Well, dreamer, turnabout’s fair play, so how about it: why is it so easy to believe in God? Whatever you say will be as alien to us as what we’re saying to you.
There’s two connotations to “believe”: one suggests an internal affirmation in the existence of something (i.e., God, Martians, Elvis sightings); the other suggests an ability to trust something (your parents, your spouse, Matt Drudge). In the theological context, the two tend to overlap.
I think people tend to be result-oriented, illustrated by the fact that so many people require proof in order for God to exist. Which is not to say that they’re toying with God, so much as they can’t trust in an almighty being (much less his church) without some validation of his existence.
Me, I’ve been struggling with the “trust” issue. Like Guinastasia said, the issue of God’s existence isn’t an issue for me anymore. The concept of no-God just feels wrong. But I DO struggle with the ability to trust in God, because when things get sucky, I wonder where the almighty and I stand in relation to each other. Given that, I think it WOULD be easy for me to toss aside my recognition of his existence. In other words, but for the fact that I’d know/believe I was wrong, it’d be easy for me to credit bad things in life to God’s non-existence.
Why do people talk of belief as if it is a conscious choice? Does anybody really choose to believe anything? It’s out of my control whether or not I believe in a god. The concept just seems very fairy-tale-ish and contrived and in conflict with how the world seems to work. Even if I decided my life would be happier if I believed in a god, I couldn’t MAKE myself believe. I could pretend to believe, but what would be the point?
Thank you! dreamer
I’m so relieved.
I respect you as well, though I feel kind of sorry for you.
What if…All those atheïsts are right? You’ve spend your whole life praying to something that doesn’t excist.
Hoping you’d go to heaven.
Fearing you’d go to hell.
Why is it so hard * not * to believe in a god?
I have never understood this idea of “choosing” what you believe. Shouldn’t the criterium for believing a given thing be whether you think it’s true or not (i.e., if there is evidence)? I can think of lots of things that I could believe that would make me happier, but they aren’t true. I don’t just “choose” to believe them - I would be deceiving myself.
Shoot - Revtim just made almost the exact same point as mine while I was waiting for my slow computer. Oh, well - I’ll bore you all with it anyway.
Not for me. I went through a phase wherein I consciously chose to question my beliefs, and to investigate their historicity. That ended in my leaving the church I belonged to, and becoming an evangelical believer.
Belieivng in God (and Jesus)
is easy.
If its all benn untrue, then its really made my life so much better anyway.
God, as defined by Christians (and most other religions) is not a loving, caring, nurturing being. He is mean, heartless, and in my opinion, not worthy of worship, even if he does exist (which I don’t think he does).
But suppose there is a being that actually created everything and then just sits back benignly and watches. No control over our behavior, our future, or an afterlife. What if you are worshipping something that doesn’t even know you worship it? How can you just think that there is a controlling power out there that has the will to care what you do? And why would he let good people live horrible lives and die horrible deaths? Why would you want to associate with a monster like that? Just askin’, cuz I don’t get it.
I find all man-made religions to strike a false note with me. Specifically, no religion of man treats God as being better than his creations- God is always an angy vicious brutal bastard with absolutely no sense of reason.
Also, no man-made belief system, including hard athiesm can explain where “it” all began. If you believe in a creator, where did the creator come from. If you believe science has all the answers, where did all the matter originally come from (I’ve never heard an answer that satisfies me on that one…)
Aditionally, I would be remiss to ignore the point that many religious people are obviously not at peace, and take their rage out on their fellow man- many of the worst bigots I’ve ever met claim to be Christian, the KKK claims to be a Christian organisation. If god could smite Sodom and Gomorrah why hasn’t he wiped the PTL off the map.
I chose to believe that there may be a creator, but it doesn’t belong to any human faith.
My father is a devout Christian and, without doubt, one of the best people I know. I truly admire his faith. It brings him peace and comfort in a way that I sometimes wish I could have.
I was raised in the Presbyterian Church and met lots of really good people there, who were striving to lead a Christ-like life. (I met some total schmucks, too, but that’s another story.) But as I grew up, I found it harder and harder to believe in the divinity of Jesus or the presence of a loving God–or a God at all for that matter. Without wanting to sound condescending, it’s a little like Santa Claus. It’s a great story; it contains a message we can all learn from; and it would be nice if it was true, but I just can’t believe it.
I wouldn’t call myself an atheist, but I’m not exactly a Christian either. I do try to seek justice, love kindness, and live an ethical and meaningful life. Much as I sometimes crave the comfort that comes from deep faith, I don’t need it to be a good person.
He did. Surely you remember the Jim Bakker scandal, Jessica Hahn, the air-conditioned doghouse? PTL was wiped out.
Now if God could arrange something nasty for the hosts of Trinity Broadcast Network, Paul Crouch and his plasticized wife, Jan (I swear she looks like a deranged Pomeranian!)
a purple pomeranian…
I’m paraphrasing this from Kevin Smith’s Daredevil run:
Basically, there’s a wealthy knight and an impoverished monk traveling down the road. The knight starts to tease the monk about how his entire life has been in the gutter, while the athiestic knight has had fame, fortume, women, etc. So he asks the monk the same question you just asked: what if you’re wrong?
The monk responds: “then I would be very sad. But praytell, sir knight…what if it turns out you were wrong?”
I hope this doesn’t come off as one of those obnoxious Christian stories that gets ranted about in the pit. I often think Pascal’s wager(1) wasn’t intended to make athiests appear irrational so much as to say that there is a rational basis for theism.
(1) Paschal’s wager states that it’s mathematically better to be a theist than an athiest, because the outcome of faith never loses. If you believe and there is a God, you go to heaven. If you believe and there’s no God, you die in blissful ignorance.
What you are saying is not alien to me. I understand completely how and why you feel that way and I don’t deny that everything everyone has said is the truth for them. I can’t begin to explain why I believe in God and why it’s easy for me to do so. I can remember far back when I was a kid and I got in trouble for something and cried out that if there was a God out there, would he please help me out. Nothing happened. And it wasn’t until I was 21 years old that I decided to investigate what this “God” stuff was all about. I still don’t know many things. But what I do know is that I know God exists. I know (and can’t explain) in my heart and mind that whenever I think of him, he’s there, and when I’m not thinking about him, he’s there too. I do my best to be kind, loving and respectful of others (though I wasn’t that way before), and I do it because I know God loves you all too. I know there’s a lot of Christians out there who push their beliefs on others and do a lot of crazy things, but there are also many who genuinely care for others, even strangers :).
I’m really glad you all responded to this thread and I am enjoying reading it. I won’t say I’m glad to know how some of you feel, but I will say I understand and (you knew it was coming) I will keep you all in my prayers 
ResIpsaLoquitor Pray tell ; What would I care if I die in blissfull ignorance or with all my wits intact?
I’d be dead.
**dreamer ** I believe you’re one of those who genuinely care.
Thank you for that.
The more I study the world and the people in it, and the more I know about the various belief systems that people hold, the more obvious it becomes that all of these belief systems have been formulated as a means of providing a “why” to the great unexplainables.
As humans, we put things into categories and figure out explanations for things because those skills are extremely useful for getting by in the world. “Why did those people get sick and die? They all ate this one plant. Let me watch for anyone else eating that plant. Okay, that person got sick and died. I can conclude that one shouldn’t eat that plant.” This is a valuable and necessary trait of the human intellect.
But sometimes things happen for absolutely no fathomable reason. Look at that baseball player who went to bed one night and stunned everybody by failing to wake up. The autopsy explained what had happened, but consider that event ten thousand years ago. Healthy guy just up and dies. Why? The human response is to explain the event, because we have to know in order to prevent it. Sometimes, there just isn’t an explanation. Why did a piece of blue ice just happen to break off the passenger jet at that moment, fall 30,000 feet, and kill a guy riding his bicycle? Dumb luck. Pure chance.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all religions (at least the ones I’ve seen) center on the fundamental questions that would have been unanswerable until very recently, or indeed are still unanswerable: Where did we come from? Why are we here? What happens after we die? Seriously, can anybody name a religious system that isn’t basically about those three issues?
That, to me, is very telling, beyond even the remotest possibility of coincidence: Every single human culture on Earth has a belief system that provides answers to those otherwise unanswerable questions. Every single one. And the fact that these belief systems vary so widely in their details, ranging from reincarnation to polytheism to animism and on and on, but all center on the same essential questions, is compelling evidence to me that the belief systems were manufactured in response to a need. If there really were some sort of supernatural force at work in the world, it beggars belief that it would have permitted such wildly divergent philosophies to have developed in order to explain it.
Or, to put it more pithily: All I see when I look at the range of religious systems in the world is a whole lot of people who are willing to kill each other over their absolute and unyielding belief that their explanation of the utterly unknowable is superior to the thousand-and-one other explanations.
Don’t make the mistake of equating my lack of belief (which, to me, is more accurately stated as an inability to accept a fantasy) with any sort of hatred or superiority. I fully understand that the human mind requires an explanatory structure, a belief paradigm, in order to function, and that religion serves this purpose for people. Most folks aren’t willing to spend the time on comparative anthropology or sociology or whatever other disciplines are necessary to form a deeper view of human behavior. Most people simply freak out when confronted with the idea that life has no meaning, that when we die that’s it, and that we didn’t come from anywhere particularly special. It’s counterintuitive on an almost genetic level, contradicting our most basic mechanisms of thought and understanding. Everything has a “why,” we know in our bones, and Life Itself, we believe, must be no exception.
“Why was my beautiful six-year-old daughter run over by a drunk driver?” wails the distraught parent. “No reason, just dumb luck,” is not at all comforting, even though, as seems obvious to me, it’s the truth. It’s much more pleasant to imagine that “God has a plan” and that the daughter is “in a better place” and that “we’ll see her again in the afterlife.” I don’t believe that any of that is true, because it flies in the face of everything I know about the world – but only the most cold-hearted bastard would be unable to see why those sorts of beliefs, really, do no actual harm, and can make the survivors feel better about the loss. Yes, it’s a fantasy, but really, what does it hurt?
(There’s a whole debate here about whether our indulgence for “magical thinking” with respect to God allows us to accept all sorts of other counter-rational claptrap, like laundry balls and astrology and magnetic bracelets and John Edward. Suffice to say that while I can see that point of view, I honestly don’t think the human species is capable of strictly rational behavior. Indeed, in many ways, that could prove to be significantly limiting, and have undesirable side effects. Our ability to imagine alternative realities, I think, has been the driving force behind – or at least contributed to – much of our cultural and technological progress. But that discussion would be a major hijack, probably better suited to a separate thread.)
Sometimes being an atheist is like living in a world where everybody got to adulthood without ever being told that Santa Claus isn’t real – but then Santa Claus does, after all, serve an important social function.
Dreamer, I don’t want to sound disrespectful, but as a skeptical agnostic, I believe that the existence of a god is unknowable. You may have FAITH that a god exists, but you cannot KNOW. Just as I cannot KNOW that one does not exist. You can hope, you can pray, you can even THINK there is a god, but you cannot know. By the way, you sound like a very thoughtful, nice person.
No disrespect intended to anybody’s religion here. I figure, whatever helps a person through tough times is fine, as long as he/she doesn’t try to foist it on me.
One thing to consider is the Taoist idea of the unnameable. “The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao.” I remember reading that once and it makes sense. If there is a “god” it is infinitely beyond description. God isn’t “good” or “loving” or “just” or even “wrathful” or “jealous.” Those are human terms used to describe attributes we see in each other. To use them to describe an omnipresent force that was capable of creating an entire universe is to limit it to a finite personality. I don’t believe in that at all.
I don’t KNOW there’s no god, but if there is, I’m certain in my own mind that it isn’t anything like God, Jehovah, Allah, Yahweh or any other humanified deity.
If it does exist, to me it’s just life.
This is exactly how I feel. I don’t believe God exists, but if I had perfect proof and evidence that he does exist, I still would not worship him. Sometimes the relationship people have with God has very disturbing similiarities to relationships between abused women and their husbands. “I know he does really bad things to me, but it’s because he loves me.” or “I know he threatens me if I don’t do what he tells me, but only because he loves me.”
Some of the esteemed Dopers (especially the ones who spend a lot of time in GD) may remember when I joined the board? I was very much the faithful “Molly Mormon”. I believed in God in heaven, I had moral absolutes, there were no shades of grey, and I even had my now husband convert to the church because I wouldn’t marry a non-Mormon.
And then something…happened. I can’t exactly put my finger on what, or even when it happened. But one day things were just different. I personally blame the SDMB----and thank the SDMB.
The more I thought about it, the more I evaluated my beliefs, the more I debated, the more aware I became of the fact that God simply does not exist.
So in the course of two years I went from active Mormon, to inactive, to agnostic, to atheist. And I’ve never been happier. This inner peace you speak of? I found it after I was finally able to make my own decisions without the constant weight of Jesus hanging over my head.
As a matter of fact, nothing has really changed, except I’m being honest with myself.
If I all of a sudden started believing again tomorrow, the only thing that would change is that I would start going to Church. If God exists, than there is no reason why he shouldn’t love me, because I’m a good person. Just because I don’t have a Sky Daddy handing down morals and instructions doesn’t mean I lack morals. If doen’t love me because he’s so insecure and petty that he needs to be worshipped, then I don’t want to know him anyway.
Thank You kase, that is very kind of you to say.
Cervaise - I just want to say that your post does make a lot of sense and I can see where your coming from. But it still does not disprove that there is not a God and why there couldn’t be one. Life is all about unanswered questions and maybe some of us make things up to cope with that, but the human mind and heart are incredible things that expand to places we just don’t know or understand. Nothing can be proved physically beyond reasonable doubt, so all our beliefs come from inside ourselves. We are all alone in our thoughts (without God) and we can’t share those knowing feelings we have about what we believe or what faith we have and how or why, without being able to prove it. So we continue to search for ways to show/tell others about what we believe to be the truth. Thus the neverending debate continues.
Echo Kitty - you cannot say that you know that what I know in my heart is not true. I don’t want to sound disrespectful to you either, but you have not lived in my shoes and felt what I have felt nor experienced what I have experienced. I know what I know and I know it to be true. If you only thought that a God didn’t exist, but didn’t really know, wouldn’t you want to search for the truth and know for sure that he wasn’t real? Just to be sure your making the right choice and all.
Thank you also for your kind comments