You believe in God because...

I was taught from a young age about "god" even attend private Christian school through 6th grade. I honestly do not know what I am now religiously. While logic and research has caused me to doubt that a specific religion could be completely correct. I must admit I have had experiences that made me feel as if something greater than me protected me. It could very easily be just luck and coincidence that I experienced. I do not consider myself religious or atheist nor can I understand how anybody can be completely sure of their beliefs. My conflict could be because like your OP says I was told to. However I have never been one to follow blindly or to lie for the acceptance of others. It is a question that I will likely never answer since I have resigned myself to this being above my intelligence level. Short of actually meeting "a" or "the" superior being I do not know how anybody could.

 

Then I die and see God. I don't want to die but I'm not afraid too because I believed thafterlife will be heaven.

In the bible it says worthy men are tested in hard times as gold is tested in fire. I try to remember that and keep fighting and that adds to my drive and the doctors have admitted My drive is a big part why I am sill alive. I believe God has helped and blessed me but it is up to me to meet him halfway.

 

Everything is cause and effect. The big bang is the cause, everything that is, is the effect. BUT, the big band is the effect of the CAUSE. The cause of the big gang IS GOD. The cause of TRUTH is God. Truth is my God.

Everyone has a god. Whatever consumes your life is your god. Those that are full of themselves are their own god. But what you believe is not the truth. Only the truth is the truth. You can't beat the truth, it's futile.

 

yes

When I thought it through for myself, I decided against any religion.

 

I believe in Allah because it is all scientific and not mystical nor "spookish", not because I am told. I was raised to question everything and all things.

 

This is why I accept moral codes, for they are the basis of establishing and maintaining civilization; the process in which societies are developed. This piggybacks on why I believe and know that Allah is as real as both you and me. Yes it because with a bang that brought about other bangs which in turn developed into consciousness but I disgress.

 

A reasonable position as far as it goes - but then, what is the cause of god? And whatever that cause was, what caused it? And what caused that cause? And so on ad infinitum. Is it elephants all the way down, or is there some 'first cause'? And if there IS a first cause, is it not equally possible that the big bang itself was the first cause?

 

We're goldfish swimming around a fishbowl.
We can know every square inch of the fishbowl and peer outside the confines of the bowl and view the room the fishbowl is located in...but that is the extent and limits of our knowledge.

To make the assumption we know the layout of the house the room is located in...is absurd to me.

We've been out of the caves and exploring for a little over 10,000 years as residents of civilizations that aspire to more than mere survival...a veritable drop in the bucket in the ocean of time our Universe has existed.

I find the extent of humanity's hubris thinking we "know" everything...obscenely ridiculous.

Now there may be no divinity in the Universe, but we're certainly not at a point, epistemologically, to categorically make a statement of absolutism regarding same...or regarding
the boundaries of reality extending beyond our observable Universe.

Keep swimming little goldfish...and making those grand assumptions.
Oh masters of the fishbowl.

No God?

Indeed.

 

In my mind yes. I believe that pretty much every religion in the world is wrong in some way. Even if it started being the "right" religion (as mormens believe) it will end up being corrupt because we are human and it is in our nature to do so. I believe in a God. But yes, in my mind he is different than what I was told he was.

 

I agree with you completely. You said my thoughts with better words.

 

I am a skeptic of all accounts regarding deities, spirits, forces, or any other transcendental moral entity. When I look upon the current debate regarding transcendental moral entity, I see, as Herckdriver indicates above, a quest for an absolute. Science is looking to discover a Theory of Everything, whereas many religious ideologues continue to parrot various forms of creationism. Based upon my analysis, both are inadequate in explaining the derivation of a transcendental moral entity. I look to the social sciences, not religion or the physical sciences, as the fundamental basis for the beginnings of an answer.

Historically speaking, civilization has gradually developed tools for acquiring knowledge that sheds light on the universe humanity lives in. In the earliest societies, one of the first ways, if not the first way to comprehend the unknown and organize a way of life around such was through spirituality, divinity, and religion. Therefore, it is humans that created spirituality, divinity, religion, philosophy, and morality as social constructs capable of governance, or regulation of the affairs, actions, and phenomena of humanity. With this in mind, the goal of bridging the gap between the spiritual/divine/religious/philosophical/moral and scientific is simply an effort to reconcile two methodologies of knowledge acquisition and application, and social organization, one more archaic than the other. Both are truly not incompatible with one another.

Personally speaking, I do not know how to characterize my position on spirituality/divinity/religion/philosophy/morality. I was raised a proud Jew; my parents instilled the core tenets of the faith in me. However, my family has never been devoutly religious, nor am I. Where my family really influenced me is in embracing nationalism. I may not be a religious Jew, but I am a highly nationalist Jew, a Zionist to be exact.

Nevertheless, my parents did make me go to religious school and I had a Bar Mitzvah. However, as my family became more secular, so did I. Then, in high school, I befriended an individual in my Advanced Placement United States history class. He was an atheist. He decided to engage in a series of intense discussions with me regarding spirituality, divinity, and religion. After a brief period of personal reflection, I came to the conclusion that I was an atheist, and that deities do not exist.

Despite such seeming certainty, I still questioned the role of the aforementioned factors in the universe. A few months ago, I revised my position regarding divinity by stating that I reject the belief in the existence of deities. In turn, this classified me as an apathetic atheist. But over the past few months, I have become uncertain of any and all categorized positions on such matters. No longer do I see spirituality, divinity, religion, philosophy, and morality to be absolute, or black and white, but relative, or innumerable shades of gray.

Bearing this in mind, the following are my qualitative ramblings on the following subjects. Enjoy:

Spirituality:

Like all other concepts, spirituality is socially constructed. It is defined by a created relationship between humanity and the ultimate and/or immaterial reality. As I result, it is quite similar to the role science plays in bridging the gap between such realms. Henceforth, I would argue that science and spirituality are mutually compatible. We can boil the paradigm down to spirituality being a continuum on which science makes light of all its complex, non-linear idiosyncrasies.

Divinity:

This is a tough subject for me to discuss, as indicated above. My views on divinity have shifted like the sands of the Sahara Desert. Still, I would say that my stance on divinity is best described by the first two paragraphs of this post.

In addition, I would consider my views to be fluid. I am a theist in that it is one of the first and simplest means of reconciling oneself with the unknowable. I am an atheist in that it is a stance which contrasts the old fatalistic world with the new existential world. I am an agnostic in that I am inherently uncertain as to the existence of a deity. I am a pantheist in the hopes that science and religion do reach a revolutionary synthesis regarding the formation of the universe. I am a panentheist in that if science and religion do form such a synthesis, they will be able to explain all the natural processes we know of. I am a polytheist because I recognize that peoples of different religions have interacted with one another, leading to the borrowing of the names and characteristics of deities, including in Judaism.

To continue, I am a deist recognizing that humans inherently reason and observe to justify both science and religion, and that revelation defies the laws of nature, meaning there is a human and historical basis for the creation of religious knowledge, compatible with my position found in the first two paragraphs. I am an igtheist in that there are epistemological limitations in theology. I am a henotheist in that there is historical continuity and interconnectedness between deities and religions, and that all are worthy of adherence. Lastly, I am an Apatheist because I am objective in my thoughts on the relationship between spirituality/divinity/religion/philosophy/morality and religion. You can say that I am confused, and I probably am, yet my bewilderment manifests from legitimate cognition. Only a closed mind is certain.

Religion:

I am becoming increasingly secular in my religious beliefs. In other words, I am adopting religious tenets into an everyday life. For example, the Jewish principle of Tikkun olam serves as a guide for my career path in international service. I do not consider it to be a religious concept for me, but a core philosophical construct. Therefore, in my life, religion is ideological and moral rather than spiritual and divine.

Well, that was my rambling regarding this subject. I hope you all thoroughly enjoy the narrative and analysis.

 

God knows you will mess up before you do it, yet he allows you to. He knew you were going to mess up before he made you, but made you anyway. He made you in his own image, yet punishes you for being like him.

religious founders should have thought their story through a little better.

 

Fair enough.

 

So you can not be happy and productive without believing in some invisible being that you can not even prove exists?

 

But there is no scientific evidence that proves the existence of Allah. So you had to learn about Allah somehow, didn't you? Somebody must have told you about him/her/it.

 

Yet the "moral codes" of Allah would seem to contradict the Jefferson quote in my signature in many instances, wouldn't you agree?

 

But you believe because you were told to when you were very young?

 

Didn't you read my message before commenting? Where did I say that I couldn't be happy without my belief in GOD? Having GOD in my life just makes me more of a complete and happier person despite having to deal with the extreme negativity that comes from those who possess such ideologies as agnostics, socialists, marxists, commies, progressives, statists and leftists. In fact, my belief in GOD gives me the needed strength to counter all of the propaganda, anti Americanism, anti Constitution and nonsense that the left dishes out every single day. GOD bless you despite you being a non believer. If GOD doesn't bless you....who will?

 

I believe in God because...
(It's a two parter, but I'll try to keep it short)
Firstly, I believe in a Creator over "life is just an accident". "Science" is incomplete. By it's nature it'll always be incomplete. What was "known" yesterday, is disproved today, just like what is "known" today will be challenged in the future. Methods get improved & more data gets revealed. Science can attempt to tell us how, but without it's own certainty & it surely can't tell us why.
Secondly, I believe in Jesus Christ & the God of the Bible as that Creator. Why do I believe this & where's my proof? The proof I can offer are the many lives, including my own, I've personally seen changed by turning our lives over to Christ. That plus the words & the actions of the Apostles after Christ went back to Heaven after the resurrection. Men might die for a lie if they thought it was the truth, but men would not die for a lie if they knew it was a lie. These were men who were skeptical about Christ before they saw with their own eyes the resurrected & then ascension to Heaven of Jesus. Then went & spread the truth of what they saw & in many cases died horrible deaths because of not their faith, but of what they saw with their own eyes. For me, that (plus what the Bible says about Good & Evil and it's many prophesies that have come to be) is all the proof I need. There is also the fact that no credible historian denies that the Jesus of the Bible actually walked the Earth, though they may not believe the accounts of His life & death.
When Jesus says "I am the Way & the Truth, nobody goes to Father except through me", I believe Him. When Simon Peter said to Jesus "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.", I concur
I am not a scholar nor scientist. Is the Bible perfect? I don't know. Is the Earth 10,000 or 10 million years old" Again, I don't know. I just know what I know and that is that Jesus Christ is who He says He is.

 

I believe that is because human beings are neither all good nor all bad and we are capable of rationalizing bad behavior. Assigning certain basic moral values to a so-called 'higher power' or a 'Creator' takes certain decisions about what is right and what is wrong out of the reach of human beings and gives them (us) an agreed upon set of moral standards that each of us understands without stacks and stacks of legal proclamations based on moral relativity.

 

I completely agree. I see the concept of God as unfortunately necessary, but that doesn't speak to whether there actually is one.

But, the reason I don't argue that religion is useless and bad is because nobody has come up with a consistent method to replace that paradigm. Until they do, religion will be a necessity for human civilization.

For me personally it creates quite a intellectual pickle. On one hand, I don't have any belief in the existence of God and I bristle every time I see a law or a social rule based on subjective beliefs based on a book thousands of years old. On the other hand, getting rid of religion entirely won't produce any good either.

It's sort of like chemotherapy. Yes it can save your life, but it can destroy you in the process. It's used for lack of something better.

 

I was raised Catholic, yes.
However as an adult, a person can reject or accept the beliefs of their parents.

It's possible the notion of a God as defined in Christian, Jewish or Muslim beliefs is wrong, but we're hardly at a stage of knowledge to completly obliterate the notion of a higher power...
entirely.

I believe in a higher power for sure. I trust the laws of physics, for example...humans didn't invent those, they discovered them. Certainly the mathematical precision of it all
is not easily dismissed as mere "accident"...order emerging out of chaos.
Our World is quite the opposite, the 2nd law of thermodynamics is quite the opposite...out of order emerges chaos; not the other way around. Shiny cars eventually rust and break down to their simplest components. We don't see shiny new cars bulding themselves from iron ore and petroleum based plastics.

The Universe seemed to start as one singularity and exploded into complexity. Complexity that was already embedded within the singularity...as though it was programmed to do what it has done... I just can't accept that as "dumb luck."

As the Universe cooled and stabilized, order emerged...an order involving mathematical precision that can be predicted; for example the orbit and rotation of the planets.
I can't explain that as mere happenstance...

 

A very poor attempt to explain it would be attributing it to god's intervention or to conclude that your experiences were somehow influenced by your faith.

You have no evidence to support that this implicated god's presence. It seems illogical and irrational to me that you would arbitrarily default to a unsubstantiated belief that god's work was apparent in those instances.

In fact, I would really like to hear your reasoning and evidence behind your belief that god has intervened in your life.

Kids believe santa leaves presents under their tree because they've been manipulated into believing that is the truth without thinking critically about the issue. The present remain there, but santa didn't leave them under the tree. That's exactly the case here. Just replace cancer recovery with presents and god with santa.

I could believe that having faith in a sandwich caused me to have seemingly transcendent, spiritual, healing experiences with as much validity as your rationale behind your belief in god and your faith.

 

Religion's usefullness stems from the belief that an all-powerful being created everything and is watching over us and knows everything you do. Nothing escapes it's eyes and it is responsible for you having a soul which continues after your death indefinitely. If you do not live your life by the rules, eternal justice will be wrought upon you. God's mechanics are simple though. Bribery and threats. Do good and you will be rewarded in the afterlife. Do bad and you'll suffer, though in my opinion they ought to stick with the fire and brimstone and burning instead of saying that Hell is simply being void of God's love.

I mean, you just can't beat that. God is the pinnacle, the quintessential parent figure who is beyond reproach or question. That's hard to beat. We don't need God to have the morals and the social order because those are all common sense, we need him to be there to give us the cookie or the spanking at the end.