To want to make myself believe in god?

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I have always been very logical and so despite going to a Christian primary school, having a very religious mum(though not in a pushy way) and reading the bible when I was younger(the story version I was a bit of a book worm) I have never really got my head around how god could be possible.

But I really wish I had the extra "something" that some people seem to find by believing in god. I'm probably not making much sense, but I wish I could get myself to feel like there's somebody watching out, that there's something after death, that everything happens for what'd ultimately a good reason/what's meant to be so on.

AIBU to try going to church for a bit even though I don't believe in god? Or am I just being silly, is it something you can't 'make' yourself feel?

You think my words displayed on a computer screen are so powerful that they could bugger up someone's percieved relationship with the most powerful being in the universe? Can't be that great then can it. It reminds me of teenage girls fighting over boys saying things like 'you stole my boyfriend away from me'.

If the only way to keep someone in a relationship with you is to prevent them from listening to other ideas that's brainwashing. That's not a relationship.

I've had the worship discussion with several of my pagan friends. I can't recall a single one who has said that their gods demand worship. We talk about relationships and honouring, but never worship.

What does Jehovah get out of worship, other than a bloody big ego stroke, which, as has been previously established by his behaviour in the OT, is probably one of his least terrible character traits.

If the only way to keep someone in a relationship with you is to prevent them from listening to other ideas that's brainwashing. That's not a relationship.
In this I am in complete agreement. We should always listen to other ideas and question our own.

Back to the worship thing. I know not everyone worships something, but that doesn't make my point invalid. My experience (and that of countless millions) is that worshipping God brings freedom and satisfaction. I don't think anything else does that - nothing else fills that gap. I know. I've been there.

What God gets out of worship wgc is an interesting question, because like you something in me rebels against the idea of it being one big ego stroke. I just don't think it is. I think it is much closer to the delight we have in our children when we see them the happiest they can be. I think God delights in our delight in God - if worship brings us to a place of deeper satisfaction and joy than anything else, then God's delight is in that joy - as the Psalmist puts it, God delights in our praises, because they give us wholeness and healing.

Again, this is unquantifiable and unprovable, but you asked what I think about it :)

Old Nick holo

I don't think a lot of these q's are genuine or sincere. Yy it's good to get a workout but there is a definite element of sneering and jeering eg 'I hope jesus has the decency to asnwer my questions'. That may have been wry or it may have been an unnecessary addition and purposefully contemptuous imo. and yet the writer insists she has no feelings either way for christians/christianity

It's good to exercise the theologies and I'm glad some of you are up to this relentless assault, with the ability to wade through the mire with aplomb. It's the almost total lack of humility in a lot of atheists that I find hardest to bear. Whatever, my stuff, no doubt!

I really really really do get the hatred and contempt towards religion, however [finding it hard not to be distracted by the baby wig blog to the right there ...]. Just that people get that and God mixed up. Someone said upthread that God's religions had caused all the upset and heinous(ity?)? It wasn't God! it never has been God! God gets the blame for a lot that has nothing to do with him.

Back to old Nick...

'I hope jesus has the decency to asnwer my questions'. That may have been wry or it may have been an unnecessary addition and purposefully contemptuous imo.

You think it's unreasonable to expect him to answer a few questions? That was an honest statement. I would have a lot of questions. Wouldn't you if say, it turned out that Zeus was god. Would it seem fair if Zeus refused to explain why he was holding you accountable for not believing in him even though there was nothing to suggest he actually existed.

hih. I think that you have been saying things and asking questions about God for at least a year and a half.
But as I said somewhere in this thread, I dont come onto the philsophy board that often].

I did think that you were asking questions genuinely.
But I now think that you are maybe asking them for your own wrong reasons. Even asking them all just for a verbal workout may not be advisable for you.
Will you get a chance to ask Jesus questions on judgement day? Will any of us? I do know that we have to give an account of what we have done and said and thought throughout our lives. So I suspect that the short answer is no.

Christians have to be careful what they expose themselves to. Repeatedly being in the company of fools, repeatedly having exposure to risque media and risque entertainment, all these things for example will weaken Chrsitian faith in the long term, rather than strengthen it. So best avoided imo.

headinhands. I get the distict impression that you think God owes you something.
But if he doesnt exist, then the question is irrelevant to you isnt it.

It would be best if we deal with the debate at hand instead of quizzing each others personal motives. Play the ball not the player as they say.

ok.

Just personally, I struggle to see the point of bringing evidence and science into a debate about religious beliefs.

"In a hypothetical scenario where science did provide proof that there was no God, would you alter your beliefs?"

Many of the theist poster claim there is evidence. I guess it's those who engage with debate.

But even of those who claim there is evidence (including my entire family), they will still admit that even if there was evidence proving God wouldn't exist, they wouldn't change their mind, period.

I mean, for people with thoughts/beliefs structured around evidence, evidence is the catalyst for change. All I'm saying is that for those with religious beliefs, it appears at first glance this is also the case for them, and that they have interpreted the evidence a different way.

But actually many (all in my acquaintance at least) outright admit evidence or lack of it makes no difference, they will believe what they believe no matter what - making any evidence-based discussion rather void.

Very good points, Solari. Scientific evidence is not possible. The evidence believers have is the evidence of experience and it is most often personal and subjective, and they don't care if the scientists or Richard Dawkins or anyone else claims that God does not exist, because their faith and evidence by experience tells them different.

In a way, it is like trying to prove that art is beautiful. Some people like certain types of art and others can see nothing in that type of art and they ask those who like it to explain why it is beautiful, to prove to them and show to them where the beauty resides, because they themselves can't see it and feel it. But you can't prove things like that, because they are subjective and no proof exists, no evidence exists.

So let believers continue believing and non-believers continue not believing. Let people use free will and free choice to decide what is true and real. Everyone follows a different path, a path that is their own.

Am I the only one who is slightly suspicious of the category 'evidence'? I've raised this point on previous God threads and no-one seemed to respond really iirc. To my mind, to even get to the point of assessing what constitutes evidence in any given scenario involves a huge amount of thought within certain frames of reference. In the last Lewis programme I watched, an upside down book on a bookshelf turned out to be evidence; lots of murder mysteries work on the basis of the overlooked evidence. So before we can even decide whether any sort of evidence plays any sort of part in assessing whether believers' experience of God is genuine, there's a lot of thinking-work to be done.

In previous God threads, atheist posters have disagreed strenuously with this claim and gave said that we start from the evidence. But to me, that's intellectually highly unsatisfactory because it's as unexamined as any fundamentalist biblical literalism. (This may just be my perspective.)

Good question hol. If a friend said they wanted to explore religion but were worried about getting the 'wrong one' what would you advise them to do?

I'd drink lots and lots of coffee / wine with her, and chat as we drank about the religion she was considering. I'd get her to describe the gatherings, the community, etc. If I could, I'd go with her to the gatherings (I'm trying not to use Christian specific language here). Anything coercive would ring massive alarm bells for me. Anything genuinely open, patient, exploratory and loving is probably a good thing. Most of all, I'd say to give it time, to get to know a faith community well, and not be afraid of changing your mind of it doesn't turn put to be your spiritual home after all, bug to try and learn from everyone you meet on the way, even the obnoxious nutters who can teach you why you reacted so strongly to their nasty beliefs - the strength of your own response will point you in the right direction to a healthier, saner faith.

How does that response strike you?

Sorry for typos -overenthusiastic spell checker on phone!

That's actually a good answer not that I needed to say that.

I think nearly all evidence is physical, based on matter. Nearly all of the sciences are physical to some extent, based on matter. but the Queen of the Sciences - mathematucs - is in fact abstract, and yet it is through that abstract language that physical realities are proved.

God is spiritual, not physical. God as an idea is abstract, in some way similar to abstract concepts such as freedom or beauty or goodness.

You can love freedom and love goodness, but since they are abstract, you cannot see or touch them, you cannot get physical evidence for them, you can only use thought to describe them.

God is also abstract and you cannot get physical evidence for God, but you can use thought and love to gain some comprehension of God.

Although I would initially ask why she wanted to explore religion and what she felt it would offer that was missing, but copious amounts of wine nevertheless.

"Although I would initially ask why she wanted to explore religion and what she felt it would offer that was missing"

But that is a bit like asking why do people fall in love or want to be loved. It is in-built, a human need and love of God and search for God is in-built in many people and has been from the beginning of time as the in-built search for the answer to why we are here and why we suffer has been here since the beginning of human consciousness.

Claig, from what I gather, maths is very abstract! A family member is a maths whiz and he says that the most important qualities in being a competent mathematician is imagination and visualisation. He told me about a maths debate within his university in which one Prof argued that he doesn't believe in infinity. Belief, imagination, visualisation... It's difficult to escape these as arbiters of knowledge, even in so-called empirical learning contexts.

No, if she said, 'I want to fall in love' I would still ask why especially as some people make poor decisions about partners. Not everyone feels a need to explore religion, it's not innate.

No, not everyone, but lots of people do.
The communists in Russia destroyed churches and killed priests and tried to put an end to religion, but they couldn't do it, because the human spirit of many people sought the Divine Spirit. The communists couldn't stop it, because their earthly power was nothing compared to the divine.

Holo, you are right. Maths is abstract, it is pure thought and logic. Philosophy is abstract too, and both maths and philosophy require leaps of imagination and leaps of faith that then need to be explored through thought and logic.