[Closed] Do you believe on god?

I just feel there is room for all manner of thought, not just a pattern sanctioned by those in power, or those who proclaim themselves to be superior because their beliefs are more correct than others.

Couldn't agree more. Pity the likes of TJ, Woppit et al cannot be more tolerant of others beliefs.

Couldn't agree more. Pity the likes of TJ, Woppit et al cannot be more tolerant of others beliefs.

Why does one set of beliefs deserve tollerance more than others? Plenty of people on here challenge, some might even say bully, TJ for his beliefs.

Religious beliefs, like all beliefs, should be open to challenge and criticism, they do not deserve special treatment.

Agree with Fred, God is a manifestation of y/our inability to comprehend the vastness and depth of existence and reality.

Some people turn to religion for answers others to art, poetry, philosphy or science - which one is 'right'?.....

.....IMO 'none of the above' at least in isolation.
We need all aspects of our experience, intellect and creativity to even begin to understand "the big questions" and using an adversarial reductionist approach does nothing but build boundaries and exploit differences between people with varying understandings, experiences, opinions and beliefs.

If you are a person of faith you are culpable to an extent in all of the activities of the faithful bad and good, no matter how limited your involvement in organised faith. By accepting god you are part of the god squad as a whole.

Silly.

If you are a football supporter you are culpable of any football hooliganism?

If you ride a bike you are culpable of red light jumping?

If you have a child you are culpable of playground bullying?

If you vote you are culpable of supporting the system that makes possible the BNP?

gonefishin - Member

Plenty of people on here challenge, some might even say bully, TJ for his beliefs.

The difference is Tj doesn't put his points over as beliefs or opinions but as :facts:

If we're going to decide if God exists or not we're going to have to deefine what me mean by the term and stick to it.

The God I don't believe in is obviously different to the God some people choose to accept. 😀

"Do you believe in god?"

No.

😆

The difference is Tj doesn't put his points over as beliefs or opinions but as :facts:

As do many, many Thesitic people. The difference is that his facts are at least falsifiable.

is god short for godfrey? if so then i know he exists, i've got him working a shift for me in oxford at the moment.

[i]increasing number of people see Science as the principle form of investigation[/i]

Eh?

If you 'investigate' something, that's you, doing science, right there.

That's what 'SCIENCE' is; it's a way of asking about the world.
Religion is one way of answering those questions, old fashioned, self limited, unsatisfactory, but just one way of answering.

[i]Because God didn't build himself that throne
And God doesn't live in Israel or Rome
God doesn't belong to the Yankee dollar
And God doesn't plant those bombs for Hezbollah
God doesn't even go to church
And God won't send us down to Hell to burn
God will remind us what we already know
That the human race is about to reap what it's sown

[/i]
From one of my fave choons.

Very true Rusty Spanner 🙂
There's that old thing about a bunch of philosophers discussing the concept of existence and the problem that it's hard to tie down what reality is and if we are as individuals real objects or just constructs of an imagination, or for that matter even if imagination really exists.
One of them sits quite quietly and when it comes to his round says "Anyone here who doesn't exist, put your hand up, because I'm not buying pints for imaginary people"

..and just to overturn the usual [i]science is a religion[/i] thing, it's actually the other way round.

Religion is very early, quite primitive science; it's an attempt to explain the universe using various theories with a helping of social construction on the side.

Unfortunately, the historical development of religion as science has painted it into a corner, leaving it unable to deal with the things that have come later, apart from imaginative reinterpretation.

Religion is very early, quite primitive science

I believe that this could be true. Equally, though, it could be stated that religion is an inadequate expression of the divine... and that the problem with atheism is that non-theists are left countering the precepts of dogma, rather than arguing truly against the existence of a divine unknown.

Non-theists don't have to argue against the existence of a divine unknown; the clue is in the name.

The logical extention becomes insulting; I don't argue against the existence of a whole number of things, so why am I not defined as a non unicornist, a non homeopathist, and so on.

There is no 'problem with atheism', there is only a problem with people who wish to ascribe problems to atheism.

Afternoon,

Have you all not got something more constructive to be doing.

Heh! 😀

No, God is there to fill a void of knowledge, it's a way people have of explaining things they don't understand, nothing wrong with that. But I'm happy enough knowing that I don't know everything and that we are just a part of the expanding universe.

I don't think it's a coincidence that our acceptance of god as a species seems to decrease as our knowledge of Science increases.

God - Member

Afternoon,

Have you all not got something more constructive to be doing.

Well if you have to ask, then your not an all knowing god!

What was Mary like in bed?

'God has gone wrong again.
He's taken my money and run,
I lost control of him I turned the switch and none of the lights came on.'

tyger - Member
Anyone want to discuss if there is a Devil?

What's to discuss?

[img] [/img]

NO, in my own opinion it is the biggest loads of bollox ever made up.

if you believe there is a bloke in a white robe sat behind a cloud you need to go and see somebody.

as stated above...

it's a way people have of explaining things they don't understand,

you cant argue with somebody who is a believer, check out dawkins interview with the arch bishop.

[b]BUT that is just my opinion, if people believe in god and it makes them a better person and happy who am i to argue.
[/b]

[i]if people believe in god and it makes them a better person and happy who am i to argue.[/i]

That's fine, until the logical extension becomes kill the unbeliever because the man who knows about God said so...

...and that is why questioning religious beliefs is important, that is why it should be open to criticism, that is why we should be able to hold religion up to the light and examine all its claims, that is why religion deserves no more respect than any other belief.

if people believe in god and it makes them a better person and happy who am i to argue.

monkey_boy?

All believers in a god are essentially adopting a view of the universe that is based on faith and not proof or at least the proof of what is known and the ongoing quest to know the unknown..
However moderate your belief may be you are still in that camp like it or not. People in the camp but nearer the front, as it were, will be involved in things you may well disapprove of however your membership still sanctions those actions no matter how distantly. If no one believed, if belief was ridiculed as I feel it should be, then all their power is lost and they become loonies on the fringe instead of the heads of state or the main arbiters of morality in a society.

On god and certainly religion I feel you have to make a call, either you're in or out. If you're in you have to accept some responsibility for the actions of others who also believe. It's not enough to say "I don't believe what the fundamental loonies do" because in the most important way you do.

[IMG] [/IMG]

All believers in a god are essentially adopting a view of the universe that is based on faith and not proof or at least the proof of what is known and the ongoing quest to know the unknown..
However moderate your belief may be you are still in that camp like it or not. People in the camp but nearer the front, as it were, will be involved in things you may well disapprove of however your membership still sanctions those actions no matter how distantly. If no one believed, if belief was ridiculed as I feel it should be, then all their power is lost and they become loonies on the fringe instead of the heads of state or the main arbiters of morality in a society.

On god and certainly religion I feel you have to make a call, either you're in or out. If you're in you have to accept some responsibility for the actions of others who also believe. It's not enough to say "I don't believe what the fundamental loonies do" because in the most important way you do.

[img] [/img]

Neither.

Stoic Hedonism - my only belief

So, awkward question time for theists; how do you deal with religious fundamentalism, the people who actually follow the teachings and laws of a religion to the letter?

Are they wrong?
Are they misguided?
Are they just a bit keen?
Are they the keepers of the one true way?
How does their interpretation of the religion measure up?
Are their beliefs as worthy of consideration as yours?

In your own time...

The concept of God backs up my belief that humans are an evolutionary dead end.

[i]All believers in a god are essentially adopting a view of the universe that is based on faith and not proof or at least the proof of what is known and the ongoing quest to know the unknown..[/i]

I don't think that is entirely true. From the probabilistic point of view it's entirely possible to construct an argument that there is a greater chance of there being a creator than there isn't.
The problems with this are such arguments are based on conjecture, and the nature of the conjecture means no further rational basis can be built upon it. I.e. the conjecture in itself doesn't give us a basis to produce further testable conjecture. The initial conjecture is entirely rational. The belief structures then constructed around them rarely are. But it is important to realise that they can be two separate entities.

[i] If no one believed, if belief was ridiculed as I feel it should be, then all their power is lost and they become loonies on the fringe instead of the heads of state or the main arbiters of morality in a society.[/i]

So are you asserting that if only the world was ruled by people who didn't have religious belief systems the world would be a better place?
And will you be using Stalin as your gold standard as to what can be achieved using this premise?

when science doesn't have the answers humans turn to god

where where the Dinosaurs in all these religious manuscripts????

That's fine, until the logical extension becomes kill the unbeliever because the man who knows about God said so...

That's not a logical extension. That's you scaremongering. I don't think that most of the despots of history who promoted genocide were particularly driven by religion. Some of them might have used that as an excuse, but generally speaking people go to war with people of other races, not people of other religions. It's not the same thing.

So, awkward question time for theists; how do you deal with religious fundamentalism, the people who actually follow the teachings and laws of a religion to the letter?

There aren't that many of them. Probably only a similar proportion to the proportion of nutters in the non-religious population. How do [b]you[/b] deal with them?

I don't think that most of the despots of history who promoted genocide were particularly driven by religion.

Indeed.

Stalin. Hitler. Pol Pot. None of them, as far as I know, particularly of a religious inclination. All vile, though.

Atilla the Hun probably wasn't doing it for religion either. It was just because he never really felt loved as a child or something.

Are you going to answer the questions with regard to fundamentalists?

The 'nutters' in the non-religious population are subject to the same laws as everyone else, the difference being that they do not claim to be following the word of any god.

Notice that I do not class religious fundamentalists as 'nutters', merely people who believe in a particular religion in a more fundamental interpretational way.

So, the questions?

So are you asserting that if only the world was ruled by people who didn't have religious belief systems the world would be a better place?
And will you be using Stalin as your gold standard as to what can be achieved using this premise

Yes I am asserting that.

In response to the Stalin thing, no, oddly enough I do not hold him up as the gold standard.

I hope that over time religous belief will erode aginst the tide of non believers. You can't extinguish something as well established as religion with brute force, that's even worse than religion.

With the increase in secularism and an increase in people not indoctrinating their children into faith, I hope as time moves on faith will become increasingly less important until it fizzles out. It will take a while but I think it will happen eventually..

 

Stalin. Hitler. Pol Pot

Hmmm 5 pages before Godwin gets a look in. I'm impressed.

Not sure about numbers 1 or 3 but Hitler was most certainly a Theist.

Edit. Oh and that's a massive strawman argument by the way.

I believe in God, but it would take more than a few lines on here to justify it. I would have to tell you my story, how God reached me in depression in my teenage years, I would have to tell you the stark changes that have happened in my close friends lives as they have accepted Jesus as Lord in their lives, freeing them from drug addictions etc. I would have to explain prophesies in the bible that have come to pass, and go into detail about 'shadows' and 'types' in the bible that show a constant theme of the coming savior right from the beginning of Genesis, even through it was written by many different authors covering a huge span of time. If you study the bible you'll find a deeper significance in every item in the Jewish temple, every feast, even in the lives of men who were living in Gods will. But all these things take time to see, and you have to be interested, if you don't want to see God, you won't. the bible says that "if from there you seek the LORD your God, you will find Him if you seek Him with all your heart and with all your soul" Deuteronomy 4:29

If you're in you have to accept some responsibility for the actions of others who also believe. It's not enough to say "I don't believe what the fundamental loonies do" because in the most important way you do.

You know you can renounce your citizenship, don't you? When do you intend to take up that option?

if from there you seek the LORD your God, you will find Him if you seek Him with all your heart and with all your soul"

...reached me in depression in my teenage years, I would have to tell you the stark changes that have happened in my close friends lives as they have accepted Jesus as Lord in their lives, freeing them from drug addictions etc

It's nearly always the vulnerable who are the evangelical converts. Interesting in a cod-psychology* kind-off way...

*Can't claim to be a professional.