vent. silly reason for not believing in god

I find it funny when people associate the many wrongs that organized religions do, directly to whether or not "god" exists...

The messed up evangelicals, who we all know are con artists, use people's weaknesses for their love for god as a way to make money off them. Same goes for churches who do wrongs, or extremist religions that have redical views. For some people, this is good enough reason to not believe in "god" . That blows my mind...

What the heck does "god" have anything to do with these greedy bastards? if he does exist, he surely didn't associate himself with them.. on the other hand, they used "him" as a way of stealing

It's like saying, "I hate poor people cause infomercials on TV scam us into sending money to them when in fact these organisations steel the money for themselves."... Difference is, we can visually see these "poor people" while seeing god is debateable in itself...

I just think it's a silly excuse.. if anything, don't believe in organized religion... leave god out of it. And if you don't believe in god, it should have nothing to do with all this fucked up religious extremist stuff.

 

Thats seems like a logical reason to reject the morality of the church, not too many people I am aware of think it's evidence to not believe in God they believe it's reason not to believe in the church.

 

Hey man, you're alive! Haven't heard from you for awhile. Watcha been up to? I notice a common refrain on the atheist site that says belief in God is bad because religion causes wars. Sam Harris also beats that drum. This seems to be a variation on the theme Clegg is talking about.

 

I do not believe in God simply because I have found logical flaws with every single attempt to define of explain a belief in God. It doesn't have anything to do with how evil these God defining organizations are.

I'm open to any reasonable explanation that supports believing in God. I just haven't heard one yet.

 

I don't think your gonna find a logically unflawed argumet for believing in God or in anything else. Logic and evidence are the threshold considerations, but when those are in doubt, as they often are, I go by what seems plausible to me on the basis of my personal experience and intuition. Believers, like me, are struck by the complex orderliness and fitness of the universe and an overwhelming sense that it's too cool to have come about by the operation of blind forces or dumb luck. A comeback that I frequently encounter from atheists is that for all we know on planet Fubar and zillions like it in the multiverse there is no such order, and the order we see is just a product of a cosmic accident. Logic isn't going to settle that argument. Since we don't know of the existence of planet Fubar or its counterparts, that argument doesn't seem satisfactory to me, just as God doesn't seem satisfying to you. My gut tells me "Bet on God, not Fubar." On the other hand, faith does give lots of people an excuse to believe in some really silly things.

 

It is very cool and almost surreal to be alive, conscious, and a winning ticket holder to the biggest odds lottery in the universe called life. If there is a planet out there called fubar it also beat the odds because it has overcome what billion, even trillions of other planets could not. There is no debate raging on planet 'no name' 13563927391 of 1000000000000+ because there is no consciousness, there are no feeling or thoughts or communication. Just a bunch of energy and matter that didn't come up with the right combinations.

A "fit" universe is an illusion of our tiny skewed perception of reality. If a pool player took an entire lifetime to sink the 8 BALL after millions of shots would we call him a great player? What if we were only conscious for the moment the ball went in and that's all we ever knew?

We are so narrow with our little reality perceptions that even as lottery holders we can't believe it when little bad things happen in our lives. "I can't believe I wrecked my car.. or lost my job .. or my house burned down.. how can this happen to me, how can I have cancer, this can't fucking happen to me, there's got to be more, there's got to be something in control, there's got to be final judgment.."

What's so fit about a universe or an existence that is so brutal, unpredictable, frail and painful that most people need to live in denial to sleep at night? On a planet where an atheist doesn't want his son to know of his godless conclusion because he'll never forget watching a 3 year old cry himself to sleep after learning about death.

We don't know how many planets in the universe developed life but we can use our acquired knowledge about nature and estimate that there's a lot more "dead" planets than living. We can estimate that if we did find a planet with life that it faces the same struggles for existence and is bound by the same laws of natural selection and survival of the fittest.

 

Maybe. Or maybe it's a "put up job", to use Fred Hoyle's expression. I'm the winner of the cosmic sweepstakes either way. Since we don't know the odds, we're betting blind. Either way, it seems miraculous to me: that all this could happen and beings could evolve to appreciate it all and hold discussions like this on the internet about it. It would be even more miraculous if it all came about by chance or the operation of blind forces. Sure life is brutal. Suffering, Lord Buddha taught us, is an unavoidable aspect of existence, or as Peck put it The Road Less Traveled, life is difficult. If we grasp that, it becomes easier. We have the consolations of our philosphies and religions. That really is all we have, and the're important. Our ideas help us to endure the otherwise unendurable features of human existence.

 

This and the excerpt following it are very thoughtful, moving posts by you. Thanks, man.

I lost both my Mom and my brother to cancer within less than a year of each other--the sort of freaky event that might lead some to suspect we pissed off God or some gypsy, or a naturalist might suspect exposure at the same time to some carcinogen. They were long, horrible deaths involving unimaginable suffering happening to good people undeserving of such ends. My brother, well along in the disease process, was able to attend his mom's funeral. Then we all concentrated on doing as much for him as we could. The doctors gave up hope for him and he got to the point that he couldn't take nutrition, nor even much hydration. The doctors said it would make the condition worse.

Both of them faced the suffering and awareness of impending death for months with exceptional courage. My brother, in particular, emphasized the need to take the reality as a given. "It is what it is. Deal with it" was his favorite saying. A good looking, athletic guy, a straight "A" student, was reduced to something looking like Night of the Living Dead when it was over. But he showed no emotion at all throughout the ordeal. Of course there are pros and cons to that. My sisters and the hospice nurse were stressed out about it, because they didn't think it was normal or natural. He was certainly aware of what was happening to him. I'd like to say his Christian faith helped him cope, but actually Victor Frankl and Epictetus were the ones he gave credit to. Anyhow, he had a deep love of life, but in the end accepted death without a whimper. In particular, one thing that kept him going was the thought that others could learn about the meaning of life and death from his experience. The whole family was with both my Mom and my brother in a constant bedside vigil during the dying months and at the time of death. We felt good about that. For the funeral services, we had the challenge of finding the right ministers. I know some who believe that tragedies like this are the result of see-in (sin is a two-syllable word for Oklahoma preachers). We tried to avoid those. We found two who did a great job, particularly the one we had for my brother. The theme of the sermon was there's too much religion in the world and not enough spriituality--using my brother as an example of the latter. My brother would have loved that sermon.

As is always the case, the "lessons" from this story are ambiguous. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why is there suffering in the world? Doesn't this prove there's no God, or that if there is He's indifferent, incompetent or downright evil? That's not an unreasonable inference. Another approach is to emphasize divine inscrutibility--God has a plan for us and we just don't understand how seemingly awful things like this fit into it. Maybe so. I'll never get over the pain and loss, but I also value the example of human courage both of them demonstrated, and the love and closeness of our family for both deaths. I hope I never go like that, but I know that if I do, I'll have a couple of good role models to follow in the dying process. I see it as evidence of a beauty in the human spirit that can prevail in the face of the most horrible adversity. I see some benefit in relating that to the crucifixion story, if I can say that without sounding hokey or melodramatic.

I don't know what to tell an atheist father, or any other parent, to say to his three year old kid about death. Three year olds obviously don't have the sophistication to make sense of such a grim topic, which even most adults have trouble with. Let's face it, that's one of the reasons religion is so popular. The atheist dad has the dilemma of being true to his conscience versus comforting to his son. One approach I've seen, which may be lame and probably not effective for a three year old, is to use the analogy of a beautiful flower. We enjoy the beauty while it lasts; eventually it fades, but we enjoyed the beauty and will always have memories of it. Relatives of mine used this with their kid to deal with the death of her brother. Later on, I heard her say, in a sarcastic tone, when her brother's death was mentioned "Yeah, I know, it's like a beautiful flower." That kid is now a Christian religious fanatic, so you might watch out. The important thing is that the atheist dad loves is son and feels empathy over the child's fear. Some parents might say "Stop your crying kid, or I'll give you something to cry about." There are some parents like that. So this atheist boy is forutnate to have a loving father, and will one day appreciate that, and the kid will probably grow up to be a good, loving father himself. Intuitively, I feel strongly that the love and concern demonstrated by that father are manifestations of something right and beautiful in the human spirit. Is that just an illusion, a comforting delusion, or is there something really there--a sense of what is good, pure and healthy versus what is not? I think it's an impressive development for something that emerged by chance and natural processes out of the primordial ooze. Namaste.