To genuinely wonder how or why anyone believes in God?

[ChaosNeverRains]

Genuine question.

I was until fairly recently I think probably agnostic rather than anything else, having been brought up in a very church oriented school where the emphasis was all on sin and retribution and the need to worship this higher being and that if you lived every day then it was through God’s will - you get the picture. Until recently though I was prepared to believe that perhaps there was a higher being out there somewhere, and even now I can see that some could believe that there is a higher being out there or that there was at some point.

But what I don’t understand is why people seem to believe that there is a God who looks over them individually when everything points to that not being the case. People talk about the power of prayer when actually no such power exists. The man dying of cancer is no more or less likely to die if you prayed for him than if you didn’t. I know of some very devout Christians who have fallen victim to the most horrific illnesses and where the church have genuinely believed that praying for them means God will heal them, which of course he hasn’t. But when they die those same people are thought to be up there eternally worshipping the lord. Why?

I can see that a belief in God might somehow make people feel comforted that this isn’t the only life we will have, but what I can’t see is that a God who allows the amount of bad and suffering that goes on in the world, even on an individual level should be so worshipped. If a father treated his children in the way that the supposed Heavenly Father treats his, no-one would want anything to do with him. Yet worshippers of a God go to all and any lengths to ensure that they continue to do things in the name of the father and to not upset him for fear of the retribution they will receive.

I’m not one for dismissing belief as believing in the fairies and what-not (with the possible exception of the dinosaur deniers,) but I am becoming more and more curious as to how it is that people can believe in this individual God and actually believe that it is true when there is no evidence to suggest anything of the sort.

PS: I am talking about any and all religion not just one. My thought process being that if there were one God it would be the same God whether you are Christian muslim or Jewish but that the scriptures are defined by humans to make for the individual religions.

tabbymack but where would you expect him to draw the line? Every single act of violence across the world should be stopped in its tracks? Do you expect him to physically intervene across the world to every awful thing that happens. That sounds bizarre. Why does God have to live up to this human idyll of how we think he should act. There are many people who have suffered throughout the ages, many people have only managed to get though much suffering because of their faith in God. It isn't God who causes suffering but man.

But if you really want to blame God for all the bad things in life it should be only right and fair then to give thanks and praise for all the wonderful and beautiful things in the world. But it's fine, no ones forcing you to believe in God, so you needn't worry about any perceived inadequencies.

Free will:
According to Genisis, god created us ignorant, without free will. It was the devil that gave us free will. God subsequently punished us for having free will by giving us original sin. Men are allowed the free will choice abuse women. Women don't have the free will choice to stop a man abusing them. Abusers are allowed into heaven and celebrated if they say sorry. If a victim refuses to eternally worship god he throws them in hell for eternal damnation.
Can a christian explain how they square that circle?

to think we're all just here by chance. The odds of it happening by chance are too high to be counted Earth is the only planet that we know can sustain life where it has evolved it. Until we survey other planets where life could have evolved but didn't then chance of us evolving on a planet that can support life is currently 100%.

Logicalmum

Not really because if we presuppose God's existence then its equally possible that He actually causes all the evil things to happen in the world and the good is just an unintended consequence.

If we just go off observation of the world we live in, he could very easily be an evil God.

but where would you expect him to draw the line? Every single act of violence across the world should be stopped in its tracks? Do you expect him to physically intervene across the world to every awful thing that happens. That sounds bizarre.

But this is his show- he draws all the lines. Having him physically intervening is no more bizarre than him creating this circus.

I am an atheist, for me the concept of an all powerful loving God just does not fit with the world we live in. However a few days ago this came up on my facebook, it is interesting and made me think, even though it did not change my mind or my beliefs;

In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other: “Do you believe in life after delivery?”The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”

“Nonsense” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be?”

The second said, “I don’t know, but there will be more light than here. Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths. Maybe we will have other senses that we can’t understand now.”

The first replied, “That is absurd. Walking is impossible. And eating with our mouths? Ridiculous! The umbilical cord supplies nutrition and everything we need. But the umbilical cord is so short. Life after delivery is to be logically excluded.”

The second insisted, “Well I think there is something and maybe it’s different than it is here. Maybe we won’t need this physical cord anymore.”

The first replied, “Nonsense. And moreover if there is life, then why has no one ever come back from there? Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery there is nothing but darkness and silence and oblivion. It takes us nowhere.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said the second, “but certainly we will meet Mother and she will take care of us.”

The first replied “Mother? You actually believe in Mother? That’s laughable. If Mother exists then where is She now?”

The second said, “She is all around us. We are surrounded by her. We are of Her. It is in Her that we live. Without Her this world would not and could not exist.”

Said the first: “Well I don’t see Her, so it is only logical that She doesn’t exist.”

To which the second replied, “Sometimes, when you’re in silence and you focus and listen, you can perceive Her presence, and you can hear Her loving voice, calling down from above.”

May be this was one of the best explanations to the concept of GOD.

Logicalmum

I don’t expect anything of your invented galactic overlord...he/she/it doesn’t exist.

What I do expect is for someone making a public declaration about how they believe the universe operates to be able to support their argument with a coherent explanation and (ahem) real logic.

But you can’t. Just a load of nonsensical gumpf about “god doesn’t do what we want him to do”.

If God is benevolent, why is there such extreme suffering in the world? If you cannot answer that, say so. And, if you were intellectually honest with yourself, you might ask yourself why you can’t answer that question.

I believe that the world we live in now is only our mortal life, just a dot in time.God has promised us Heaven, there will be no badness, pain or suffering there. But he has given us this wonderful world, it's so easy to look for the negatives, can't we just appreciate what we have.

HiggeldyPigsinblankets It is good isn't it.

tabbymack just what do you want me to say, and why are you bothered. I believe in God, you don't. Simple. I really don't have to justify anything to you. Are you asking me to prove something,....I can't and i don't have to. Calm down, you sound angry. There was really no need to come on a thread just to have a go at believers, it really shouldn't bother you.

I think believing in a higher power or life after death doesn't mean you have to believe in organised religion. The difference is in ppl saying they don't know what happens after death as opposed to knowing with certainty in faith.

As someone with depression I think about life after death. It scares me a lot there is more to it but more in a matrix/black mirror style and it feels horrible to be in a trap of needing to die but scared it means no death at all! Why is it a comfort I've no idea!! I ask though what about ants or my old hamster?

No, I don’t sound angry - and you know it.

You have chosen to come on to a thread and talk about your beliefs. When questioned about what you’ve said, you’ve danced around and avoided answering a pretty simple question.

It’s OK...all theists do this, so I was expecting it.

There’s no answer, is there? Because in a universe governed by love, there would be no preventable suffering. Obviously.

You haven't given me any specific question, and you know it. But please do, i have certainly not danced around anything....and you DO sound angry, atheists always do, renowned for it in fact. Really don't know why, but for some reason it makes them angry hearing about people who believe in God. Why come on the thread, it wasnt asking for reasons why people don't believe.

Where was god in Auschwitz or Treblinka?

Many religious people were murdered in those places in horrible ways.

Why didn't god prevent the Holocaust?
Possibly because he's either evil or doesn't exist.

May be this was one of the best explanations to the concept of GOD.
"When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put aside childish things"

A 'baby' in the womb could reason that the oxygen and nutrients are coming from somewhere therefore it would be reasonable to infer an outside exists. God however does not provide us with anything from anywhere, so it is not reasonable to infer there is a somewhere else or that someone else exists outside of our space and time.

A baby in the womb during delivery would see the physical body go somewhere, there is no reason to think it is an end of life and every reason to think there is a destination outside the womb. When a human dies, the body does not go anywhere, there is no journey and no reason to think there is anywhere to go after death.

A 'baby' in the womb could experiment with kicking the womb and seeing if it caused pressure to be experienced coming from outside the womb. A baby could experience sound from outside the womb and all the evidence would point to something being there. In the real world none of these experiments have ever indicated the existence of a deity outside space and time.

Nice metaphor but nothing like the concept of GOD.

So God couldn't create a world with free will where children didn't get cancer?

🤨

tameka that reminds me of the prefix to William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice.

The query : At Auschwitz, tell me, where was was God?
The answer : Where was Man?

Seems a cop out to me though - if god is sufficiently powerful to be worth praying to to help a sick relative, or whatever, you’d think, at the very least, he’d have intervened to stop children from being gassed. Maybe he was distracted by a woman in Australia trying to procure an abortion, or teenages in the UK having sex before marriage or a child in America lying about eating the jam.

God created good, yet we, humans, make moral choices which have resulted in evil.

Unfortunately collective human choices have resulted in a world of have or have nots, where the impact of diseases and natural disasters can very much depend on where you are born in the world.

God didn't murder the jews, the evil nazis did. I'm sure that they will have been judged for what they did., But it's wrong to expect Gods intervention on every atrocity of mans doing. That is obviously not his way. I've read many books on the the holocaust and the thing that strikes me, on the whole the jews often felt that God had abandoned them but it didn't make it them lose their faith. Many jews talked of numerous miracles in their struggle to stay alive. But the holocaust was not of Gods doing, it was the evil of man.

Just because god's experiment went wrong doesn't mean he is not responsible.
And he should have seen it coming- he is all knowing.

If my ants in my ant farm start fighting and eating each other- that's their choice is it?
Or is it mine for keeping them in a perspex box under my bed?

So either he's an irresponsible God or there isn't a God. If there isn't one what's the point in calling him irresponsible.....and all the woes of the world are caused by man. God must despair.

I have a couple of religious friends and one gave me a bible. I read it and it’s really awful, it’s like a horror novel, why tf would anyone worship a god like that and claim he loves us?!

God didn't murder the jews, the evil nazis did. I'm sure that they will have been judged for what they did., But it's wrong to expect Gods intervention on every atrocity of mans doing.

Seriously! If he's so good and powerful he should intervene. What a load of nonsense! He'd stand by and let a baby be gassed in a concentration camp - nice!

I quoted this in an above post from Epicurus

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"

So if prayers are thought to work it’s divine intervention but the terrible evils in the world are due to man?

Didn’t Tim minchin write a song about exactly that? It’s called Thank You God and thanks the lord for taking a break from giving babies malaria and ignoring the AIDs-ridden African nations and the plague ridden nations to fix the cataracts of a healthy, privately-insured Australian. This is a verse:

“Thank you, Sam, for showing me how my point of view has been so flawed
I assumed there was no God at all but now I see that’s cynical
It’s simply that his interests aren’t particularly broad
He’s largely undiverted by the starving masses,
Or the inequality between the various classes
He gives out strictly limited passes,
Redeemable for surgery two-for-one glasses”

He’s got a fairly good deal with believers, hasn’t he? If things go well then he and prayer are responsible and when all the truly shitty, evil aspects of the world are discussed it’s, “But it’s wrong to expect God’s intervention on every atrocity of man’s doing.”

Clearly I’m not a believer, but why is it wrong? Why not prevent or stop the Holocaust, or remove AIDS from Africa or cause a paedophile to die a painless death? If Man was made in God’s image then God doesn’t seem very nice. Overly preoccupied with women’s reproductive health and happy to turn a blind eye to mass suffering.

A few ideas on the suffering question.

1. Which group of people has the biggest problem with why God allows suffering? - Its those that suffer least i.e. western developed countries
2. Everybody dies. I'd be devastated if my dc died of course I would, but I would be comforted by the idea of them being with God in heaven. The idea of dying early must surely be worse if you believe this life is all there is.
3. I dislike it when people say 'Everything happens for a reason'. Like bad things are part of God's plan. They're not. Shit happens. Sometimes someone is to blame, sometimes not.

God created good, yet we, humans, make moral choices which have resulted in evil

If only there was some way we could murder everyone drown everyone and start all over again. That would be a good thing, right? I am sure we could get it right the second third time around.

Or maybe someone could give us a list of what is right and wrong, something permanent and can't be misinterpreted, like its set in stone, or did we try that before?