Do you believe in god, if not do you believe in something else?

[vlad321]

Kasz216 said:

vlad321 said:

Kasz216 said:

chapset said:

vlad321 said:

chapset said:
after reading some of your posts, it's clear to see that some of you do believe and some don't, am just curious why people believe and why not, i mean by that, is it because you where raised in that environment or did you decide to believe by yourself? same question for the non-believers.

personally I feel like we are spirituals beings and that's why most of humanity believe in some kind of god, my mom is a protestant but she never forced me to go to church while i was growing up, so that's maybe why i don't believe that much.

 

There was no religion in my house, either anti or pro, and I remember my mom being extremely pissed when my grandmother taught me to pray, but she still didn't say anything. My beliefs are my own, I formed them by myself and my parents had absolutely no effect on them. I didn't know they were diehard atheists until after my belief's basis were formed. Yes I knew about Jesus and different religious ocurrances and holidays and stuff, but my parents never took a pro or anti stances on those, I am after all a Christian in terms of culture, atheis/agnostic/deist in terms of eligion.

This is why I also hate religion, it spreads by parents stuffing it into their child's head at an early age when the child thinks that their parents can NEVER be wrong. It is a horrible practice and my theory is that if it stopped religion would outright die out. Many things are taught at an early age that should never be taught and history is rife with examples of what happens when ideas are stuck into children's heads, one needs to look no further than World War II to see its effects. It's also the #1 reason why I hate religion with a strong passion, it's isidious, and targets the most vulnerable creatures of humanity.

yeah, i get what you're saying.

anybody else has something to add?

 

That people who outright hate religion probably have anger issues and is probably projecting.

Also, Kids are also taught to believe in Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, and any number of other things... that eventually they don't believe in.  If religion had nothing real to it people would just not believe in it.

Not sure what WW2 had to do with religion/people taught something as kids though... he really lost me on that one.

As for me... I wasn't raised any religion... though did have a strong feeling of some sort of "god" some of which caused by very measurable circumstances.

After which, i studied up on just about every religion i could... even some not practiced anymore... as well as arguements for atheism... and decided i wasn't too happy about any of them.

The Christian god seemed "most right" but at the same time a lot of stuff people tended to preach seemed counter to what he said, and in general the bible just seemed like it was cobbled together by the Romans to make a more docile religion.

So, i just took up the prospect to be who i was.  Since god made me that way anyway... and that God would let me know what he wanted me to know.  Since he was god.

It's worked pretty well for me so far.  It's kinda like a Christian Deism.  Though who knows.  He might even not be the particular Christian God... might be someone else.  But either way, i think i've got a feeling of the right guy.

'I don't always know what the right thing to do is, my Lord, but I think that the fact that I want to please you, pleases you.'

You know, if i'm wrong.  It's not like i lose anything anyway.  Well unless it's some other god.  In which case... whoops?

 

Oh please save your broad generalizatoins for some other place, if you actually asked around and talked to people that knew me thay'd all say I'm one of the most laid back and calmes people they've met. Then again I could jsut go ahead and start by making my own gnealizatoins by saying that people who start with personal attacks have reached the point of having to grasp at straws to try to rationalize what they believe in, cognitive dissonance at its finest. But then that's just another generalization.

Yeah kids are taught to believe in Santa and the Tooth fairy, and they keep on believing right up until they learn they aren't real through one way or another and then confrimed through people they trust the most, parents. If no one told them that they were false they'd grow up and still believe they existed. Your argument fails on this point.

Maybe you haven't read about children being taught about how the propaganda machine worked? Children being taught from the earliest stages to hate Jews and to treat them as inhuman beings. They all probably believed that at the time and in the most extreme cases they believed in even after the war and all the way into their adulthood. But, maybe I can use other examples, the beginning of the USSR, children were taught that Communism was the best thing to happen to them and they kept on having faith in communism all their lives, later on when things started going downhill the whole system of teaching children started to fall apart due to the fact that in real life Cummounism didn't work as well. You can see the same thing in the US with Capitalism and recently how people who voiced their opions against the government are unpatriotic, many of those chilren are now fighting in Iraq. I can keep going and going on this, religion works the exact same way, teach them young, make it fails safe (how can god be wrong if you can't talk to him, you can't see anything of his happen and the only thing you have to go on is blind faith?), and you have a lifelong believer who will then pass on his teachings to his children and the cycle begins.

I've studied social effects and reseached the spread of religion througholy, and it's the main reasson im not religious at all, I too looked into religion and just did not see why I should blindly put my faith into anything, anyone who says the world is too perfect is a naive fool. (would have majored in History instead of CS if there was more money in it...) I see it for what it is, what it can do, and the power it has over people and that's the reason I hate it so much. Marx put it best "Religion is opium for the masses."

That really had nothing to do with WW2.  The Holocaust wasn't a  main reason for WW2.  That's pretty goofy.

As for Santa Claus.  Most people don't find out he's real.  Most people realize logically that he isn't real.

Things like racism are believed by people because people are born with a shortcut generalization that "different = bad."

It's part of the structure of the brain.

People might actually just believe these things because you know... they believe them after all.

Also, the fact that your generally laid back, yet have something against religion so hard actually is a very good sign that you probably have projection and anger issues.

You seem to equate religion with "differing opinion."  It's ok for people to disagree with you, you aren't some super genious who knows the best, logical and correct answer on every issue.

If you studied as much as you say... you'd know now all religions are pleasent... so the opium theory goes out the window.  Some treat people as if they were made to serve, and then made to bow out of existance.

Also, if you studied the effects or religion, you should of come to the conclusion, that it really hadn't caused much bad at all.

When you see the "effects" that are bad religion has casued... you often find there were political and economic reasons for everything they did.

Religion had nothing to do with it in the end effect except as a justfier.  When other justifiers would of worked as well.

Even science.  After all... most dictators tend to slow the flow of new information.  It makes ruling over people easier.  Aside from which.... religion has done as much to perserve and advance knowledge as it has to stop it.

Politics is what is wrong with the world.  Not religion.

 

Nowhere did I say anything about WW2, I said you don't have to even look past WW2 to see the effects, implaying a time frame not the event itself.

That's the whole point, you can logically discount Santa by the simple fact that there is no way someone would be able to travel around the world in one night and visit everyone, to top it all off give everyone a pesent. You can't do that with god, because there are not enough limitations on him. In fact every time something contradicting religion has been made religion has given ground. Back in the day when people thought Earth was the center, that the stars were heavenly bodies, all that, when it got disproved it gave even more ground. Right now it has been pushed back to the Big Bang and how that's the moment of creation. Come a few years, centuries, or millenia when people figure out why that happened religion will give ground again. God has been made so that he can't be logically disproven on purpose, if god could be logically proven or disproven we wouldn't be having this debate. I also realize that these things aren't mentioned directly in any scriptures, however they are as much a part of religion as the Pope is, a religion is a belief and you can't have a right or wrong belief if it can't be disproven in some way.

I don't equate religion with differing opinoin, I view it as a tool to control thousands or millions easily. Also, yeah most religions are pleasant and don't promote anything of what has happened, but Communism is also the greatest idea to grace mankind in history, yet we saw how well that worked out in practice. In the end, theory doesn't matter, real life actions, effects, events do, and religion has been nothing but a divisive, violent catlyst used by very few to control millions.

Religion has everything to do with it because if thats what people believe, and if someone twists it to their own accord, it's still a belief held by the people, still a religion. If the initial belief didn't exist then there wouldn't have been anything to twist in the first place. At least in science when someone starts yelling "1+1 = 2" no one will be fooled because to earn a scientist's "belief" they have to go through extreme examination.

Politics are fine, politics is just a way of phrasing social interactoin between groups of people, or between few powerful personas, something we can't live without, we're not about to start living alone. Religion on the other hand is something we don't need to survive, plenty live just fine without religoinin their lives (statistically atheists earn 10% more, just random trivia) and we would all be better off if it never existed in the first place.