Crowd Sourced Questions: Theology

We wanted to know what questions people are really asking.  For about two months, we asked our people to turn in their own questions and to poll their friends.  I even put my writing class students to work on this through homework assignments.  This Sunday, we'll try to answer as many questions as possible in a rapid-fire two minute answer format.  

Here is the first category: Questions about Theology.  Feel free to offer up your own answers or questions in the comment section.  (I'll try to post the audio of our Q and A time after we do it.)

 What is predestination, and what do we believe about it?

Can we lose our salvation?  Can we be separated from God?

What is hell like?

How could a loving God allow eternal punishment in hell?

Are there aliens? How would we make sense of aliens with our beliefs about God and Jesus?

What will happen to us after we die?

Why should we believe in things we can’t see?

Why doesn’t God just prove himself so that everyone will believe ... or speak more clearly so that everyone will understand what God wants?

Why do so many religions have so much in common?  Why can’t we study all the religions and just kind of blend them together?

Why doesn’t God answer my prayers?  I mean this both ways - as in why doesn’t God speak back to me, and why doesn’t God give us the good things we ask for?

Does praying “change God’s mind” about a situation?

What is faith?

What was Jesus’ ethnicity or skin tone?

How can God ever love me after all the bad things that I’ve done?

Does God watch my every step and plan my every move, even if I take a wrong turn?

How did the world get so bad?  How did our modern day culture become so much more sinful?   It seems like every day I turn on the TV there is a new terror threat or international conundrum taking place.  I feel like society as a whole is steadily drifting down a more sinful path than ever before. 

Is Christianity just an emotional experience?  How do you know?

How did Christianity as a religion get started?

How does the Trinity work?

If someone lives a charitable life, saves puppies from burning buildings, ends world hunger, but chooses to never attend a religious service, are they still damned to eternal suffering?

Who or what created God?  How is God already created and there?  I don't understand the logical process of cause and effect and how this world came to be.

If Jesus is God, then who was Jesus praying to (for example, in the garden of Gethsemene)?

How could God really be so forgiving - as to forgive anyone of anything?  It doesn’t make sense.  It doesn’t seem fair.