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Is there a God?

Samerron

New Member
Everyone have thought of this, so let's start talking about it, and I want to start it!

A simple question but not with a simple answer. Let me know if you believe in God or you don't and make sure you tell me why... if there such a why that can be told about God existence.

Societies in history have all believed in some greater creature; the ultimate creature. When the religions of the book (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) came to earth, it became a different story, people didn't just believe in God but actually fought and died for Him. He created us to die for him?

The next question that arises to my head (after assuming He exists), where is He?

Did God fail or is he just taking a break? Maybe he's dead? Or maybe this is just a test for our faith?

Share your thoughts and if you think this topic can be open for everyone (not just "Mature" people) please let us know!
 
These threads never end well.

Logically the answer is "there is no god" or "there is a god but we have it all messed about about what god is".

Of course when faith and logic meet, the best possible outcome is to agree to disagree and walk away.
 
It's simple. There is no evidence whatsoever for any form of god, as described by any of the world's religions.

If something 'bigger' does exist, it extremely unlikely to be anything even remotely akin to the gods that have been worshipped by humans and the gods that continue to be worshipped by humans.
 
Well I guess that is the problem. There is not enough evidence that God exists and also there isn't enough evidence to show he doesn't exist also.

Thanks Beer Good for the voting site, but I guess it doesn't represent the rest of the people but interesting to look at.
 
Well I guess that is the problem. There is not enough evidence that God exists and also there isn't enough evidence to show he doesn't exist also...

With respect – it isn't that there is not "enough" evidence that any god exists. There is no evidence that any god exists.

And since you cannot prove the non-existence of something, it is up to believers to prove that their god exists, if they want to (which would destroy faith, but there you go).

In terms of the question of proof, you may find this interesting.
 
I'm also in the "awaiting more evidence" category. The problem is, it's easier to prove that God does exist (i.e., someone finds God and says "SEE! There's God! I told you!") than it is to prove God doesn't exist. Not finding God remains an argument for many (and not a good argument) that we simply haven't found God yet. How do you prove without doubt that God doesn't exist? This is why this issue still remains a hot topic after millenia. I wish we would all admit that we don't know and move on to something else until further evidence for or against arrives. And maybe it never will. Regardless, we have many better things as a species to do than squabble about abstractions.
 
There is not enough evidence that God exists and also there isn't enough evidence to show he doesn't exist also.

As soon as you use gender references to God - "he, him, his" - you are defining God as male. If God is a spirit, the spirit is neither male nor female or both male and female or totally unrelated to our concepts of sex.

All these discussions run into the sand because the God I do or do not believe is is almost certainly not the same as the God you do or do not believe in. The result is that we are talking past either other, and usually with great fervor.
 
Being Greek orthodox,I was raised to believe in God and Jesus and ofcourse we have our saints etc..
I personally want to believe because believing means hoping for something better than suffering, abuse , sicknesses.
Then I think ,I had a very difficult childhood and if there was a God why did he let me suffer, or I see young children suffering from illnesses and I say why would God let this happen.
It is a very confusing subject, I see a lot of people going to church and then they curse their neighbors and as the years pass everyone makes new rules to what God really meant. T he preists are getting worst so they aren't helping.I am very confused, and reading The Last Templar by Khoury made it worst.
 
Being Greek orthodox,I was raised to believe in God and Jesus and ofcourse we have our saints etc..
I personally want to believe because believing means hoping for something better than suffering, abuse , sicknesses.
Then I think ,I had a very difficult childhood and if there was a God why did he let me suffer, or I see young children suffering from illnesses and I say why would God let this happen.
It is a very confusing subject, I see a lot of people going to church and then they curse their neighbors and as the years pass everyone makes new rules to what God really meant. T he preists are getting worst so they aren't helping.I am very confused, and reading The Last Templar by Khoury made it worst.

That's a question the Christian community has struggled to answer and I've never heard a convincing answer.

Greek Orthodox has beautiful services and amazing churches.
 
Russell's teapot WAS an interesting idea...
But sadly, as science increases, it is found that Russell's teapot is a bit of a truth. I don't know how many people here are interested in string theory and various quantum physics combining the four forces into one universal concept, but it states something along the lines of "everything is possible and nothing is possible at the same time."
In fact, it's quite true that the teapot has been the cause of many NASA disasters when trying to send something out past Mars, it's just that the NASA team fails to see the truth of this and blaims it on simple human concepts such as "the metric system," or "drunken astronauts."

I believe the entire argument comes down to this:
There is no scientific evidence for either side when you actually look at true science instead of middle school science books. All true scientists who are honest and true will tell you something along the lines of "I don't know."

I can't remember the particular philosopher, but he used the concept of 'i' in mathematics (square root of negative one) to essentially prove the fact that God cannot be disproven.
My apologies for using the word "God" implying a judeo-christian god. As silverseason stated, defining god is one of the biggest problems of these arguments.
 
My apologies for using the word "God" implying a judeo-christian god. As silverseason stated, defining god is one of the biggest problems of these arguments.

Can I get an Amen to that? Personally I think if there is a god, we're way off on our perception on what god really is.
 
That's a question the Christian community has struggled to answer and I've never heard a convincing answer.

Greek Orthodox has beautiful services and amazing churches.

Sparkchaser yes we do , and when I personally go to church I am very calm and serene. It's overpowering the feeling of calm I feel.I think though that like alot of other things ,it also has become a business.The priest (not all) drive around with a mercedes and then in church they pass the basket around for people to put money in for the church.T he people that should be an example are not.
 
There is a God. But because no one is able to prove this one way or another it comes down to belief and if you believe in God then you don't need proof.

It is this belief that non believers find hard to get their heads around, not the existence of a god.

Non-believers are constantly questioning whether there is a God or not, believers are not. The non believers are happy and content not to believe in God but they are not content that believers, believe, and so they constantly question and sometimes ridicule, using science as a sort of verification that until it can be proved there is a God then God can't exist.
 
Most of what we believe cannot be proved. Science has faith in the regularity and order of physical laws. Yet, you cannot "prove" that the laws of physics are operative throughout the universe. Or they they won't change tomorrow. Or that what you perceive as laws are not totally random events which just appear follow some sort of rule or order. Or that you see anything at all - that it's not just fabrication of your brain. Or that you have a brain and are not just a free-floating mind.

So, as the previous poster says, those who believe do so without proof. Those awaiting proof for the existence of God (however defined) should humbly concede that they believe many things without proof.
 
There is a God. But because no one is able to prove this one way or another it comes down to belief and if you believe in God then you don't need proof.

It is this belief that non believers find hard to get their heads around, not the existence of a god.

Non-believers are constantly questioning whether there is a God or not, believers are not. The non believers are happy and content not to believe in God but they are not content that believers, believe, and so they constantly question and sometimes ridicule, using science as a sort of verification that until it can be proved there is a God then God can't exist.

Personally, I don't care if people want to believe in Zeus, Odin, unicorns, the Flying Spaghetti Monster or fairies at the bottom of the garden. And of course, belief in any of these requires no proof (which is a darned good thing really, since none of them exist).

What many people do get irritated by is religious groups and individuals attempting to interfere in the lives of those who believe something different or in no superstitious myths at all.
 
I will admit that at this point in time in my life, the jury is still out. I haven't closed the door on faith and quite frankly, I'm beginning more and more to believe that there is a God. It has been my experience that most secular humanist/atheist/agnostic groups are parasitic riders of christianity. It's one thing to be a coherent sense of belief or ethical values, it's another when your group identity is attached to what you are not, as opposed to what you promise people. That is the main problem that I have with the secular viewpoints of the world today. They are absolutely incapable of standing on their own without referencing christianity.

The matter of faith is not one for intellectual snobbery/elitism. Until you've seen an elderly couple take the sacrament in front of a pew, or were taught to pray by your United Methodist grandmother, you are not aware of the deep meaning of faith and what it means to people. It's more than just an inclination or a habit. It's something that people think about very seriously and use their senses and reason to the best of their ability to determine if it is true. I may not agree with the viewpoints of others, but I can't dismiss it outright entirely either.
 
Don't forget SFG75 – because I know that you know from a discussion elsewhere – that I've been there, done that and got the t-shirt.

For the sake of this debate, since we now seemed to be lapsing into: 'oh you're an atheist so you don't know what faith feels like', I'll repeat my own story. The point being that I am well qualified – by dint of personal experience of faith and of religion – to comment.

My father was (well, still is, since he's retired but a 'supernumary') Methodist minister. He has loosened up a little over the years, but was very much of the fundamentalist evangelical hellfire and damnation wing when I was a child.

There are only bits and pieces of specific things that I remember, but by the time I started becoming sexually aware (around 12), I had imbibed enough to 'know' that sex was sinful. Since it was sinful and masturbation (although I hadn't a clue what it was called) made me feel dirty and unclean, like a leper, I couldn't tell anyone. I prayed for years for God to remove these awful feelings, but of course nothing happened. Partly because of what my father did and partly because (as a result of his job) we moved a lot when I was a child, I never developed any close childhood friendships – the kind where I might have mentioned such things to my peers and found out that I wasn't unique. I was around 20 before I discovered that sexual 'feelings' were natural.

When I was about 13, my father's local circuit hosted a US-style evangelical 'crusade' over two weeks. My sister and I were taken to plenty of meetings and eventually, in such heightened emotional circumstances, the inevitable happened and I was 'born again'. Strange to tell, God still didn't do any better in terms of answering my prayers and stopping me feeling horny, though. However, I went around reading Jack Chick tracts (they're obscene and that guy should be given a serious smack), handing them out to other girls at school, organising prayer meetings and being generally unbearable. I think I kept that up for about a year and then the intensity started to gradually fade away – although I still 'organised' a Christian folk group for a few more years and later ran the Christian Education Movement group at school.

Later on, I drifted away from organised religion, but the general religious belief stayed, after a rather mawkish and sentimental fashion, together with the guilt.

Fast forward to late 1999 and I moved into a new job. Almost immediately, I met someone who, very quickly, became the sort of confidente I'd never had. Loads of things poured out. To all intents and purposes, at the age of 36 going on 37, I started to go through the adolescent experience I'd never had (my parents used to boast that I was the most trouble-free teenager in history). Things fell like dominos. Religion was not, at first, amongst them. I clung to it. But during a boozy conversation one evening, I had stated that, while I didn't do organised religion any more, I still believed in a god. This new friend asked the simplest of questions: "why?" Nothing happened immediately, but about a year later, I was filling in the census form and, when it came to the religion question, I automatically filled in 'none'. Only then did I realise that it was all gone. And with it the guilt – perhaps it was more that, in a series of gloriously liberating experiences during the preceding 12 months, I'd finally shed guilt when it came to sex. With the guilt gone, there was no longer anything to hold me to any superstitious beliefs.

The following years saw my mind almost explode. My working vocabulary probably came close to doubling. I started reading far more widely, in fiction terms as well as in non-fiction. I started exploring philosophy as well as history. I started writing fiction and have subsequently been published in the UK and in Germany.

As the friend in question said, it was as though my mind had been locked in a cage.

I don't feel any sense of loss – quite the opposite. I feel liberated. I feel that I can think now.
 
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