Do you HONESTLY believe in God?

I've never seen any evidence of a God, so no, I don't. Same goes for fairies, ghosts, spirits, etc.

 

Until someone shoots him in the knee and brings him to me to show me he is fake. Same goes for aliens.

 

What do aliens have to do with a god?

 

I'm assuming he's talking about any unproven entities.

 

Alien life is a completely different subject because we've seen life on earth, and due to logic it's not unreasonable to assume that other life exists in our vast universe.

 

I agree with you, I think his point is that there's no direct evidence for either, though.

 

The creator of religion is the worlds greatest salesman. You fucking idiots murder, rape and condemn other people all in the name of religion. How many different gods are there now? 2000-3000? How many people laugh at Greek mythology and it's gods now a days? Yet we believe a virgin whore gave birth to a 6 lb 7 ounce baby who can walk on water... It's not even half as funny as what muslims believe in. They adore and revere a fucking child rapist...

 

Everything has an inventor and a creator. If I tell you this glass of water on my right popped into existence and no man made it, you'd say I'm crazy. So how did the moon, space, and earth were created? Also, the argument that religion makes wars is false, because wars are made from human greed justified in the name of a religion.

 

There wasn't a single creator of religion, religious beliefs started in many different cultures.

Most people don't.

Whether people laugh at something or not has no bearing on whether it's actually true.

Not everybody's Christian. Also, God and Christianity aren't synonymous.

Yeah, that's pretty creepy.

 

I have a love/hate relationship with religion. I love reading all kinds of religious scriptures metaphorically, the way they were (in my opinion) meant to be read.

There's a verse in the Bhagavad Gita where Lord Krishna's enemies are raining fireballs on him and he turns around and smiles. As soon as he did that the fireballs turned to flower pedals and floated to the ground. You can read that and say "bullshit smiles don't turn fireballs into flowers" or read it metaphorically and say "Okay, I'm in this shitty situation currently but if I look at it positively everything will be okay.

There's all kinds of lessons to be learned from different religious scriptures. But no, I don't believe in God as any religion describes it.

I have no idea if there's a God or not. I guess I'll find out one day.+

 

I don't know, actually..
Been through shit load and had some near-death experiences, but every time it felt like I had an guardian angel or something.
idk lol

 

To those who find solace and security in believing in the existence of God, that's great, feel free to continue doing so. But when you feel the need to impose some supposed supernatural superpower upon others who are not so like minded, there is a problem.

What I believe is that God is a social construct - an explanation in the form of an almighty being created to help people wrap their heads around the vastness of the world, if not the universe. As far as we know, there is no meaning to life, there is no meaning to existence. God and religion, however, solve that problem, at least for some people. There are those people who seek meaning in their lives. They can't handle the thought of living without any purpose other than to eat, shit, piss, and procreate. It drives them nuts and so they look to God and religion for answers. As for me, I am not one of those people who seek 'greater meaning'. I live my life day by day and am contented. I don't believe in the existence of God and don't need people telling what to and what not to believe in.

 

Interesting idea. How do you account for the fact that virtually every human culture, geographically isolated from one another, have independently developed some form of religion?

 

Maybe it's human instinct?

 

There has been a pretty good amount of studies on the brain that have shown that there is a part of our brain that seems specifically designed to produce religious experiences.

 

I always thought the generally agreed upon idea was that religious & spiritual experiences were mapped across multiple regions of the brain due to the complexity of not only the brain but the experiences themselves. This source seems to think so, and they seem to be well cited, but you never know. Check it out:

However, there is also a bit here about the right temporal* lobe being associated with feelings of religious experience as well... maybe that's what you were talking about? I'm gonna do a bit more research on it, but this is also worth a read:

*EDIT: Temporal lobe, not parietal.*

 

Yeah that second quote is exactly what I was talking about. It's really interesting research and provides a scientific explanation of a lot of the spiritual experiences people claim to have had.

 

Also interesting. Why do you think humans universally have a predisposition towards religious experiences?

For the record, I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just interested in your thought process.

 

After thinking on it a bit I suppose the predisposition is perhaps genetic. The human brain operates in such a way that patterns are perceived, even fabricated, in the midst of chaos. There also seems to be a genetic predisposition towards superstitious beliefs & false-positives, oftentimes incorrectly forming cause-and-effect sequences and wrongly associating them. B.F. Skinner's famous pigeon experiment is a perfect example of this:

This could apply very easily to the human condition. We observe life and patterns, whether they exist or not, in nature and our universe. It seems to me the automatic instinctual reaction is to associate a cause the effect we are observing. The cause being God, religion, a creator, or some form of a higher power.

Just the way I've currently come to view it. What do you think?

 

Although developed independently, each of these religions or supernatural figures are infact quite similar. Take a look at the ancient Greeks and Romans for example: Zeus and Jupiter, Poseidon and Neptune, Aphrodite and Venus. Each of these pairs of Gods are similar in what they "govern" with very minor differences separating each pair.

For a more modern comparison, we can take a look at Christianity and Islam. The Muslim God Allah and the Christian God Yahweh often draw attention to the theory that they are both in fact one and the same. Each was said to have created some kingdom and each was said to have governed this kingdom in very similar ways.

To me, this honestly does not come off as surprising. Drawing from my previous post, people conceive supernatural powers to help them explain the unknown. In the case of the Greeks and Romans, they needed help explaining the existence of sky, ocean, love, etc.. In the case of Christianity and Islam, people simply wanted an explanation to existence and so they conceptualized Yahweh and Allah, respectively. You may also come to notice the difference between the ancient Greek and Roman Gods vs Yahweh and Allah. My explanation to this difference is demand. These two supernatural powers were conceived centuries apart and so it was only natural for them to look towards different things as civilization evolved.