You sound like a wise 14 years old, so I hope that you keep thinking about God and never conflate His perfectly objective love and justice with human frailties and flaws. You can only see the random bits and pieces of the puzzle. But there is a picture. You don't always know how the pieces connect, but our sovereign God does. Trust Him.
Let me say something to you about creation and morality. You may have to think about this one for long while, but it's important. You see, if you're merely material energy acting on random chance, then there are no objective moral values in the world and you could rightly question the validity of your rationality and objective morality. As I said, you'll need time to chew on that. You might not even start to understand it until your 40 or 50 years old. But, I know you're a deep thinker so I'm going to plant the ideas in your brain now.
Let's talk about the word "faith." It's usually misunderstood and misused. When Christians say, "faith," they mean "trust." We put our trust in our friends, husbands, wives, and God. People will fail us, but God never does. We trust him because of creation, conscience, and Christ. The evidences are so overwhelming and large in the world we see, but also history, science, philosophy, and theology. The cumulative evidence that there is a God is staggering. I learned this late in life: you don't have to know something 100% to believe it's true. We don't hardly know anything 100% except for maybe our own self-reflection. If we had to know something 100% then we couldn't understand history, science, or basic ideas of logic. Don't believe anything you consider untrustworthy. Do your homework and make inferences to the best explanations. That's what everyone does. Oh, skepticism isn't belief. Most of the things we know are properly basic beliefs grounded in our experience, which we are perfectly rational to accept unless and until we have a defeater of that belief. Skepticism is just a stupid epistemological policy, leading us to deny most of what we, in fact, know.
Okay, I know this is all over the place, but I still have a lot I need to tell you. Four years from now you'll listen to a few Francis Schaeffer lecture and buy his complete volume of works. Don't let it sit on your shelf for 20 years before you start reading it. Also, start reading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. It's a good start.
Also, be careful, because there are scoundrels in the church too. Don't let them run you away from God. People will fail you, He will not. Stay in the word and stay in a healthy church. God is your protector and defender. Concentrate on knowing Him. Get involved. It's important to do everything in your power, with God's help, to try to make a difference in this world and eternity.
Another point: we all draw our ideas of right and wrong and good and bad from someone, so when you hear that "Christians are the reasons," for war or impatience in the world it is just ignorance, hate or both speaking. All religious and political sides have made mistakes and committed "evil," whether they believe in God or not. The Church has had a lot to repent of in history. But, it simply reaffirms that there is an underlying problem with people that Christians call sin.
I like you a lot, so let me be frank. You're going to make mistakes and sin too, but, as a Christian, you have a perfectly righteous God to redeem you and aspire to. Is there a hell? Yes. It is the separation from God. I can't imagine what the separation from everything good will be like, but it's hell. The bible talks about hell. I want to concentrate on this point, because it will be thrown at you many times. You will find Norm Geisler's writings helpful:
The Nature and Location of Hell
The Bible describes the reality of hell in forceful figures of speech. It is said to be a place of darkness (Matt. 8:12; 22:13), which is “outside” [the gate of the heavenly city] (Rev. 22:14-15). Hell is away from the “presence of the Lord” (Matt. 25:41; 2 Thess. 1:7-9). Of course, these are relational, not necessarily spatial, terms. God is “up” and hell is “down.” God is “inside” and hell is “outside.” Hell is the other direction from God.
The nature of hell is a horrifying reality. It is like being left outside in the dark forever (Matt. 8:12). It is like a wandering star (Jude 13), a waterless cloud (Jude 12), a perpetually burning dump (Mark 9:43-48), a bottomless pit (Rev. 20:1, 3), a prison (1 Peter 3:19), and a place of anguish and regret (Luke 16:28).
To borrow the title of the book by Lewis, hell is the “great divorce”—an eternal separation from God (2 Thess. 1:7-9). There is, in biblical language, a great gulf fixed” between hell and heaven (Luke 16:26) so that no one can pass from one side to the other.
Nowhere does the Bible describe it as a “torture chamber” where people are forced against their will to be tortured. This is a caricature created by unbelievers to justify their reaction that the God who sends people to hell is cruel. This does not mean that hell is not a place of torment. Jesus said it was (Luke 16:24). But unlike torture which is inflicted from without against one’s will, torment is self-inflicted.
Even atheists have suggested that the door of hell is locked from the inside. We are condemned to our own freedom from God. Heaven’s presence of the divine would be the torture to one who has irretrievably rejected him. Torment is living with the consequences of our own bad choices. It is the weeping and gnashing of teeth that results from the realization that we blew it and deserve the consequences. Just as a football player may pound on the ground in agony after missing a play that loses the Super Bowl, so those in hell know that the pain they suffer is self-induced.
Hell is also depicted as a place of eternal fire. This fire is real but not necessarily physical (as we know it), because people will have imperishable physical bodies (John 5:28-29; Rev. 20:13-15), so normal fire would not affect them. Further, the figures of speech that describe hell are contradictory if taken in a physical sense. It has flames, yet is outer darkness. It is a dump (with a bottom), yet a bottomless pit. While everything in the Bible is literally true, not everything is true literally. There's much more to be said.
On another subject. So, you might ask what accounted for all the atheistic killings of the Jews and purging of the millions of Chinese in the 1950's? Good question. Again, it's sin, and there's still plenty to go around. Let me put it to you like this: to lay the notion of evil on Christians is like saying the piano is the reason for all the bad songs in the world. I'm sure you get my point, right? Just because the instrument was poorly played, by a Christian, doesn't mean it's not a good and true piano. And, as a side note (pun intended), it doesn't mean a non-Christian can't play a good tune on it. They can. It was God who made the piano in the first place or at least gave us the creativity to make it. To lay all "evil" on Christians is a lot of nonsense. I'm sure that you recognize by now that if something isn't good in an objective way, then it's just a social contract, not moral or immoral. It's just your opinion and we're really not getting anywhere in a conversation like that. Most people who take this route do so because they only want to live, as I say, to their own made-up morality.
As you can tell I believe in objective truths-- that some things are really, objectively wrong no matter what people say. Like killing babies for fun. No one would say that's okay anywhere or any time. It's always wrong, even if everyone says it's okay (like Hitler killing Jews).
Your faith/trust in God encourages will encourage you to be salt and light in the world now. And, will you mess up? Yep. Will you sometimes offend people? Yep. You will live life like everyone else, imperfectly. Still, try to become what God wants you to be, and not what the schools, government, or courts try force you to be. Humanist philosophy and other religions are incomplete or dead-end worldviews. There is a foundation in God that carries objective morality, freedom, or a future upon which to gauge or live in truth.
In the mid-1800's Nietzsche predicted what the nihilistic "God Is Dead" philosophy would bring. You probably see it more clearly now than previous generations. The Nietzschean "Will To Power" attitudes and programs have overtaken our ideology, government, schools, and courts; and even liberal churches.
Don't be satisfied with only living on the borrowed capital of Judeo-Christianity with one foot in the world. Embrace it as the truth. Don't fall prey to the "Woke" neo-Marxist ideology subtly inculcating our world through Cultural Marxism or Critical Theory. It won't bring a final utopia to Earth. No man can do that. They too selfish and power hungry. Critical Theory, Critical Race Theory, and Identity politics has been tried in Russia and China and it destroys lives. It will ultimately lead to loss of freedom, virtue, and faith. It is a godless, relativistic, pseudo-reality that has no objective standards. It has no ultimate meaning and leads only to hunger, hate, and hopelessness.
And, again, yes, Christians have done wrong things and have done plenty of historically evil things in the name of God, but we recognize it as evil because there good and there is good because there is God. We find objective standard in the nature of God and the Bible that inform our moral values, duties, and responsibilities.
Pay attention in history class and read. It was the spirit of the Great Awakening that tempered democracy in the American Colonies through the ministry of John Wesley. It's our strength. The Revolutionary War secured freedom and our constitution ordered freedom. That is unique in history. The ideas underpinning our U.S Constitution were born out of a godly covenant (a promise we made to each other and God) came from the days of Mt. Sinai and through the Reformation. It shaped us with Judeo-Christian values, unlike the revolutions of 1789, 1917, and 1949.
The Enlightenment, Socialism, and Marxism have recycled our worst angels of oppression and victimization. Repentance and forgiveness are key. We're obviously in a world of a huge amounts of evil, injustice, and violence. But the real question is how we respond to it. Our Jewish friends are the most victimized people on Earth throughout history, sadly, sometimes from Christians, yet they refuse to be victims. It's because by becoming victims you become passive and you paralyze yourself. The heart of the Jewish understanding is responsibility, initiative. So the Jews refuse to be victims, to their credit. But you can see a part of the progressive secular left is playing that victim card. It weaponizes injustices and evils from the past by portraying yourself as a victim. But it's counterproductive because people who see themselves as victims come and play that in real life, and they end up weak and pathetic. So it's not a Christian thing at all. (Os Guinness)
It's just one more example where the difference between a biblical view of tackling, addressing wrong and the progressive secular left way is totally different. The biblical view of prophetic challenge, confession, repentance, reconciliation, restoration, all these good things. But in the secular view, something's wrong. You have retaliation or in current language, reparations, and so on. You can see, take American history. Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King, all of them tackled slavery and racism, but from a biblical perspective, aiming for forgiveness and reconciliation. From Stokely Carmichael right down to the extremes of Black Lives Matter, you have a very different view, and the problem of race is getting worse, not better. That's an absolute tragedy and quite unnecessary. (Os Guinness)
Learn civics. There is a difference between civics and politics. Civics is the stuff we’re all supposed to agree on, regardless of our policy views differences. Civics is another way we talk about the rules of the road. Civics 101 teaches that Congress writes laws. The executive branch enforces laws, courts apply them. None of that stuff should be different if you’re a Republican or a Democrat, or a libertarian or a Green Party member. This is basic civics.
Civics is the stuff that all Americans should agree on, like religious liberty. People should be able to fire the folks who write the laws, and voters can’t fire the judges. Judges should be impartial. This is just civics 101.
Politics is different. Politics is the subordinate, less important stuff that we differ about.
Civics doesn’t change every 18 to 24 months because the electoral winds change or because polling changes. Civics should be the stuff we affirm together. And contrary to the belief of some activists, religious liberty is not an exception. You don’t need the government’s permission to have religious liberty. Religious liberty is the default assumption of our entire system.
Congress doesn't have religious tests. The committees are in the business of deciding whether a certain dogma lives within someone. It isn’t in the business of deciding which religion beliefs are good, which religious beliefs are bad and which religious beliefs are weird.
We should not view judges as politicians who hide behind their robes. The antidote to judicial activism is originalism. Originalism is basically the old idea from eighth grade civics that judges don’t get to make laws. Judges just apply them.
An originalist comes to the court with a fundamental humility and modesty about what the job is that they’re there to do. An originalist doesn’t think of herself as a super-legislator whose opinions will be read by angels from stone tablets in heaven.
Judicial activism, on the other hand, is the bad idea that our judges’ black robes are fake. That they’re wearing red or blue partisan jerseys under their robes. We should reject all such judges.
And finally, to me the way Pastor Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church fought against the Nazis and conspired to kill Hitler during WWII, was a loving and appropriate example for serving God and living out your faith. He stood for faith, virtue, and freedom, which must co-exist for a nation to survive. I pray we never have to give up our religious liberty, but even if you do you will never have to give up your faith in God.
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