From: "Sperry"
Subject: Believe In God?

God is real. God really does love you exactly the way you are now. You can know God for yourself. God is not going to send you to hell. If you do not believe that he is real he still loves you. The benefit of knowing God before you die is that he brings some confidence about things into your life that you would not have otherwise and he shows and lets you experience the reality of his love. Not just the words "I love you but to feel and know his love for real. You will experience this after you die. Why not now? There is much more I could tell you but this should give you something to think about.

I'm sure that Sperry meant well in sending this email, but what would ever give him the idea that any of the above would give me "something to think about"? I know that he and others think that their god is real - there is absolutely nothing new in someone insisting that the god they believe in is the "real" god. Other believers are just as convinced that their gods are real. Unfortunately, none of those claims are any more credible than each other and there is simply no good reason to bother believing them.

Did it ever occur to Sperry that his experiences of his god's love perhaps came from himself and the community in which he is involved? I'm not questioning his experiences (the feelings he experienced), but I do suggest that, as a fallible human being, perhaps his interpretations of his experiences (what he thinks the origins of his feeling were) may have been mistaken. That is possible, isn't it? He aren't perfect, is he?

Hearing, once again, that some people are absolutely convinced that their god exists is nothing that needs to be thought much about. Considering that these people may be mistake, however, is something that deserves some attention. Unfortunately, I doubt that Sperry gave it any thought at all.

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