Am I an agnostic or just a really weak Christian?

If you have not been able to come to a definite conclusion about your religious beliefs or your religious skepticism, then you could describe yourself as undecided. That is allowed.

I know of no reason to believe that anybody is going to hell, or that such a realm exists. It's just a story that was made up to scare people. Why should you believe any claim that is presented to you with no evidence?

Your question "if God exists, why does he have to hide himself?" is exactly the question that all theists should be asking themselves. Religious authorities claim that God very much wants to be worshipped and obeyed, and if that is the case, it would be logical for God to make his existence obvious. It makes no sense for him to be in hiding.

But then you have this other question, how can something come from nothing. I would suggest several possibilities. Theologians will tell you that God was not created because he simply always existed. If God can always exist, that could be true of the universe. Perhaps it did not come from nothing, but simply always existed in some form. We do have good astronomical evidence that the Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago, which many people take to be the beginning of the universe, but that did not have to be the beginning. There could very well have been something else that existed before the Big Bang, but we just do not know what it was. Furthermore, there is some very solid reasoning in the field of theoretical physics in support of the idea that something can indeed come from nothing. To read about this in detail, I refer you to the book "A Universe From Nothing" by Lawrence Krauss.

And beyond all that, even if you never find out where the universe comes from, that does not require you to believe that it comes from God. It just means that you don't know. The human race does not know everything, but that does not require us to believe in mysterious supernatural beings whose existence we can't explain either.

/r/atheism Thread