Political Crossfire Forums

[thefranzkafkafront]

aLienaTeD wrote: Why is it that individually you do not believe in God? What is the strongest argument for tossing the idea of (a) God out the window that you can throw at me?

Haha time to employ rabbinic technique.

What evidence is there that he dose exist?



You must also realise thats its logically impossible to prove a negative precept.

[Izzibeth]

i stopped believing in God when i was around 9ish years old. (Roman Catholic parents by the way) i had been going to church every sunday with my parents and i also went to CCD during the week (my parents made me continue to go and get confirmed until 10th grade despite my many fights with them about it). i'm not sure exactly what did it, but basically, i think it came down to the fact that i had so many questions that could not be answered and/or people refused to answer them. or perhaps it was that their answers did not make sense to me. it was so long ago, i can't remember.

i joked around with my friend, who also didn't believe but was also in the same boat as me, during CCD and, even though i really didn't want to be there, i had a lot of fun. hehe i openly would defy what the nuns said and again, i still would not recieve answers.. only punishments (and i was a really good kid... not a trouble-maker at all). i would answer the tests we had with my own answers and, of course, fail. it was more of my way of defying my parents actually. i just... didn't think i should have been forced to go to a church when i didn't believe a word that was being preached to me. i never tried to convince anyone and i kept my non-belief to myself and my friend.

i remember in 10th grade when confirmation time came, i told my mom "the priest says that i can not get confirmed if i don't believe. and i DO NOT BELIEVE. it is a sin, in your religion, to make me do this. i will be sinning if i say i want to get confirmed when i don't." but, apparently it didn't matter that much because i was still made to do it. that just made me believe even less. true, i could have said "no" during the ceremony and completely embarassed my entire family who came to see it all get done... but i have respect for my parents i suppose and i did it anyway. my whole family saw how angry i was that night. even the bishop who confirmed me knew... but.. he still did it. no idea why. my grandmother on my mother's side does not like me because of my lack of belief and.. well.. that's her problem i suppose.

i do not believe because in my mind... it does not make any sense. i don't understand how other peoples' minds wrap around the idea that there is a supernatural being 'in the sky' that makes decisions, has a paradise waiting for you if you are good or has a hell waiting for you if you are bad. i'm not saying it's bad to believe in things like that. i'm sure it's great and a relief to believe that someone you love has gone to 'a better place'. that is why i think religion is here in the first place. human beings made it up so we could cope with things we didn't understand or things that hurt us. my father, when i was 12, said i was "going through a phase" and that i would believe in god soon. well..... that was a decade ago and i'm not anywhere close. if anything... i'm growing further and further away every day.

i have actively tried to understand how people believe and i have searched through different religions to see if i could pray and believe in something. but my brain just goes "nope. sorry. that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever." and i can't do it. Buddhism, as a philosophy, has been the only thing that i have ever felt a connection to. and in Buddhism... i do not believe in 'paradise'. i believe in finding some peace in this life and connecting to other living things... but no life after death.. i can not believe in supernatural beings or supernatural places. as i said in another thread, i will not argue with theists about what they believe unless they are trying to force their beliefs on me directly or indirectly. it's awesome that you have that peace and you feel better when someone dies. i hope it makes you happy. for me, it is not feasible and i can not even imagine believing in it. it makes me laugh just as much as it makes me get angry. i do not judge people based on what they believe. someone who believes in Zeus, Athena, and Apollo is on the same level for me as someone who believes in God or Shiva or whomever. it's all the same. everyone thinks they are right.

am i right? honestly. i really don't care. i think caring too much about being right is where the problem arises. i'm not an atheist who feels the need to explain away your God to you. i can do it easily enough for myself. why would i try to take away your peace or happiness? if you try to attack me or run my life based on what your god says.. that is where i have a problem.

[SaintLucifer]

aLienaTeD wrote: Why is it that individually you do not believe in God? What is the strongest argument for tossing the idea of (a) God out the window that you can throw at me?

Pfft. As an avowed fascist, that would be a piece-of-cake for me. Allow me.

WHO CREATED GOD??

I thank you for your question but try something more difficult next time.

[sparsely]

aLienaTeD wrote: Why is it that individually you do not believe in God?
Who?

[Carlin]

aLienaTeD wrote: Why is it that individually you do not believe in God? What is the strongest argument for tossing the idea of (a) God out the window that you can throw at me?

I want to seek truth and understand the social world as much as possible. In studying social history and social interaction, religion and God becomes something that remains the bi product of all of us. It is something that really doens't make any sense, other than as a social tool. I think if I were stranded on deserted island or in a desert with a good number of people, I would think the ten commandments would make perfect sense for keeping order. Invoking a fear of punishment is a primary source for a ruling group (or person) to impose on a lesser group to get them to obey and work. That is the origin of religion. In time, the oppressures began to believe their own trickery. I believe religion has played a big part in getting us where we are today, but I feel it can take us no further. It is an unfortunate excuse for people to not think critically and stunt the potential of human growth.

Even if there is a God, what makes us think it is something that even wants to be worshipped or praised (or bowed before)? Why would it need to be something to go into servitude for? In studying the social world, we know that humans have an inclination towards social hierarchy. Having kings, soldiers, and peasants is a social construct. Therefore, believing that God is a king in the kingdom of heaven is a social construct of our minds. Religion and God is an illusion. I'm not going to say it doesn't bring people more comfort at night than their blanket, but many of our fellow humans will remain out in the cold to die.

[Carlin]

Izzibeth wrote: i stopped believing in God when i was around 9ish years old. (Roman Catholic parents by the way) i had been going to church every sunday with my parents and i also went to CCD during the week (my parents made me continue to go and get confirmed until 10th grade despite my many fights with them about it). i'm not sure exactly what did it, but basically, i think it came down to the fact that i had so many questions that could not be answered and/or people refused to answer them. or perhaps it was that their answers did not make sense to me. it was so long ago, i can't remember.

i joked around with my friend, who also didn't believe but was also in the same boat as me, during CCD and, even though i really didn't want to be there, i had a lot of fun. hehe i openly would defy what the nuns said and again, i still would not recieve answers.. only punishments (and i was a really good kid... not a trouble-maker at all). i would answer the tests we had with my own answers and, of course, fail. it was more of my way of defying my parents actually. i just... didn't think i should have been forced to go to a church when i didn't believe a word that was being preached to me. i never tried to convince anyone and i kept my non-belief to myself and my friend.

i remember in 10th grade when confirmation time came, i told my mom "the priest says that i can not get confirmed if i don't believe. and i DO NOT BELIEVE. it is a sin, in your religion, to make me do this. i will be sinning if i say i want to get confirmed when i don't." but, apparently it didn't matter that much because i was still made to do it. that just made me believe even less. true, i could have said "no" during the ceremony and completely embarassed my entire family who came to see it all get done... but i have respect for my parents i suppose and i did it anyway. my whole family saw how angry i was that night. even the bishop who confirmed me knew... but.. he still did it. no idea why. my grandmother on my mother's side does not like me because of my lack of belief and.. well.. that's her problem i suppose.

i do not believe because in my mind... it does not make any sense. i don't understand how other peoples' minds wrap around the idea that there is a supernatural being 'in the sky' that makes decisions, has a paradise waiting for you if you are good or has a hell waiting for you if you are bad. i'm not saying it's bad to believe in things like that. i'm sure it's great and a relief to believe that someone you love has gone to 'a better place'. that is why i think religion is here in the first place. human beings made it up so we could cope with things we didn't understand or things that hurt us. my father, when i was 12, said i was "going through a phase" and that i would believe in god soon. well..... that was a decade ago and i'm not anywhere close. if anything... i'm growing further and further away every day.

i have actively tried to understand how people believe and i have searched through different religions to see if i could pray and believe in something. but my brain just goes "nope. sorry. that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever." and i can't do it. Buddhism, as a philosophy, has been the only thing that i have ever felt a connection to. and in Buddhism... i do not believe in 'paradise'. i believe in finding some peace in this life and connecting to other living things... but no life after death.. i can not believe in supernatural beings or supernatural places. as i said in another thread, i will not argue with theists about what they believe unless they are trying to force their beliefs on me directly or indirectly. it's awesome that you have that peace and you feel better when someone dies. i hope it makes you happy. for me, it is not feasible and i can not even imagine believing in it. it makes me laugh just as much as it makes me get angry. i do not judge people based on what they believe. someone who believes in Zeus, Athena, and Apollo is on the same level for me as someone who believes in God or Shiva or whomever. it's all the same. everyone thinks they are right.

am i right? honestly. i really don't care. i think caring too much about being right is where the problem arises. i'm not an atheist who feels the need to explain away your God to you. i can do it easily enough for myself. why would i try to take away your peace or happiness? if you try to attack me or run my life based on what your god says.. that is where i have a problem.

Very good post, Izzibeth. I relate to your catholic upbringing very much. My mom was crazy about getting me to church when I was a kid. She tried to get me confirmed, but she only got us to one class for it and it was such a fight that she didn't want to go through it again. :-D I was happy for myself that I didn't have to go through that. I'm sorry you had to. I officially "came out" to my mom a few months back and she seemed fine with it (for a while, I considered myself agnostic before Atheist, but I think I was just afraid of it). I'm sorry people in your family aren't.

[Vercingetorix]

Why is it that I hear all these stories of Catholic children becoming atheists? Ugh... If you had questions, why didn't you seek answers? I did. And if you didn't get answer, look harder. I did.

I have another question for atheists, just out of curiousity: When you became an atheist, did you logically think it through, or did you just decide spontaneously?

[feederband]

Vercingetorix wrote: Why is it that I hear all these stories of Catholic children becoming atheists? Ugh... If you had questions, why didn't you seek answers? I did. And if you didn't get answer, look harder. I did.

I have another question for atheists, just out of curiousity: When you became an atheist, did you logically think it through, or did you just decide spontaneously?

For me I searched, asked a million questions, prayed,then one day I woke up a free person...And now thay my mind has been opened up I now search for the real truth...

[Carlin]

Vercingetorix wrote: Why is it that I hear all these stories of Catholic children becoming atheists? Ugh... If you had questions, why didn't you seek answers? I did. And if you didn't get answer, look harder. I did.

I have another question for atheists, just out of curiousity: When you became an atheist, did you logically think it through, or did you just decide spontaneously?

If we had question, why didn't we seek answers? I know I did. Just because I can ask people if there's a God and most of them would say yes, it doesn't mean that it means anything. Anyway, yeah, I thought about it my whole life. I tried very hard to believe in God, but my rational mind pulls all the clouds of illusion from the notion.

[feederband]

Vercingetorix wrote: Why is it that I hear all these stories of Catholic children becoming atheists? Ugh... If you had questions, why didn't you seek answers? I did. And if you didn't get answer, look harder. I did.

I have another question for atheists, just out of curiousity: When you became an atheist, did you logically think it through, or did you just decide spontaneously?

The question should be after Mom and Dad and preacher told you all this stuff was real did you think it though logically or did you decide well all these people cant be wrong so god exist?

[Izzibeth]

Vercingetorix wrote: Why is it that I hear all these stories of Catholic children becoming atheists? Ugh... If you had questions, why didn't you seek answers? I did. And if you didn't get answer, look harder. I did.

I have another question for atheists, just out of curiousity: When you became an atheist, did you logically think it through, or did you just decide spontaneously?

i asked questions. i asked questions of everyone. then, at a pretty young age, i realized... just about the time i stopped believing in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny... that is was time to face reality. i could not understand how it was that i was to believe in Santa Claus and then discard him.. yet my parents were believing in a god.... somehow he was more real than a man that is supposed to come down into my house one day a year and give me presents (who turns out to be my parents).

looking harder just made me see that nothing was there. looking harder made me see WHY people believe in gods and other deities. that is the part that interests me. why people do. i understood at a young age that i would never be able to believe in a god... why is one god more real than another? why is one god more true than another? why is one god more 'right' than another? there is no answer to that question other than "one god is not ... than another." for me anyway. it's all well and good, as i said, for you to believe in whichever god you believe in. just keep your beliefs a good distance away from the life i choose to live.

i also noticed another thing when i looked harder. hypocrites.

[John Wilkes Booth]

aLienaTeD wrote: Why is it that individually you do not believe in God? What is the strongest argument for tossing the idea of (a) God out the window that you can throw at me?

The same reason I don't believe in unicorns: the absence of proof. Actually, you can couple it with the fact that humans have demonstrated time and again a habit of inventing gods. So even the presence of religion can be explained.

[John Wilkes Booth]

Vercingetorix wrote: Why is it that I hear all these stories of Catholic children becoming atheists? Ugh... If you had questions, why didn't you seek answers? I did. And if you didn't get answer, look harder. I did.
I did have questions and the answers brought me to atheism. But I should look harder. Let me guess: when I arrive at Christianity, I've asked the right questions. Quote:
I have another question for atheists, just out of curiousity: When you became an atheist, did you logically think it through, or did you just decide spontaneously?
It only came about through years of philosophical searching and development of education. If I were dumber or less educated I wouldn't have achieved it.

[Æ]

SaintLucifer wrote: aLienaTeD wrote: Why is it that individually you do not believe in God? What is the strongest argument for tossing the idea of (a) God out the window that you can throw at me?

Pfft. As an avowed fascist, that would be a piece-of-cake for me. Allow me.

WHO CREATED GOD??

I thank you for your question but try something more difficult next time.
If not for some base case, there would be infinite recursion.

[sparsely]

aLienaTeD wrote: SaintLucifer wrote: aLienaTeD wrote: Why is it that individually you do not believe in God? What is the strongest argument for tossing the idea of (a) God out the window that you can throw at me?

Pfft. As an avowed fascist, that would be a piece-of-cake for me. Allow me.

WHO CREATED GOD??

I thank you for your question but try something more difficult next time.
If not for some base case, there would be infinite recursion.

and what makes that unacceptable other than the human minds inability to conceptualize infinity?

[Enoch]

John Wilkes Booth wrote: aLienaTeD wrote: Why is it that individually you do not believe in God? What is the strongest argument for tossing the idea of (a) God out the window that you can throw at me?

The same reason I don't believe in unicorns: the absence of proof. Actually, you can couple it with the fact that humans have demonstrated time and again a habit of inventing gods. So even the presence of religion can be explained. Religion is a man-made construct, true. But, that is hardly indicative of the non-existence of a higher power.

[Saf]

aLienaTeD wrote: Why is it that individually you do not believe in God? What is the strongest argument for tossing the idea of (a) God out the window that you can throw at me?
I will give you the logical positivist answer to the question of god.

"Does a transcendent creator exist?" does not ask a literally meaningful question. A literally (i.e., objectively) meaningful question asks one of two things: clarification about a tautology, or a question about a matter of fact which is at least weakly verifiable. Weakly verifiable means we can at least conceive of how we might go about proving yes or no. For example, if I ask the question, "Is George W. Bush wiretapping this forum?" we can imagine tracing all kinds of data and lines and finding out yes or no. But how do we discover if there is a transcendent creator god? We cannot go back to before creation and watch, because it is logically necessary that prior to creation, nothing existed. We cannot look for a transcendent creator with any of our senses because a transcendent creator, by definition, is beyond the scope of human experience. Stating "God exists" or "God does not exist" may look like English sentences due to grammatical illusions, but neither sentence has a truth value (i.e. true or false).

The only relevant question is, "Do you feel that there is a transcendent creator?" Being that I do not feel that way, my answer is no.

However, I am not entirely a nonevidentialist. There is one way in which one may make literally meaningful statements about something empirically unverifiable: tautological arguments. If the definition of God presupposes its existence, as the ontological proof claims, this is a literally meaningful proof. It is invalid, but it is literally meaningful (falsely so). If one could, for instance, demonstrate that the conception of God as a transcendent creator held, within its very definition, a logical contradiction, this would disprove the logical possibility of the entity as so defined. That, however, is an argument best left to another thread.

[sLiPpY]

aLienaTeD wrote: Why is it that individually you do not believe in God? What is the strongest argument for tossing the idea of (a) God out the window that you can throw at me?

I'll answer this one again.


What god?

[John Wilkes Booth]

UrielsFyre wrote: John Wilkes Booth wrote: aLienaTeD wrote: Why is it that individually you do not believe in God? What is the strongest argument for tossing the idea of (a) God out the window that you can throw at me?

The same reason I don't believe in unicorns: the absence of proof. Actually, you can couple it with the fact that humans have demonstrated time and again a habit of inventing gods. So even the presence of religion can be explained. Religion is a man-made construct, true. But, that is hardly indicative of the non-existence of a higher power.

"Higher power" is vague. What makes a god a god? What if there were a perfect being, but he didn't create us? Is he God? What about a being who did create us, but isn't perfect? Is that God? What about a being who isn't perfect, and didn't create us, but he sent Jesus to Earth? What about a creature that is none of these things, but is simply "higher?" Yes, I suppose something like that might exist. It's far more likely to exist than a perfect being who created us. How conceited to think an entity must be both perfect AND mankind's creator! Oh, and it LOVES us!

There's no reason to believe in a higher power except to make myself feel better about the world. People who believe in something for no reason, in order to avoid looking foolish, invented a virtue called "faith" and pretended it was a good thing. In reality, a remotely just god would be more than understanding of those who didn't believe in him.


So no, I cannot disprove that a perfect entity created humans, loves us more than anything in this gigantic universe, leaves no evidence behind, and programmed us to invent religions, just to keep it all interesting. But like I said, I can't disprove unicorns either.


God and unicorns are equally likely to exist, and that is all that can be said on this matter.

[Saf]

dtwizzy2k5 wrote: Refrozen Seabass wrote: If I say "I don't know", what does that prove?

It proves that the atheist explanation for how this universe came about is just as much a leap of faith as belief in God

Refrozen Seabass wrote: I don't know how plumbing works or how they get the caramel inside the Caramilk bar either. So?

Haha the difference between plumbing/candy is that SOMEBODY out there does know how plumbing works or how they get caramel inside Caramilk (wtf is that) bars, but NOBODY knows how the universe was created, so if you dont have a better explanation than God, just stop arguing

Refrozen Seabass wrote: As for where the earth came from, how far back would you like to go? Ultimately, a cloud of interstellar dust. Something perturbed it, it started to rotate, mass started to gather in the middle as it tends to do. Fast forward lots of years, and you get a star and in our case planets out of the deal.

Yeah, so you expect me to believe that this cloud of dust came out of nowhere and coincidentally happens to create an earth and a sun and all the planets, as well as the marvels of nature such as DNA coding, Phi, etc. Please, use your damn head and realize that there must have been an intelligent being behind all of this who designed it all and it couldn't possibly have been a matter of mere coincidence and happening.

All you have proven is that you don't understand the cosmology of modern physics. Walk up to a physics professor and tell him or her that s/he doesn't know how the universe was created, and watch yourself get pwned.