Believe or Not Believe

How I love to listen to the non-believers in the world, how they rationalize their behavior, good or bad, how they justify what they believe or not believe. It all seems so extraordinary. I've often said, "Just because you don't believe doesn't make it not true...." and then the words come back to me "Just because you DO believe doesn't make it true....", so you see, gates can swing both ways in the realm of rationalization and justification.
I've got a friend who claims to be an Atheist and tells me over and over that there is no scientific proof that there is a 'supreme being', an 'all knowing God' or anything supernatural that deals with Deity and creation of the world. Yet, when we have had discussions on this topic he claims to have moments of 'deja-vu' and chills, and states to me that what we have discussed makes sense in a way and sounds familiar. But, he attributes that to living in a state where the predominate religion is so openly discussed on the radio and television that it has become part of the norm. I suppose in that sense he is quite correct and he does hear about the predominate religion on a regular basis, however it doesn't mean that he knows what is being talked about since gospel principles are not usually discussed over the news airwaves in a detailed sense.
We've talked about how anything is possible, including that there may be no God or that there may be a God and in all reality it can't be proven either way to the mortal man (or woman). It is all based on faith and spirituality when we decide to believe in God, then there are those tiny and sometimes huge miracles that prove that God does exist or in my friends mind, it is the POWER of the mind that heals ourselves. Well, I argued, if that were true, then there would be no illness at all. We wouldn't suffer from cancer, from the swine flu....yes I said the dreaded word...swine, we wouldn't suffer from ALS, Parkinson's, etc, because we should be able to heal ourselves just because of our faith. He pointed out that it depends on whether we have faith or not, that if we have faith, then we can most likely heal ourselves better than those who don't have faith. I pointed out that there are a great many men and women who have a very strong faith in God, yet they suffer from the infirmities of horrific illnesses and die anyway, how can you explain that? His answer....'apparently their faith wasn't strong enough'. 'Cop-out' I replied.
There is no winning an argument with an 'intellectual' who thinks that they are the highest degree of life and that there is no proof to say otherwise. We even had a discussion on life on other planets and alien abductions....which is a blog for another time.
I've come to love this person, in-spite of his atheism and attitudes and he has come to love me, a mutual love in a relationship of a mother and very young son. Not young enough to be my grandson, but barely old enough to be a son. He's a wonderful person who has many good traits and a great deal of love, he is still on the road to finding himself, he's only 22. He's cocky, has a mouth that needs to be washed out with soap on occasion, but he's also a gentle soul who will one day find that no matter what he says, God is there for him and will love him in-spite of his stubbornness and I think when he does discover that God does exist, he will be not only humbled, but greatly surprised.