Do You Believe in God or a Higher Power?

[lestatdark]

WessleWoggle said:

lestatdark said:

WessleWoggle said:

I'm an agnostic antitheist.

I find the belief in Gods or a higher power for any reason other than faith is foolish, because there is no objective evidence.

That being said, I find those who only believe out of faith to be brainwashed, self deluding, or fearful(fearful of unceirtan afterlife) people, that have had the God cock shoved up their ass by society, there own delusions, or religious propaganda, that they can't get it out.

Religions are all bullshit; It's all based on where you were born. No religion is right, either by mistranslation over time, or it being bullshit to begin with.

As for the actual existence of a higher power, I don't know, but I find it stupid and illogical to believe in a higher power. There's nothing wrong with hope, I hope there's a higher power and that reincarnation is real, but I'm not going to pull out my brain and stomp on it just so I can comfort myself with feel good bullshit.

Well as a scientist i can say that there is so much wrong points in your post. Religions aren't at all bullshit or illogical, it comes from the collective experiences of a group of people who gather their thoughts, fears, doubts, hopes and beliefs about the frailty of life and the need to hang on to something larger than themselves, something that is above them, higher and purer.
It's all human psychology coupled with the fact that there are somethings in this life that just don't have a scientific explanation so far.
I as a biochemist have found that although life as we know it is far from the miracle that most religions tend to make it look like, as we are just a combination of DNA, proteins, lipids, sugars and inorganic material, there are still some mysteries that we cannot phantom so far.
How come that the combination of factors needed for sustained organic life were met, even thought that the probabilities for it along the billions of years were extremely slim. The first Cyanobacteria lived in a sea of molten ammonia, water, CO2 and CO, which made conditions for life just a little better than the surface of Venus, which is filled with dangerous concentrations of H2SO4 (very strong acid). Even so, life sustained itself and flourished into all the forms we see today, maybe through natural selection or some other organic mechanism for selective chosing of determined characteristics that made the living species survive in different conditions, the fact remains that life did overcome many slim odds (the probability of having another planet with conditions of a Water based, Nitrogen-Oxigen atmosphere, low gravity and 1 AU distance from the sun like our planet earth, are close to 1x10^-30 %, so you can see that life in this planet is nothing short of a miracle.

That being said, i'm wiccan, i believe in the forces of nature, of mother earth, since we all come from her, and to her we shall go, maybe not in the literal sense of the words, but in spirit and earthly connections when we die at the end, we become nourishment for her and every living being that depends on her, that you cannot deny, that in the end, we go to the dust from where all living species have come since 4,5 billion years ago.

 

You said there was things wrong with my post but from what you wrote you don't really seem to convincingly contradict or refute anything I said... I still think religion is bullshit, I don't care what reason it was conceived for. All you did in trying to refute my point that religion is bullshit is telling me it's purpose. Oh, and I don't care how complex life is or how unideal the situation was. I don't really care how it all started and it sways me in no way to hear the unprobability or our development.

You said I cannot deny that we all must go into the dust that is the earth. I don't believe in nature, as anything other than a chaotic force that we need to seperate from. Also, we may not have to go back into the dust of the earth if our plans of colonizing other planets works out.

 

 

 

 

 Actually no, all i did was trying to point out a scientist point of view on religion, you may think religion is bullshit, that's in your right to do. You may not care about the complexities of life, but the fact remains that they do exist, and that is a pure empirical and logical scientific fact, and as you spoke on your first posts of the illogical pattern of thought behind religion, i was just trying to give you a logical rebutal, but it seems you do not care about empirical science and logic other than your own.

Oh and nature is no more chaotic than humanity is, the only difference is that the chaos that comes from nature derives on the fact that it must mantain it's balance and equilibrium between an enormity of parameters for life to be sustained in a planet, as were humans seek to destroy most of it without searching for a way to balance out, and just like a chemical reaction, if you start to consume more products than the reagents that you have, then the chemical equilibrium will tend to form more and more products, thus consuming all the reagents, or natural resources in the case of humanity. 

And since you talk about space colonization, do you realy believe that there won't be another nature in the planets that we seek after? that there won't be any chaos when we arrive there? We will face more hardships on another planet than we'd ever face here on earth, and probabily end up consuming it's natural resources just like we do here on earth.