Do you believe in God?

Sometimes, sort of, I think.

Humans are complex creatures and go through many phases in their lives.

When your young and healthy you view religions with a correct amount of scepticism.

However as we age and our actual mortality is brought into clearer focus we search for something to give meaning to existence, yes, yes younger people reading that are sniggering believing they won’t. But the vast majority of humans on their final throw of the dice view things differently, nearly everything differently.
Part of that is the possibility of the existence of something bigger that connects things and gives meaning to it all.

I can tell you with the certainty of experience that when your sitting at the moment before the consultant says whether you have a terminal issue or not, in your head you will be pleading to someone or something that the result is good or that the end is quick and easy.

It’s hard wired into our species, one just has to look at the plethora of religions that literally span the globe, that’s not accidental.

So ask yourself not if there is or is not a god, but more to the point when your life and mental fortitude will be pushed to the stage when you really hope there is a god and that he/she/it hears and answers your call, that stage will come to us all, some sooner and for some later, but nearly all of us will face it and the vast majority make the call for help.

Boom_Bap wrote: »

I Am God.

Nothing quite like a boards moderator getting ahead of itself.

A lot of believers seem to believe based on - What they i get out of it ......at church/mosque then they are total saints, then the rest of the time total A-holes.

dvdman1 wrote: »

A lot of believers seem to believe based on - What they i get out of it ......at church/mosque then they are total saints, then the rest of the time total A-holes.

.......and then we get to go to heaven - it just ain't fair Joe !

Tangatagamadda Chaddabinga Bonga Bungo wrote: »

I'd like to think I do. Light candles in a church for people that have passed away in my life. And I certainly identify as an Irish Catholic for ethnicity purposes.

Having said that, I'm firmly of the belief that when you die you're absolutely gone. If an afterlife does exist, it makes no sense how anyone would actually know what it's like there.

The church have been responsible for the most heinous crimes against individuals since the state got independence. And suicide bombers are mostly influenced by religion to carry out what they do.

I think I believe in God, but not in religion, while also thinking an afterlife doesn't exist.

To a large degree all of Humankind (not all individual people, just a sufficiently large percentage of the whole) have a natural inclination towards finding comfort and assurance in the principle that there is some benign higher power looking down on them benevolently from above.

The burden of proof attached to this statement can, I believe be very comfortably met by simply pointing out that every societal gathering on the Planet has independently found some form of Deity and begun to worship it.

This innate tendency within the human being has served to beget hundreds of diverse religions everywhere. These religions grow from this common seed and then become massive bureaucratic entities which have more in common with Global Business Corporations than promoters of decent moral values and saviours of souls.

Crucially it has been demonstrated time and again that these organisations will always seek to protect their own 'staff' and interests ahead of the victims of their endemic sexual, physical, emotional and monetary abuses.

We're not living in the dark ages anymore people, in my view the religious among us are now indefensible in their selfish outlook as they explain away the Churches every sin in order to continue blindly with their own personal religious indulgences.

Ignorance is simply not an excuse any more.

Mankind's inability to contemplate the unknown led to the invention of God to explain it. From a very young age we are taught that God is all seeing, all knowing and ever present therefore it is a natural reaction to fall back on God when things go belly up.
From earliest times God was associated with the most powerful and unexplainable things like the sun, moon, planets,wind water etc. These were the things that controlled your existence and could take it away in the blink of an eye, therefore they commanded respect and awe. Gradually this respect and awe developed into worship and adoration. The ancients would carry their Gods into battle with them and whichever side won, their God would be considered more powerful on the day. This has gradually progressed into modern religion to the exten that up until relatively modern times, wars and conquests were in the name of the various Gods. Even the spread of Christianity is attributed to that being the particular God responsible for a victory on a particular day. If it had been the next day then half the world could be Jovians or Neptunites or whatever.

smacl wrote: »

Not so sure it is the comfort of some benign higher power or simply a fear of death that involves termination of the conscious self. .

This is a rather Christianity based view - Buddhists don't believe in a benign higher power, and many think the point of living well is to escape from afterlives.

bnt wrote: »

You can see this in the speeches and books of Jordan Peterson: I think he has some good things to say about responsibility etc., so I'm puzzled when he goes on about Bible stories

In fairness he believes paintings of intertwined snakes from our past are actually not paintings of intertwined snakes but evidence that ancient people, through nothing but the use of hallucinogenic drugs, were granted knowledge of the existence of DNA and it's double helix nature.

He also claims that there must be a god because otherwise people could not do art or.... wait for this..... give up cigarettes.

So I am not sure he would be my go to guy on this kind of topic.

_Brian wrote: »

So ask yourself not if there is or is not a god, but more to the point when your life and mental fortitude will be pushed to the stage when you really hope there is a god

Much like the "Atheists in Foxholes" narrative.... or the death bed conversions of atheists into theists..... when I hear people talk like this it just suggests to me that the probability of thinking religiously goes UP in proportion to the amount of stress and duress you are under..... and hence inversely proportionally to how rational and clear thinking you are in a given period.

Which has always made me wonder why theists go on about things like death bed conversions and foxholes. They are literally standing up and saying "Look, the less rational you are capable of being, the more likely you are to believe what I believe!".

Seems a strange things to advertise openly.