God gives joy

Awesome! I can attest to God bringing much more joy than Earthly stuff can ever do.

 

Great point! I would add that the opposite is also true. One description of hell is a place where God is completely absent. The souls there are languishing for eternity in loneliness, without love and without hope.

 

Thank you for posting this brother.

As an ex-Atheist I regret trying to shut the light of God out of my life. I thought that religion was just a list of rules that were made to control people and all everyone needed was strength and a moral compass to live but it turns out I was not as strong as I once thought I was. My moral compass was also very dysfunctional too. (Maybe because Atheism was leading me to a life of spiritual bondage.) If I'm being very honest I actually thought that there was some good that came from the Covid-19 pandemic Without Covid-19 I would've never realized that I needed a spiritual belief system in order to truly be happy I understand if you choose to boot me from this group
I just wanted to tell my story. Oh and that spiritual belief system I was talking about It is Roman-Catholicism.

 

Dioplleo, you are very welcome here. We have all had our doubts about faith. Indeed, one of the greatest Saints, St. Paul, spent much of his young adulthood persecuting Christians before he was converted to become one of the faith's most important advocates and teachers.

I love my Roman Catholic faith, it has led me out of many a crisis and helped me to feel the presence of Our Precious Lord in my life. Still, I know the earthly components of the Catholic church are led by humans and humans can make mistakes. Perhaps the biggest one we so frequently repeat is to forget that Christ railed against the Sadducees and Pharisees for their dogmatic adherence to ritual and the law instead of recognizing that the purpose of both are to love God the Father and to be lenses to bring into focus His love for all men.