Is there a god?

[LeedsRhinos]

Is there a god? I mean look at all the different relgions around the world who all believe that THEY are right & the others are wrong. They can't all be right can they. Which is why in my opion it all rubbish.

[jcherbstritt]

Neither of you seem to be able to accept this 'God is beyond human understanding' - but there are lots of things beyond human understanding.  Why we are alive at all for example, how we can grow inside our mother's womb, how the universe was made etc.  Feelings in particular are difficult to explain.  Imagine trying to explain falling in love to someone who had never been in love.  Infact, explain love full stop.  Define it.  Where does it come from?  Describe it without contridicting yourself.  There are many different aspects to love that sometimes contradict themselves.  There are bad aspects to love - which may or may not be part of love - e.g. possessiveness, obsession, lust.  Then there's falling in love, or love of a long-term partner, or love of a brother you don't get on with.  And did you know that in some languages they have no word for falling in love - because they don't believe it exists.  So try explaining falling in love to someone who has no language for it!  This is how difficult it is to explain God.  Love and God are both ultimately beyond human explanation, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

Have you ever considered that believing that God doesn't exist is a cop out?  You don't have to explain anything like evil and suffering - these are just something humans do to one another.  And if you don't understand something you just assume science will find out how it works eventually, or else you say it doesn't exist.

Anyway, that's me for Christmas.  Happy New year, and season's greetings to you both!

[mrknowledge]

are you prepared to deny the existence of God? What kind of repercussions could that have on you? Is it not better to seek the answer more thoroughly than to simply reject faith outright?

[El D]

jcherbstritt - I will reply to you later.

 

Mrknowledge, your post is a little bit silly if I may say so;

 

1. I dont deny the possibility of a god, I deny that there is sufficient or to my mind any evidence at all that a god exists as described by any of the existing religions. In that sense yes I do deny the existence of god because I have seen nothing to the contrary.

2. Well if my conclusions are correct absolutely none, with the added bonus that I dont have to live my life apologising for being human. In fact, I can take responsibility for my own actions and their effect on this life, not some fantasy land never seen or heard by a living person.

3.Exactly what kind of god do you worship that would welcome love and adoration through fear of the alternative? As far as I know most xstian's god desires love, not acts of self preservation due to entirely selfish urges on the part of the worshipper. I would strongly urge you to consider exactly what your faith is based on and what kind of god you are actually praying to.

4.This one made me laugh. In what way do atheists, most of whom (me included) embrace the term freethinker as a self description, stop searching for the answer? How does faith provide an answer - its very nature is that it cannot. Otherwise why is faith needed? As I have said many times, god presumably knows what it would take to convert me, if this does not occur then he is happy to send me to hell. Most atheists, having been brought up in extremely theistic cultures, have reached their conclusions by using reason and logic to deconstruct the fallacies of the various religions

[freethinker]

aceizace wrote:

 "A christian dies, if he was right then he goes to heaven and gets eternal joy, if he was wrong, well then it's just neutral. An atheist dies, if he was right it's just neutral, if he was wrong, he suffers eternally in hell. Which does it make more sense to be?"

You make a common mistake regarding Pascal's wager.

Pascal made the mistake of assuming there were only two choices, his Christian religion or atheism and that if the Christian was right, the atheist would suffer in hell forever while the Christian would receive the heavenly reward. But what Pascal and aceizace and many others don't take into consideration is the possiblity that if religion matters at all, another religion--and there are hundreds--is correct, and embracing Christianity might doom the person to eternal punishment anyway. Pascal also assumed there could only be one god--but there could just as well be 100.

Embracing any religion does not guarantee an afterlife of joy, nor any afterlife at all. Embracing a religion because you simply want to avoid eternal damnation is unlikely to do any good either. Wouldn't a Christian god, for example, if one exists, be able to tell if a person was being purely expedient and didn't really believe?

I'd rather take my chances on reason..It's a lot less stressful and makes more sense.

 

 

[leonard]

What came first the chicken or the egg? Answer that, then answer who or what created that? And so on and so on until you're left with the very essence of existance - who or what created that? And who created the thing that created the creator? Why? Did everything just "pop" into existance?

[bobbyx]

Leonard:

If we are talking about a chicken and a chicken egg then then the answer is 'neither or both' seeing as the chicken evolved from something else and when going through stages of evolution developed the need to lay eggs to safeguard the further existence of the species -other egg-less mammals similar to what evolved into a chicken may have existed, but died out because they didn't develop egg laying.

[Merlin]

Leonard

The egg came before the chicken: reptiles were laying eggs before chickens were invented.

No single entity 'created' life on this planet. Life was enabled by the environment of this planet; the right circumstances obtained and life began, very simply, as the result of chemicals, elements and energies coming together.

And yes - it did all start with a 'pop'!

What's your explanation for it? A man sitting on a cloud waved a wand?

[delilahcat]

I can't believe that there are still people who think God exists - did they think the tsunami in South-East Asia was his Christmas present to the world?

[smed]

I can say absolutley 100% there is no God.

[Merlin]

smed

Of course you can say that - anyone can.

But is it true?

[dj_chief]

There is also a quite ironic theory which states that religion is seen as an institution in all faiths, that has withstood the test of time. WHY?

It is hard to comprehend why over these vast years people have beeen believing in something they can't hear, see, touch, or smell, yet some are are willing to die for their faith.

The people that have set up these religions or over the years, must have thought, yeah this is a good business, why do you think so many temples, churches have been lavishly built. Its not just for spiritual awakening?

Religion has been dominated by politics from the very beginning and still is, look around you in America, Islam or any other faiths.

Religion teaches you a belief system, usually of obedience in this life and you will reap the awards when you go to heaven. Again this has an element of politics or propaganda to scare people into doing the "right" thing.

And the reason why there are so many tensions between religious groups is because no likes to have their belief system challenged, something they have been brouight up with.

So to find true spiritual awakening, its best to alleviate from any religious belief but speak to God directly, who I feel does exist.

Everyone should believe in karma, the belief to do good, because humans have to realise that we have been given freewill on this earth, even thougfh our paths have been mapped out for us, our destiny is predetermined, even Einstein scientifically discovered that. If we aim to do good we will spiritually be rewarded.

[jcherbstritt]

I am curious - how did Einstein prove that our destiny is pre-determined?

I agree about what you say about finding your own spirituality.  There is too much blind faith going on, where people believe things without questioning.  I think you can only go through life trusting in your own experience, listening to others, but being critical.  And this works with belief in God as well.  But I think you can be apart of a religious grouping - Christian, Muslim, Bah'ai whatever - and still follow your own path.  You can learn alot from other people, including those with very different views, and there is also something valuable about being part of a community.

[Foolish_Mort]

"No religions can't all be right. So therefore, there must be one which is the Truth."

That's completely illogical. They could all be wrong.

"Personally, I can't believe anyone denies God's existence, His signs are all around us."

Not really. Why is it so hard to believe that everything we see developed by chance? After all, no one's counting the failed attempts. There could be countless millions of planets in the universe, even without entertaining the distinct possibility of parallel universes, where all these things we see don't exist.

[Merlin]

CHIEF

"our paths have been mapped out for us, our destiny is predetermined, even Einstein scientifically discovered that."

Please do tell us more - what's this about then, where is it written??

[dudette2005]

i don't think so- if there is then why didn't he stop the tsunami?

[bobbyx]

In answer to dudette2005's question:

He didn't stop the tsunami because:

 

a) He caused it / he decided to punish the people

 

b) He couldn't be bothered / didn't want to

 

c) He didn't know about it

 

d) He doesn't exist

 

If the reason is:

 

a) - He's willing to kill innocent people indiscriminately (people from different backgrounds & religions many of whom worship him).

 

b) - He doesn't care about human life

 

c) - He isn't all knowing / omnipresent or omnipotent

 

d) - It was just nature taking its course - God was neither able to cause it or prevent it, because there isn't one, and this is just another example of an event or phenomenon which we can scientifically explain now, but caused people to form the assumption of the existence of a higher being centuries ago.

 

(d is the correct answer by the way!)

[dudette2005]

if there was he wouldn't have let the tsunami kill hundreds of thousands of people!

[slimfandango]

bobby, you missed out three important options:

e) Hiiit's ah mystareh!

f) Galloshes 3, 4-11 "And truly I say onto thee, that in those times there will be great evil upon the earth, because mankind turned his back on God, and lived only by the worship of the great governor, and thus I said to them, repent, or I shall unleash on ye a great wave of incredible might that shall overcome thee". So there, God predicted it, therefore God exists.

g) Mary, the mother of God, in an apparition (on piece of toast/somewhere in Croatia/on the tube/crying from a statue to some priest guy in Italy) explained quite clearly that time was up due to the overwhelming use of internet pornography and this would definitely result sometime soon in a big wave. Or something.

So you see now? How could you have been so blind? Heathen.

And another thing...

[slimfandango]

omfg, I just realised that my answer came out with paragraphs in place without me having to learn C++ from scratch. Go answerbank!