# Why do so many people still believe in God? **URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-people-still-believe-in-god/962965 **Category:** Great Debates **Created:** [April 17, 2022, 8:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-people-still-believe-in-god/962965 "2022-04-17T20:24:15Z") **Posts on this page:** 1 **Showing post:** 70
### Author: ![Bill\_Door](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/50afbb/32.png) [@Bill\_Door](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bill_Door) #### Post date: [April 19, 2022, 4:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-people-still-believe-in-god/962965/70 "2022-04-19T16:22:51Z")
> [@SenorBeef](#): > > I would also say that about 95-99% of self identified believers don’t actually act like they believe. If you really think your eternity will be determined between infinite reward and infinite punishment based on a few decades on Earth, there’s no way you would fucking dick around with that and risk infinite punishment by engaging in sin. I don’t think anyone truly deep down believes in the sort of religions that promote those ideas except people whose lives are basically monk-like, because dicking around with eternal reward/punishment, if you truly believed, would be pure insanity. Exactly. I was in school back in the 1950s, and the school had an intercom system to make announcements in the classes. When the teachers left the room they would tell students that the principal had a switch to turn the loudspeakers into microphones, and everything that was said in the class would be heard by the principal. Some students believed this, and some did not. You know how you could tell? Sure you do, by the way they behaved while the teacher was out. It’s the same with belief in a deity, 95% of the people who profess belief do not truly believe, and the evidence is how they behave. No one who believed in God would act the way they do. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-so-many-people-still-believe-in-god/962965)._