Mod note:
Terrifel is not the OP, see last post for explanation. --Giraffe
Which part of the question were you responding to? You don’t demand that non-religious people explain the creation and purpose of the universe? Or you don’t shrug off the question of the creation and purpose of gods? Or both?
Want to give us the answer, then? The only one I’ve ever heard is that god is always there, so isn’t created, or that god is different. For the purpose, the only answer I’ve ever heard is that it’s beyond us.
That sounds like shrugging it off to me.
We all believe in an Eternal Something- non-theists believe in eternal energy that mindlessly organized itself into all this, theists believe in eternal energy that mindfully organized all this out of itself. To me, the existence of a Mind behind it all makes much more sense. YMMV.
I think the problem being pointed out (albeit somewhat oddly) is that you don’t believe in a Mind behind it all. You believe in a Mind behind all except that Mind itself. Put another way, wouldn’t it make even more sense (but lose clarity 
) to say there’s a higher MInd still, one that ordered the Mind that ordered the universe?
So must we regress infinitely then? I don’t think so- as I said, we both believe in an Eternal Something. You just think it’s ultimately mindless & I think it’s ultimately mindful.
Why don’t you think so? I mean, if the logic is “something that appears ordered must have been ordered”, I would certainly consider most gods to appear ordered.
We do, certainly, both believe in Eternal somethings. But your logic demands that we infinitely regress - at least, until we get to a creator/god that does not appear ordered. Which actually could work, thinking about it. A god that is essentially random at the very heart of things would not need to be regressed past under this argument.
Actually, I don’t demand anyone explain the creation and/or purpose of the universe. C’est la vie.
Both. When some atheist claims that they have an explanation for the creation of the universe, I may demand that they produce their explanation, but I’ve never issued a blanket demand that all non-religious people should have such an explanation. As for the second part, I and others have debated it several times on this board and elsewhere.
(To recap, the idea of something being created can only apply to things that exist within time. As God exists outside of time, the concept of “the creation of God” would have no meaning. Or think of it this way: given a line with an orientation, we can definitely identify the points where a certain interval starts and ends. But in a 3-dimensional space we can’t say that a region starts and ends at certain points. Since God exists in more dimensions than our universe has, we cannot make any meaningful statement about the point where God was created.)
Azathoth !
There are 6.4 million people on earth with 5 unifying and dividing forces. The Five Fingers of God (Religion). When in reality, there are 6.4 million religions and five fingers to hold the gun.
Put the"B" to the “M” in there, and enjoy your daily constitutional.
No eternal energy. It appears the net energy of the universe is zero, so there is no issue with the universe beginning. An eternal non-universe is in violation of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
Not that I’m saying that we know the full explanation, that would be egotistical.
Well, I can only speak for myself, non-religious Theist. My belief in a Creator primarily comes from science of the physical world and logic. Everything must have a cause. The Big Bang was caused by something. If not it would not have occured in a particular time and place. So we go back ad infinitum looking for a primary cause. You can’t get there, so there must have been something else able to operate outside of the basic law of the univers: cause and effect. That thing would be extra-natural, a thing we call the Creator, i.e, God. Or god, if you prefer. If one can offer a sensible answer around this I am happy to rethink my position. I have yet to hear anything but vagueries and people throwing out terms like quantum mechanics, which as far as I am aware, does not explain or allow uncaused events. Now it could be that our understanding of the physical world is insufficient and will remain insufficient to understand things fully for another millenium or two, but at that time an answer will be had. But I find it hard to have faith 
in that when every single event in the physical world known to man comports with cause and effect, even if we may not fully understand the how and why.
Mind you, this position is completey silent on religion of any flavor.
If you are a theist, you are religious.
Quantum mechanics is full of uncaused events; virtual particles and so forth. And there are many other possible explanations. And even if there were some outside force, there’s no reason to assume it’s God and not some simple, mindless force. The God hypothesis for the creation of the universe is just about the least probable one there is, given the unlikelyhood of God existing in the first place.
And it doesn’t explain a thing unless you can can explain where God came from anyway.
God is a religious concept.
Religious people insist that science provide an explanation for where existence comes from because they assume science will fail to do so. For the most part, they seem to be right. We don’t know how matter came into existence, because there is no process by which matter CAN come into existence, according to the laws of physics. Matter had to come from somewhere, because science says it can’t come from nowhere. To a religious person, science defeats itself attempting to explain the origin of matter and energy.
Religious people don’t have to explain where God came from, because no religious law or rule says that god had to come from anywhere. It’s a convenient argument, because God doesn’t have to follow any rule or definition that someone might use to argue about his nature or existence. God created everything, and god was never created. Why did he have to be? The universe had to start somewhere, but not God.
That is why I never ask a religious person to explain the origin of God. If they insist that I explain the origin of the universe, I tell them I can’t. At the end of the day, both sides are left insisting that something just “always was”, and it doesn’t sit well with me.
We’ve been through this before. I shant waste my time again. Your hatred of all things theist or religious is not something penetrable by anything other than the hand of GOD. But for my amusement, why don’t you tell me which religion I practice. Or what rites I participate in. And just to help you out a little, if I fill a bucket with all the red balls in the univers, it doesn’t mean the bucket itself is a red ball.
The usual vagueries. But I do love the “and so forth”. You seem to have quite a lot of faith in “and so forth” and other things you—we—don’t fully understand.
Wrong again. I may seek to understand the physical world. And even if I am successful in that endeavor there is no reason to think I would know the mind of God.
It may be, and often is. But it is not a necessary condition of it. A God was the first cause, the prime mover. The end. If I then try to hypothesize what this god is or why he did what he did or what he wants of us, then we’re moving into religious territory.
This is pefectly reasonable and well stated. For me, when I get to your last paragraph one of those two things is more likely to be “always was”—that which is not of the natural world.
Well, that’s you personally; but you also claimed that you’ve never heard of any other theist making such demands either, which is a much broader statement. If I were to take the time to search this board’s forums, just as an example, do you believe that I would be unable to find any examples of theists demanding non-theistic creation theories, or of theists declaring that God’s nature is unknowable? Because I seem to recall hearing others make such claims before.
It’s turtles all the way down.