Why you do or don't believe in God?

[summerbloom]

Interested to hear people's views on why they do believe in God or on why you don't believe in God.....

I do. I was brought up by atheists and taught that religion was a crutch/delusion, but I always had a sense of God's presence. I not sure I can put it in rational terms but that is my experience.

I struggle that some teachings say only religious people are good people. My dad was a plumber and his business had a contract with a very large diocese. Some of the vicars were down right nasty and at one vicarage dad and his mate had to move to a vicars bed to get to a radiator under the bed was huge pile of gay porn and he often had young lads from the Philippines staying with him during their teachings! I have issues with some people hiding behind an organised religion pretending to be holier than thou and being g someone they are not etc! I also struggle with the fact that bad people can suddenly become born again Christians. How many times do you hear of prisioners finding God whilst inside? Isn't it just a way to absolve themselves of their crime? I mean how can a religious organisation happily take in a convicted child rapist/murderer with open arms, just because they say they've 'found' God?

Can you say more about how disease is man-made, Lady?

FFS God doesn't give children cancer, nor was he responsible for my 16 son being hit by a car and killed. How ludicrous. Why on earth would he? God gave us free will
Faith is faith is faith, really impossible to describe but I have from time to time looked out at wonderful sites or into the night sky and thought 'how on earth can people not believe?"

How come your god exists and thus everybody else's is a myth?

FFS God doesn't give children cancer, nor was he responsible for my 16 son being hit by a car and killed. How ludicrous. Why on earth would he? God gave us free will

So why attribute everything positive to God? Every birth, every "miracle", every shred of talent is God's work.

notarehearsal I'm really sorry to read about your son - but I struggle to see how free will was involved, any more than it is for children getting cancer. And what sort of a god would devote his time to making lovely starry skies, but put them on top of a world in which people die needlessly, painfully, and through no fault of their own. We happen to find starry skies etc appealing to look at - that doesn't mean someone put them there for us!

I don’t. I believe we all have free will. God gets the credit/blame for a lot of things in life. You hear people say that they didn’t get a job/pass an exam because it wasn’t “God’s will”. No, it was because you weren’t right for it or didn’t study hard enough. God also gets the credit for curing people from diseases, or putting criminals behind bars, when actually it was the tireless work of highly trained doctors/lawyers who did this. People are unwilling to take responsibility for things that happen in their lives, god is an easy get-out clause.

I was describing myself as agnostic for years, but about 2 years ago I went to a CofE christening and it was just awful. The vicar going on and on about sin and evil, in relation to an innocent little baby. That cemented it for me, it left a very bad taste in my mouth. I’ve been happily atheist ever since. I don’t believe in the afterlife either, just as there was nothing before we were born I believe there is nothing when we die. The only lives we have are the ones we are living right now.

No I don't believe in a God. I had a very strict religious upbringing but nothing made any sense to me. I want to do my own thing when I want, how I want and without judgement from an ancient 'man' who tells me how to live my life and tries to blackmail me into doing as he says.

I believe that people who need religion/God/Other higher being, as babies all (majority of people) have this 1 person who looks after them, feeds them, keeps them safe and warm and that person is their Mother. As they get older and become more independent they still look for that same feeling they had as a baby, someone to guide , look after them etc. Their Mothers (alternative guardian/person) pass away and they're left alone so try to replace her with a God who will give them the same feeling of being nurtured and guided through their lives.

I can see why people feel they need a God in their lives but for me religion is full of rules that discriminate against half the population and blackmail them into doing something perhaps they really don't want to do. If there is a God who created everything then why be so cruel and vile? And the big one, if there is a God then who created him? Who/Where is he born from? Who were his parents?

I believe in God. They are some things that can't be explained by science.

However I don't believe in religion and I think the world would be a better place without it.

Which things can't be explained by science?

I don't believe, and would tend toward the Dawkins school of thought. I have met some very nice people who do believe, and I'm content they do. I like the., I don't have to like all that they do, or say, anymore than they do my views.

I would like a compelling explanation as to what free will has to do with cancer. And in particular, what several of my siblings, who were born with a cancer-causing mutation could have reasonably done to prevent their disease at approx. age eight. I would also like to know what actions I can take of my own free will to prevent cancer developing in me since I have the same mutation.

I would also like a compelling explanation as to why god enters the story concerning positive events but is strangely absent when things go wrong. Why is free will invoked in bad cases but rarely the good ones?

I believe there's a creator. I believe that creator is good, kind and benevolent. I'm not sure just how much I believe the doctrine of any organised religion though.
We attend church regularly.

FFS God doesn't give children cancer, nor was he responsible for my 16 son being hit by a car and killed. How ludicrous. Why on earth would he? God gave us free will

I'm sorry for your loss, nota, but in what sense is free will responsible for children's cancer? I get very impatient with the the 'the gift of free will is responsible for the world's catastrophes', because it's so patently not true, and representative of the kind of feverish mental gymnastics required of the religious. There is simply no way in which you can square the existence of a loving, omnipotent God with the world as it is, and while you may claim war as the ultimate 'free will disaster', many other things can in no way be laid at the door of human beings. Then you get religious types shrugging and saying some version of 'Thy will be done', which leaves us roughly where we were at the beginning.

The 'awed feeling that comes over me when I look at a mountain or a starry night' doesn't indicate a creator god - it's simply the more obviously awe-inspiring aspects of nature, the same 'red in tooth and claw' nature that has food chains of predation, and waterborne larvae that eat their way out of children's eyeballs.

'Is it not enough to see that the garden is beautiful without believing there are fairies at the bottom of it?' Douglas Adams.

I don't believe. If I went to my GP and told her I was hearing voices in my head she would probably diagnose me with a mental illness. I'd agree with the other posters that god seems to get all the credit for the wonderful things but manages to dodge the flack for all the crap - so earthquakes, etc - that's all down to our free will is it? And as for the contention that all diseases are man made - really, granted some are caused by our actions but what about those that are brought about by spontaneous genetic mutations - if god created us shouldn't he take responsibility for his fuck ups as well?

I'm torn, I cannot believe that an all powerful god would allow such suffering in the world, that good people suffer and bad people get away with murder.

I was raised a catholic and my dad was very religious (my mum was and still an atheist) until the day my 13 year old brother died and he just stopped believing, I was 15 and I followed his beliefs. I was also a teenager so happy to stop going to church 2/3 times a week. I was very certain there was no god until I was 44 when my partner died suddenly, I had to believe we would be together again at some point and that he was in a better place! 4 years (tomorrow!) later I'm so torn, he was a good person, healthy, didn't smoke, do drugs, did drink alcohol often 2-3 units a month, worked hard, made my life good, now I wonder what I did to deserve it, why, if there is a god, is he punishing me?! But still need to believe he is in 'heaven'. I do go to church occasionally again now but more because I found a bereavement group run by the church and they have bereavement services 2-3 times a year and I go other times as it is the most beautiful church and I do find it calming.

The disease is man-made. The war - man-made. Poverty - man-made. God lets it happen because we have the free will to stop it.

If only all those west Africans a few years back realised they could have prevented contracting Ebola if they just exercised the power of 'free will'.

As for war, what do you say when Old Testament God orders it?

Take his command to King Saul of Israel: “Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.” (1 Samuel 15:3 NIV)

Or how about this statement regarding Israel’s destruction of Jericho at God’s prompting: “They devoted the city to the LORD and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys”? (Joshua 6:21 NIV)

As Dawkins said: The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

Quite why you want such an entity to exist is beyond me.

I don't believe in any god. There is no evidence in support of the existence of any god, or to support any of the myriad religious stories. Supposing I wanted to believe in a god, which one should I pick? Supposing I felt there was a hell to avoid, which set of stories should I choose to take as a guide on how to do that?

Supposing I got past those questions somehow and settled on a god to believe in and stories to take as truth, how could I worship a being which caused and allowed all the misery and suffering of the universe? If I ever do, for some strange reason, find myself believing in a god, you can rest assured I won't be worshipping it anyway.

I have very close and much loved friends who are very religious. They accept me, I accept them. Believe whatever works for you. No one needs to justify their choices to me (unless they are extolling said choices as the only right ones) and I don't need to justify mine to anyone else.

A.C. Grayling on religion, it's only 8 mins long. It's excellent

How on earth is disease "man-made"? Certainly, human behaviour may facilitate the development and spread of disease, but viruses and bacteria are as much a part of the evolutionary ecosystem as we are.

Or does God get a free pass from the less-nice aspects, while he gets all the credit for the good stuff - oh-so-clever us and those purposeless flowers?

I don't believe. It seems quite clear to me that religion has evolved as a way of helping us cope with the fact that we die. Nothing about the way the world works suggests to me that it's overseen by an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent deity. For one thing, in terms of the universe we are indescribably insignificant. How does it make sense that an all-powerful being would select one microscopic planet among the trillions of stars and planets that exist on which to create a race of beings 'in his own image'? We just aren't that special.

I don't believe there is a god, because there are too many flaws and inefficiencies occurring in nature to make me think it was created by an all-knowing cosmic entity.

"Which things can't be explained by science?"

I just struggle with the first atom. How did that happen. I can explain planets, flora fauna etc but just not that first bit