Why do/don't you believe in god?

[KAMP_KAOS]

Atheism is a Religion & Not Collecting Stamps is a Hobby! Atheist are the ones Attacking, But it's a Church on Every Corner or some Idiot saying they Believe with no Evidence & Forcing Everyone Else to Just Accept it!. The Goofy Shit Christians say about Feeling Empty Inside after they can't Defend they Position is meant to throw people Off the Trail of they Bullshit. The People who Make Laws that Affect all our Lives Believing in Some Bullshit is Scary to me & They Beliefs Should be Questioned & Challenged at all Times!

 

[alissowack]

Atheism is a Religion & Not Collecting Stamps is a Hobby! Atheist are the ones Attacking, But it's a Church on Every Corner or some Idiot saying they Believe with no Evidence & Forcing Everyone Else to Just Accept it!. The Goofy Shit Christians say about Feeling Empty Inside after they can't Defend they Position is meant to throw people Off the Trail of they Bullshit. The People who Make Laws that Affect all our Lives Believing in Some Bullshit is Scary to me & They Beliefs Should be Questioned & Challenged at all Times!

...and atheism can't be questioned and challenged at all times? There is the impression that because atheism has this "passive" approach at the non-existence of God, that it doesn't affect perspectives on how people live their lives. To say that God doesn't exist has a lot more weight to it than what it suggest.

 

[maestro_lungs]

Atheism is a Religion & Not Collecting Stamps is a Hobby! Atheist are the ones Attacking, But it's a Church on Every Corner or some Idiot saying they Believe with no Evidence & Forcing Everyone Else to Just Accept it!. The Goofy Shit Christians say about Feeling Empty Inside after they can't Defend they Position is meant to throw people Off the Trail of they Bullshit. The People who Make Laws that Affect all our Lives Believing in Some Bullshit is Scary to me & They Beliefs Should be Questioned & Challenged at all Times!

...and atheism can't be questioned and challenged at all times? There is the impression that because atheism has this "passive" approach at the non-existence of God, that it doesn't affect perspectives on how people live their lives. To say that God doesn't exist has a lot more weight to it than what it suggest.

Everything Should be Questioned & Challenged at Every Time & I Think Atheist do that All the Time. There is not a Atheist on the Planet who's Mind Can't Change if EVIDENCE is Presented, If not Then it'd a be a Faith! We Take this Passive Approach to There Being No God the Same as We take the Passive Approach to there's no Smurfs, It Holds no Weight! There are Countries where Atheism Leads. They Haven't Descended in Doom & Despair. In Fact They Doing Better than us! God Didn't invent Humans & Morality , Humans & Morality invented God

 

[VoluptiousVirgo6]

I have a personal relationship with God. It was something that I decided and I believe. God has been good and his grace and mercy has been proven in my life over n over again. I don't know what others do but I give God all praise If you doubt him..try him

 

[alissowack]

Atheism is a Religion & Not Collecting Stamps is a Hobby! Atheist are the ones Attacking, But it's a Church on Every Corner or some Idiot saying they Believe with no Evidence & Forcing Everyone Else to Just Accept it!. The Goofy Shit Christians say about Feeling Empty Inside after they can't Defend they Position is meant to throw people Off the Trail of they Bullshit. The People who Make Laws that Affect all our Lives Believing in Some Bullshit is Scary to me & They Beliefs Should be Questioned & Challenged at all Times!

...and atheism can't be questioned and challenged at all times? There is the impression that because atheism has this "passive" approach at the non-existence of God, that it doesn't affect perspectives on how people live their lives. To say that God doesn't exist has a lot more weight to it than what it suggest.

Everything Should be Questioned & Challenged at Every Time & I Think Atheist do that All the Time. There is not a Atheist on the Planet who's Mind Can't Change if EVIDENCE is Presented, If not Then it'd a be a Faith! We Take this Passive Approach to There Being No God the Same as We take the Passive Approach to there's no Smurfs, It Holds no Weight! There are Countries where Atheism Leads. They Haven't Descended in Doom & Despair. In Fact They Doing Better than us! God Didn't invent Humans & Morality , Humans & Morality invented God

Evidence may change the mind, but it is not going to change the heart. Atheism suggests a "non-commitment" to the evidence; that you don't have to feel a certain way about the evidence. In the discovery of evidence, you don't have to think about what it means in respect to who you are, what is your purpose, and where you are going. People may know the universe exist, but they could care less if doesn't affect what they do with their lives. Things that destroy the world isn't going to stop someone who loves partaking in things that implicitly does so.

 

[maestro_lungs]

The Mind is What Guides you in Life or Pose to & There are Times When that Can Fail You, The Heart is not a Reliable Guide.. Our hearts and our minds can’t automatically be trusted.

As vivid as the experience of our hearts and minds can feel, if we’re going to treat it as evidence in support of a hypothesis, we can’t give it any more weight than we would anyone else’s experience. Intuition is important, but it’s notoriously unreliable and subject to bias. We have to step back from it, and view it like we’d view anyone else’s experience. And when we look at human experience in general, we see that our hearts and minds can’t automatically be trusted. That's Why Evidence is Important in These Matters, Instead of Believing Any Old Thing Cause You Feel it in your Heart that it Gives you purpose can be dangerous Our hearts and our minds can’t automatically be trusted.

That’s the whole point of the scientific method: it’s a method of verifying our physical perceptions of the world, and seeing if those perceptions can be replicated, and testing whether our interpretation of them is likely to be right.

All of which strongly suggests that, even if our interpretation of our physical perceptions is flawed, there is a real entity with real existence that we’re perceiving.

And that conspicuously does not work for religious experiences. There is no consistent way to induce a perception of Jesus in all people, or even in most people. Religious experiences are un-measurable, un-replicable, un-verifiable. Everyone who has them has them in different ways; there’s no way to consistently generate them; many people don’t have them at all. And attempts to verify religious experiences using rigorous, double-blind, placebo- controlled scientific methods have universally failed across the board.

 

[alissowack]

The Mind is What Guides you in Life or Pose to & There are Times When that Can Fail You, The Heart is not a Reliable Guide.. Our hearts and our minds can’t automatically be trusted.

As vivid as the experience of our hearts and minds can feel, if we’re going to treat it as evidence in support of a hypothesis, we can’t give it any more weight than we would anyone else’s experience. Intuition is important, but it’s notoriously unreliable and subject to bias. We have to step back from it, and view it like we’d view anyone else’s experience. And when we look at human experience in general, we see that our hearts and minds can’t automatically be trusted. That's Why Evidence is Important in These Matters, Instead of Believing Any Old Thing Cause You Feel it in your Heart that it Gives you purpose can be dangerous Our hearts and our minds can’t automatically be trusted.

That’s the whole point of the scientific method: it’s a method of verifying our physical perceptions of the world, and seeing if those perceptions can be replicated, and testing whether our interpretation of them is likely to be right.

All of which strongly suggests that, even if our interpretation of our physical perceptions is flawed, there is a real entity with real existence that we’re perceiving.

And that conspicuously does not work for religious experiences. There is no consistent way to induce a perception of Jesus in all people, or even in most people. Religious experiences are un-measurable, un-replicable, un-verifiable. Everyone who has them has them in different ways; there’s no way to consistently generate them; many people don’t have them at all. And attempts to verify religious experiences using rigorous, double-blind, placebo- controlled scientific methods have universally failed across the board.

You brought up that our hearts and minds can't be trusted, yet it is the heart and mind that is responsible for why science exists. It took intelligent thinking and a passion to pursue it. If our hearts and minds can't be trusted, then why should we trust science? It is a byproduct of what we created.

You make some valid points, but at the end of the day, just like religion, you have to go out into the world and deal with the happenings of the world and answer for the struggles of life. You will lose trust and respect if you treat people as a science project or "unholy".

 

[maestro_lungs]

I'm Skip out on the Mumble Jumble of Why Science Exist & Just say Science Continues to Exist Because of The Scienctific Method & We Trust it, Cause The Evidence is Reviewed Over & Over. Not Because of Our Feelings which Betray us Time & Time Again. I Can give you Many Reasons to Trust Science as Opposed to Religion, But It's Not The same Kind of Trust as Being Faithfully Blind to a Religion, Cause Things can Change. The human mind is very, very far from perfect.

The human mind is an amazing instrument… but it’s a strikingly flawed instrument, loaded with biases and cognitive errors. The human mind did not evolve to perceive and process information 100% accurately. The human mind evolved to find food and escape from predators. Many of our cognitive errors are important and useful in helping us function (or they were 100,000 years ago on the African savannah when we were hunting gazelles and escaping from tigers)… but they make our minds not entirely trustworthy as sources of information.

And even taking these cognitive errors into account, the mind doesn’t always operate as it should. You don’t have to be mentally ill, or even on drugs, to have weird experiences of things that aren’t there. It’s not that hard to alter our consciousness. Exhaustion, stress, distraction, trance-like repetition, optical illusion, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, sensory overload… any of these, and more, can create vivid “perceptions” that are entirely disconnected from external reality. You can’t say, “I had an intense personal experience of God — therefore God exists.” You have to say, “That’s interesting. Person X (insert your name here) had an intense personal experience of God. What’s the most plausible explanation for this? Is there any corroborating evidence for this being an accurate perception of a real god? Are other people’s experiences of God consistent with this one? Does this experience too conveniently dovetail with this person’s biases and expectations? Is there a better explanation than a real perception of a deity? Is it more likely to have been a psychological glitch in this person’s brain function?” You can’t treat yourself as a special snowflake. As vivid as your own experiences may feel to you, you can’t give them any more weight than you would anyone else’s experiences.

The Mind is What Guides you in Life or Pose to & There are Times When that Can Fail You, The Heart is not a Reliable Guide.. Our hearts and our minds can’t automatically be trusted.

As vivid as the experience of our hearts and minds can feel, if we’re going to treat it as evidence in support of a hypothesis, we can’t give it any more weight than we would anyone else’s experience. Intuition is important, but it’s notoriously unreliable and subject to bias. We have to step back from it, and view it like we’d view anyone else’s experience. And when we look at human experience in general, we see that our hearts and minds can’t automatically be trusted. That's Why Evidence is Important in These Matters, Instead of Believing Any Old Thing Cause You Feel it in your Heart that it Gives you purpose can be dangerous Our hearts and our minds can’t automatically be trusted.

That’s the whole point of the scientific method: it’s a method of verifying our physical perceptions of the world, and seeing if those perceptions can be replicated, and testing whether our interpretation of them is likely to be right.

All of which strongly suggests that, even if our interpretation of our physical perceptions is flawed, there is a real entity with real existence that we’re perceiving.

And that conspicuously does not work for religious experiences. There is no consistent way to induce a perception of Jesus in all people, or even in most people. Religious experiences are un-measurable, un-replicable, un-verifiable. Everyone who has them has them in different ways; there’s no way to consistently generate them; many people don’t have them at all. And attempts to verify religious experiences using rigorous, double-blind, placebo- controlled scientific methods have universally failed across the board.

You brought up that our hearts and minds can't be trusted, yet it is the heart and mind that is responsible for why science exists. It took intelligent thinking and a passion to pursue it. If our hearts and minds can't be trusted, then why should we trust science? It is a byproduct of what we created.

You make some valid points, but at the end of the day, just like religion, you have to go out into the world and deal with the happenings of the world and answer for the struggles of life. You will lose trust and respect if you treat people as a science project or "unholy".

 

[judahxulu]

again...criticism of christianity does not = debunking God

i see a bunch of elaborate points made from basic errant concepts

 

[maestro_lungs]

again...criticism of christianity does not = debunking God

i see a bunch of elaborate points made from basic errant concepts

What Criticism of Christianity Sir? I was Talking About The Deity called God. I Said Nothing about The Holy Trinity or the Followers of Jesus. I'm Talking About Belief & How the Brain & Heart are not the Most Reliable Tool as Proof of Anything, Much Less a God!

 

[judahxulu]

again...criticism of christianity does not = debunking God

i see a bunch of elaborate points made from basic errant concepts

What Criticism of Christianity Sir? I was Talking About The Deity called God. I Said Nothing about The Holy Trinity or the Followers of Jesus. I'm Talking About Belief & How the Brain & Heart are not the Most Reliable Tool as Proof of Anything, Much Less a God!

how you describe this god is only as christians understand it. the attributes, characteristics etc..its all grco roman christian

 

[maestro_lungs]

this is god as described by christians, jews & muslims, which is based on the gods who came before them. It's also the way the majority of people view god! Now if You Have Your Approach I Applaud You, But I'm Only Talking about The Harmful Effects of Belief & Why I Don't Believe in What We all Consider God. Not Your Personal Custom Made God that You Define!

 

[alissowack]

I'm Skip out on the Mumble Jumble of Why Science Exist & Just say Science Continues to Exist Because of The Scienctific Method & We Trust it, Cause The Evidence is Reviewed Over & Over. Not Because of Our Feelings which Betray us Time & Time Again. I Can give you Many Reasons to Trust Science as Opposed to Religion, But It's Not The same Kind of Trust as Being Faithfully Blind to a Religion, Cause Things can Change. The human mind is very, very far from perfect.

The human mind is an amazing instrument… but it’s a strikingly flawed instrument, loaded with biases and cognitive errors. The human mind did not evolve to perceive and process information 100% accurately. The human mind evolved to find food and escape from predators. Many of our cognitive errors are important and useful in helping us function (or they were 100,000 years ago on the African savannah when we were hunting gazelles and escaping from tigers)… but they make our minds not entirely trustworthy as sources of information.

And even taking these cognitive errors into account, the mind doesn’t always operate as it should. You don’t have to be mentally ill, or even on drugs, to have weird experiences of things that aren’t there. It’s not that hard to alter our consciousness. Exhaustion, stress, distraction, trance-like repetition, optical illusion, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, sensory overload… any of these, and more, can create vivid “perceptions” that are entirely disconnected from external reality. You can’t say, “I had an intense personal experience of God — therefore God exists.” You have to say, “That’s interesting. Person X (insert your name here) had an intense personal experience of God. What’s the most plausible explanation for this? Is there any corroborating evidence for this being an accurate perception of a real god? Are other people’s experiences of God consistent with this one? Does this experience too conveniently dovetail with this person’s biases and expectations? Is there a better explanation than a real perception of a deity? Is it more likely to have been a psychological glitch in this person’s brain function?” You can’t treat yourself as a special snowflake. As vivid as your own experiences may feel to you, you can’t give them any more weight than you would anyone else’s experiences.

The Mind is What Guides you in Life or Pose to & There are Times When that Can Fail You, The Heart is not a Reliable Guide.. Our hearts and our minds can’t automatically be trusted.

As vivid as the experience of our hearts and minds can feel, if we’re going to treat it as evidence in support of a hypothesis, we can’t give it any more weight than we would anyone else’s experience. Intuition is important, but it’s notoriously unreliable and subject to bias. We have to step back from it, and view it like we’d view anyone else’s experience. And when we look at human experience in general, we see that our hearts and minds can’t automatically be trusted. That's Why Evidence is Important in These Matters, Instead of Believing Any Old Thing Cause You Feel it in your Heart that it Gives you purpose can be dangerous Our hearts and our minds can’t automatically be trusted.

That’s the whole point of the scientific method: it’s a method of verifying our physical perceptions of the world, and seeing if those perceptions can be replicated, and testing whether our interpretation of them is likely to be right.

All of which strongly suggests that, even if our interpretation of our physical perceptions is flawed, there is a real entity with real existence that we’re perceiving.

And that conspicuously does not work for religious experiences. There is no consistent way to induce a perception of Jesus in all people, or even in most people. Religious experiences are un-measurable, un-replicable, un-verifiable. Everyone who has them has them in different ways; there’s no way to consistently generate them; many people don’t have them at all. And attempts to verify religious experiences using rigorous, double-blind, placebo- controlled scientific methods have universally failed across the board.

You brought up that our hearts and minds can't be trusted, yet it is the heart and mind that is responsible for why science exists. It took intelligent thinking and a passion to pursue it. If our hearts and minds can't be trusted, then why should we trust science? It is a byproduct of what we created.

You make some valid points, but at the end of the day, just like religion, you have to go out into the world and deal with the happenings of the world and answer for the struggles of life. You will lose trust and respect if you treat people as a science project or "unholy".

But what makes you think that when someone says that God exists, they are doing so out of some "out-of-this-world" experience or seeing a bunch of magic tricks? To suggest an existence of God involves as much thought as you might think. To just generalize it requires considering how much of a role a deity would have in the existence of everything we know and don't know. If God exists, does He have a transcending view of the things we value as important like truth, justice, love and equality? Is it possible for a deity to share in the emotions associated with who we are. And is it possible that we could experience the things we value in a transcending way?

Unfortunately, because of the same "bias" you talk about, people are going to treat the the issue in a delusional way.

 

[alissowack]

Well, when you have people who have been told by one or few people of who they think "God" is, it is automatically assumed that it applies to everybody else who believes in God. So far, I've been on the receiving end of jokes in regards to God being something I don't think of Him as. However, I think it's well deserved by people who have a certain disrespect for who they are posting to so I just let it go. It doesn't matter.

I don't quite understand why you ask the "common" questions about the things that do or don't exists. It's almost like you just want to "trap" someone into answering something that has absolutely nothing with why people believe that God exists. To me, it makes no sense to say "God exist because I saw Him in the sky one day" or "He showed me this cool trick on how to walk on water" or "I got a revelation on the end of the world from God". Asking why God would exist is a lot more sensible. If the miracles happen, I want to know why. If Jesus did die and rise again, I want to know the reason for that. If evil and suffering exists in the world...then why does it? I believe God exist because He has answered those...and a lot more...questions through the Bible.

 

[maestro_lungs]

Well, when you have people who have been told by one or few people of who they think "God" is, it is automatically assumed that it applies to everybody else who believes in God. So far, I've been on the receiving end of jokes in regards to God being something I don't think of Him as. However, I think it's well deserved by people who have a certain disrespect for who they are posting to so I just let it go. It doesn't matter.

I don't quite understand why you ask the "common" questions about the things that do or don't exists. It's almost like you just want to "trap" someone into answering something that has absolutely nothing with why people believe that God exists. To me, it makes no sense to say "God exist because I saw Him in the sky one day" or "He showed me this cool trick on how to walk on water" or "I got a revelation on the end of the world from God". Asking why God would exist is a lot more sensible. If the miracles happen, I want to know why. If Jesus did die and rise again, I want to know the reason for that. If evil and suffering exists in the world...then why does it? I believe God exist because He has answered those...and a lot more...questions through the Bible.

I Can't go on Your Personal Perception of God, All I Can go on is The Majority Perception of God & That Automatically Does Apply to Those who call Them selves Christians. I Can Answer You Why People Think God Exist. Easy Answer to a Complex Question. It's Easier to Chalk it up to God than do the Actual Research. It's Something that has been Passed down generation to Generation Mostly with the Warning of Do Not Question these Things or God works in Mysterious ways...lol. Miracles don't happen, It's Just Easy to Chalk it up as One & Ignore the Thousands of Lucky Breaks & Co Winky Dinks that Happen per day Worldwide. Other Than the Bible, What Makes you think Jesus Died for Your Sins or Even Existed? The Fastest Way to Become Atheist is to Read the Bible from Front to Back. Evil & Suffering Exist in The World Cause Good & Pleasure Exist. Everything has a Yin & a Yang. No Evil, Then How can you Know what Good is. Human Nature. We do Good, We do Bad! How can you Possibly Think 7th Century People had a Better Idea on How to Live Life Now?

 

[alissowack]

@maestro_lungs. I believe that good and evil exist, but our discretion of the two is a matter of sin...or falling short of the mark. The "How do you know" question is a simple yet complex question. In all commonality, we know what is good and what is evil or bad. But, why do we find ourselves choosing to do evil when we ought to do good? Why is it that when someone tries to do good that it not rewarded as such? Why do people who do evil think it's "good"? Something is flawed, but it's not our thinking...it's our hearts. It's believing that God has done something about this that I believe that He Exist through Jesus.

I'm not as "deep" as people might be lead to believe. I haven't gotten familiar with the arguments and counter arguments of the existence of Jesus though I have read a book in defense of Jesus. But, the Bible is enough as is. It doesn't answer every question (and I don't believe it intends to), but it answers what matters the most.

 

[VIBE]

What is good and evil? Who decides which is which? They can be both, can't they?

 

[maestro_lungs]

No We all Have a Perception of Good & Evil that is Shaped by where we Live. What's Evil & Good is Not Universal. We Shape That! You can’t treat yourself as a special snowflake. As vivid as your own experiences may feel to you, you can’t give them any more weight than you would anyone else’s experiences.

And if someone else’s personal experience of Allah or Ganesh or the invisible dragon in their garage wouldn’t persuade you that Allah or Ganesh or the invisible dragon is real… you shouldn’t let your own personal experience of God persuade you that God is real. I Ask you what would make NOT Believe?

 

[Weazel]

In the beginning, people were to stupid to believe in anything

Later on, they started to believe in many Gods:

Judaism: Yahweh

Christianity: God

Islam: Allah

Polytheism:

Greek: Zeus, Hermes, Hades, Hera, Aphrodite, etc...

Roman: Iuppiter, Mors, Terra, etc...

Norse: Odin, Thor, Loki, Njordr, etc...

Hindu: Krishna, Vishnu, Kali, Ishvara, etc...

Chinese Folk (Simple): Shangdi, Mazu, Shou Xing, Tu Di Gong, etc...

Shinto (Japanese): Izanagi-no-Mikoto, Izanami-no-Mikoto, etc...

Celtic: Cernunnos, Damona, Epona, etc...

Egyptian: Ra, Isis, Anubis, Osiris, etc...

Summerian: An, Ki, Enlil, Enki, etc...

Babylonian: Sin, Marduk, Ishtar, Nabu, etc...

Persian: Simurgh, Rostam, Gaokerena, etc...

Aboriginal: Bunyip, Kurreah, Mutjinga, etc...

Waaaaay further in time..

There were a few Gods left ((we can watch the rest of them on tv, and in comic books))

IMO, 200 or 300 years from now, there are maybe one or two Gods left

500/600 years later, people don't believe in Gods at all, it was a thing from the past

 

[Rock_Well]

What is good and evil? Who decides which is which? They can be both, can't they?

Ultimately? nope. Impossible.

Right and wrong is a matter of perspective. Morality is based on God perspective. So He decides. We just either choose to believe or disbelieve.