I feel much more honest with myself now. And god has had little if anything to do with it. Does that still make me honest? If I feel there might not be a god?
There is nothing wrong with thinking there is no God because there is reason to come to that conclusion. However, the idea of God has for the majority of human existence been synonymous with law. So to not believe in God you have to be careful not to become lawless as a result. You must have order in your life and it sounds like you do which is great.
Can we not know truth without Christ? And if we are being christian like but are denying christ...is that ultimately denying truth?
Denying Christ is only a sin if you know what you are doing. The Roman soliders did not really know what they were doing when they were crucifying Jesus so therefore he asked God to forgive their actions. There is only one truth, not many and we all have the opportunity to connect with it or not. That connection to Truth whether the experiencer knows it or not is spiritual.
I look at it this way. What if God lived in our time like he lived in the 1st century? What if he lived YOUR life exactly as you did and was essentially you. Would he hold the exact same opinions as you? Would he question the existence of himself like you do? I think the answer to that question is YES. To deny God in the old world was to deny the law, which is not the case today.
Take sex before marriage for example. Is it wrong? It was part of the ancient law which was attributed to God. There is a large difference between now and then with sex and that is the advent of contraception. Any law against sex is going to be there to control the children who enter a population. The law of marriage and sex was to safeguard the humans that were born into the world that was supposed to have order, not procreation willy nilly based off sexual urges. Sex meant babies back then which is not the case today. Sex became just sex once condoms were born. So, naturally we look at sex completely differently today and sex before marriage is no longer in the law books for a reason. Human morality is progressive and is tied to the advancement of mankind.
Now take atheism for example. In the old world it would be hard for anyone to consider an atheist a lawful person as all laws were tied to the mind of God and how humans viewed it at that time. Again, because of technology and the scientific method atheism has become much more of a viable option logically because people have more data than they did in the past. Therefore, as science studied things like love, crisis of conscience rose up and droves of people chose atheism as a life philosophy because they didn't see love in the old texts. Did they all just become mindless lawless zombies? Not at all actually they created secular humanism and are making life better for all. So atheism, just as sex before marriage, is actually not inherently bad. It's all relative which is why principle and philosophy are so important to maintain. I hope that makes sense.
-Sab
