@Edward the Less – you said ‘Why doesn’t God simply become a man and explain the characteristics of God to us? Explain to us about the Kingdom of heaven and what God expects of us. Why doesn’t He simply become a man and heal the sick and raise the dead and perform miracles that would validate His divinity while telling us of God?’
He did that, about 21011 years ago. People believed Him then because they could see with their eyes and hear with their ears and touch with their fingertips. People don’t believe him now because they have to believe without hearing, believe without seeing, believe without touching. Not believing, they call themselves Atheists, although they do not call all Theists Christians. After all, there are many more religions that believe in God – A god or a panoply of gods. The vast majority of people in this world believe they are part of something so big that it could only have been created by God; Science talks about the Big Bang Theory and the hundred thousand years of light, and the Bible says just that God spoke, saying ‘Let there be Light!’ and lo! There was light. I’ve read the Bible and I’ve read the science, and there are two differences for the creation theories. The bible has the fish before the fplants and the science has the plants before the fish. The second difference is the time it took to do it inScience knows that a ‘day’ wasn’t even defined until the third ‘day’, so the world couldn’t have been created in 6 24-hour cycles. The Bible says that a day is as a thousand years and a year is as a thousand days to The Lord – but terrified Christians insist that a day to the Lord is limited to the 24 hour earthly rotation. So People didn’t believe because they hadn’t seen, heard, or felt His touch. He became incarnate, lived 33 years as a human, was crucified, died, and was buried. Now, some 2000 years later, we no longer believe because our generation has not seen Him, has not heard Him and has not touched Him. How quickly we forget! And now, of course, we don’t even have the generations of oral story-telling to keep our belief alive. Thomas Aquinas said. “To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.” The fact remains that you don’t have to believe in God. “God has such a deep reverence for our freedom that he’d rather let us freely go to Hell than be compelled to go to Heaven.” – Desmond Tutu.