I don’t think I believe in “God” anymore

[anonymous1120]

I feel really low today, my trigger was reading an online story about how Madeline’s body might be found in a few days as police think it’s 30 mins from hotel in a well. I’m sorry I stopped reading so details might not be fully accurate. My eldest daughter has just turned 4 and it’s really upset me thinking what Maddie might have gone through in her last moments.

I know some people will respond negatively to me and hence the name change. I’m really struggling to think how can God really exist and let awful and evil things happen all the time. My faith has really been tested over the years and I do not believe in God anymore.

It’s ok to not believe in god, I don’t believe in him, yet at moments of true disparity I pray to him, which is weird, maybe that’s my nature?

However, I do believe that even if you don’t believe in god others do, and that decision shouldn’t be questioned, just like yours shouldn’t.

@dottiedodah

BashStreetKid Sorry to hear about your poor Teacher .However she did not have Alzheimers "inflicted" on her.It is just the Brain wearing out ,or as my DM nurse told me when DM died of it, like the hard drive being wiped. As far as not being "deserved " Who on earth does "deserve" such a cruel illness!

Well, no, Alzheimer's is rather more than that. And of course, no-one deserves it. But my point really was that I can completely acknowledge it as a totally shitty thing to happen but part of the human condition. What I could not accept is the notion that it is compatible with the existence of a God. Because what rational and reasonable God would do that (or allow that to happen) to someone who had done nothing but serve him with devotion all her life, when he has the power to prevent it?

@silverstrawberry

Would you have left your daughter in an apartment and gone to dinner? God uses us as parents to protect our children the only thing I fear is leaving them in this world and not being able to protect them from danger Keep praying

What a deeply unchristian post.

[quote SharonasCorona]@BashStreetKid I can't speak for others, but I don't believe in God simply to get good things. I accept that there's a lot about God that I don't understand. I'm going through a terrible time right now and my faith allows me to accept that things are what they are right now and if I want to make things better I have to take action and God will either help me or not as he sees fit. I can't say if the parents of babies born with horrible conditions feel the same, I wouldn't speak for them.[/quote]
I haven't suggested that anyone believes in God just to get good things. What I do think that believers need to be able to answer, however, is why in their view a beneficent and omnipotent god allows bad things to happen that have nothing whatsoever to do with free will (e.g. natural disasters, children born with horrible conditions like epidermolysis bullosa) when he could prevent them.

Christians claiming Atheism is 'evil' while also trying to claim a monopoly on morality. Get bent.

I'm an atheist, and as such, I totally deny the very concept of 'evil'. It's frequently attributed properties much like something akin to gravity and such, in that it's an actual force that can have an altering effect on the universe. Absolute garbage.

People can make choices in how they act totally outside the notion of religion or how it defines morality. Christians are quick to describe kindness, compassion, love, empathy, concern etc as 'Christian' values, and that's fine, however, I see them as simply facets of what it is to be a decent human being. There's no need for religion in order to have a positive, humane morality, and it really does irk me when I see it hijacked by religious folk as if they have some sort of monopoly.

Likewise with 'evil'. There's no such thing, at least, not in the sense that it's an actual independent force. If you want to describe actions that are in conflict with your morality as 'evil' then fine, but to me they just another set of actions decided by choice by a human being, or by accident by nature. There's no requirement to add another utterly needless degree of complexity by bringing god into it.

The suffering of children is unpleasant to the sensibilities of any normal human being. There's no 'evil' involved though. Someone, somewhere made a conscious choice that led to the child suffering, just as nature doesn't decide to be 'evil', nor is it propelled by a notion of 'evil' when a volcano erupts and kills a load of otherwise decent people.

If you need to cling to these concepts in order to be able to negotiate the world on a day to day basis, then I'd suggest you try giving atheism a whirl. It's enormously liberating not having to constantly battle with contradictions, paint yourself into logical corners, or attribute wacky, nonsensical human constructs to things that really aren't complicated enough to actually require any extra explanation in the first place purely in order to fit into your religion's description of the nature of the universe. It's actually reassuring once you accept that you are totally insignificant, the universe functioned perfectly adequately before you arrived, and will continue to do so once you're gone.

Yet we do, because so many people prefer to abandon all logic and choose one of the multiple fantasies to have faith in.

Logic matters to me. Reason matters to me. I read widely and think for hours on philosophy and classical thought and greek gods and all sorts to attempt to gain understanding of the human condition and of our tendency to mess up. I've explored my Christian faith in great and sometimes tedious detail because I would prefer not to be picking a fantasy I fancy in order to feel a bit better about myself (and in fact am not sure how Christianity would fit into that construct, being a gospel about how we've messed up and need salvation - it's hardly self-help 101).

There is so much about Christianity that I have found to ring true and to be underpinned by reason. Such matters as cosmology and the moral argument, the argument from consciousness etc, but most of all the life, death and resurrection of Jesus and the startling explosion of a motley body of mainly uneducated people into a world-changing movement that did what its founder said it should do - and who were prepared to go to death for their adherence to this new faith. The history of the Bible, the NT landscape and the tools of hermeneutics have all fascinated me at different points and drawn me even further in to this faith that has transformed me and countless others, and offers a living hope every day. I do not abandon logic and reason to take hold of this faith; it is underpinned by it. At some points there is what you might call a leap of faith (skeptics may call it cognitive dissonance) where we have weighed the evidence and take a step forward into something different, not only evidence based but relationship, experience based, and in that relationship and experience is where Christians find the hope, the peace, the inexplicable joy that carries us through even the worst of times.

I am sorry Madhairday, I just don't subscribe to what you say. I know some of my friends who are believers are highly intelligent and in other areas of life some of the most logical and even clinical thinkers I know. I just think that in that area of their normal thinking process is disrupted, the leap of faith you mention I suppose.

Fair enough, inkpaper. I understand that. I think the same about many people who seem to believe blindly in things that don't make sense (flat earth, no climate change etc). I know I cannot convince you that my thought process is not disrupted when what you see is my belief in something that doesn't compute to you. Perhaps my thought processes are disrupted, but even if that were the case my experience of faith is so overwhelmingly positive I wouldn't wish to not have that - and for me, the experiences I have had, and many others I know and don't know have had, are of a God who is not far away, a God of the most perfect love I've known. But still a God who can be chased and encountered within the bounds of reason, as many have (CS Lewis being one case I can think of).

But I understand.

PurpleThistles84 "Some of our strongest emotions comes from experiencing suffering. How could we ever experience true joy, if we never have anything to compare it to?"

This is pretty much what I was referring to in an earlier post. The Christian belief that suffering in other people (even children) is a good thing.

I doubt you thought of it that way, but suppose you were in charge. Would you ensure that some children died horribly so that other people could "experience true joy"

I don't imagine you would you see, but supposedly god thought that was fine.

I remember following the story of Bradley Lowery on Facebook a few years ago now. I took a shine to him as he was ages with my son and looked so alike. I remember the day his Facebook was updated to say he had died. We were about to leave for our first ever family holiday.

I did not believe in God then, but I still felt so angry that this beautiful, brave boy had passed away in pain, how his parents were suffering. Evidence indeed that there could not be a God.

Now, as a believer, I take comfort in the belief that Bradley is in Heaven. As Jesus said, the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs (children). A non believer will of course not agree with this and so their comfort would, i imagine, be in that their child is no longer suffering.

I don’t think any Christian (could be wrong, I don’t have the monopoly on Christianity) believes that children suffering is ever ‘okay’, however we believe that children go to walk with Jesus and there is no greater reward than that. And as much as non believers hate it and see it as a cop out, we also believe that there are some things we as humans are just not able to comprehend. In other words, trying to use human reason and logic to understand God and why He allows things to happen that He does, is just not going to work. I think a lot of the time, believers and non believers both treat God and think on Him in human terms. He is not a human, so we cannot assume to always understand Him. I couldn’t reasonably call myself a Christian and have Faith if I believed we could apply human reasoning to His works.

There are aspects of logic that are universal. Mathematics being a good example. Hiding behind 'god isn't human so we can't understand him' is a nonsense. There are a lot of things in the universe that aren't human, but we understand them implicitly, and the things we don't understand do not mandate the existence of deities in order to explain them.

If you want to argue that god's seeming irrationality, impulsiveness, and selective ignorance is simply because he isn't human and doesn't act the way humans do, I'd posit that it's because god doesn't exist, and the things you are attributing to god are nothing other than the haphazard, random consequences of a chaotic universe.

I think the fundamental difference is what you, as a believer, think is more likely as opposed to what I think is more likely. My 'explanation' doesn't bring about all sorts of philosophical and logical contradictions, needless layers of complexity, and doesn't vary depending on where you were born on the globe and your cultural background.

The simplest explanations tend to be the correct ones in the overwhelming majority of circumstances.

I’m not arguing, rather stating that to believe in God, is to believe that He is our creator. You cannot believe in Him without believing that.

It is well known that the probability of life ever existing in the first place is beyond tiny, yet here we are. Scientists are still throwing out many different complex theories on how life began with such infinitely tiny odds. What is the simplest answer?

Anyways, I know how threads on faith tends to go so I will wish the OP well and hope she finds her peace whichever beliefs she chooses to have.

Big Bang, a growing universe, infinitesimal number of stars and planets, possibly even infinite universes, an unlimited period of time, probability, and happy accident.

All still far more believable than 'god did it', which quite frankly, has no credibility.

I think it has as much credibility as the multiverse theory which still suffers from lack of explanation of origins as we are expanding so cannot go back into infinity. I agree with you that the simplest explanation is often correct and many feel that is to be found in a creator - the mathematics of the universe you mention, cosmological constants etc are more likely to spring from something than nothing. Everything that begins to exist has a cause. Why is a creator so unlikely when our world is so full of reason and we ourselves are creatures of reason who can actually understand many of the mechanics of our universe through that reason? I believe in the big bang. I believe in evolution. They are the best explanation we have, but nothing explains the cause, the initial spark. Except God.

So how did god appear then?

I’m a believer, but it’s humans who have mucked up the world, not God.

We have a beautiful diverse planet which produces enough food and resources for everyone to live well, but human greed has skewed the distribution, hence poverty which breeds resentment, violence and hatred.

Maybe we’re too far gone to correct this, but it’s not God’s fault.

It’s like providing a person with a nice apartment with a full fridge in a large building but the person decides they want the whole building, trashes the place and puts the other occupants out on the street.

@Madhairday

That supposes that god exists outside of the universe, predates the origin of the universe.

That being the case, what was god doing before the 'initial spark'? Sitting around doing nothing for all eternity? Off creating other universes? Did god not exist prior to this 'initial spark'? If not, did god will itself into existence? If so, where did this 'will' come from?

Or is it just that universes have been expanding and contracting in perpetuity, old ones imploding, new ones exploding, possibly with the help of black holes?

Again, I know which seems far more plausible to me, even if it's not understood entirely.

I sincerely hope he wasnt weeping for both his children, you are putting them in the same category ffs

'karma'

File that along with 'evil'.

Totally superfluous to the explanation of anything at all, except for bizarre, convoluted belief systems that are the invention of mankind's imagination.

@priya38

Tell me, are people who don't believe in 'karma' also subject to karma? Surely if you believe so, then this means those people's beliefs and religions can not also be true?

@XDownwiththissortofthingX

It don't understand why some people don't believe in karma. It's a part of life. It's something we all go through and something we've all experienced and will continue to experience whilst alive.

Never heard the phrase "what goes around comes around"?

Life's a never ending cycle, there's no full stop.

It's funny I never once heard a religious person bring negative about non believers, not once never, not a word in 50 years of church going but I hear lots of atheists making prejudiced comments

[quote priya38]@chickenblc

It you want to perceive that as fucked up then so be it. To me your just not intelligent enough, to understand, that this was just an example I was giving of how karma can work.

Amen 🙏 [/quote]
Not intelligent enough to believe that disabled people deserve to be disabled because they did something awful in a "past life"?

Or maybe it's because I have a shred of empathy.

Amen yerself. 🖕

I never have. It's nonsense.

"Never heard the phrase "what goes around comes around"?"

Never heard the phrase "pile of shit?"