Is it cool to train your brain so it believs in the barking mad and you become a religious person?
I think I look at religious people with the same suspicion that you look at atheists.

Some religious people would think YOU are the one who believes in the barking mad - a world without a God. What you consider "Barking mad" is highly subjective, depending what side of the fence you're speaking from.

Just saying!

There is something comforting in the logic of hedging your bets.
Of course the theist still has to choose the right religion or they may wind up in hell with the rest of us fence sitters.

Maybe we should embrace them all, then when we die and if we find out which is the true god, we can say "I was a Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Wiccan who also believed in all of mankinds ancient religions. Me and you God, I was with you all the way." :)

If God existed, and futhermore was the type of being that was impressed by this thoroughly cynical 'believe-just-in-case-of-punishment' attitude, then he is so petty and small minded, that I think I would choose not to worship him anyway.

I take it that you are not impressed with the "worship me or I will send you to suffer in hell for all eternity" type attitude. :)

I was baptized as baby but my parents never took me to church, the only things I heard about God were little things my grandmother would say like “judge not ye be judged” and “the lord smiles upon you” and similar phrases. I grew up believing in God and Jesus Christ. I felt as my faith was born into me. I’ve been told that in baptism it is the Holy Spirit that entered me. I guess that’s it since I have no basis as to explain my strong faith.
As an adult I took a conformation class and belong to a church. I love going when I can; it gives me great comfort to take Holy Communion. I don’t judge people that don’t believe or that believe differently, that’s not my place. I’m not a debater so I won’t get into heated discussions; everyone has the right to believe what they want.

YES I DO BELIEVE IN GOD

Absolutely I believe in God. I just think that the problem with a perfect God is when any imperfect man tried to interpret him. Organized religion will be the fall of all faith.

Actually, Antikarma, that's one of the reasons I think that organized religion is essential. Yes, one of the problems is that we are imperfect, so our understanding will always fall short in trying to understand a perfect God. But it doesn't seem like the answer is to disdain organized religion. Surely trying to understand God on our own is going to be much more problematic than trying to understand Him in a group. In a group, we can all work to improve each other's understanding of God; within a tradition, we can draw on the understanding of wise and intelligent people who have come before us. On our own, we're limited to our own understanding, and so much more likely to be unjustly influenced by our own biases.

IMHO, the single greatest downfall of humanity is the notion that "God" is a separate entity from us.

I think that organized religion is the embodiment of our spiritual desires to seek God, but also the embodiment of all of our human corruptions as well. Organized religion isn't an oasis from all of our imperfections -- it's a collection of imperfect people seeking God in the imperfect world.

Faith sustains religion, not the other way around.

What does everyone think about Anselm's ontological argument? For some reason my brain can't wrap itself around the idea that the assumption that God does not exist leads to a logical contradiction.

My Philosophy professor provided the class with some objections Anselm's argument and demonstrated how each one of them failed (or would fail). I can't really get my brain around that either, it takes me awhile to collect my thoughts. I'm assuming that if you know about Anselm's argument, you know the objections. I might post my prof's examples a little later.

What does everyone think? I understand that Anselm's argument is preaching to the choir in a way, but some of it just seems to be begging the question.

believe... and have always considered Pascal's wager as an important rational support...I have lost little if I am wrong and have gained much if I am right.

I don't believe in "god."
I don't not believe in "god."

It doesn't matter to me one way or another if there is or was.

How's this: I don't believe in any of the gods that I have been presented with thus far. If anything, I believe in the Earth and the Stars and the Moon and the Wind and the Rain.

Oh.. one supreme creator? Hmmmmm... well, I guess that I don't, given that definition. But I did put "Yes". Have always felt that there was someone up there that loves me and to whom I should be grateful, but I'm not about to rule out the possibility of multiple dieties or a complete lack of diety and merely the presence of angels working for our good. Dunno. Definitely feel there is something more mighty than me going on.

I'm surprised that nobody's quoted Marx yet. Or Nietzche, for that matter.

I do have an observation to make, as well : sportswidow (unintentionally, I assume) reversed an old maxim by saying "what comes around goes around" instead of the commonly accepted "what goes around comes around". I kind of like it; the idea that you give what you get, rather than you get what you give. Of course, I've always figured one leads to the other, so it makes no difference to me.

If you want to know my personal beliefs, I am a strong agnostic, which means I hold central to all of my beliefs and decisions that not only do we not know what's ultimately out there, we cannot know. The knowledge you seek is impossible to find. This leaves one with two options; one may posit that in the absence of knowledge, faith takes over (and therefore believe) or one may, as I have done, conclude that the ultimate answer will present itself in due course once I've left this mortal realm, accept that the understanding of it is beyond my limited reach at the moment and move on with my life accordingly. Do I believe in God? No, not as such. I do believe that there is a strong possibility of some form of divine creator, be he God or Zeus or one of the African deities known only to some small Amazonian tribe. What form such a being would take and indeed if such a being ultimately exists is not for me to decide.

I don't begrudge those who believe their faith; please don't begrudge me my lack of it, whatever that may net me in the end.

"This eternal accusation against Christianity I shall write upon all walls, wherever walls are to be found - I have letters that even the blind will be able to see... I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough, - I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race..."

-Nietzsche


Although I don't have a problem with people who do believe in god, I have an extreme dislike for the way some people interpret their religion. I don't believe in god, and if someone threatens me with their gods punishment, I don't like them. Religion and personal beliefs shouldn't be about what happens to people who don't follow god's every word, religion should serve to help people make better decisions for themselves and towards other living things. Sadly, I see myself following the important rules of religions more closely than most religious people I see do. I see far too many people treating religion and their god's forgiveness as an excuse to be able to do wrong, yet I just don't do many things they consider sinful in the first place, and I don't hurt myself or other people.

Many people don’t know that Nietzsche was a very religious person. He was the son of a priest and also his writing style in “Also sprach Zarathustra” is very similar to that of the bible.

For me is the best option to be an agnostic.

How sympathetic Nietzsche is to religion depends on what point in his life you're looking at. He was religious as a child, but dropped it fairly early. But he wasn't nearly as antagonistic towards Christianity in his early works as he ended up -- even The Gay Science has some good things to say about religious people. Of course, the question as with any interpretation of the later works is how much they are affected by his growing mental instability. In any case, see my signature quote for Nietzsche giving a positive reading to at least a couple important elements of Christianity.

simple.....i dont kno

i was raised in an extremely religious household... spawned right in the middle of the 'bible belt'.
like so many, the indoctrination started very young. i had religion force-fed to me while strapped into my highchair. ;)

as i got old enough to form critical thoughts of my own, i began questioning everything. neither my parents, my sunday school teachers, nor my pastor could really answer my questions, and people began to get really alarmed by this... ending up causing me a lot of grief throughout my childhood.
when i was about 13, i started studying other religions... which later led to my studying the evolution of religions, themselves.

the things i learned through this, coupled with what i learned through studying science, the geologic columns, the regurgitation or retelling of many of the same myths throughout different religions, etc. all led me to not believing in a god.

however the fear (of hell, getting 'left behind' behind to experience the horrors of revelations, etc.) that had been, literally, programmed in me from the time i was a little girl was much harder to shake.
it came down to a dream.
i dreamt i was in an airplane that was going down. in the dream i cried out asking god, if he did exist, to forgive me my sins and 'come into my heart'- you know the rhetoric. this disturbed me, upon waking up.
i felt like a hypocrite... holding on to this possibity of last-minute salvation, 'just in case'.
that is NOT how i live my life. i am very much a blatantly honest 'what you see is what you get' type of person.
so i did some more research, and came away more certain than ever.
i no longer have that little "what if" fear in the back of my head controlling me.

Thanks for posting your story, red0blivia. I've known quite a few people with similar stories to tell. It's really a form of child abuse, even though the parents and religious leaders usually have the best intentions.
I also know it takes a lot of inner strength to get past something like that, so you are definitely to be congratulated for making it.

I dont believe in god but... if there is a god its his/her/its fault i dont believe in it if they are the all powerful being that made everything they made me as well and made the way i think. Im more then willing to start believing in a god but if there was one i would expect them to show up and say hello every now and then. untill then i dont.

No. I believe in myself instead.

I also do not believe in Santa Claus, 9/11 conspiracies, or spontaneous human combustion.

I believe in God, but at times it is hard to believe in humans. I am Christian by faith, but many times I do not agree with what the people that walk in its faith believe. God placed rules with his covenant, and then realized that people were falling in to sin with no way to recover and being exiled by the lord’s covenant. So then the lord sent his son as a sacrifice to save those not born in his covenant. This destroyed judgment from people and left it only for god to perform. Yet to this day people still judge and act out against people that appear to be against what the Old Testament established. My belief comes from experience; I feel that even with all the evidence against god I feel him in my life. I see this the most when I view people when sitting around or taking the bus; it’s like a mist traveling through the sky.

No, I don't believe in god but I have nothing against people believing in it if they think it actually helping them... I respect all beliefs...

Also in my opinion religion is mainly for people in fear... fear of the unknow... fear of not knowing where we come from... fear of death...

I believe the notion of God, Heaven and Hell, the Bible, and all of that was created thousands of years ago by men in power to control the general population. Sure laws work, but eternal damnation works better. I bet if there was a after life they would be laughing their asses off, seeing so many years later that so many people still believe it.

Yeah, I too am a Pascal's Wager kind of guy.

But it's always seemed sort of paradoxical to me (given that you subscribe completely to it). I mean if you do believe in God due to the Wager, then that means if God does exist, and he is omnipotent (pretty much a given with his existence), then he's gonna know what you're really thinking, so it negates the whole point, in a way.

I dunno, it's just one of those things.

I prefer Sir Stephen Henry Roberts:

"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer God than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible Gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."

While I do not believe there is a god, I also do not believe there is no god. To put it more clearly, I have not seen anything that would give me cause to believe in a god, but I also have not seen anything that excludes the possibility that there may be a god.

I don't buy into Pascal's Wager because of the existence of multiple religions. If a god can accept being worshipped incorrectly then it should be able to accept not being worshipped at all. If not, if this god would condemn an otherwise good person for not following any religion at all, it's not really a god I would want to spend eternity with. Shallow people suck, even if they're omnipotent.

no agnostic option? come on!

No god. I do, however, believe in Nancy.


;)

But belief does not guarantee entry, nor is God necessarily tied to notions of "Heaven" or "Hell." Statistically, these Christian spheres of punishment and reward are in the minority of global religious thought.

But to answer the question: I don't believe in a humanized entity. I don't think there's an over-arching identity that created the cosmos. I believe the universe is the result of an opposing reaction to void.

That is not to say that we couldn't have creatures whose science, and understanding of the mind, transcend the limited sensory organs and higher brain fuctions of Man. Like Arthur C. Clarke once said, anthing sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. A species could eventually make itself god-like, and perhaps it already has. In a world that prompts more questions than it answers, we could have been created by this superpowerful race, then monitored. Or forgotten. Or monitored for a while, then forgotten.

That's a long way of saying that I think the popularly accepted notion of God is simplistic and absolute. I find the notion of a transcended species to be much more interesting.

Awesome answer.

To me, God is perfect. He sat down one day, and made a set of rules. He is not bound by them, but we are.

Physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology. Every element of science.

He (the royal He... I don't think of God being sexual) knew when he created the rules what the outcome would be. The planets, the environment. When He created the first spark of life, He could see the evolutionary process, He could see history in every second, from every angle.

And He saw that it was good.

Not good at every angle. Not good at every moment. There was pain. There was suffering. People would believe in Him, others wouldn't. People would commit crimes in His name. Others would be perfect creatures, yet never come to terms that He was responsible for the whole show. This did not bother Him. God took everything into account, and gave it His blessing.

Now, some folks came around and started talking about rules of humanity. They looked around and realized that order had to be established for the human race to prosper. People wouldn't listen to reason, no matter how often and how hard the rule makers tried to tell them. This left them in a sticky situation:

To establish order, people created a set of punishments that would befall every transgression, and a short list of rewards for obediance. You do well? You will be rewarded. You do bad? You will be punished.
Humans set these rules in place; Yet they were allowed to, because if these rules were to set everything off-balance, God would not have set things in motion. God saw everything, and judged the work as a whole.

Now the rewards were very sketchy. You get to go to heaven. If people could really sell it properly, it can sound like the best reward EVER. A reward so good that it will affect the way you behave, for the rest of your life.

The punishments were more on scale. Small crime equalled small punishment, while the big ones were really bad, and written down. These crimes were thought to be so severe that death could be the reward, and even then the folks thought of a deterrent. You didn't get to go to heaven. You were cast out, and sent to an evil place of pain and suffering.

God didn't write this stuff down. People did. God gave people free will. They can do whatever they want. He (and only he) knows what you are going to do.

As far as the Heaven and Hell debate, I don't know. I don't believe in it in the traditional religious sense. I even left out religion when telling my view. You can insert Christianity, Bhuddism, Muslim, Taoism, and Animalistic religions into my telling. You can look at it as an agnostic, and still understand my view. It stands up to each individual religion. It embraces all of them. It embraces scientific theory. Evolution is allowed.

I don't believe in God. For some time this was something that concerned me because I thought it was a sign that I was arrogant or immature. I decided I would give it a shot. Partly it was due to the fact the girl's family I was in love with at the time where extremely big on church, partly I just wanted to prove to myself that not believing in God was the right path for me. In the end for lots of reasons no matter how hard I tried it just seemed to me far too obvious that the Bible was written by people and that it was all an effort to overcome insecurities and influence one another (albeit in a mostly positive way).

One such moment came to me when a missionary spoke to our church and told us how he had been in Cambodia spreading the faith. He spoke of people so poor that they didn't have clean drinking water yet now because of his mission they believed in God and would be saved. I felt sick and I had to go for a long walk alone because I just found it hard to stomache that with the bigger problems the world is facing right now, like overcrowding, a significant if not majority of the population are actively doing nothing to help because they believe God will save them.

Another incident occured when we were sitting up the top of the church in a special area for singers. I was sitting up there with my girlfriend at the time because she was a classically trained singer. We had to fill out a survey by the Church about whether we believed in God and how old we were and so forth, and while we were filling it out one of the old ladies next to me confided in me that she was dying soon but that was she happy because she was going to meet the lord. I didn't know what to say - I struggle with empathy at the best of times and my brain cannot imagine being that deep into religion. Even now years later I don't understand this at all. How do you get through life where you need to make complex decisions and doubt your own logic every day and yet believe something you read in a book?

The final incident was at high school when a religion friend said to me that Jesus was a better person than me and that I sin every day. I said to him that I had never done anything to hurt him and that the times I had hurt other people I was really very sorry, I always try and be a good person and if I have failed simply by being human then I don't really consider that failing at all. I believe that being the best person that you can be qualifies you for being a good person and I only judge myself for that which I can control. I am colourblind and have trouble seeing the difference between the red balls and the brown balls on a snooker table, yet sometimes being colourblind allows you to differentiate some colours more easily than people with common sight and sometimes it can be an advantage (for more info look up colourblind soldiers in vietnam). In the same way, sinning everyday and being imperfect give me a better chance at perfection than Jesus ever had. He was a mean persecuted by his own perfection, yet I am a man attempting everyday to overcome my imperfections.

In short I made my peace with God by accepting that a truly loving God who loves me for how he created me will accept that I have chosen to accept that he may or may not exist, and in the form the bible presents almost certainly does not. I cannot stress that it is against everything I stand for to believe without conviction and I am highly distrusting, so either (A) God doesn't exist, (B) God made me wrong/I haven't yet found my true power to believe in things that are all around me or (C) God does exist but accepts that I don't believe in me and loves me anyway. Regardless people of faith have no right to judge me because either way this is really between God and myself.

Thanks for reading :)

My problem with religion is having to worship a person/place/thing.... who created God?

Until someone can explain that to me, I will remain quite content believing in my own spirituality and beliefs (a combination of Buddhism, Christianity, Lennonism and whatever else I learn along the way, that betters my life and how I treat others).

Yeah I was shocked to, but then I remembered this was Tilted Philosophy.:thumbsup:

I believe in "god" the question is what name do I call said diety?

I care not what any one person follows as a belief structure so long as that person lives by the golden rules of said belief structure.

It matters not to me who you worship or if you pray to the god of spork!
Kudos to anyone and everyone who adheres to their personal beliefs even in times of adversity and Kudos to the person who does not try to force their beliefs on anyone and...
KUDOS KUDOS KUDOS to those who can accept everyone as they are in a semi-zen kinda way!