I agree. It’s like when someone says they’re glad they weren’t aborted. Although I can understand the emotion that seems to inspire such a statement, it really is as you say in hindsight and actually pretty bizarre since you wouldn’t be unhappy if you were aborted and to be thankful seems to presume a happy/unhappy dichotomy that doesn’t apply, obviously, if you don’t even exist!
Gratitude as a general principle is probably psychologically healthy, but I agree imputing god behind what we have around us is quite a leap.
and yet we did… and we developed consciousness and asked why we existed. And we came up with something called God and held it responsible for our existence. Which would cause more harm, believing that we will be held responsible for our actions by something called God, or not believing and live as we like?
Without believing in God, the ancient man with their limited knowledge of morals would just follow their natural instinct without control and lead to great suffering because of it. Many people today has better knowledge on how to lessen suffering with amiable morals, but there are still those less advanced society without such luxury. The idea of not believing in God would cause havoc in such society. If you think you’re advanced enough not to believe in God and not cause suffering, then good for you. You no longer need the concept of God. (no sarcasm here, I do mean it).
I was raised LDS, baptized when I was eight, started helping to serve the sacramental bread and water at meetings when I was twelve, etc.
When I was thirteen or fourteen, I was hanging around with a couple of neighborhood kids who were Jehovah’s Witnesses. As I spent time with them the subject of religion came up, and after a while I found myself involved in some fairly extensive debates about the two religions. For essentially the first time I was defending the tenets of my religion to someone with different beliefs.
It wasn’t long before I realized that while I could debate with them and score points, it was purely an intellectual exercise. Deep down, I didn’t really believe it. I didn’t have faith.
Within the year I had quit attending church, and called myself an agnostic.
In the nearly forty years since then, I’ve seen many things that, at least to me, argue against the existence of the stereotypical judeo-Christian god. In those same years, I’ve learned many things that reinforce the my thinking that there is no reason that we, the earth, and the universe could not have come into existence and to our current form without any intelligent guidance, and without any mechanism more complicated than the laws of physics (as if they weren’t complicated enough!).
So I still call myself agnostic, but lean ever more toward simple atheism.
My family is Lutheran, but we stopped attending church when I was little. I was a horrible brat and the pastor essentially banned us until I wasn’t such a hellion. We wound up never going back. So, I didn’t get much churchy experience. I somehow managed to consider myself a Christian without believing in Jesus’ divinity. Did believe in God, though. Onto the story!
When I was ten, my pet cockatiel got sick. I prayed to God to save her, and she died the next morning. I came home from school, cried, buried my bird in the backyard, and concluded God didn’t exist. Obviously, He would have saved her had He existed. :dubious:
I was angry at first. I felt like I’d been lied to. Then I just sort of got over it. Like it was something you just outgrew, like Santa Claus. I used to miss feeling like there was some fundamental goodness to the universe, but the idea just didn’t work with me anymore.
This sounds remarkably like Pascal’s Wager, and is not a terribly convincing argument.
You’re assuming that religion and belief have been a net positive force over the years of human history. This is not at all proven, and there are those (some on this message board) who would argue the opposite. While various religions have done good things, and many people have done good, even great things having been inspired by their belief in god, a lot of pain and suffering have to be laid at the door of “my beliefs are right, yours are wrong, and we’re going to have to kill (or subjugate, or repress, etc) you because of it”.
I don’t think you can say willy-nilly that without religion there would be more havoc and great suffering than without it.
There was no single defining moment for me that made me reject religion. As I grew older I just realized that irrational faith didn’t suit me and I just fell away from it.
There was a period of time when I was around 13 when I started questioning why I was attending church and all. I never felt the presence of an invisible deity in my life, and started wondering whether I was lacking a chip, whether the people around me could feel the presence of the big juju in the sky and I was the one of the few that couldn’t. Of course this was largely because I was surrounded by a whole bunch of Christian friends, coming from a mission school background.
And then I realised that the whole point of faith was to believe, even in the face of contradictory evidence. That’s when I chucked the whole thing out the window.
Believers in general don’t get my goat, as long as they are not shoving their beliefs down my throat. Many of my old school friends are still Christian, and attending the same churches. But when I hear crap such as 'it’s God’s will" whenever some natural disaster comes up in the news I :rolleyes: . Even worse still is when some idiot looks at it and says 'God must be punishing them for [insert wrongdoing of choice] ’ , as one relative did on the morning of the Boxing Day tsunami in reference to the Achenese rebels. That nearly made me choke on my breakfast :eek: :mad: . If you think your God is such a vengeful monster I sure as hell wouldn’t touch him with a 5-ft pole.
I know, it seems some people insist on there being a moral reason for things that can’t otherwise be easily explained like natural disasters. While other religious people say well god didn’t do that. Which begs the question: why didn’t he stop it then? The answer: free will. Free will…of the tsunami? LOL
It’s all an illogical downwards spiral from there.
All because some folks, apparently, need everything to have a moral cause/effect.
I didn’t say anything about religion in my post you quoted. I said the believe in some force that would held us responsible for our actions. The force some of us call ‘God’. Most religion (as far as I know) had only corrupt this belief to benefit whoever made/reinvent it. I think we should see the difference between believing in God personally and believing in God through a religion.
PS: My posts kinda off the OP isn’t it? we’re talking about religion not God. Sorry…
I think your view isn’t uncommon and actually held by quite a lot of people, explicitly or implicitly.
My own view is that it’s equally – maybe even more – likely that if you tell people that there is an afterlife, they may then do things to cause suffering in this world since this world doesn’t matter as much as the afterworld and we have to battle evil on earth and evil people and kill them and stop them from defeating our religion, etc., etc. It’s not ‘causing suffering’ if you’re “saving someone’s soul.”
Some people believe they will be held accountable for their lack of action in this world (by not killing infidels, for example) so being held accountable for them has the opposite effect of what you might imagine.
Some religions, for example, forbid blood transfusions from saving someone’s life because it violates gods will. So, to them, the real suffering to avoid is afterlife suffering and not this-world suffering. And there’s the rub. At least one of them.
But I specifically mention belief in my post, not just participation in a religion. I believe the same is true for both: I don’t think you can say with certainty that a belief in god, a force, or some higher power has been a net force for good, or that things would be worse without it.
If I may explain in my ‘believe in God’ point of view, I’d say it’s bulls**t that disaster was there to punish people. To be able to ‘experience’ things, we need duality, good & evil, joy & suffering, etc. Could there be possibly any joy, without ever knowing suffering? Life should contain both, but leads towards lesser and lesser suffering, and when there’s no more suffering, we’ve obtained singularity and become one again with God and no more experience for us then, cuz there’s no more us, only God. We were God to begin with.
I think it’s Buddha that said: we are a dream that God dreams. We’re like an NPC with smart AI in a videogame. There was never really an NPC, its something made up by the videogame console.
Point taken. And may I add that I never intended to be certain of my views. It’s just easier to comment without concerning too much on how people might take it, otherwise my posts would take too much space (and I don’t speak English! It’s hard enough to write! )
That’s an intriguing perspective. I think it’s probably true about experiencing things. But it doesn’t argue in favor of god to me (but not necessarily against god either, I guess).
Different views offer interesting ‘experience’ I think. There’s no need to be absolutely right/wrong if it doesn’t cause more ‘suffering’… right? no? Doesn’t matter
Everyone has covered almost anything I’d like to have said, and done a better job. I have one more thing to offer, as one of many straws that broke the camel’s back: The Christians I’ve known tell me that their faith fills them with joy. But they don’t seem very happy. A lot of Christians I know don’t like going to church, either. If it’s so terrific, why are they all behaving as if it’s a grim burden?
