The God Thread

Making a new religion thread because Saikou's isded.

Do you believe in God? Do you believe a higher power? Why?

I'm an atheist for quite a few reasons, the most prominent being that God cannot be tested, cannot be contained and can't even be theorized. While many folk of the faith praise this to be because God is too big to understand, I think that alone proves that something does not exist, let alone throwing that we are on a fast track to explaining everything around us without the need of interference of a higher power.

The best response I've gotten is simply "How do you explain the wind?", which only increases my disdain as people like this seem to not understand how the atmosphere works and pretty much adds to the stigma that religious folk are rather uneducated.

So yeah, I suppose this is the part where we sling things at each other.

Personally, this depends on who is asking. In this case, I'd have to say that I don't particularly care whether the human race was created by some sort of higher being (heheh, higher...) but if it's any of my religious friends, I have to say that I'm not really fixed to any beliefs. They're the same answers more or less, but I feel inclined to treat them differently to, say, a very close friend.

8 days later

Wow.. and I thought I had it rough. Hugs CompaIsMyWaifu
I'm agnostic. Or athiest. Or norse/taoist, not sure. I like the norse mythos though. But I guess in all actuality I'm athiest.

So to the above questions:

  1. No.
  2. To some degree.
  3. Because even though wind is created by the atmosphere and the earth was created by... time, and... stuff, the time and stuff, and, you know.. Had to come from somewhere. Where? No fucking clue.

I can not belive in it. I wish I could though. Would give life purpose.

Aoz wrote

I can not belive in it. I wish I could though. Would give life purpose.

I find purpose in the little things that most people wouldn't appreciate - enjoying a sunrise, complimenting a stranger, donating spare change to the homeless. Things that basically remind you that you, and the people around you, are human.

I was born Catholic, see myself as agnostic. I can see why people would and wouldn't want to adopt religion into their life, and I can respect both sides so long as one doesn't force itself into another. My family expects me to attend Sunday mass every week and volunteer at my church, but I live my life the way I want to: as a good person to do good things when I can.

I myself am a choirboy. You could even call me an acolyte judging by the time I've spent 'serving'. The thing is, I don't really believe in God. I'm some sort of agnostic, who needs to be proven that God does exist to actually believe it. I just find it really odd that people in this day and age are so fixated on the 'higher being'. We're no longer uneducated, unskilled beings, that praised fire because it gave them light and warmth. We know all sorts of things, we can tell where something came from, how it was created or what caused it (for example, wind is created by differences in the pressure on different heights in the atmosphere, causing air to move in bulk, being subject also to the Coriolis effect). We are not omnipotent and don't know everything, but the way things go now, I believe everything that goes on around us will get a scientific explanation. Unless some sort of miracle occurs and Christ does come back to judge us all. Very unlikely, but the chance still exists... at least according to the Catholic Church.

Hell, I'm not even sure if me being an agnostic is caused by my own self or rather shaped by the country. You see, I live in Poland, the democratic country where for the past 20 years the ruling party has given church unlimited space for growth and real importance to the country. The church holidays are seen as something unmissable by all means, a significant margin of the money the government gets from people goes to the church and renovations of said places. So yeah, I'm not sure if my state of mind is shaped by myself or rather caused by some natural resistance to what everyone else believes.

Lokorfi

VyraLove wrote

Wow.. and I thought I had it rough. Hugs CompaIsMyWaifu
I'm agnostic. Or athiest. Or norse/taoist, not sure. I like the norse mythos though. But I guess in all actuality I'm athiest.

So to the above questions:

  1. No.
  2. To some degree.
  3. Because even though wind is created by the atmosphere and the earth was created by... time, and... stuff, the time and stuff, and, you know.. Had to come from somewhere. Where? No fucking clue.

Jeez, I've never really thought about it that much, but how did time start existing? Is it just an ancient concept? Maybe it's not even real?!

UGHH

Time is a concept made by a human and if we were to disappear as a species, so would time. It's a hard thing to wrap your head around, but yes, time is not real and simply how we measure things. Every way you use time is a form of measurement and even the concept of stasis is a measurement. Time didn't come from anywhere.

When you start to question the more fundamental constructs of how we function and think, religion or no, things start to get pretty dicey.

mis wrote
Aoz wrote

I can not belive in it. I wish I could though. Would give life purpose.

I find purpose in the little things that most people wouldn't appreciate - enjoying a sunrise, complimenting a stranger, donating spare change to the homeless. Things that basically remind you that you, and the people around you, are human.

I was born Catholic, see myself as agnostic. I can see why people would and wouldn't want to adopt religion into their life, and I can respect both sides so long as one doesn't force itself into another. My family expects me to attend Sunday mass every week and volunteer at my church, but I live my life the way I want to: as a good person to do good things when I can.

Just to extract a little something from your statement being completely aware that's not what you meant:

The biggest thing I take issue with in religious thoughts is that they are the only ones who possess and created moral cores. Blah.
Otherwise, yes. Leave me alone and I'll leave it alone.

Nanashi wrote

I myself am a choirboy. You could even call me an acolyte judging by the time I've spent 'serving'. The thing is, I don't really believe in God. I'm some sort of agnostic, who needs to be proven that God does exist to actually believe it. I just find it really odd that people in this day and age are so fixated on the 'higher being'. We're no longer uneducated, unskilled beings, that praised fire because it gave them light and warmth. We know all sorts of things, we can tell where something came from, how it was created or what caused it (for example, wind is created by differences in the pressure on different heights in the atmosphere, causing air to move in bulk, being subject also to the Coriolis effect). We are not omnipotent and don't know everything, but the way things go now, I believe everything that goes on around us will get a scientific explanation. Unless some sort of miracle occurs and Christ does come back to judge us all. Very unlikely, but the chance still exists... at least according to the Catholic Church.

Hell, I'm not even sure if me being an agnostic is caused by my own self or rather shaped by the country. You see, I live in Poland, the democratic country where for the past 20 years the ruling party has given church unlimited space for growth and real importance to the country. The church holidays are seen as something unmissable by all means, a significant margin of the money the government gets from people goes to the church and renovations of said places. So yeah, I'm not sure if my state of mind is shaped by myself or rather caused by some natural resistance to what everyone else believes.

I tend to despise when religion has a significant or any hand, really, in government since that's when it starts to interfere with people's lives, whether or not they believe. To make matters worse it may be a foundation for a person who is being raised within said country and should they have conflicting beliefs end up confused whether or not their 'compromise' is their real decision or a heavy influence. The brain is a tricky thing like that.

It seems we want to believe in God because we start seeing patterns in nature, we begin to think things were put there for us to use. Though if that were true we would have far more access to hydroelectricity or some such earlier, no?

I find, and feel free to correct me, that the 'non-believer' train of thought is that things were there and we turned those things into resources.

The 'believer' train of thought (primarily the Christian one, if I may be so bold) things that those thing spawned as resources all along, ignoring that we had to purify or modify many a thing to even be able to give it any use, meaning it was not a resource before.

Blah, might go on a tangent, but my little tidbits.

Time as a measurement was man made, yes. I know that.
But... if we as a species go away, time does not go away. Just the label.
Plants will still grow. Animals will still grow and breed and do things.

It's not like... things freeze when we go away. That's what I mean. Where did it come from?

Waifu wrote

I tend to despise when religion has a significant or any hand, really, in government since that's when it starts to interfere with people's lives, whether or not they believe. To make matters worse it may be a foundation for a person who is being raised within said country and should they have conflicting beliefs end up confused whether or not their 'compromise' is their real decision or a heavy influence. The brain is a tricky thing like that.

It seems we want to believe in God because we start seeing patterns in nature, we begin to think things were put there for us to use. Though if that were true we would have far more access to hydroelectricity or some such earlier, no?

I find, and feel free to correct me, that the 'non-believer' train of thought is that things were there and we turned those things into resources.

The 'believer' train of thought (primarily the Christian one, if I may be so bold) things that those thing spawned as resources all along, ignoring that we had to purify or modify many a thing to even be able to give it any use, meaning it was not a resource before.

Blah, might go on a tangent, but my little tidbits.

Well, I just tend to laugh it off in most cases. On one hand, the church is said to willingly 'give us the choice' whether we want to praise the God/Jesus/Holy Spirit, Buddha, Allah or any other deity at hand. On the other hand, it tells the parents to raise their children in faith and belief. So that's one factor that already sits within your head from the very start.

As for that... I've been told that people believe in God because they want something to have faith in. They live cause they have faith in tomorrow, faith that the better day will come whenever they're down, things like that. In reality, though, church has turned this primal instinct of people into a weapon, a weapon to drive them to church and be the 'blind followers', regardless their opinions.

Train of thought... it's more like, everyone believes in what they want to believe. In my opinion the whole 'god has given us resources' is bullshit. We have habitated the Earth for long, long milleniums. And we gradually found more and more use in what we found. We couldn't use trees to produce wood at first, but now we can. We couldn't mix the elements to create new substances, medicines and things like that, but now we can. It's all a matter of how long have we been exposed to the world around us, how much we've learned from it and how much we have adapted to it. Adapted. If we couldn't adapt to the surroundings, what good would it do? Would god give us the wood, the wheels or medicines just like that, cause we would be so stupid as to not know how to make them ourselves? Nope. We'd just die out, or at best, live like apes.

mis wrote

I find purpose in the little things that most people wouldn't appreciate - enjoying a sunrise, complimenting a stranger, donating spare change to the homeless. Things that basically remind you that you, and the people around you, are human.

I was born Catholic, see myself as agnostic. I can see why people would and wouldn't want to adopt religion into their life, and I can respect both sides so long as one doesn't force itself into another. My family expects me to attend Sunday mass every week and volunteer at my church, but I live my life the way I want to: as a good person to do good things when I can.

The "find purpose in little things" bit sounds like straight out of a self help book, but I agree with that life philosophy and try to apply it.

In terms of beliefs, I'm an agnostic because it's the least logically fallacious answer to the question "is there a God/Circle of Deitys, etc." I don't mean this as in "oh I own the maximum logic and you're all dumb for believing or not believing", I mean it as in we don't have any clue at all, so I won't pretend I do and I won't really try to guess.

I do believe some stuff with fair conviction (shooting myself in the foot, kinda, but hey). I think the existance or inexistance of a higher power to be irrelevant. If God exists or doesn't exist, well, the world will tick on all the same, no? I also believe we're all equal on death. I don't know if we cease to exist, go to a higher plane, or whatever, but we all go to the same place in my set of beliefs.

Regarding purpose, I don't see the problem with not having any higher cosmic purpose and shit. I just plan on enjoying life and doing cool things while it lasts. Eventually I'll be dead and so will all my friends and family and everything I've done (unless we can upload minds before I die and shit) but I don't care, because that's not relevant to me at all.

Also, about time. Time is a thing (after all, spacetime are together) but it doesn't really flow at our speed. It's kind of how movement is a thing. Yeah, things move, but they can move as quickly or as slowly as possible. Kind of a weird way to put it, I guess.

I guess in short, I don't care if people believe in God or whatever as long as they don't stall/fuck with scientific developments (the fact that creationism is still a thing makes me want to punch a bear) or human rights (gay marriage and the sort).

That was pretty long :o

VyraLove wrote

Time as a measurement was man made, yes. I know that.
But... if we as a species go away, time does not go away. Just the label.
Plants will still grow. Animals will still grow and breed and do things.

It's not like... things freeze when we go away. That's what I mean. Where did it come from?

Time is our measurement and that's it.

What exactly we're measuring is a foundation of our dimension and completely insane to even explain, at least for me. Fact is, it just seems like something beyond our comprehension and, without meaning any offense, the question "Where does time come from?" is malformed off the bat.

Waifu wrote
VyraLove wrote

Time as a measurement was man made, yes. I know that.
But... if we as a species go away, time does not go away. Just the label.
Plants will still grow. Animals will still grow and breed and do things.

It's not like... things freeze when we go away. That's what I mean. Where did it come from?

Time is our measurement and that's it.

What exactly we're measuring is a foundation of our dimension and completely insane to even explain, at least for me. Fact is, it just seems like something beyond our comprehension and, without meaning any offense, the question "Where does time come from?" is malformed off the bat.

Time is pretty funky and sometimes hard to get. Our measurement of time is made up. Time isn't quite made up, since particles decay through time and, well, everything moving at less than the speed of light is falling through time to everything else at the speed of light. It's a bit hard to explain ._.

I agree with what you think of the question, though.

2 months later

10335

A lot of religion can be compared to what's called "chaos magic". It's a type of self-mapping of consiousness that is passed down. To people who understand it (in 'chaos magic' form or any sort of religion) it seems real because it is the real structure of the mind. The exact notation is just metaphor.
edit:
link

I despise religion in general. I don't want to be a part of any religion. Christianity or Catholicism especially. Think about this, back in the days when Christianity first started being developed, people didn't have the knowledge or the creativity of building nice houses, farming or gathering water to drink. The first person who heard the words of "god" or "Jesus" had to be seeing and hearing things, why? He must not have had much to eat or drink. I don't know how it spread to be so big but that guy right there, caused all of this shit about religion. I forgot what it's called, but there are some "powers" in this life that could guide you and tell you things. But it's definitely not religion. Ever done something that has been out of your control? That's what I'm talking about right there. To me, religion is a bunch of bull. There's a ton of theories on how Christianity works, but there isn't any proof in God himself. We do have diseases, illnesses and unexplained powers that do guide us to how we work, but could that be considered "God", did you wake up because of him, no you woke up because your brain refreshed.
Christianity is slowly dying down, people supporting homosexuality are not christians at all, it is against the rules of "God" to be homosexual, yet these people call themselves Christians. It's actually only a matter of time before religion itself is completely gone, and that's the time where we can support ourselves and not hang on to false hope.

TL;DR: God is a bunch of bullshit, so is religion, don't be guided by false hope.

I don't believe in god, however I don't outright believe there is no god either. I doubt there is a god, but the way I see it, is that there's no way to be sure regardless, so, to me at least, I don't see any reason to keep thinking about something I can never know a clear answer too.

If god didn't exist, why do us men have a G-Spot? That's right, it was the divine addition of my great intellect.

I don't believe that we have the expertise required to perceive whether or not there is a god. tl;dr I basically feel the same way as Uzinero does.

tn5421 wrote

I don't believe that we have the expertise required to perceive whether or not there is a god.  tl;dr I basically feel the same way as Uzinero does.

If you get down into assertions and assumptions assuming god does not exist is not the same as asserting god does not exist. Asserting either way takes evidence.

5 days later
Red wrote

I'm a catholic.
Why? Well, it's quite a long story.

But take a look at Rt. Rev. Robert Barron's videos, he clears up a lot of misconceptions.
And there's a wealth of literature on the topic (such as the Summa Theologica (PDF), which is very good for beginners).
Personally I found kierkegaard's fear and trembling particularly captivating.

In any case, if somebody has a particular gripe with Christianity (or even with catholicism specifically) I'd be happy to discuss it.

I was born a Catholic and raised in a strong religious household, had to attend Sunday mass, and even went to Sunday school up until high school.

I'm pretty happy with the progressive changes that we as a religion have made, mostly in that we become more tolerant of others and it's less about redemption and more about saving.

What would you have to say to someone who still wants to believe in a higher power, but not in the faith of it? It's pretty hard to keep faith when all you really have to rely on is yourself in the world, yet preachers and followers say to you every single day to "believe in God's work" or "God has a plan for everyone". When you hear about the stuff that happens every day in the world, from disease to conflict, I find myself questioning what this "plan" is for people staring down the barrel of a gun or having their bodies literally torn apart from the inside. Some people live lives without worry, while others fear if they can even survive the day. In other words, why is he so unfair?