Why do/don't you believe in God?

Damian Mahadevan

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Not this isn't for just the Judian God, it can be any God.

I suppose for me it all started as i was born into a Catholic family. But i at around age fo 15 i had different views of God/gods, I believed that there may be multiple god that control certain elements like fire/wind/water/earth mainly because i am embarrassed to say because i was playing Master Of Magic. Then as time went by i stopped believing in God and believed in evolution as such. For some time after than i tried to commit suicide and fail a lot. The turning point was when I took 60 tablets(30 Panadol and 30 Solian). I started to believe in God again. Then i was found by a Tamil christian pastor that helped me a little. Then I started not going to that church because of so much hypocrisy there. Then after than my cousin who is a pastor found me and i started to go to that church. Soon(one and a half years) if found myself dramatically changed to the point i call it a miracle to myself. And now here i am a commited Christian.
 
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Because I'm not a Fool!! Psalm 14:1 and Psalm 53 :1 :)
 
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Haha. :) But nothing in your life that wavered you or changed your attitude? You've always been a Christian Corwin?
 
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I could cite lots of reasons, I suppose, but in the end it all boils down to feeling. For me, whatever is out there, anything resembling God in the sense that most religions -- Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc. -- talk about isn't there. There is no God-shaped hole in the universe, or inside me, for me.

I had a very religious grandmother, who had a big influence on me when I was a kid. Largely due to her, I grew up with a "default" Protestant Christianity with some what you might say "charismatic" overtones -- an emphasis on the Holy Spirit, a belief in the literal truth of the Bible, what have you. Probably not altogether unlike Corwin's flavor of Christianity, actually.

I was very bookish and very literal-minded as a kid. I read enormous amounts of stuff, fiction and nonfiction. Until the age of 9 or 10 or so I don't think I even attempted to turn it into a coherent whole; I was simultaneously absorbing stuff about dinosaurs and the Big Bang and trilobites and memorizing the geological eras (Precambrian, Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic... gack, I can still reel off a few), while reading Bible stories and absorbing the Old Testament as it's re-told to kids as equally true; it didn't even occur to me that the two timescales didn't match, for example.

But kids grow up. As I did that, being the literal-minded character I was, I had to try to make sense of the whole. I eventually went and read the Bible itself from start to finish, rather than the re-tellings for kids that I had previously read. And I quickly realized that the narrative in the Bible didn't make a lot of sense, while the narrative in those science books did. The Bible resembled those wonderfully exciting Greek myths -- which I knew were fictional -- more than the logically coherent, evidence-based, entirely accessible worldview from the science books. So I quietly filed the Bible under "myths and folklore."

That left God sort of intellectually orphaned, although still emotionally important. To cut a long story short, at roughly the age of 15 or 16 -- perhaps coincidentally around the same developmental time as I was building a separate identity from my parents -- I realized that he just wasn't there anymore. There wasn't any screaming sense of absence or anything; just a realization that God had gone the way of Santa Claus and the Easter bunny. That, actually, was in Nepal, where I had seen a completely different mode of piety from what I was used to -- people conversing with gods on a daily basis, as naturally and unproblematically as they conversed with each other. That may have had something to do with it too.

Since then, I've been doing a quite a lot of studying about various religions and spirituality in general; in that process, I've come across ideas of God that make sense on an emotional and intellectual level and that I can even identify with, to a degree -- the God that is inside that is found in mysticism in just about all religions. I'm no good as a mystic, though, so I don't think my odds of ever actually experiencing God of John Chrysostom or Suhrawardi or Rumi or Buddha are very good. Who knows, though -- anything's possible. :)
 
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Yes Damian and while a voracious reader as a child like PJ, I never lost my faith. Perhaps because I had what I term a personal experience of Him in my life at a young age.
 
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This guy says it funnier than I ever could. The important bit:

George Carlin said:
But I want you to know something, this is sincere, I want you to know, when it comes to believing in God, I really tried. I really, really tried. I tried to believe that there is a God, who created each of us in His own image and likeness, loves us very much, and keeps a close eye on things.

I really tried to believe that, but I gotta tell you, the longer you live, the more you look around, the more you realize, something is fucked up. Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed. Results like these do not belong on the résumé of a Supreme Being. This is the kind of shit you'd expect from an office temp with a bad attitude. And just between you and me, in any decently-run universe, this guy would've been out on his all-powerful ass a long time ago.

And by the way, I say "this guy", because I firmly believe, looking at these results, that if there is a God, it has to be a man. No woman could or would ever fuck things up like this.

So, if there is a God, I think most reasonable people might agree that he's at least incompetent, and maybe, just maybe, doesn't give a shit. Doesn't give a shit, which I admire in a person, and which would explain a lot of these bad results.

Apart from the "really tried" part this is pretty much my view on the Christian (and Muslim and the Judaic) God. For the really tried part it was rather me somewhat interestingly wondering if there was one. Never got a hint that there was, so I figured there wasn't.

Übereil
 
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When I was a christian teenager, I asked myself one important question; If there was a creator, why would he/she be selective? (That is, give priority to a minority of "chosen" people). All the religions claiming that God only cared for them... that didn't fit with the idea of a good god holding everyone equal.

Later I begun reading up on the Bible and pretty soon understanding that the Bible didn't match science, history or archeology, it didn't even match itself.

Much later I realized that if I had discarded those religions, then what reasons did I have to believe in ideas they introduced and they spread? I realized that all attributes I ever associeted with God and all promises, was introduced in my local area by the Bible. Now when I realized that the foundation of Christianity was wrong, I also realized that I had no reason to believe in an afterlife etc, and the idea of a cosmic force beyond our comprehension was actually quite useless since it had nothing to offer to ponder upon that idea.

In hindsight through my studies in social psychology and anthropology I have understood that Christianity is ruled by primitive affections, including egoism, chauvinism, fear and an exploitation of empathy. Unlike PJ I consider the psychological mass to be dangerous.

I also realised that the idea of a creator discards the bible for thousands of reasons, due to the behaviors of characters within. The only conclusion available was that God/Jesus was inspired by and drafted by humans and actually quite immature/childish ones at that.

Psychology also made me understand how so many could have a so anti-biblical image of Jesus in their heads and why they would lock themselves out from examining the religion like I did. I even understood how "God" as an idea work through cognitive psychology.
 
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Since I'm an agnostic - more precisely a weak agnostic, I simply don't know. I don't even know if it's possible to ever know.

If there was a god, I wouldn't expect to understand him/her/it based on human interpretation. So, when people base their beliefs on books or words (even partially) - written or spoken by other human beings - then I simply get confused.

Why would you think of this being as it's being presented by others? I mean, if there is one - isn't it possible that this deity is nothing like what's being described and the numerous rules/systems are just faulty interpretations? That's certainly something I've often wondered about.

As to WHY I'm an agnostic, well, it's very basic. I've never experienced anything that conclusively tells me there must or can't be some kind of being or existence that resembles what you're talking about - a greater power if you will. I don't expect to ever feel certain either.

But I CAN tell you that I wish with all of my heart that there is more than what I've perceived with all of my senses, because if there's nothing more - I think the whole thing sucks pretty hard. But I'll still do what I can manage to do to improve our existence - and hopefully it'll mean something beneficial in the end. But I'm also aware that I could be doing a lot more, and that's something I'm going to have to live with.

Oh, and I'll add that I'm just as open to a god as I am to something like the big bang theory. Actually, the former makes more sense to me than the latter.
 
In hindsight through my studies in social psychology and anthropology I have understood that Christianity is ruled by primitive affections, including egoism, chauvinism, fear and an exploitation of empathy. Unlike PJ I consider the psychological mass to be dangerous.

Probably because it damaged you. OTOH it didn't damage me -- I didn't experience any emotional trauma when leaving Christianity behind, nor do I recall my "child's faith" as something that damaged me either.

Religion certainly has screwed up plenty of people, but then so have many other things -- nationalism, political ideologies, drugs, gambling, extreme sports. I see religion itself -- like the other things I listed -- as morally neutral; it's what people make of it that makes the difference between Soeur Emmanuelle and the Spanish Inquisition.
 
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After being annoyed by some of the sigs here, I created my own one which incidentally answers the topic's question.

When it comes to the "WHY should I believe in God, or that any god exists", the answers never seemed satisfying to me.
 
The God I believe in cannot me measured in *anything* we can imagine or describe - therefore ANY discussion is kind of senseless from my point of view.

Humans are just too limited for that.
 
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The God I believe in cannot me measured in *anything* we can imagine or describe - therefore ANY discussion is kind of senseless from my point of view.

Humans are just too limited for that.

So, you believe in something you can't even imagine or describe?
 
First, some back ground on my family/upbringing: My stepfather was a catholic and my mother was a protestant. They decided to send me to a hard-core southern baptist literalist christian school. I went there from preschool 'till the end of sixth grade. I went to a "default Protestant" for junior high, and a catholic highschool until halfway through my junior year.I had a ... very bad childhood in terms of my home life (when my father would randomly have custody of me) and my school life. I was constantly getting in trouble and getting into fights with other kids. Being the "demon-child" and the "non-believer" tended to make the crazy psychos think they should try and pick fights with me, especially when they out numbered me.

As far back as I can remember (about the time I was in preschool), I never believed in a god. I can't really explain why I never developed this belief - it certainly wasn't for lack of trying on behalf of my parents or my super-crazy baptist school - but I the utter hypocrisy and vileness of the people around me probably made me unwilling to fall in line and believe. This school was basically of the Jerry Falwell school of Christianity. We went to church about three times a week, had to memorize bible verses (I have at one time or another had the entirety of the King James Bible memorized). I remember in one 'sermon' the pastor told us that anyone who went to a psychiatrist was "a faggot and a servant of satan" and would burn in eternal blah blah blah blah.

I was a very weird kid - I loved to read and learn different things and I was extremely skeptical of anything people told me. I think my "lack of belief in a god" turned into "a belief there is no god" around the age of six or so. I remember in our "science" class (and I have to use this term very loosely - it was science in the same way that the Twilight series of novels are literature) my teacher was describing evolution as "saying if you threw up a toaster in the air when it hit the ground it'd be an alligator" and "the universe has to be 6,000 years old because Apollo 11 didn't sink beneath miles of dust when it landed on the Moon". She followed by saying that most scientists have been deluded by their arrogance and are serving evil, and that to prove god's existence all you had to do was to look at how "perfectly" god had designed everyone and everything.

I was sitting around, bored and only half paying attention as per usual, but this got my attention. Even at that young age I looked up, and said "Are you kidding me?" Even at that young age I thought that idea was completely and utterly retarded. I had completely flat feet and I hurt every time I'd go running around on the playground, I had severe allergies and a mild case of asthma. I told my teacher such, and followed up with "if that's your definition of perfect, Mrs. Jensen, then you need to buy a new dictionary." About an hour later as I was leaving the principal's office, smarting from the spanking with a paddle (and I'm not talking a 'light' spanking. The principal probably could have been an NFL linebacker. 6'3 and close to 270 lbs of pure muscle, I'd say) and being forced to pray to god to forgive me for making them hit me I decided that if this is what this whole god thing was all about then sorry, but I have better things to do with my time.

This turned from stubborn refusal to believe/associate with an idea that caused me a lot of grief in my childhood to an actual intellectual understanding that there is no god around the time I became a teenager. Through the wonders of the internet and the library, I was able to learn more about evolution, science, what have you. These pursuits made me realize that, well, the idea of a god is completely unrealistic. Especially the personal god that made everything specifically for you of the Christian faith. Not only is it unrealistic, it's completely arrogant. The whole universe is created specifically for you in mind!

To sum it all up - I don't believe in god because there is no evidence for the existence of a god. I feel completely fine knowing there is no god. I view the universe as a wonderful, great, and beautiful thing, and believing that "some guy made it with magic" would cheapen the whole experience - it's an infantile belief. Science has pretty much consistently proven the "bible creation story" wrong and the Bible itself is so full of contradictions and historical errors that I honestly feel bad for anyone who takes it at face value.

Now, unlike PJ, I do not view religion as morally neutral. I am definitely in the Hitchens camp with this. I think all religion is harmful - it may be more latent in some people/creeds, but the potential for harm is there. Right now the Quakers aren't really screwing anything up for anyone, but they have in the past with their pacifistic creed. I view religion as about six hundred barrels of gasoline sitting next to a few tons of TNT. Sure, I guess it won't harm anyone, at least until some idiot walks by smoking a cigarette and the whole thing goes ka-bloeey.

I think that anything that tells people it's okay to be ignorant of science/reality and to not reason things through for yourself is a harmful ideology and the sooner we're rid of it, the better.
 
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Probably because it damaged you. OTOH it didn't damage me -- I didn't experience any emotional trauma when leaving Christianity behind, nor do I recall my "child's faith" as something that damaged me either.

I have never been a communist, nationalist, nazi, sexist, anarcholibertarian, racist or homophobic. I have also never been a victim of any of those. Yet I oppose them all. I oppose them because I have seen the consequences of such reasoning. I am an idealist who often give up comfort based on what I see is right. I oppose authoritarian, totalitarian and inhuman ideologies based on my core beliefs, which is currently inspired by social liberalism and humanism. That's also the reason why I do not offer ideologies labeled "religion" an automatic free pass.

I oppose some religions because their core teachings carry seeds of harm; chauvinism, exclusivism, intolerance, fighting words, sexism, homophobia etc. I also put a direct link between a zealous tolerance to religions no matter what, to be part of the harm.
Suggesting I oppose all religions because I seek personal revenge is more of an ad hominem attack which you will find it difficult to link.

Religion certainly has screwed up plenty of people, but then so have many other things -- nationalism, political ideologies, drugs, gambling, extreme sports. I see religion itself -- like the other things I listed -- as morally neutral; it's what people make of it that makes the difference between Soeur Emmanuelle and the Spanish Inquisition.

Incidentally I am not a major fan of several of those either. Any movement which in it's core agenda carry seeds of exclusivism and chauvinism at the same time can never be neutral.

And PJ. Is Soeur Emmanuelle;
a) A humanitarian
b) A catholic

There are very good psychological reasons why a human, regardless of background, religion, ideology, ethnicity, would like to dedicate their lives for good. The only difference is that I see the human, you see the religion, and I say they aren't related. In fact, whenever you link religion=good, you are also saying no-religion=bad. Whenever you say catholic=good, you are also saying non-catholic=bad. That line of reason have most certainly screwed up the minds of more people than you know.
 
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JemyM

I'm not suggesting there's anything wrong (at the core) with your beliefs or your position, but it seems to me - very much so, in fact - that you're letting the actions of human beings interfere with the concepts of religion and philosophy.

In my personal opinion, it's a mistake to condemn any ideology because human beings have used it for ill purposes throughout history, or because human beings have interpreted these ideologies in various ways with similar harmful outcomes.

Now, I'm not trying to belittle your point of view - but I've noted a pattern in your posts suggesting that the unfortunate history of our race is guiding your opinion of base concepts, philosophies, or religions.

It's possible that the ideas are sound - but that human nature has interfered with the beneficial outcomes they might each have had.

In short, I suspect your problem is with human nature - and NOT the individual truths, ideas, or thoughts behind any or all of these concepts.
 
There are very good psychological reasons why a human, regardless of background, religion, ideology, ethnicity, would like to dedicate their lives for good. The only difference is that I see the human, you see the religion, and I say they aren't related. In fact, whenever you link religion=good, you are also saying no-religion=bad. Whenever you say catholic=good, you are also saying non-catholic=bad. That line of reason have most certainly screwed up the minds of more people than you know.

This is why I use the concepts of benefit and harm instead.

Since I'm an agnostic, I have no religiously inspired incentive to be morally good - because being morally good implies some kind of objective moral ideal.

Instead, I'm pragmatically inspired to behave in a way that's as beneficial to mankind as possible.

Good and evil are concepts that make no sense to me.

Just a thought ;)
 
Suggesting I oppose all religions because I seek personal revenge is more of an ad hominem attack which you will find it difficult to link.

Are you claiming that your hostility towards religion, Christianity in particular, has nothing to do with your personal experiences? That it's all a product of cool, calm ratiocination? If so, you're seriously in need of some self-examination. "Know thyself," that sort of thing.

The only difference is that I see the human, you see the religion, and I say they aren't related.

Actually, that's exactly what I meant when I said that religions themselves are morally neutral -- they become whatever we make of them.

In fact, whenever you link religion=good, you are also saying no-religion=bad. Whenever you say catholic=good, you are also saying non-catholic=bad. That line of reason have most certainly screwed up the minds of more people than you know.

Why do you believe that religion=good implies no-religion=bad? That doesn't make any more sense to me than claiming that apples=good implies oranges=bad.
 
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As a proper apatheist, I'm obligated to say:

*yawn* Are y'all still nattering on about this? Yadda yadda yadda. Let's get back to fun stuff like calling Obama a Kenyan or defending the UN.

:p
 
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I'm not suggesting there's anything wrong (at the core) with your beliefs or your position, but it seems to me - very much so, in fact - that you're letting the actions of human beings interfere with the concepts of religion and philosophy.
In my personal opinion, it's a mistake to condemn any ideology because human beings have used it for ill purposes throughout history, or because human beings have interpreted these ideologies in various ways with similar harmful outcomes.
Now, I'm not trying to belittle your point of view - but I've noted a pattern in your posts suggesting that the unfortunate history of our race is guiding your opinion of base concepts, philosophies, or religions.
It's possible that the ideas are sound - but that human nature has interfered with the beneficial outcomes they might each have had.
In short, I suspect your problem is with human nature - and NOT the individual truths, ideas, or thoughts behind any or all of these concepts.

But DArtagnan... you cannot do anything with human nature, so why can you suggest that human nature can be a "problem"? Nature simply is what it is. The only real question is what to do, and that's where ideologies and religions come in.

Now, we have plenty of ideas regarding how human life should be organized to maximize the potential result, ideas that are more or less consistent with our current knowledge of humanity. One problem with religions and even the ideologies of the 19th century is that they haven't got the insights we have today, thus they may sound attractive at a first glance, but when you begin to challenge it with stuff like psychology and anthropology (= our understanding of human nature), some of them really go blatantly wrong.

How do we know communism is bad? Well, it's not that human nature is the problem. The real problem is that communism doesn't go well with human nature as it is. Thus communism is a tempting, romantic but lethally dysfunctional system, one that should be warned against, at least one should be well educated about it's result throughout history, so one can identify when and why it go wrong. If we do not use such experiences, we are little more than random animals, doomed to repeat mistakes over and over again. We humans have an unique capacity to learn about our ancestors mistakes, that's the reason we are kings of the animal kingdom (which also gives us great responsibility).

I consider it to be a problem to begin to read John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith, Edmond Burke and Karl Marx to understand the deep political concerns of today, because in our time, their arguments, their greatest topics, are by many ways outdated today. You are better off to jump right into modern ideologies. We have deep, important political questions today that have nothing to do with classes for example. The only thing studying those old ideologies does, is that they make you see things that aren't really there (like "classes"). You have the same problem with studying Freud really, since Freud also make you see things that aren't there, an illusion with great consequences.

To sum up; Some ideas are very tempting to human nature, which is why it's in humanity's best interest to learn why those ideas doesn't work. That's why almost every child learn about Nazism so early on that Godwin's Law is a trained kneejerk reaction. Hitler is the Satan of our time, the villain that show how to not be, where one should never go, where one should begin to question himself if he begins to see signs that he's thinking like him.
 
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