No deeper than the reasons many religious people have for disparaging nonbelievers.

I would like to think all "good" people make it to heaven or whatever sort of paradise in the afterlife. And not just the fanclub.

My mother was part of a pretty intense "born-again" Christian church/cult. She flew over to Vanuatu as a missionary with the head pastor and she reckons she saw the Pastor bring a dead guy back to life. I was always skeptical, but she swears she is telling the truth. I asked what happened to the man who was resurrected and apparently he was alive for no less than 45 mins before he stabbed his wife and kids to death, all because he couldn't handle being back in his "human form" etc.

I still have doubts, But at the same time don't know why Mum would continue with this lie for so long.... She never used it as an argument to try and convince me of Gods existence.

Faith v. Intellectualism. The intellectuals always sound so ..... desparate; maybe even frustrated.

Human knowledge is limited by elements of time and space, both of which are creations of the almighty. To believe in God is to accept there exists a reality or plane of existence that transcends our own; that there is something greater than human knowledge. While Capo has been calling for a "rational" explanation to prove the existence of God, I believe that humaintellect and rationality are human traits and science is a strictly human creation, and are insufficient to fully comprehend or define the existence of God, whose identity as an all-powerful being rests within a separate plane. Thus, to try to use rationality and science alone to disprove or prove his existence is like using a fork to eat soup.

For reasons that are too vast to post here, I believe that God has revealed himself through the prophets and Christ, who, I believe, is the Word made flesh. This isn't merely based on faith, but the resurrestion of Christ seems reasonable to me, based upon many inferences from the events surrounding the crucifixion and rise of the spreading of the gospels.

That's a cheap shot.

Sitting blindly where you were yesterday v. moving about to get to know your whereabouts: May be desperate and frustrating, but it is satisfying and I don't have to pretend that I know without actually knowing.

Why do you talk?

As Richard Dawkins put it in The God Delusion, “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

Even if we take the 'fiction' bit out, even if the Bible were a work of non-fiction, if it were a faithful (no pun!) portrait of God, all of those descriptions are apt.

Firstly, I think religious beliefs - which are beliefs in superstition - thrive in a society where universal education has not been achieved; this is also the same society where criminals are punished more than rehabilitated, where poverty is a natural result of exclusive wealth, where crime and poverty are related, where gang cultures have a strong social grip and the laws against such cultures are ill-thought-out.

It's a vicious, vicious cycle of continual destruction; with this, scientific, intellectual, artistic - in a word, human - development can only happen in little bursts of progression, against the greater tide of regression. We need to change the fundamental forces that create these social contradictions.

Religious beliefs do not arise from a vacuum, but from concrete social and historical processes, which we can trace and analyse and learn from. Beliefs in God have evolved through time and space - Klydon's right, but I contend two of his points (the first is obvious and the second is less so): that 'time and space' are 'creations of the almighty'; and that science is no more strictly a 'human creation' than religion. I see both as antagonistic, exclusive ways of interpreting the world; one is founded on rationality, the other on idealism - or 'faith'. Crucially, though, science develops; science is by definition a process of continually attempting to prove itself wrong. Theism is stagnant, reactionary, non-progressive. It is used (and crucially, is able to be used) as a means of homophobia, xenophobia, sexism and many other evils. It deals with a world of absolutes.

And yes, science is limited to the socio-historical forces in which it exists; is limited by the instruments and technology available to it at any one time. These are truisms that do not help the believer's argument, since I've already said science is no more a human construct than religion. But what scientists know about the world now is a lot more than what they knew 100 years ago. Priests, on the other hand, still believe Moses parted the sea.

I could just as easily believe in Middle Earth, in Frodo, in one ring to rule all; through the establishment of time and space - creations of the almighty Gandalf, of course - I might hope that the idea could catch on, and in a coupla thousand years time we're all thanking Frodo for a white fucking Christmas - I mean Frodomas.

With enough social sway, ideas become very powerful, especially in a society in which such sway can garner very quickly as a result of said society's fundamental flaws - i.e., not everyone has the same access to the same level of education, which is of course an economic problem at heart, a class problem. (Sigh.)

To say that science cannot answer the mysteries of creation is an insult, an inherently reactionary statement indeed. It is also an intellectual cop-out. To say 'it is not a cop-out because intellectualism is inadequate and insufficient to give genuine insight into the objective world' is probably the most cynical, depressing statement I've ever read on here.

Yes, I don't think God, or a belief in God, necessarily precludes morality. I think I answer this further below...


As I wrote yesterday: 'That's not to say I don't have some sort of understanding of what might drive people to a belief in God, a belief in some Grand Other (whose image Man tellingly loaned his own) on whom we might project our neuroses and fears for comfort. Historically, it's actually been a clever survival mechanism; I just think it's extremely outdated. (Just as the Industrial Revolution was a vital part of the scientific and intellectual progression of mankind, but how the capitalists ought to be long dead.)'

This seems to be a fallacy or a truism or both.

If we hadn't changed our understanding of the world through genuine scientific development, we'd still be under the assumption the earth is flat. This is false.

How can you say that we didn't 'have to prove the earth was round'? What a great argument against empiricism. Cynical and depressing.

It's absolute nonsense to say 'God believes in us' and that is what matters. That implies and allows a complete rejection of concrete human reality; religious idealism begets self-debilitating sceptical relativism. It's misanthropic and cynical. It's horse shit, I'm afraid.

If God has an agenda, it's a highly contradictory one at best. He's not much of a thinker. Nor, it seems, does he want his creations to be.

If God doesn't have an agenda, there's absolutely no importance surrounding whether or not he exists; he becomes an unimportant abstract, reference to whom we should totally eradicate.

Sorry for the multiple posts, I'm just replying to peeps separately.

So you're choosing to interpret a medically possible occurrence in religious terms. ('Inexplicable' does not mean 'impossible'.)

So you're choosing to interpret something very possible indeed - you've even mentioned the morphine yourself - in religious terms.

Again, does knowledge of the idea of God preclude the interpretation of such visions in religious terms? I'd argue yes. Another way of putting it: if I lived in a society where there was no idea of God, no knowledge of him, would it be possible for me to explain such images of dead relatives in religious terms? I'd argue no.

Crucially, though, either way it still remains inexplicable. 'God' explains why we have visits from dead loved ones much less than the chemical reasons given by science.

I dreamed I was with my dead grandmother last week. I could just as easily choose to interpret that as God sending her to me in a dream.

Why does God guide some doctors and not others? That agenda thing again: contradictory. He's a bit selective for someone who's apparently omnipotent, no?

Riddle me this: Did God aid Darwin in his studies on evolution? If so, why? So that Darwin could publish his findings and that people could then be tested for their loyalty to God? Seems like a bit of a vindictive thing to do to me. It's like hiring somebody to seduce your girlfriend and then setting up CCTV in the bedroom...

Or did God secretly hope Darwin would fail in his research? Why didn't he intervene with his power? Why, with Darwin's findings, is God even part of this hypothetical question at all? It's all very absurd, but it brings me back to my previous post.

Or did God place all the 'evidence' against him as a trick on poor old Charles? Again, seems a bit of a shitty thing to do for someone who loves everyone. What had Darwin done to deserve that?

Hmmm. Perhaps I'm thinking too much about this mystery being. Perhaps I just need to have a hot bath and wash away my rationality - it's done no one any good anyhow, has it, because the real truth 'transcends all human endeavour'. (AND PEOPLE SAY IT'S NOT JUST ABOUT FAITH REASON IS INVOLVED AS WELL. BUT REASONING OFTEN ENDS IN FALLACY OHNO!)

That's not me misunderstanding, either: if a God exists and that God has a moral agenda (which he should, otherwise 'God' becomes reducible to 'physics' or 'nature', becomes a meaningless abuse of language), then he is the real truth, and we'd be better off killing ourselves in the would-be full-of-meaning-and-explanation world, because what would be the point?

This same God could also have given us a better vocabulary, because the whole notion of 'belief' unavoidably implies a conscious choice to be made between something, between truth and non-truth. And if God exists, it doesn't come down to a belief at all, because it then becomes the ultimate truth. (Which then brings us to the last sentence of my previous paragraph.)

(Again, sorry to repeat, but this brings us back to what I said earlier: consider the meaninglessness of the following statement: I do not believe that boys have penises and girls have vaginas. Or, I do not believe that tigers have stripes or that leopards have spots.)

I wouldn't try to prove there is no God. I'd only say one way or another, it doesn't matter. Would I change a single thing in my life if he existed? No! Would he, if he exists and there's an afterlife send me to hell for not recognizing his existence? I'd say I'd be better off in hell to be with such a petty God.

As it is, my understanding of the human life is that once your brain is gone, you are no more.

Hear hear!

For the record, let me clear up a misconception on this issue. Roman Catholicism, in particular, does not teach that salvation is based upon acceptance of God and recognition of the divinity of Christ. This is a common mistake made by nonbelievers, who lack essential knowledge of the faith, but love a sound bite.

It is taught that our salvation is through Christ, but acknowledges that there are many, who for whatever reason are not believers, but will share eternal life. This is a doctrine I learned when I was young.

By the way, another misconception, to which there was an allusion within the thread, is that believers in God lack the education, intellect and sophistication of nonbelievers. I think you'll find that a proportional share of atheists and theists rode the short bus.

Yeah, I know a lot of people who declare indifference ('fuck that' / 'whatever lol') to religious views, and they're not educated in the slightest.

But that doesn't mean contemporary religion isn't a product of the same society that inevitably creates vast gulfs in wealth and therefore education. (I've said elsewhere on this board that if we were to abolish God, we would have to abolish the fundamental flaws in society that create the material voids that God helps fill.)

On the flip side, I find it extraordinary how people who show a clear capacity for rational analysis of situations - I'd include you in that bracket, Klyd, as well as Sicilian Babe - and yet still maintain faith in a superstition.

It might be a generational thing. A lot of successful, educated people inherited their faith thanks to family indoctrination. We need to teach our children how to think, not what to think.

Thanks for that clarification. There are some fundamentalists, however, who do believe that anyone who doesn't believe the "correct" religious theology will go to hell. I am Jewish and so is my mother and all her family, except for her sister. She became a born again Christian many years ago and has her own Bible class. She has said that both of her and my mother's parents are in hell since they didn't accept Christianity before they died. At the same time, she clearly thinks of herself as a very compassionate and moral person. It has always boggled my mind how anyone with the slightest glimmer of compassion could believe something like that. By their logic, Hitler could have gone to heaven even after causing WWII and the Holocaust just by accepting born again Christianity in the bunker before he died. But a three year old Jewish child gassed at Treblinka who was too young to even know what religion means before they were killed went to hell. Who would need the devil with a God like that!

VitoC, I've never understood that brand of Christianity. How is it possible that if you believe in Jesus, who came to Earth to sacrifice Himself to wash away our sins, that you could possibly condemn "non-believers" to hell?? That goes against all His teachings! He taught love, acceptance, tolerance, respect and humility. How can anyone interpret that to be "believe as I do, or go to hell?" It makes no sense to me.

As for my father's appearance at my bed, Capo, it was no hallucination. He was there. I felt his presence. I saw him. He was no hallucination. He wanted to see my daughter, because he died two months before she was born.

As for religion, to me, there's a vast difference between faith and religion.

It doesn't make sense, but that's how some people are. My mother told me that a woman once told her that her minister said that the Jews got what they deserved in the Holocaust for rejecting Jesus. I was thinking the same thing--how does compassion fit into a belief system like that? I'd hate to see wickedness if that's compassion!

“Faith is a knowledge within the heart, beyond the reach of proof.”

Thanks SC, I like that one.

It's a quote from Khalil Gibran. I'm sure an old hippy like you must have read some of his stuff.

Why do some people have to have scientific proof for this and for that?

I believe in miracles, guardian Angels. Just because I can't see an Angel doesn't mean they aren't there. I have enough faith to know that they are Angels all around us. If it wasn't for God and his Angels I wouldn't be alive today.

We don't get to decide who goes to Heaven or who goes to Hell. That is up to God.

Probably because they have no faith.

The thing that always disturbs me about faith is that it seems like it could be used to justify anything and enable people to believe whatever they want, regardless of what the evidence shows. What if a Holocaust denier, when asked about the overwhelming evidence for the Holocaust, said "Yes, the evidence and all logic suggests there was a Holocaust. But I just have faith there wasn't"?

Doesn't the huge number of world faiths with mutually incompatible beliefs suggest that faith can be an unreliable guide to what's true?

I guess there is no inherent right or wrong in one's faith. It's an individual thing.

Agreed.

And, as such, is pretty redundant as a social moral force.