My Confusion and I

I was born Jewish. By saying this I mean that I was born having parents that practice the Jewish faith. Because of this I was raised to believe in God, follow certain rules and participate in several different festivals. My parents never told me God existed but it was pretty much implied by the way they encouraged me to go to the synagogue to pray and say all types of blessings before Friday night dinner and lighting candles. Even my name is Jewish so lets face it, there was no way I could grow up without considering myself Jewish. As I grew up it was simply just a given thing. I was Jewish and therefore should believe certain things and behave a certain way. Lately my thought process has changed though. Not because I don't like some of the Jewish traditions but because I (after a very long time) stepped out of my comfort zone and religion wasn't a thing handed to me anymore. I got the freedom to explore how I really feel about religion and what I've learnt is that ther...

A while ago I go into a discussion with an old jewish friend who now doesn't associate with Jews at all. We started talking about whether God exists or not and why I believe in something that you have to prove but still haven't been able to prove . She strongly believed that God is something we made up a few thousand years ago and believing that praying  is going to help us is completely unnecessary. It is basically just us talking to ourselves and thinking it is going to make life better. As the conversation moved on the obvious argument came up, if there is a God why are there evil people in the world? To be honest I don't have a good answer to any of these questions so I usually end up answering the question with another question. Why should we not believe in God. There is nothing to disprove that God exists and even if it were so, why can't you not believe in something that makes you feel stronger and gives a some kind of hope. It doesn't hurt anyone or aff...