I was never comfortable with the idea of Hell. So, the all-powerful God made this place to send the non-believers, where they suffer for eternity (and it’s not like God plopped himself down in front of them and parted a sea or sprinkled some fairy dust and created a unicorn, or something–most of them just were never able to believe, for all the reasons people have talked about here). So the punishment for that heinous crime is endless agony. What an asshole. What made it worse was the perspective of the believers–not “Yeah, I love God and all, but that is a pretty dickish move on his part.” No, it’s always the sort of subtle, elitist, smug condescension or desire to convert you so that you’ll be saved.
Some people no doubt deserve an eternity of suffering. But there are millions and millions of good people–many no doubt more ethically and morally grounded than some religious folks–that don’t deserve it. And yet, I’m supposed to believe in an entity that puts them in Hell anyway? I’m supposed to love this thing? Seriously? It’s mentally offensive to me, just like the attitude of believers when it comes to the fate of non-believers.
And I can’t even wrap my brain around the pedophile priests. I’m sure because they believe, there’s a nice comfy spot in Heaven for them, as long as they repent. Which is another offensive concept to me… well, I could go on all day, so I’ll just quit here. I want to believe, and I’d love for there to be something out there, but not this thing that Christians believe in.
Oh, there’s doubt about it. Even thinking in terms of eye for an eye, how can a finite being deserve infinite punishment? Even people like Hitler or Stalin didn’t inflict an infinite amount of evil on the world.
Two things that compel me to believe in a God are a) consciousness, and b) astrophysics. I can’t even begin to explain the former, and for the latter, I find that the systematic way the Universe works is far too complex and exacting to just happen accidentally and randomly.
Ironically, when I gaze at the sky at night, thinking about how small I am and how big all that is, I can’t help but feel that there is no afterlife. There are an infinite number of things in the Universe that are far more important than me and my sins.
Not looking to argue - merely curious - but what do you think a universe that was the result of natural processes (the laws of physics as we understand them) would look like, and how would it differ from our own?
Child cancer and the like pretty much took away any belief I had in a good or loving good. You can’t justify that. Why would any loving God allow the innocent to suffer like that? If he really wanted to bring them closer to him, as people say, then he could just have them die painlessly in their sleep one day. Still disturbing but just look at any child cancer ward.
Beyond that it just doesn’t make any sense. I like others have no need in my life for a God. I don’t need wisdom or guidance from it; I get my own.
Can I open a question to the atheists here? I never gotten a good answer to this, and I am posing it with genuine curiosity and not in a way that is ‘setting up’ for something else.
If you do not believe in a God, how did the universe begin? I guess I wonder about the exact point when we crossed over from literally ‘nothing’ to ‘something.’ I am probably butchering this, but isn’t the accepted theory now that the universe had a beginning, as a singularity, and that before the singularity, nothing existed, not even space or time. How then did the singularity appear?
Deists answer this by saying that God exists outside of space or time, so he created the singularity. How do atheists answer it? Is it just that science hasn’t advanced that far yet? It just seems to break all our known scientific laws to create something out of nothing.
I have had atheists say to me, “science does not support the idea of a God who created the universe.” But to me, science does not support any theory about the origin of the universe. We know a lot now about the very very early stages, but there comes a point when it seems like we hit a wall, which is the beginning. Yet we are aware that at some point, there was a 'before."
We have to say “there was something that existed or occured in the ‘before’ that is beyond the ability of science to explain.” (and this seems different than other scientific mysteries, such as curing cancer, that we just haven’t figured out yet. It seems possible that we can cure cancer someday, but how can we use science, a tool that exists in our own space and time, to explain something that happened before our space and time? Why is “god” less likely than “something else” at this point.
If this is too much of a hijack, I apologize. Maybe I should start a new thread on this.
I don’t think there was ever a time when the universe wasn’t.
Further, appeals to god fall on this very same sword. What did god create the universe out of? Nothing?
Do you take two scoops of nothing, add no time, and bam a universe occurs?
In all seriousness, I view the cosmos as functioning on the B Theory of time. Past, present, and future all exist and always did.
God is less likely because God = magic. Think about it - what are you actually saying when you say a non material entity did something outside of space and time to create time and space?
We don’t know how the universe began. Maybe at some point we will know. Maybe we’ll get it wrong a few times. Maybe it’ll be quite a long time before we do know.
It doesn’t actually answer the question, though. It just adds another thing that hasn’t been proven.
We answer it by saying, “We don’t know.”
Are we aware of that? Maybe there wasn’t a “before.”
Is “god” defined or is it just “whatever we haven’t explained yet”? The problem is that the term “god” comes with a lot of baggage that has nothing to do with answering your question about the origin of the universe.
This isn’t the default. The default’s largely dependent on how you were raised. I suspect there’s also a genetic component, since I’ve read articles on the “spiritual centre” of the brain, and natural proclivities for superstition and religious belief. So I think for a lot of folks, there’d be an age where an argument or piece of evidence simply became compelling, when they really hit that age of abstract thought.
For the OP: As for myself, I can’t answer. I’m an atheist (I usually say “agnostic” these days), born and raised. I was your militant atheist type as a kid, but then, I was a loudmouth then, who liked nothing better than an argument. Hit my teens and I went through a kind of derealisation that’s left me largely unwilling to pin down existence at all.
I 've read about that too – the so-called “God-gene” – and I do wonder if it’s just something I was born without. I was raised fairly religiously (though not fanatically), and don’t think I ever even met an admitted atheist until I was an adult, but I never had any faith at all. I realized early, I mean early, like when I was 6 or 7, that I didn’t buy it, but I can’t count the number of people who have told me they “just know” that something is out there, that they can feel it inuitively, feel it “in their bones,” etc.
Not me, and I tried every which way to trigger a “religious experience.” I had some interesting mediative experiences and experiences with altered consciousness, but never anything “religious,” and never the slightest sense that there’s anything “out there.”
I wonder too. me, my sister, and my father were all atheists before any one of us knew the others were. I didn’t know my father was until after he died. I knew he wasn’t religious, but we never talked about it. A gene would explain that well.
And it’s not like my sister and I weren’t “indoctrinated”, we were taken to church as kids (by my mom, my dad stayed home).
Not to continue the hijack, but the fact that every single religion on earth got the history of earth, sun, and universe wrong is pretty compelling to me. The actual story could be written just as clearly as Genesis is. God is also very good at giving clear directions when he wants to. I’m sure there are plenty of moral lessons that could be drawn from the real story, even better than the “Thank Me It’s Sabbath” one.
Since you didn’t start a new thread, I’d like to make a point here about this.
First of all, the Big Bang theory as I understand it does not say there was ever nothing. It only says that the universe was once a single hot, dense point. There is nothing in the theory about what was before. But this is really beside the main point I wish to make.
There were times when lots of phenomena were unexplained, and seemed unexplainable without invoking a god or gods or some other supernatural thing. The sun, volcanos, rain, you name it. Eventually, they all were explained naturally.
There is no reason that I can see to think the origin of the universe or what caused the Big Bang will be the exception. Surely people thought at one point that a god created the earth and the sun and the planets and the stars, and how these came to be was the final question that can only be claiming god did it. Science now knows the natural means by which these came to be.
The question of the origin of the universe is really just the same question at a different scale. And I wouldn’t be surprised if someday the big bang is explained naturally, and some larger scale (like a multiverse) will be argued the exact same way.
<slight hijack>
I know many who use the phrase “there is no evidence” intend it to mean “no compelling evidence.” However, there does appear to be some who maintain there is actually no evidence whatsoever. Even if I’m mistaken on that, I want to address this point for theists who may be reading this thinking, “What do you mean there is no evidence?”
Within the realm of my experience, there is probably more evidence in support of the claims of Christianity than there is the existence of some continent called Africa.
I have met one person who claims to be from Africa but I have met hundreds who claim to know Jesus Christ in a personal even intimate way
I have never myself seen an embassy from any African country but I have seen countless churches
I have never been to Africa, but I have had personal experiences consistent with the promises found in the Bible.
(diverging now from the African comparison)
I have seen how the passage of time acts as a filter: ideas with merit survive the ages while nonsense disappears
People I have reason to trust and respect attest to the truth of the Christian message
Looking at “creation” there is ample prima facie evidence of a designer
I could go on. My shorthand point is this: People who believe in God are not necessarily deluded (though some are). It is often the case that they merely haven’t weighed the totality of the evidence and haven’t yet gotten around to honestly considering alternate hypotheses.
</hijack>
Which leads me to my answer to the OP. I was accidentally raised a Pentecostal. I was on fire, born again, dedicated to God so much so that I enrolled in Bible College with a view to becoming a pastor. Call it confirmation bias or what-have-you, but I was convinced on the evidence that God was real and his message needed spreading. I had no need to reopen the case.
Until “The Incident” The details are unimportant here - suffice it to say I came face to face with the realization that if there was a God and this congregation I loved was in a meaningful relationship with Him, then the reaction to “The Incident” should have been different than it was. Instead they acted like any other group of people in the “world” I had been taught was so evil.
This resulted in a years-long difficult process of rethinking the evidence (it sounds way more intellectual writing that way than as it really happened - but how else to describe it?). I eventually allowed myself to consider evidence contrary to my wished-for conclusion. Eventually I learned the questions I thought were answered by “God did it” had better, more sensical, more compelling answers elsewhere. Further, I realized how absolutley unlikely the God hypothesis really is on its face (but so are many of the realizations stemming from quantum mechanics, right?)