-
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 not believe in God?
- Thread starter ZooGirl02
- Start date
Gjallarhorn
N'yog-Sothep
If you're talking about your god (the Roman Catholic god), then "I have no need of that hypothesis".
methylatedghosts
Can't brain. Has dumb.
Because "God" doesn't fit anymore
As I understand it, the world is composed of things and nothing. A thing is our mental image of the world, and nothing is a gap where something should be, and everything has a gap because "nothing lasts forever." Things exist or they don't, and hence nothing either exists or it doesn't, but the lack of both is the world--our world--beyond the capacity to conceive existence and nonexistence, and so we have an image of the world as it neither exists nor doesn't. "God," to me, is that image, formalized as something so that we can point at it and talk about it.
I believe in things that exist, and I can bring myself to believe in nothing. I can even bring myself to believe in the image of "God" formalized as something so that I can talk about it, but I cannot fool myself into thinking that it is anything more than something. Everytime I try to make it more than something, it's still something. Everytime someone speaks of god or talks about god or points to god, it is a poetic metaphorical image they are addressing, and if they toss their belief into the ring, it is that that they are believing in, not god.
That's why I can call myself atheist.
I have never met a good evidence that he does exist except as a human creation. And I do not have the kind of mindset that would make belief in his existence advisable. And I lack the vocation to do so just because. And I thought about the matter and concluded that belief in God is quite unimportant either in its absence or in its presence, except to the degree that it may cause or corrupt personal inspiration. I'm very much an apatheist as well as an atheist and agnostic; I just can't seriously consider the matter of literal existence of God as something of importance. It is so blatantly unimportant and inconsequential that I am fully certain that if God turns out to exist, he is displeased with the insistence of people to convert non-believers. I wonder how I would turn out had I been raised in a Muslim culture...
Belief in God has the ultimate degree of strictly personal scope; more so than nearly anything else, it is not supposed to matter to others. It may easily be the case that god, in fact, does not exist at all except as a personal inspirational construct.
I consider it unfortunate that whole religious traditions have (IMO quite unproperly) raised its supposed existence to the very foundation of their faiths, because such a dramatically personal belief is doomed to cause dissent and confusion when treated as if it were a more general, more consensual entity. It amounts to supporting one's faith and religious practice to the most fragile and inadequate of all foundations conceivable.
Religion works far better when it does not rely in belief in God, although such belief should of course be accepted as the natural tendency that it is for many people. It just shouldn't be seen as something important, and certainly not as something that unites or should unite adherents, for it is in fact quite the opposite: an unfounded appearance of common belief.
The exacerbation of monotheism into a main trait of the Abrahamic Faiths may well have been the single most serious disaster in the history of religion. It made it so that those faiths have little ability to do anything except try and remind themselves of what their point is supposed to be beneath all the self-inflicted confusion.
I don't feel there is even a need for any reason to either believe or disbelieve in God - it is a very minor matter except in a strictly personal context, really, and not to be treated as any more important than what my favorite color is - but I do specifically reject conceptions of God that I analyzed and deemed destructive.
As a general rule, the more God is supposed to be active or judgemental as opposed to inspirational, the more of a mistake it is to lend worth to that specific conception of God.
Last edited:
Hola...
Erm, well. It's oft repeated, and sounds flippant, but for the same reason you don't believe in Poseidon, I suspect.
Unless you're a Hellenistic Polytheist, I guess. In which case sub-out Poseidon and sub-in Huitzilopochtli.
If you're not talking about a particular God-concept, and just talking about a God-type being (kinda like deism) it gets a little trickier. I have less issue with God as a concept than religion, really.
But still, in simple terms, I need a reason to believe...not a reason not to.
Musty
Active Member
As a child I was only interested in naturalistic explanations for things and supernatural claims just sounded silly. Although I quite enjoyed the stories told at Sunday school it was fairly obvious to me that the supernatural claims were nonsense.
I didn't believe in Santa Clause or the tooth fairy either.
Amechania
Daimona of the Helpless
The god of the Bible really just seems like an imaginary surrogate parent to me: an accepting father for to those whose own father withheld words of encouragement, a loving mother for the child whose feelings were discounted or minimized, a wise counselor for for the child of disinterested parents, a deliverer for the abused, a constant presense for the confused and disappointed, or a shepherd for the abandoned child. These are wonderful wishes for the damaged adult but poop in one hand.............
I wonder if some day we will have a clear, objective scale of measurement for the importance of beliefs about God, going all the way from true apatheists such as me to those who see the existence of God as an Important Matter.
That such a spectrum does exist (and is fairly independent of the belief itself) is quite clear to me. Maybe it has some relationship with the capability of feeling gratitude, or with the sense of having free will.
That such a spectrum does exist (and is fairly independent of the belief itself) is quite clear to me. Maybe it has some relationship with the capability of feeling gratitude, or with the sense of having free will.
Well, I'm an atheist, and happy in it. I feel neither a sense of loss, nor lack of fulfillment due to my (un)beliefs. Far from it.
But having said that, don't confuse religion and spirituality. It is possible to separate yourself from religion, without separating yourself from spirituality.
rageoftyrael
Veritas
Yeah, I'm not gonna be all philosophical and such, like some of these other guys. I will just tell you my personal experience.
I was a Christian, in so much as i went to church. I realized as I got older, that I had never really thought about god. I'm not sure if i ever really believed or not. I do know that around when i was 18 or 19 i realized that i had serious doubts as to whether there was a god or not. I'd never had an experience that told me there was a god.
Now, I've discovered I have doubts, and I think to myself "I need to find evidence for god". Yes, believe it or not, I went looking for proof of god, not proof there was no god. At the time, I wanted their to be a god, because it was something I'd been told was true all along. So, I began to look for evidence of god. Unfortunately, as I searched, I found no evidence for god, while simultaneously finding compelling information that it might simply not be true. The more i thought about it rationally, the more i realized that the whole christian concept of god didn't make any sense. As i continued, I began to reject just about every god concept, because none could prove themselves to me.
So, once I realized I didn't believe in a god anymore, I looked for what I was now. And I became an Atheist. I'm still open to the possibility of a god, but I simply don't believe....
I was a Christian, in so much as i went to church. I realized as I got older, that I had never really thought about god. I'm not sure if i ever really believed or not. I do know that around when i was 18 or 19 i realized that i had serious doubts as to whether there was a god or not. I'd never had an experience that told me there was a god.
Now, I've discovered I have doubts, and I think to myself "I need to find evidence for god". Yes, believe it or not, I went looking for proof of god, not proof there was no god. At the time, I wanted their to be a god, because it was something I'd been told was true all along. So, I began to look for evidence of god. Unfortunately, as I searched, I found no evidence for god, while simultaneously finding compelling information that it might simply not be true. The more i thought about it rationally, the more i realized that the whole christian concept of god didn't make any sense. As i continued, I began to reject just about every god concept, because none could prove themselves to me.
So, once I realized I didn't believe in a god anymore, I looked for what I was now. And I became an Atheist. I'm still open to the possibility of a god, but I simply don't believe....
lunakilo
Well-Known Member
Never met a god.
No god ever told me that he/she/it existed and wanted me to believe in him/her/it.
I have never found any reason to believe that a god must exist...
... so all in all I have never found a reason to believe any god exists and thus have no reason to believe in God.
lunakilo
Well-Known Member
Is this spiritual enough for you?
[youtube]9D05ej8u-gU[/youtube]
The Most Astounding Fact - Neil deGrasse Tyson - YouTube
Aquitaine
Well-Known Member
Honestly, lack of evidence. In much the same way that you don't believe in Slenderman.
Except Slenderman is real!
Aquitaine
Well-Known Member
Nice video, Lunakilo. Reminded me of Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot". :yes:
dust1n
Zindīq
Copernicus
Industrial Strength Linguist
I could write a long exposition on why I don't believe in any gods, including the Abrahamic versions of God. There is, of course, the classic rejection of belief on the grounds that there are no good reasons to believe. However, my rejection of belief in God is stronger--more akin to my rejection of belief in Santa Claus. So let me give my currently strongest reason for rejecting belief: the implausibility of the belief that "spirits" exist independently of physical brain activity. Since most religious concepts depend on belief in an independent plane of spiritual existence, that rules out most religions for me.
Why do I believe that there are no spirits independent of physical brain activity? It is certainly true that such a thing is conceivable, but spiritualism is grounded in dualism--the perception that consciousness exists independently of bodily sensations. My belief is that consciousness itself is a bodily sensation. The main evidence for that belief is that brain injury correlates with loss of consciousness. The simplest extrapolation of that factual observation is that brain death results in permanent loss of consciousness--a return to our "conscious" status quo prior to birth. One's "spirit" or "soul" is almost always conceived of as an entity that is conscious and even able to perceive physical reality. Since such dependence demonstrably depends on physical stimuli to a nervous system, it seems implausible that a bodiless soul would have exactly the same properties. Therefore, I conclude that mental activity depends on physical activity in a brain for its existence.
Why do I believe that there are no spirits independent of physical brain activity? It is certainly true that such a thing is conceivable, but spiritualism is grounded in dualism--the perception that consciousness exists independently of bodily sensations. My belief is that consciousness itself is a bodily sensation. The main evidence for that belief is that brain injury correlates with loss of consciousness. The simplest extrapolation of that factual observation is that brain death results in permanent loss of consciousness--a return to our "conscious" status quo prior to birth. One's "spirit" or "soul" is almost always conceived of as an entity that is conscious and even able to perceive physical reality. Since such dependence demonstrably depends on physical stimuli to a nervous system, it seems implausible that a bodiless soul would have exactly the same properties. Therefore, I conclude that mental activity depends on physical activity in a brain for its existence.
Kilgore Trout
Misanthropic Humanist
Because there are no good reasons to think that god/gods exist, and plenty of good reasons to think that god/gods are the invention of human beings.
Well the really simple answer is that I don't have any evidence that any gods do exist, and some evidence that certain god concepts don't exist.
I view most metaphysical descriptions as having internal logical inconsistencies and/or areas where they're contradicted by evidence or at best simply lack evidence. As far as I can tell, all god concepts are manifestations of various cultures, created by humans, rather than the other way around.
In some ways I'm a student of religion, having been raised in two religions by parents with different religions, and then having taken religious studies classes in school and having read numerous historical books on the subject. In addition to reading books about religion, I have read a significant chunk of religious texts such as the Bhagavad Gita, the Mukhya Upanishads, the Tao Te Ching, the Heart Sutra, the Diamond Sutra, other Buddhist texts, the Hebrew Bible, the Canon New Testament, some of the Christian Apocrypha like the Gospel of Thomas, the Qur'an, and various Greek and Roman writings on philosophy and their metaphysics.
I don't read much religious material anymore as I've basically had my fill of the topic, but it is fascinating to me the various worldviews that cultures have provided. It's also interesting to see the change in religions over time, how they have influenced each other, and so forth. With such diversity, and with a more scientific understanding of our world that undermines some religious proposals, I just don't view religion (and their gods) as anything other than human representations of their desires, fears, hopes, worldviews, interpretations, etc.
If someone has a metaphysical claim, including a claim about the existence of one or more deities, I think they should provide evidence to support it.