Why you don't believe.

Ignorance really is bliss sometimes. People can often get great personal comfort from believing things that are not true. That's the flipside of the point that Nismosis made.

 

No, saying someone who does believe in a God has 'shallow thought processes', is not the flip side from personal comfort at all.

 

Let me clarify. When he said "acceptance is peace" he meant acceptance of the truth, not acceptance of a lie. I'm saying that either one can bring peace to an individual.

 

That wasn't the part of what he said that I was concern about. Peace can be found in any belief, I understand that. It's the insulting of a believers intelligence that riles me - which is what I initially pointed out.

 

I don't know about Scotland, but most outspoken believers here do not sound very intelligent. Ask them why they believe, and most will not have a good reason to give you. Most will reply with a Bible quote, which is circular logic, or they will explain that their parents told them to believe in Christ. And then they will start talking politics.

 

Perhaps not all religious folk are well educated, that doesn't mean all atheists are. Ask someone why they don't believe in a God and they are just as likely to give a answer that they have heard from someone else.

Do not say one is the same as another.

 

Scotland or the UK maybe. Not here. Not in the South.

 

Ok.

 

It usually isn't the same answer just because they heard it from someone else. I had no access to any atheists growing up, and as a teenager, however I still became one. When I moved off to college, I met atheists, who had the same answers to me as why they don't believe in God and we had all came to these conclusions independently of each other. This seems to point to a logical, rational deduction as to why there is no God.

 

He never drops in and says Hi.

 

I believed in a god when I was a child and didn't know any better. Now that I am educated I understand that this "god" figure was just invented to control me. Now I actually feel very sorry for people who believe in this "god".
This god bullshit needs to end for the world to be a better place.

 

I lol'ed


How is it any of YOUR business what OTHER people believe?


You sound like a fucking missionary.

 

Anything that directly affects the quality of my life is my business.

Religion has ruined too many peoples lives across the world. This bullshit needs to stop, it's the 21st Century!!!


Spirituality unites people, Religion divides people.

 

what is so hard to believe, about a loving god, that doesn't micro-manage, may not have created the universe, and has very little if anything to do with what christianity and several other organized beilefs, have become?

not that it adds or subtracts a single thing either from it nor from me, what another person may or may not choose to believe about it.

but yes, indeed what does matter, is not hurting each other and cleaning up our messes. that is what people need to do, and can, no matter what they believe or don't.

one reason for promoting beliefs in the past has been to try and get people to do that.
contrary cusses that humans are, invariably there are always some, who look and find in beliefs, excuses to do just the opposite.

so obviously this hasn't proven, as far as i can see, to be the best medicine.

yet worse things HAVE been attempted. l

 

So someone over in Australia who believes in God directly affects the quality of your life?

 

not some ONE, but many people in many places, buying into the lie that we can't have technology without burning something, destroying the only planet we have to live on because they do, yes, we all affect the quality of each other's lives. NOT by what we consciously believe, but by what the priorities we usually mindlessly live be, statistically combine to create the very incentives that affect our policy decisions, that in tern create conditions we experience and motivate still further un-thought-out priorities.

its not even a matter of people believing the same things, its the statistical combining that takes place in real life, the adding up and sorting out, of all the different things and how they then combine together.

so no, nobody has to call themselves this or that belief, that, in and of itself has nothing to do with it. but yes, every individual seperate one, then added up together, in australia, europe, asia, america, africa, every place and everyplace else, in that way, affects everyone else in every other place.

a very few decades, at most centuries, ago, this may have been less the case, but there is one ocean of atmosphere, not seperated by the boundries of nations, one world ocean of the planet's water. these things, they circulate from all of us, to all of us.

but this IS in the realm of practical matters, not strictly of belief and metaphysics and spiritual ones.

 

Themnax has a good point, we are affected everyday by Christianity. I am from Alabama, so here it is stronger than other places. I can't gamble, I can't buy alcohol on Sunday. In high school (a public one) we were forced to say prayer every morning before the Pledge of Allegiance, people read bible verses over the intercom... etc. My life is constantly affected by a barbaric 2000 year old institution of social control.

 

One important example of this is that many conservative christians believe that god manages the natural environment for us, so no action on our part is needed, and we can consume all the fossil fuels we want. Their direct actions and the way that they vote have a negative impact on all of us.

 

If you are of the persuasion that this is so. Actually, "harm" has no face, no definitive author.

 

Thank You!

It's good to know that there is intelligent life out there