition. I won't go in to detail for fear of being deemed a loony tune, but if I didn't have absolute faith before, I definitely do now. The thing is we are human and we're limited in our understanding of things greater than ourselves. For us death is the worst thing that can happen to us, but really dying is being born to eternal life so it isn't even a bad thing if you look at it like that. True there is suffering but we have the power to alleviate a lot of that if only we would, and it's only temporary. God can be with people in their suffering too. Some of the happiest people I've ever met should have been the most miserable because outwardly they were suffering, but they had God within them. The suffering we create hurts God even more than us because his love for us far surpasses ours for one another.