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Forums - General Discussion - Doe it really matter if God exists or not...?

 

I am

Theist 96 20.25%
 
Atheist 178 37.55%
 
Agnostic 96 20.25%
 
Spiritual but non theist 29 6.12%
 
Other 32 6.75%
 
God. 43 9.07%
 
Total:474

Agnostic. I was raised by very religious mother and an atheist father. I was originally very religous, even giving talks at my church and stuff...

..buuut then over time I realized my moms beliefs (not the religion, her beliefs were extreme and beyond the religions teachings) were too overbearing and seemed to be based on fear of what is not understood, such as Pokemon being "bad" or anime being "bad" (because they made 'angry faces' wtf XD), or that I couldn't be a paleontologist because theyre "all athiests that are trying to prove humans are older than 4,000yrs old... crap like that really grated me over time. Then, one talk I heard from the religion was really stupid, it went along the lines of: Men should not wear skinny jeans. Skinny jeans are created by gays to look at other gays and by wearing them youre showing gay people youre open to having sex with them... WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT LOGIC

But anyway, after that I decided I dont care much for religiousness and have become agnostic. I don't know if theres a god or not, but if there is -hi!

Knowing if there was a god or not would be important though. Itd have a huge impacted on civilization if god was proven/disproven. So it does matter



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John2290 said:
JustThatGamer said:
God's existence would change nothing. If he did exist he'd just be a fancy programmer and we'd be a simulation of life. If he doesn't exist we just know that all we have is ourselves and the world as interpreted through our senses, as arbitrarily defined as they may be but I'm not going to get into the philosophy of solipsism.

At the end of the day whether or not God exists we wouldn't be able to distinguish the difference, we'll just live our lives unaffected until our inevitable end.

I love thinking about this as we could ourselves become God through transhumanism and/or become God of our own "virtually created" universes. In a sense we already do that to some small extent in video games, esspecially people who create engines and then use that engine to create there own vision. Advance this thinking with the current rate of tech advancement by a couple of decades/centuries and we'd Be Gods in both of those scenarios. 

Yeah exactly, afterall the universe and everything it contains is a manifestation of what we interpit to be empirical reailty. In a way we are already the God of our own lives, it's our brain generating what we percieve to be real and there's absolutely no way to prove anything truely exists as it appears via our sensory perception.

That's an interesting idea, what happens if or when we reach the technological singularity where AI is so advanced it develops consciousness, would it be considered life and would that mean their human programmers are their God? 



Mr_No said:
What really gets me curious is why isn't there something from back to 2000 years ago that disproves everything described in the Bible as a farce and as an invention?

Well there are lots of reasons for that...

1.  We don't have perfect records of the past.  Maybe something like that did exist.  

2.  It's hard, virtually impossible, to prove a negative.  If I said that aliens teleported me out of my room and experimented on me, and I got my friends to attest to it, then you probably couldn't prove it wrong.  It would be ridiculous, but you couldn't exactly prove it happened.  

3.  The Bible was written, at the earliest, 50 years after Jesus' death.  Since we are talking about 2000 years ago, there were really no tools they could have used to investigate what happened.  It's hard enough to investigate a crime that happened 50 years ago today, so I'm not sure why you'd expect them to be so good at it in the past.

4.  Few people were there.  Most scholars believe that none of the gospels were written by eye witnesses.  It's really a case of he said she said.  

5.  It wasn't that important.  To Jesus' disciples and stuff it would have been a big deal, and maybe among some of the small Jewish community.  But overall, most people had no reason to care enough to do a thorough investigation, and by the time it did become a big deal, it would have been harder to investigate.  And someone disproving this minor movement among the Jews wouldn't have been important enough to merit preserving.

6.  It wasn't like they posted about the resurrection on their blog.  The Bible was written starting at somewhere around 50CE.  The printing press didn't exist until about one and a half millenia later.  Very few people would have had any access to the information, and those who did would mainly have heard it orally.  There wasn't much material to actually do a detailed study.

7.  Mormonism was founded in 1830, and we don't have anyone who can conclusively disprove that.  And this was fairly modern.

8.  There are a number of things in the Bible that are untrue based on the laws of physics, biology, and common sense, but modern people still go right on believing them.  Even if we uncovered a 24 hour surveilance video of Jesus' tomb and nothing unusual occured, you'd still have people insisting that he rose from the grave.

TL:DR it's incredibly hard to prove something didn't happen in the past, especially something that would have been considered trivial 2000 years in the past.



o_O.Q said:

it does because without god objective morality cannot exist

When God takes action does he have a definition of morality which he appeals to? 

Or is God himself the definition of morality? 

If God appeals to morality, then morality is beyond even him, and thus morality cannot come from God. If objective morality cannot come from God, and if objective morality cannot exist without God, then objective morality cannot exist period. 

 

If God himself is the definition of morality, then anything God does becomes moral. Morality is now arbitrarily defined by God's actions. 
If morality is arbitrarily defined by God's actions then God is moral by default. If God is moral by default, then Jesus' sinlessness on the cross is not a result of his moral virtue, but a result of the way in which morality is arbitrarily defined. If someone's goodness is based not on their actions, but on who they are, then morality is not an equal measuring stick that can be applied equally to all, and thus not objective. 

So to summarize...

1. If God appeals to morality, then objective morality cannot exist. If Objective morality cannot exist then it does not exist. 

2. If God defines morality with his actions, then morality is not objective. If morality is not objective then Objective Morality does not exist. 

The only escape from this dilemma is to say that Objective Morality can exist without God. But that would refute your original point. Which is my point. :P



No it does not.



4 ≈ One

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Mr_No said:
What really gets me curious is why isn't there something from back to 2000 years ago that disproves everything described in the Bible as a farce and as an invention?

You mean like the "Epic of Gilgamesh"? 



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JWeinCom said:
Mr_No said:
What really gets me curious is why isn't there something from back to 2000 years ago that disproves everything described in the Bible as a farce and as an invention?

Well there are lots of reasons for that...

3.  The Bible was written, at the earliest, 50 years after Jesus' death.

The letters of Paul are dated to his lifetime, so directly in the years after Jesus' death and before the destruction of Jerusalem (40-68 AD)



Peh said:
Mr_No said:
What really gets me curious is why isn't there something from back to 2000 years ago that disproves everything described in the Bible as a farce and as an invention?

You mean like the "Epic of Gilgamesh"? 

No, no, no! You see even though the clay tablets predate the earliest biblical flood text by 900 years, it was the Babylonians that stole the flood story from the Hebrews. See, the Hebrews have a long history of Oral transmission, and this obviously means that they passed the flood story down through word of mouth for nearly a thousand years before those dirty Babylonians conquered them, and committed cultural apropriation!



numberwang said:
JWeinCom said:

Well there are lots of reasons for that...

3.  The Bible was written, at the earliest, 50 years after Jesus' death.

The letters of Paul are dated to his lifetime, so directly in the years after Jesus' death and before the destruction of Jerusalem (40-68 AD)

Yeah, I got my times wrong.  For some reason I was counting from 1 CE.  Still, even several years is enough for a story to be distorted.  Moreover, Paul was not a witness to the ressurection, so he couldn't truly confirm or deny anything that happened.  I believe the gospels were written later.  Most scholars believe around 70-100 CE I think.



Cerebralbore101 said:
Peh said:

You mean like the "Epic of Gilgamesh"? 

No, no, no! You see even though the clay tablets predate the earliest biblical flood text by 900 years, it was the Babylonians that stole the flood story from the Hebrews. See, the Hebrews have a long history of Oral transmission, and this obviously means that they passed the flood story down through word of mouth for nearly a thousand years before those dirty Babylonians conquered them, and committed cultural apropriation!

God should have taught the hebrews how to write so they wouldn't look like plagiarists.



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