What is your biggest problem with religion that prevents you from believing?

In My Humble Opinion
41

Dedicating so much of your life to something for which you have no actual proof of seems like a complete waste of time to me. Science is actually trying to establish fact and Scientists are happy to admit they were wrong if a previous theory is disproved. Obviously because they are just in search of truth and real answers. Religions contradict themselves and other religions. You have to buy into a set of beliefs that are based on stories full of holes and no proof whatsoever. Religion doesn’t evolve, you just have extremists misinterpreting these misinterpretations of how we became to be. You have to defy logic and explanation, something referred to as ‘showing faith’. It scares me how tied-up in religion people become. These ideas and stories were created by man thousands of years ago before we new about Space etc. We looked up to the sky and couldn’t see anything past that so of course, that must be where our creator lives. If these same people who thought up the different religions were given science books before being given a bible sy, I wonder which one would make the most sense to them.

Surely, unless God is selfish and needy, he wouldn’t want us spending all our time worshiping him instead of getting on with our own lives on the Earth that he apparently created for us. Especially when this is the only life we get and there is no better place awaiting us once we leave.

42

For me, it was a combination of several things.

First, as early as my first serious reading, I became interested in mythologies. I was sick with the measles and necessarily out of school for a couple of weeks, and read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy and then rummaged through my father’s collection of scifi to find The Silmarillion and read that, which led to my devouring his literally thousands of issues of Analog, F&SF, IASFM, Scientific American, and Nova, plus other books by big Scifi authors. Then I’d go to the library and pick up books of mythology and chew through them. I’m one of the small minority that has actually read the Bible from cover to cover, not that I can recall specific chapters other than the biggies anymore. This is a rather long-winded way of saying that I started my thinking on spirituality with a wide variety of views of religion, and led me to the same question as above about how any one religion could possibly be the ‘right’ one. SF authors not being a particularly religious lot helped too.

Also, my parents (Dad was Protestant, Mom was Catholic) had decided early on that they’d expose us kids to a range of religions, mostly variations of Christianity, and let us decide which we preferred. The one universal that I found during all this was the “I’m a better Christian than you are” competition between adherents. Overall, organized religion just made me uncomfortable, especially Catholicism. Appealing to guilt has never been a good way to motivate me. I’d have to say my favorite, though, was the Southern Baptists. The same competitions existed, but Sundays were as much about having a good time as learning.

Finally, I’ve always been a science guy, which gave me a healthy skepticism.

All of this gave me a critical perspective on religion in general, and started me on the path to figuring out exactly what my beliefs were. As usual with my individualist nature, my thoughts on the subject don’t fit into any kind of box, especially any particular form of organized religion.

43

I think everyone would agree that having faith in everything you do is the hardest thing for any religious person.

44

  1. Total lack of evidence (all religions).

  2. Huge discrepancy between Old Testament and New Testament Gods (Kill false prophets and kill Egyptian children versus ‘love one another’ and ‘forgive your enemies’.) (Christianity)

  3. Differing stories of the Resurrection in the Gospels (if the four authors can’t even agree on this…) (Christianity)

  4. Differing morality of believers (If you don’t believe in Jesus, you will:

  • burn in Hell forever
  • go to Purgatory
  • still go to Heaven)
45

I believe that there is an infinitesimal but non-zero probability of some sort of deity, deities or other sentient supernatural forces existing, but as this existence cannot be demonstrated through conventional means and as this existence is not required to explain the various workings of the universe it seems sensible to assume the non-existence of such force or forces for all practical purposes without requiring a position of absolute non-existence.

46

A being that created the entire universe wouldn’t need to panhandle his followers once a week.

Show me a god that ain’t broke and maybe I’ll listen.

47

Forgive me if it has been said before but adhering to a religion and believing are not the same thing. Perhaps a majority of the smartest people in history were Deists, ascribing the term of 'God" to forces of creation beyond our understanding. A personal god that directly interferes in our affairs is ludicrous and so is praying for Him to change his extant plan…

I could see myself being a Deist due to the vast unlikeliness that all necessary components exist for conscious life but I remain an agnostic atheist due to the lack of any evidence as such. Religion is a 100% waste of time, even with Pascal’s wager you have a 1/4200 chance of your God being the right one.

48

There’s no evidence, it’s irrational and contradictory, it’s silly, it’s immensely destructive, and it warps people.

49

Gad?

50

Which draws another logical flaw: if true this means that God intentionally deceives people into thinking the Universe is 14 billion years old, or is not powerful enough to prevent Satan from doing so.

51

There’s not “biggest problem” for me. The prevention is all the different things, and they are too interconnected to hypothetical any of them out. But if there was a “biggest problem” it would be this.

It’s fairly evident from the multitude of contradictory beliefs and stories, religious and otherwise, that people are capable of sincere beliefs in complete fairy tales. I have seen no evidence that lifts any part of religion out of the morass of the fallibility of human reason.

52

When I was six years old (that was 71 years ago), a little girl in my neighborhood casually mentioned once that Jesus was watching us. I asked “Who’s Jesus?” She pointed to the sky and said “He’s up there, and can always see us.” That did it for me. Even a six year old knows BS when he sees it.

53

Nitpick: AIUI, it doesn’t happen that way. I would have thought that usually, people believe the first one, then reject the next ninety-nine. The reason for that being inertia.

54

A couple reasons: Lack of evidence, the problem of evil, the problem of avoiding the wrong hell. These are pretty common arguments that I won’t bother elaborating on. I have three major beefs that I rarely see mentioned:

  1. I was originally indoctrinated by people who had no clue about their own religion. They told me things that any novice religious scholar would know are blatant falsehoods. As I got more into Biblical scholarship, and learned more about the various sources and revisions to the Bible, it rapidly became apparent that these people were either liars or astonishingly ignorant of the religion they claimed to speak for.

  2. God is a dick. Anyone who actually reads the Bible will realize that he is the cruelest and most arbitrary dictator to ever live. The Bible is replete with examples of God committing mass murder for extremely trivial offenses. If God does exist, he does not deserve our love or worship. Which brings me to my final point:

  3. God commands us to love him and threatens us with eternal punishment if we do not. That is not love. That is coercion. I cannot conceive of why a deity would have to coerce people into “love” for him by threatening hideous and unending punishment.

55

Christianity has the biggest loop hole in the world. You mean to tell me that you can rape children, steal, lie, break every rule there is and then, at age 95, if you accept Jesus, you go to heaven? In the meantime, the people who believe in any other religion who never do anything more than take the occasion pen home from work are commend to hell? Bullshit!

If the 9/11 hijackers accepted Jesus right before they hit the buildings, or Ted Bundy did as the juices sizzled through him, that got them to heaven?

Also, if god(s) there be, how do they think that the universe they created isn’t good enough for us? We got to make up tales of magical sky pixies!

56

I think this is the truest answer for me.

And then this one.

And then all the rest of the posts in this thread.

57

I don’t believe because I have no belief in my heart. But if I were inclined to, I don’t understand why any woman follows Christianity. It literally states that woman is the source of all evil, that woman ate the apple and thus allowed sin to enter the Garden, while Adam was just singing and innocent and happy. It lays the arguable crime of knowledge at all women’s feet, so we all have to suffer the pain of childbirth because one woman wanted to - what? Know more? So right from the start the religion is against knowledge?

I can’t be part of anything that preaches that knowledge is wrong.

I like Hinduism way, way better than any of the monotheistic religions and even Hinduism is bass-ackwards sometimes on women’s rights. And in the end that’s probably my biggest barrier other than lack of belief - most of the religions consider women to be second class citizens at best and birthing machines at the worst. Even the Dalai Llama said women had to be pretty above all. :rolleyes:

58

I gotta admit – I’m a bit envious of those who do believe.

There’s got to be a lot of comfort in it. I think most people (myself included) find randomness to be scary. If bad things happen to people for no reason at all, then it’s impossible to avoid them happening. (This I think is exactly why when someone gets lung cancer the first question most people ask is whether the person smoked.) There must be some solace in thinking that the bad thing that happened to you or a loved one wasn’t random, but part of an overall plan – god’s will – even if you will never be privy to what that plan is.

It also must be nice to believe that you will still be around after death, in some wonderful place where everything is great, and all you have to do to get there is believe what you already believe.

One thing I find particularly irritating about some religious beliefs is the notion that faith is a gift. Because nearly always the folks that think this way blame me for not having faith. It’s my fault I didn’t get the gift?

59

Didn’t read the whole thread.

To address the original question: to me, “believing” and “religion” are not intrinsically and necessarily connected to each other. You can have either one of them without the other.

But if you choose to have them together in your life, and the question applies, then you either need to find a way to make them (i.e., “religion” and “belief”) compatible with each other or drop one from your life.

60

I grew up in a uber conservative Mormon family, believing the world was created 6,000 years ago and fossils were, ah, yeah. Not only was Christianity the only correct religion, it had to be the right favor of Mormonism, the LDS tradition. Everyone else was completely deceived by Satan.

Except it all fell apart when you started to think too much about it. Then I went on a mission to Japan, and realized that people who were not only not LDS, but not even Christian, gasp, were actually damn good people.

When I started to study various religions and see how completely dependent they were on the culture which fostered them, I could never reconcile a god which would arbitrarily pick one society to sponsor.

In an Islamic studies class, the professor related that the Medieval Islamic mystics practiced what they called the “negative way” in that in order to grow closer to god, they would give up more and more things, such as wealth, possessions and social contact. They would then deprive themselves of sex, and even food and sleep for extended periods.

Ultimately, they were left with only consciousness and identity, so they strove to forgo consciousness in order to achieve pure identity with god.

Similarly, Hindi mystics traveled a similar path, but at the final choice, with consciousness.

The professor said that this underlines the basic difference between Eastern and Western religions.

I haven’t found any cites for this, (this does talk a bit about it) so I can’t really verify the account, but even if it’s not exactly true, it does illustrate my point about religions reflecting the cultures they were created in.

If there were a god or gods, one would expect a Grand Unified Theory of religion which would underline all of them, but there isn’t.