Do you believe in God, in any form? Why or why not?
EDIT:
I just want to know what people believe about God. I understand that at many times God and religion can be separate, but I'm not really looking for a deep philosophical exchange of ideas. This is more of a psychology questionnaire, aimed at tallying yeas versus nays, then reading the reasons for the votes.
I must admit, my purpose was to receive answers like that of SDGundamX; a mere yes or no and then a background of their belief. And if you feel it's too personal, then you shouldn't feel obligated to respond. No pressure here.
But I do enjoy reading your answers, regardless. So thanks to everyone who has responded.
EDIT:
I just want to know what people believe about God. I understand that at many times God and religion can be separate, but I'm not really looking for a deep philosophical exchange of ideas. This is more of a psychology questionnaire, aimed at tallying yeas versus nays, then reading the reasons for the votes.
I must admit, my purpose was to receive answers like that of SDGundamX; a mere yes or no and then a background of their belief. And if you feel it's too personal, then you shouldn't feel obligated to respond. No pressure here.
But I do enjoy reading your answers, regardless. So thanks to everyone who has responded.
I would sure appreciate it if you laid off the religious folks a little bit, and I'll tell you why.
We all know how clever and mighty and wise the collaborative brain can be, that science is designed to divine truth from the physical world through rigorous experiment and deduction. We have seen how technology can bring wrath and rapture beyond the greatest parables of any holy book. We can move mountains and divide seas with our own will and might and it's all grand. We can look at the world around us and declare that there is no need for a God of any kind. There is a reason that God will never disappear, though, and it's in that lump of gray in our heads, the very lump that convinces us that we can be rid of magic men in the sky forever.
At a certain young age, something happens in the human brain that creates gods, and it is a survival adaptation that even Darwin and Dawkins would be proud of. It's best described by the following experiment...
Most young children will say that they will look in box "B" because that's where they know the ball is. At a certain age however, the response changes, and the observer will now say that the puppet will look in box "A", because that's where the puppet left it. It's the ability to look into another's mind and understand the thinking and being that's not their own. This I believe is where gods are born.
It is helpful in predicting which way prey will run when hunting. We apply this potentially but not certainly uniquely human skill to each other as well as to the sky, the stars, the weather and the world around us. It is a fundamental brain activity that has aided us greatly in our survival and proliferation, but there's a catch.
We are afraid when we are alone. We are even worse off when we are unloved. I assure you that just about anyone out in a boat alone in the middle of the Atlantic or deep in the wilderness would start to project a personality on their environment. We're built that way. It's something that many people need to do today, as antiquated as it may seem to many. This imagining of an all knowing and omnipotent being is important to so many because without it, they would have no love or guidance. They would be truly alone and truly terrified. Even in their time of greatest pain and most unfortunate circumstance they can at least know that someone's watching, and that at the end of their troubled lives, they'll have comfort and company.
But you, Internet, want to take that away from these people, and I think that's mean. If we loved each other like we're supposed to, we wouldn't need any goddamn gods.
Respectfully Yours,
Schmawy.
I can sympathize with Schmawy's "lovie dovie" approach; we don't want to tell grandma that the Lord she has worshiped all her life isn't real, but I don't think about religion from a personal perspective, I think about it on a global perspective. On the global scale "feelings" are not very important, but the truth is; truth is derived from analyzing the evidence, not faith.
If we as a society want to survive, we need to shed our infantile "skin" which is religion. Human technological evolution has worked in spite of religion, which in my mind serves to dumb us down and control our actions, not for the betterment of mankind, but for the betterment of itself and its stewards.
(edit: note that this time, I'm not drunk...
My own story: I was a devout Christian for many, many years. Prayed at least 3 times a day, more if I'd felt I'd "sinned" that day. I was convinced God existed and in fact convinced God had personally intervened in my life on several occasions in which I escaped serious injury or death.
Now I'm the exact opposite. I become more convinced every day that there are no "gods." I am most certainly convinced that if an eternal omnipotent being does exist, it isn't the one worshiped by any of the major world religions.
You may wonder what happened to me to change my beliefs. There wasn't some horrible experience or "ah-hah" moment that changed me. Rather, it was a gradual process. I've always been a curious person. The more I learned about the world through traveling it, meeting people from different religions, customs, and backgrounds, the more this little voice in the back of my head started whispering that maybe the things I believed weren't as cut and dried as I originally thought. That started me into investigating things like philosophy, other religions, science, as well as the history of my own religion. And the more I learned, the louder that voice got until finally I couldn't ignore it anymore and had to admit my faith was shaken.
It took a few more years after that before I lost my faith entirely, but to make a long story short, I simply couldn't tolerate the logical inconsistencies in my own religion anymore. For instance, love thy neighbor--except the gay guy because he's going to hell. Religion just seemed so far removed from reality, because the gay people I met weren't Bacchus-worshiping pagans but actually pretty nice people overall.
Anyways, small things such as this gradually collected into a mountain of evidence that caused me to give up on organized religion entirely. However, having been one of the "devout" at one time I totally get how religious folk can overlook all the inconsistencies in their own beliefs and religions. The reason is simple: they just don't want to look very hard. I know I didn't want to look at first. If you had tried to convince me 15 or 20 years ago god didn't exist, you would have found it impossible. I was so sure of myself and so sure of my beliefs that I wasn't willing to look with an open mind at what my beliefs actually were and how little they were based on.
I think Schmawy hit the nail right on the head--religion is and always has been a security blanket for mankind, designed to protect us psychologically from the awful knowledge that bad things can happen at any time for no reason at all and that at the end of this life we face nothing less than total and complete oblivion. In order to escape facing the horror of that reality we will believe in anything--even if it means committing atrocious acts against other human beings in the name of our religion in the process.
Personally I believe we will always have Religion.
All the evidence presented to me indicates that there exists no supernatural being (a god), thus my conclusion is that there is no god. If any evidence has been introduced to other people, I would like to be shown this so that my conclusion can be strengthened or invalidated.
Isn't the meaning of faith precisely that there IS no evidence...
"Evidence" and the metaphysical don't go together, it's beyond experimental verification - most good things are...
There is also the question of just what do you mean by "God"? Are you referring specifically to an Abrahamic God? Any willful/intentional creator entity? Or perhaps something a bit more abstract?
Until fairly recently, I used to view religion in a very similar way as gwiz665 expressed above, i.e., on balance, religion has done a lot more harm in the world than good. But I've come to view religion not as the reason for wars, torture, repression, etc., but rather the excuse. All of those horrendous deeds done in the name of religion over the centuries would have been done in any case, just under a different mantle of authority had religion not been there. In other words, I think it is in the nature of some humans to try to exert control over as many others as possible, and whatever means are at hand will do. Religion just happens to have been particularly useful and convenient, especially in light of some of the other aspects of human nature.
On a side note - while I hate to pimp my own submissions, I think anyone interested in reading and commenting on this thread might find this TED talk really interesting.
>> ^gwiz665:
All the evidence presented to me indicates that there exists no supernatural being (a god), thus my conclusion is that there is no god. If any evidence has been introduced to other people, I would like to be shown this so that my conclusion can be strengthened or invalidated.
Isn't the meaning of faith precisely that there IS no evidence...
"Evidence" and the metaphysical don't go together, it's beyond experimental verification - most good things are...
For example...?
Teapot Agnosticism.
Can you tell us for what purpose you'll use this information? Your own edification, or an indictment of humanity's foibles?
For whatever purpose my answer is Yes. Wtih the caveat that our minds are still too feeble to understand what 'God' is.
*Quality discussion anyway (If I had powerpoints).
>> ^gwiz665:
All the evidence presented to me indicates that there exists no supernatural being (a god), thus my conclusion is that there is no god. If any evidence has been introduced to other people, I would like to be shown this so that my conclusion can be strengthened or invalidated.
Isn't the meaning of faith precisely that there IS no evidence...
"Evidence" and the metaphysical don't go together, it's beyond experimental verification - most good things are...
Then it follows that faith is not equal to truth, because truth is directly based on evidence. I value truth above faith any day. No good things are beyond experimental verification.
I may have obfuscated the terms religion and god above, but my usual attack on religion goes through faith, because I think that is the weak link. Faith in itself is not wicked, just foolish; religion is wicked.
No, some segments and remnants will always survive-some will not, according to their ability to divert attention from themselves.... religion, race-baiting, labels, name-calling and finger--pointing, irrelevant in and of themselves issues (most of which are represented on the VS in the form of personal-pulpit, bandwagonism....) like who said what and is stupid, or bleeding-heart concern for a symptom, and never the root of the problem....
and no shuac, you have been on the planet long enough to realize that reason does not necessarily rule,
and meaning is a whore whose purse is bottomless for some, they simply can't stop making her rent and dressing her in fineries........
Chaos, wonderful, blessed, Chaos is the god of this world-"Verily I say unto you, Today wilt thou be with me in paradise."
nah, just kidding, this is AtheistSift, after all
I was raised Catholic, but in a very lax environment. I went to Sunday school and to church on holidays and that was about it. The whole story always struck me as odd, I remember asking a lot of questions, but I had not discovered skepticism yet so I basically believed whatever I was told.
My mother was frequently very depressed when I was young, to the point of physical illness at times. This caused me a bit of worry as a kid. I remember, on quite a few occasions, asking God to help her. Receiving no response and thinking perhaps I had asked too much, I asked simply for a sign that things would turn out ok. I was just a little kid, 4 or 5 years old, and I was scared and upset.
I wasn't asking for much, just some reassurance, but apparently that was too much to expect from an all-knowing, all-powerful, benevolent God. That was the beginning of my doubts. Somewhere around there I learned that there were other religions out there. In my Sunday school, at least, they made no mention of Jews, Muslims, Hindus or even Christians for that matter. Everything was presented as if it were the only game in town and that everyone accepted it. Discovering otherwise was a significant boost to my doubts.
At the age of 6 I stood in the bathroom, brushing my teeth for bed, and slightly nervously turned to my dad and said something like "I don't think there is a God." He assured me that was fine and that many people don't. He also told me that he didn't either. That was the first I had heard of anyone else who didn't. There was a sense of relief at the time, but it wasn't a big deal otherwise. Now I realize it was probably one of the defining moments of my life.
I assure you that just about anyone out in a boat alone in the middle of the Atlantic or deep in the wilderness would start to project a personality on their environment.
"WILSON!"
If this God is our designer/creator then he's either not omniscient or not omnipotent as any one of hundreds of design flaws can show: cancer, wisdom teeth, the optical nerve, etc. If you believe that these flaws were intentional, then God is not benevolent.
The classic "pain & suffering" argument also applies. If God has the power to stop pain and suffering but doesn't, then he is not benevolent. If he does not have the ability, then he is not omnipotent.
Ray Comfort would tell you that it's because we live in a fallen and corrupt world; that this is Lucifer's influence. An all-powerful, all-knowing, benevolent God would not be challenged by Lucifer. Even if he were unwilling to kill him, certainly this omnipotent, omniscient God would not be foiled by one of his own creations. The negative aspects of our own existence are sometimes chalked up to "free will", but Lucifer was an Archangel and angels are generally not attributed free will. The only explanation for any of this if you believe it is "God fucked up."
There are hundreds, if not thousands of examples such as these that prove there is no benevolent, all-knowing, all-powerful God.
Always get your opponent to define what is meant by god first, before you prove why he is wrong.
@choggie:
You're right and I'm wrong. We don't need to shed religion to survive, that was a poor choice of words, but we need to shed it to evolve, philosophically and technologically. Already now we are being hampered technologically by religion for no good reason (see stem-cell research).
Do I believe that God watches over me and always takes care of me? No.
Do I believe that there's someone who listens when I pray to God that I'm going to survive when someone cuts me off on the road, or when I'm praying to the porcelain God with the stomach flu? No, but I do sincerely hope I'm wrong when I'm doing it.
Do I believe God has a cruel sense of irony about how he makes my life unfold? Absolutely.
Do I believe science and a concept of God are compatible? Hell yes.
Do I believe God wants us to ignore scientific research when it conflicts with the "history" in the bible? No, and I think he laughs at people who think we should ignore our gift of reason for what some other human wrote in a book.
Do I think religious people should be mocked? No, unless they think their religion legitimizes hatred towards others, in which case they can reap what they sow.
Do I think religion is just a parasitic meme floating through the consciousness of humanity? A big, fat, I don't know.
In regards to the claim that there is no evidence of god, do you discount the subjective spiritual experiences of billions of people? It can be hard to take someone at their word when they claim to have had such an experience, especially if one has never had such an experience oneself. But to discount these experiences is akin to the behavioral psychologists in the middle of the 20th century claiming that consciousness doesn't exist - B. F. Skinner being the most famous (?) proponent. Their reasoning was that there is no objectively verifiable way to detect or measure it. And so, despite their very own subjective experience to the contrary, they claimed consciousness was an illusion. Consciousness is not experimentally verifiable, but I'm pretty convinced it's real and a very good thing!
For the rationalists out there - sit down and read some poetry, fall in love, put your life in danger to protect another's, take a day off of work for no particular reason, or do any of the infinite wonderful things which defy reason. You'll be happier for it.
In regards to the claim that there is no evidence of god, do you discount the subjective spiritual experiences of billions of people?
As someone who had one of those subjective spiritual experiences I do indeed completely discount those accounts.
The story:
This happened when I was about 8-years old. I was over my best friend's house and it was about 3 in the afternoon. I suddenly had this strong "feeling" that I needed to go home. It's hard to explain what it felt like. It was simply like this voice in my head saying, "You need to go home NOW." My curfew wasn't until sundown, which in the summer wasn't until about 8PM or so. I just told my friend and his family that I needed to go home and left. They found it extremely odd, because we were actually right in the middle of eating a late lunch and having a good time when I suddenly stood up and left.
I got on my bike and peddled towards home. I rounded the corner just in time to see a police car with lights flashing and sirens blazing screech to a halt in front of my house. I can still remember what it felt like, peddling as hard as I could to get back to my house to find out what had happened.
It turned out that while starting to cook dinner my mom had collapsed without warning in the middle of the kitchen. My dad came home early from work and found her sprawled on the floor and called 911.
To this day, doctors can't explain why my mom collapsed. She was in the hospital for two days of testing--MRI's, cat scans, etc. but they couldn't find a thing wrong with her. And she never had it happen again.
Anyways, after things had settled down I told my parents the story about how I suddenly just had this urge to leave my friend's house. My family was very religious at the time and we all agreed that it must have been God telling me to go home and help my mother. How else could you explain that sudden inexplicable urge to go home at that precise moment?
There is, in fact, a much better explanation than God: coincidence. Years later, thinking about the whole incident, I realized how stupid the God explanation really was. My mom was in no danger--by the time I got the urge to go home my dad had already called 911 and the ambulance was on the way. My family knew I was at my friend's house and had I not come back home before the ambulance arrived they would have just called up my friend's family and asked them to look after me while they went to the hospital. Also, I realized there was a completely mundane and plausible explanation for my sudden urge to go back home--I was tired. I'd been at my friend's house since about 9 in the morning that day. Yeah, we'd had a lot of fun, but I distinctly remember on the bike ride back to my house (before I saw the police cruiser) how relieved I was to be going back home to relax.
However, for years I totally believed the "God" explanation. The story even came out at church and everyone agreed it had to be a miracle. Heck, I wanted it to be God talking to me, communicating with me. That would mean I was a worthy human being. God doesn't talk with just anybody right? And because of all the attention I was getting from my family and church-members, I totally wasn't interested in looking into any other explanations other than God for what I experienced.
So yes. I discount the subjective spiritual experiences of billions of people. I think to some degree we are all delusional--thinking the world revolves around us. I explain their experiences just like I explain mine--an attempt to inject the other-worldly into our mundane existence. We have this need to prove ourselves to be special. What could be more special than communicating with the divine? So to fill the need we imbue ordinary circumstances that we can't explain with the supernatural rather than try to find logical answers. But if we actually examine what happens with an open mind, we will eventually find a rationale answer that does not require a divine entity and that is in fact entirely more plausible.
>> ^bluecliff:
>> ^gwiz665:
All the evidence presented to me indicates that there exists no supernatural being (a god), thus my conclusion is that there is no god. If any evidence has been introduced to other people, I would like to be shown this so that my conclusion can be strengthened or invalidated.
Isn't the meaning of faith precisely that there IS no evidence...
"Evidence" and the metaphysical don't go together, it's beyond experimental verification - most good things are...
For example...?
The fact that you in no way can actually know that other people arent mindless robots. There is no "proof" for consciousness.
(this is a tangled problem, because it depends on you definition of consciousness, but it's a classic example)
This is also a clasical theory, Platos, one of the oldest (in the western tradition)
i quote it from wikkipedia -
"In a notion derived from Plato's dialogue Theaetetus, philosophy has traditionally defined knowledge as justified true belief. The relationship between belief and knowledge is that a belief is knowledge if the belief is true, and if the believer has a justification (reasonable and necessarily plausible assertions/evidence/guidance) for believing it is true."
The presumption is -
you have to actively believe in something to "have" knowledge
otherwise you could theoretically state
that you know something, but that you don't believe in it, which is problematic, to say the least.
I often try to explain my thoughts on a subject to somebody, only to grasp for words and eventually throw my hands up and say, "Nevermind." And yet, my own mind understands what I mean.
So thanks for your answer. I'll chalk it up as neither a yea, nor a nay, but rather as a shrug of the shoulders.
>> ^jonny:
My apologies thinker - I'm doing exactly what you don't want, I know, but I can't help myself. I've somewhat purposefully avoided a yes or no answer, because as I wrote earlier, without knowing what you mean by "God", I can't really answer the question. With respect to a willful/intentional creator entity (particularly one in the image of humans like that espoused by the Abrahamic religions), I'm basically an atheist. But my Catholic upbringing often informs my thoughts on the subject. Beyond that, there is no way I could really describe my belief, because it's not something I tend to think about with words.
The "proof" we have that there IS a consciousness is based on our personal introspective; I know I have a consciousness, because I'm thinking right now; this explanation, however, is unverifiable, as far as I know, and is not really enough to make a claim one way or the other. If I were a philosophical zombie - a being that does exactly what a "real" person would do, but with no "inner life" - I would still act as if I HAD an inner life and thoughts and so on.
It may very well be that there actually is no consciousness as a thing in itself, but only an emergent behavior caused by our brain's different parts, and that we are all philosophical zombies without knowing it.
The point I'm trying to make, is that subjective evidence is not good evidence. Your mind can be tricked very easily, which is why the scientific method involves multiple tests and controlled environments. Uri Geller may SEEM like he can bend spoons with his mind, so the subjective evidence is that he can; in a controlled environment, however, he is a fraud as all "magicians" who claim they aren't making illusions.
I had an experience somewhat like that of SDGundamX, in which I was a believer, but now am not.
I was raised as the type of Christian who believes in Jesus as much as Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, but even after my belief in the latter two was rescinded by my mother, the belief in Jesus persisted. Looking back, I find it odd that the way I learned about Jesus and Santa was equal, yet it was easy for my mother to throw away one, but never let go of the other.
So I spent the greater part of youth pretending to believe in Jesus, even though the actual thought of his reality never crossed my mind, except when my mother warned me about the rapture, then promptly forgot to tell me she was going to the grocery store early one Saturday morning. I woke to find the only other person in the house had "vanished," and I thought I was doomed to hell for eternity.
When I was 17, I went to a revival with my church youth group, mainly because it was in Florida and I wanted to see the ocean and hot girls in skimpy bikinis. Little did I realize that by the end of the trip, I'd be "born again." I never did get to see girls in skimpy bikinis. What a shame.
For the next three years I went to church eight times a week, not realizing for a second that it was mainly for the unity and peer acceptance.
The interesting part of my conversion was when I decided to become a preacher. I realized one day that I had never really read the Bible much, and that was the vital first step in preaching to people. Obviously you can't preach the word without reading it, right?
So I read the entire Bible in a few months. And you know what? It changed me. But not like I expected.
It's funny to tell people the reason I lost my faith was because I read the Bible, but it's true.
I read the stories that made no sense, and I read the stories that were just plain disgusting. And it bothered me. It bothered me because a holy book should be holier than this, and it bothered me because my faith was being tested.
As I was walking through a bookstore one day I noticed a philosophy book by Descartes, and I picked it up. The first part said that anything you believe is only a reflection of what you've been taught, so in the spirit of "Cogito ergo sum," everybody should start to doubt everything they've ever been taught, and start over on their own.
So I did that.
I started by analyzing the aspects of Christianity that didn't seem right to me.
I stopped believing in hell because it didn't make sense for a loving god to create a place to send people who simply didn't believe in him.
I stopped believing in prayer, because God's will precludes any need for it.
And little by little, I lost all my faith in god.
Through the past eight years I've changed my mind a lot, going through all types of beliefs, and I don't think I'll ever have a concrete idea of anything beyond the physical realm. But that's okay, because I know why I see the world in this light, and I've realized that nobody really needs to know everything, anyway. There could be a god, but there are so many questions relating to the identity and traits of said being that, it's impossible to understand the concept in an objective way.
So yeah, that was long-winded.
So I guess my answer is:
No, but how the hell would I know?
^The Philosophical Zombie argument, which you've described, bluecliff, is an old philosophical classic. There's a difference between "can't know" and "don't know". There are many theories as to consciousness, but how to find out which is right and wrong is pretty difficult. Daniel Dennett's heterophenomenology seems to be the best way forward, because it covers all the bases we have available at this point in time, the multiple drafts theory is in my mind the best explanation to date about consciousness, but there's no "hard evidence" to point in any direction.
The "proof" we have that there IS a consciousness is based on our personal introspective; I know I have a consciousness, because I'm thinking right now; this explanation, however, is unverifiable, as far as I know, and is not really enough to make a claim one way or the other. If I were a philosophical zombie - a being that does exactly what a "real" person would do, but with no "inner life" - I would still act as if I HAD an inner life and thoughts and so on.
It may very well be that there actually is no consciousness as a thing in itself, but only an emergent behavior caused by our brain's different parts, and that we are all philosophical zombies without knowing it.
The point I'm trying to make, is that subjective evidence is not good evidence. Your mind can be tricked very easily, which is why the scientific method involves multiple tests and controlled environments. Uri Geller may SEEM like he can bend spoons with his mind, so the subjective evidence is that he can; in a controlled environment, however, he is a fraud as all "magicians" who claim they aren't making illusions.
Yes but you said you needed evidence...
What I was trying to point out is that there is no evidence for many such matters, and that "belief" is, in a way, part of "knowing".
You still have to believe in the evidence, and you can never remove the subjective part of knowledge
... and even if you could, it would, in my mind, be actually detrimental to the knowledge we have
(also, the problem I see with - emergent behavior, is the problem of - who observes the behavior, and what exactly, makes this behavior "emergent")
When it all comes down to it, I'm not sure there is such a thing as consciousness; it could be that we think we have a consciousness, but it's actually an illusion. As far as I know, there have only been theories about this and no real "hard" evidence of it. That doesn't mean that there can't be evidence of it ever, though. There is no strong evidence for a consciousness apart from the subjective introspective view we all have. I can assume that there is a consciousness, and this is what I believe. Do note that belief and faith are not the same thing.
Whether we accept the evidence (believe in it) or not doesn't really change its validity. I can say I don't believe in gravity, but that won't make me fly all of a sudden. The very fact that we don't fly is continually supporting evidence of the theory of gravity.*
Emergence can be discussed far more (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence) but my (ahem) belief is that consciousness is an example of strong emergence, which is sort of like a synergy effect where we are more than the sum of our parts. A virtual machine running on our biological hardware, if you will.
*That gravity is a much more strange force than Newtonian physics is another matter.
http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/154259/
im a devout catholic, go to church every sunday, i always start my prayers by thanking God for the good things that have happened, and asking for the strength to solve some of the not-so-good things. i guess what i'm saying is, my answer is yes. this beautiful thing called the interbutts made me think wonder about the existence of God several times, but every time i do, i get scared that God will be pissed, so i guess that means i still believe.
having said that, i was talking to my mother about how she would react if i became an atheist, and she very calmly said that she would still accept me. she then told me her reason to believe, which i never forgot:
"If there was no God, there would be no reason for the world to be as beautiful as it is. trees wouldnt need to be green, flowers wouldnt be bright colors, the sky wouldnt be blue, or in some cases, red at the sunset. thunderstorms wouldnt be calming, rain wouldnt be cleansing. God just made them that way."