No one is playing games with your soul! It really boils down to…would you rather go through life and choose to not believe, then die and find out you were wrong…or go through life and choose to believe, then die and find out you were wrong?
My theory is I keep my faith, so that way when I die, if there is no God then I just die…and no one gets hurt! It beats the alternative!
es denkt
Unless you pick the wrong god, and go to hell. There have been thousands of alleged gods. Many of them were explicitly considered evil, by their followers and by our standards. Many peoples believed that they had to sacrifice in order to escape the wrath of god (look up the Moche Decapitator god).
Some believed sporadic or regularly-scheduled human sacrifice was necessary. Many more believe(d) that their god demands the submission or death of those deemed blasphemers, heretics, witches. This has included very many of the followers of the planet’s three most popular religions (Christians, Muslims, and Hindus).
So how do you know which god or gods to believe in? This is not a yes/no choice. This is a multiple choice question and no one has enough information to list all of the possible choices.
Do you want to die, and find out that you didn’t sacrifice enough of your own blood, mix it with chili powder and cacao, burn the mixture at the top of the temple, and wave the smoke toward the direction in which the sun rises, and therefore be condemn to eternal darkness and torment? (this is a rough paraphrasing of some Mayan religious rituals)
Do you want to die and find out that not eating pork really was important, and go to hell? Or beef? Or that eating the heart of your slain enemy was really important?
The fact is that millions of people have been hurt and killed over questions of which god is the right one. This continues today. Every day.
Maybe you believe in a god that does not require anyone to be hurt, but millions of other people living and dead do/did not. And maybe you are wrong about nobody needing to get hurt.
But, as is most likely, since you are in a wealth democracy separated by an ocean on either side from any significant population of believers in religions other than some form of Christianity, you will just waste a significant portion of your short life engaging in meaningless rituals instead of other more fruitful activities.
Just hope that you will be lucky enough not to be too close to anyone with a belief in a more explosive god. Thousands of Americans in New York were not so lucky not so long ago.
How could I choose to believe or not believe? I could no more choose to believe in God than you could choose to believe in Leprechauns. Sure, I could go through the motions and go to church each week, but do you think that would suffice?
But like James Polichak posted, there are not just two alternatives, but thousands, or millions, or more. Would going to a Christian church each week satisfy every one of those possible gods?
Like Homer Simpson said, “What if we picked the wrong religion? Every week we’re just making God madder and madder.”
This is essentially the same as Pascal’s Wager. The fallacy is that Pascal believed exactly as you do: that there is only one correct religion with one correct outcome and that you have found it. What are the odds?
Faith is belief. Reasoning your way to faith is an impossibility.
I don’t go to church often…maybe once a year. I don’t really associate with any religion, my religion is just ‘God’.
Just wondering, how were humans created, if there is no god? And what did humans start out as babies, or was there suddenly a grown man walking around out of nowhere?
Nothing to do with religion really…you can call him God, Allah, Jehovah, or whatever. God is God…I don’t need an organized religion to tell me there is a God…he is just there.
That’s the problem…there is only one God. These religious radicals are obviously missing that point.
Everyone believes in abiogenesis (possible exception those that believe life is infinitely recursive), the question is whether it is more likely that all life forms developed according to observable physical mechanisms in place today from a single organism*, or whether every extant and extinct organism was magicked into existence (a mechanism which we do not have an explanation for).
And it just happened to be the one that you were brought up to believe in. What an incredible coincidence!
You’re actually only off by one, so you’re pretty close.
Not really - you seem to adhere to a religion that says a person will be tortured in the afterlife if he dies an unbeliever. That’s a very small subset of possible religions. How did you know which were safe to rule out?
I don’t think there really is a God, but if there is, I would imagine that a good God would be pretty pissed off if one of his creation believed some crazy absurdity like he would eternally torture for nonbelievers who are otherwise good people. Aren’t you taking a big chance?
Yes, all humans and other vertebrates start out as babies.
The point is that this is a game of noticing the hits and ignoring the misses. You read into what he says what you want it to mean. He says “What did you smell?” You go through your smells and decide he means the perfume. It could have been the flowers in the hotel room, it could have been the ammonia from cleaning the floors reminding you of her cleaning the kitchen floors, it could have been the turkey sandwich sitting on the tray. The point is, he asks about smells, and* you* decide what smell was important.
In other words, if you’re willing to read into the thinnest of excuses whatever you already wish to believe, you can find clues and hints.
If God is really the loving source of goodness, mercy, and justice that you suppose he is, wouldn’t he be more interested in how I live my life than whether I believe he exists? A God more concerned with whether I believe in him and profess that belief than how I treat others is a God prone to whimsy and not worth believing in. You could live your life exactly how you think he wants, and then wind up in hell anyway because it suits his whimsy. Because he’s God. There’s nothing that keeps him from sending you to Hell for any reason at all, or no reason whatsoever.
My theory is that I live my life by trying to treat others well and minimizing the hurt I cause, and hoping I leave the world a bit better of a place. If I’m wrong, I’ve still minimized hurt and tried to improve the world - laudable goals in themselves. Ending up in an afterlife of bliss or whatever would then just be a bonus. I can’t control if some God wishes to send me to some hell. I can control what I do now.
What does that even mean? Where do you get your concept of God? What is your concept of God? Does your concept of God explicitly involve Jesus? Does this God play an active role in shaping individual people’s lives, or is he more of a universal overseer who keeps the wheels turning and lets the individual pieces fall as they may?
If you actually explore your beliefs, I bet the are largely a version of Christianity, perhaps with some pseudo ecumenicalism thrown in that asserts that all religions are really attempts to worship the one God, they just are more or less corrupted by human misunderstanding. But christianity is the closest version. Right?
I bet you don’t think that Jesus was just a myth, or a person who got misunderstood and misattributed as god. I bet you don’t think the Hindus are closer to correct, where all the various incarnations are manifestations of Brahman, the Supreme Being.
You are obviously ill informed and poorly understand the nature of evolutionary development. The first actual human babies were born from parents who were almost exactly, but not quite, humans.
It is the same answer as the chicken and egg problem - which came first, the chicken or the [chicken] egg? Answer: an egg that hatched a chicken was layed by a bird that was almost exactly but just barely not quite by some minute indifinible bit a chicken.
The real issue is that understanding evolution relies on understanding population genetics and the variability of species.
What makes a chicken a chicken? It’s a type of ground roosting bird with feathers, lays eggs, etc. But what makes that a chicken, rather than a pheasant, a turkey, a quail, a peacock/peahen*? More importantly, the collection of traits and genes we label a “chicken” today is not a static pool - there is variability over time, such that 10,000 years ago, the bird that humans cultivated into modern chickens was in all likelihood very much like today’s chickens (well, only some breeds, because some breeds are modern developments), but may have had tiny quirks or variances that would not stand out as being non-chickenlike to you visually, but nevertheless are slightly different than all chicken breeds today currently manifest. Moreover, the bird from 200,000 years ago that became that bird from 10,000 yrs ago might just have some very different traits. And looking 50 Million Years ago, that bird may not even be a bird.
Humans are no different. The pool of genes that make up “humans” is a varying thing, not static. At some point in the past, there was a collection of genes that made a creature we now term “Neanderthal”, and another collection we term “Homo Habilis” and another we term something else. Those collections of genes may be in a direct route, or slight offshoots in different directions from the line that lead to us But either way, the exant population of our ancestors were a continuous line of being, not an abrupt shift in appearnace/form.
The thing is, we don’t see the variances occur, because they occur over such huge time periods compared to our lifespans, so we see “species” as if they are static things. A chicken is a chicken, a pheasant is a pheasant, a turkey is a turkey, a peacock/peahen is a peacock/peahen. But that is an artifact of looking at snapshots in the path of development.
Imagine taking a tree, and taking X-ray views of the tree in cross section, like doing an X-ray tomography scan on a human in a hospital. Those kinds of scans run cross sectional slices of the person/object, and then stack the slices of the image to form the whole. So take these cross sectional sliced images of a tree. You have one down at the base of the trunk, that is basically round, with some knobbly bits around the edges. Go up about halfway, you get into branches, where you have two or three smaller individual slices that are no longer precisely round because the cross sectional view is not perpendicular to the trunk, and the pieces are not in contact because you can’t see the pieces below where they merge. Go up higher, and you have lots of little pieces of twig and leaf showing up in your cross sectional veiw. These pieces are spread around, random shapes, and have no interconnection to each other. They look very different.
But you know they are from the same tree. But they look very different, because of the “snapshot” view you are taking.
Evolutionary development is the same way. There is a continuous line of genetic development from some distant point in the past to the diversity of the present. The genes that make up the individual species birds today are the leafs and twigs that look vaguely similar but disconnected. The ancestor birds our modern species derive from are the branches, and even the trunk slice where everything is all the same. The chicken of the leaf has heritage from the trunk slice.
Show me proof there is not a flying spaghetti monster,Show me proof there is not a santa claus.
I wasn’t brought up to believe in any God. Well my mother told me there was a God, but we weren’t religious in any way. Dad was raised Jewish, mom Catholic…us kids, nothing. Just taught that God exists.
If you cut the ‘religion’ aspect out of the equation, what’s left is God. That is the God I speak of. He is indeed everyones God. I don’t follow any doctrine or bible…I don’t engage in any ritualistic ideals.
I don’t say ‘praise the lord’ and ‘hallelulah’, I don’t look down on things because I belong to a religion that frowns on such things, I don’t preach or really pray regularly. Its not like that…spirituality and religion are two different things. I don’t believe in God…I am 100% positive there is a God.
No no no! I never said God tortures people. I just said believers in God have eternal life…non believers do not. I even believe that you can say you are a non believer all you want, God knows what is in your heart, in other words, non believers are not necessarily doomed. There will be a chance for all, to believe in God. Don’t quote me on all that though, because honestly that is my opinion. But it does clarify my point that I never said God will torture anyone.
Oh? So one day, thousands of years ago, ‘bam’ a baby is suddenly laying on the ground somewhere? Well I guess there would have to be two of them. I wonder how they survived, and managed to make it to adulthood, so they could reproduce?
Apples and oranges here! There are many many things that prove that there is some sort of ‘higher power’ at work here. How can we say that everything fits so neatly in to place, all by itself?
The food chain, the plants that medicinal, the way humans think and have emotion? Accidents? Things just kind of fell into place like that huh? Nice! Evolution rocks!
The perfume thing you are not understanding. If the guy had said that question about the smell, and I had indeed smelled any other standard issue hospital smell…I agree, that would mean nothing! That would be equivalent to me being in a parking lot recently and the guy asking, did happen to see anything that had wheels. Not very remarkable, and would’ve told me nothing. You see, as soon as I smelled mothers perfume in the hospital that day, it had already crossed my mind that her spirit was indeed there! Obviously, if my mother was there it was because she made it a choice to be there, its not like a coincidental ‘funny running into you here’ thing. She knew I smelled her perfume, and when I was grasping at something, to prove this guy was indeed giving me a message from my mother, my mother decided that would be proof. When the guy asked about the hospital smell, if I had not smelled my moms perfume, it would not have been proof of anything!
And concerning the ‘belief’ and ‘non belief’ thing. Ok, disregard all that…God knows what’s in your heart. He also understands skepticism I am sure. He knows exactly what makes each person tick. I know many non believers who insist there is no god, yet deep down, they are good people…they can scream non belief, all they want…God understands that too. I think anyways.
And yes, I will admit 100% that I am both ill informed and have a poor understanding of evolution. I know to a certain extent that evolution occurred, but I doubt highly that humans, with their intricate minds, emotions, and feelings…let alone thought processes, compassions and consciousness, evolved from monkeys who do not think, feel, cry and laugh like humans! And why are there still monkeys anyways? They missed the boat when all the other monkeys evolved on into human? Or perhaps they decided to stay monkey like? Hmm…interesting thought.