Heyo
Veteran Member
How do you know?
-
Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.
Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:- Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
- Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
- Access to private conversations with other members.
We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!
Why do you believe in a god or disbelieve in a god
- Thread starter We Never Know
- Start date
Secret Chief
nirvana is samsara
His later albums aren't perfect.
mikkel_the_dane
My own religion
Do you have a belief? No, since I don't believe it to be neither true nor false.
Do you have faith? Yes.
Have you had an experience? Yes.
Or
Do you lack faith? No.
Do you lack evidence? No.
Do you lack belief? Yes, since I don't believe it to be neither true nor false.
My blind faith works for me and that is all I need.
Secret Chief
nirvana is samsara
You sleeping in the shed tonight then?
RestlessSoul
Well-Known Member
God probably isn't a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. Would be a bit worrying if He were, and I say that as one myself.
Heyo
Veteran Member
Good, now we have a criterion for divinity, not being a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. How about Dionysos? God or no god?
Hermit Philosopher
Selflessly here for you
Personally, I’m one of those who believe in God and believe that all is One in God, but I do find your wording above witty and interesting.
When you say that you feel you are One, “without gods”; I take you to mean that you feel whole (within yourself) without a concept of God. That is a good feeling.
As a former atheist, I’d say that atheists never feel a need for gods, because atheists think about gods as often as - and in the same way that - they might think about unicorns: very seldom and in an entirely fictive manner. Yet, many atheists (like many of faith too) do feel a significant lack of “something”.
An atheist will call this “something” words like meaning, purpose, belonging… and is taught that it is up to oneself to define what that is and to create it for themselves. When they do, they feel whole and that is a good feeling.
The issue is that the meanings/ purposes/ belongings that an atheist creates for themselves, ware off (in their own view). This is because people change over time and, as they change, so do their personal longings.
In my experience, atheists are the constant chasers of new [atheist] meanings/ purposes/ belongings. They are not agnostic, because they do not define their search as spiritual, but they are restless seekers (of personal goals and meaning) nonetheless.
As someone of deep, personal faith, what I have now that I (personally) did not have in any lasting form as an atheist, is freedom from inner restlessness. It’s not for everyone, for its result is serenity and a world filled only with serene people, would grind to a halt!
Most would probably agree that the world today is not good enough to grind to a halt. Life is still very much in need of restless souls and as long as that is so, the role of the restless will remain essential to us all.
Whether agnostic or atheist, we owe you much gratefulness.
Humbly
Hermit
I hear music and see a person playing that looks like what you believe to be Eric Clapton. What evidence do you have that's actually him?
I was lucky to have never been indoctrinated.
So when I learned what people believed about
God (in my area, there was only the Christian
god), it all sounded utterly ludicrous. So I
remained a non-believer, ie, atheist.
BTW, I have all the serenity I need.
RestlessSoul
Well-Known Member
Despite being associated with, among many other things, grapes and wine, Dionysus probably wasn't drunk all the time. So not disqualified from being a God on the grounds of alcoholism.
Heyo
Veteran Member
Continuity. He looks, plays and sings just as I suspect from other sources. There also seems to be a wide consensus that it's him in the comments. It would take a massive conspiracy to fake all of that. And I don't even believe in the much smaller conspiracy that would have been necessary to start Christianity (Richard Carrier's mythical Jesus).
Colt
Well-Known Member
I have inexplicable faith; I was born again long ago and know the presence of the loving Father.
Ashoka
श्री कृष्णा शरणं मम
For the first part: I have faith in myself, in people, in other living things, in the universe. In music, empathy, compassion, and beauty. I experience these things daily.
For the second part: I lack faith in a personal god because there is insufficient evidence, in my view.
Of course. Thousands, including that I have beliefs. You might mean a god belief. If so, the answer is no.
None of those beliefs are faith-based to my knowledge, and when I occasionally recognize that I had believed something since before learning critical thinking and have no reason to believe it, I discard the belief.
I'm an empiricist and a critical thinker, and because of that, perforce, I am an atheist. I believe nothing without sufficient evidence to justify that belief, and that evidence is lacking for gods.
I also didn't choose. I tried to choose both no and don't know, but had to pick one or none. Impossible means not possible, and possible has two meanings that sound similar but are distinct. One meaning of possible is based in knowing that something can happen, like an extinction-level asteroidal impact of earth.
The other meaning of possible is not known to be impossible, which includes some actually impossible things. Once, it was thought possible to create life from straw or rotting meat. It was actually impossible, but that wasn't known yet, and so it had to be called possible until the opposite was demonstrated.
Regarding gods, they may be impossible, but if so, we don't know it yet, so my answer has to be both it's possible because I don't know it to be impossible, and I don't know if it could actually happen and may in fact be impossible.
And if we could? If it could be demonstrated that neither require a deity to exist, would that change your opinion about gods existing?
Also, do you know what an incredulity fallacy is? A special pleading fallacy? You commit both with your comment.
Probably. And hopefully, too, since that designation never goes away. I used to be a hospice medical director. One year, we admitted a man on service who we were told had been a recovering alcoholic for forty years and was now terminally ill from an unrelated condition. I bit my tongue regarding him being called recovering rather than recovered, but I know the drill, and alcoholics need to remain vigilant to prevent relapse, so this language can be helpful. But he passed away, and it was reported in rounds that he died, but he was still called a recovering alcoholic after death. I spoke up then. No, he recovered from alcoholism. He beat it.
I am a firm adherent to apatheism as well as ignosticism / igtheism.
My main beef with god-concepts is that they are usually abused, most of all by the very theists that insist on their significance.
I have simply never met a god-conception that I found both very useful and very convincing.
If I did... odds are that I would not use it anyway, because there would be little point to.
RestlessSoul
Well-Known Member
Yeah, it's no mean an acheivement for an alcoholic to die sober. Or as a friend of mine, sober many years, is fond of saying; the trick with this illness is, to die of something else.
Yes
I've given details before but I'm not in the mood to repeat those answers now.
I've been reading a lovely book by one of my favorite authors lately and the last chapter was about the gods. I'm going to leave up a small quotation from this book here for consideration:
"We live in a thoroughly materialistic culture - only literal, tangible interpretations are considered possible. Anything that even hints at the supernatural is dismissed as delusion or fantasy. This is especially true for those of us who are refugees from religions where we were told we had to believe things our good sense tell us aren't true. Skepticism comes easily. Many of us are reluctant to discuss our spiritual experiences for fear of being dismissed, ridiculed, or even shunned, sometimes to the point we question if our experiences ever happened. But they did happen. They are real, they are powerful, and they are waiting for us to figure out what they mean.
...
Understand that people have had these experiences for at least as long as we've been human. And they continue today. Read the stories of our ancestors. Read the work of anthropologists, historians, and religious scholars. Talk to people in a wide variety of religions. Your specific experiences are unique to you, but this general class of experiences is common. It's just that our society dismisses anything that sounds the least bit supernatural. We're intelligent, well-educated, sophisticated Westerners - we have a reputation to maintain. So we ignore things that don't fit neatly into the mainstream view of the world."
--- John Beckett (2019) in "The Path of Paganism" p 77-78
...
Understand that people have had these experiences for at least as long as we've been human. And they continue today. Read the stories of our ancestors. Read the work of anthropologists, historians, and religious scholars. Talk to people in a wide variety of religions. Your specific experiences are unique to you, but this general class of experiences is common. It's just that our society dismisses anything that sounds the least bit supernatural. We're intelligent, well-educated, sophisticated Westerners - we have a reputation to maintain. So we ignore things that don't fit neatly into the mainstream view of the world."
--- John Beckett (2019) in "The Path of Paganism" p 77-78