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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

Original poster

To think that God doesn't exist and is a manmade concept

569 replies

Perimama · 07/12/2023 01:42

As it is taboo to talk religion politics with people socially, I often wonder whether many people think like me. As a species we have dismissed all the other "Gods" ie Greek gods etc. What makes the Christian God any different? I wasn't born into a religious household although I was baptized Christian. The whole concept seems so unbelievable to me.

OP posts:
Thread gallery
11
Holidayhell22 · 07/12/2023 07:58

Pixiepirate All religions are used as a tool to surprise women.
And there lies the crux of the matter for me.
I grew up being taught that The Bible was fact. Eve was evil etc etc. It caused untold damage and allowed men and boys to abuse me.
Show me a religion which holds women and girls in high esteem and I will consider following it. Until then, no I’m not listening.

HRTQueen · 07/12/2023 07:59

Oldsu · 07/12/2023 02:05

As Thomas Aquinas once said 'To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.

Edited

Sums it up perfectly

I dislike the attacking of people who believe which is so often sneery and becomes personal with attacks on their intellect

Anyotherdude · 07/12/2023 08:00

Religion is a set of social rules. Most of those rules are sensible. It’s when people, usually men, decide to interpret those rules to establish themselves as leaders that wars start.
For me, I take the view that religion is a shorthand for how to bring your children up to be good people, and that a few people (usually men), take the view that it is a shorthand on how to become little dictators!

x2boys · 07/12/2023 08:02

SweetFemaleAttitude · 07/12/2023 06:44

I do not believe an omnipresent being impregnated a 14 year old with a child who was sent to earth to take away our sins.

That is fucking mental.

I'm agnostic but in biblical times people had much shorter life times you can't really compare current times and values .

VivienneDelacroix · 07/12/2023 08:02

auberginefortea · 07/12/2023 02:41

Ok, I appreciate I was a little sarcastic, but assuming you're in the UK, there have been several surveys that suggests around half of the country considers themselves atheists. Here's one I quickly found which showed 53% of Brits say they have no religion. At least in the UK, atheists are not "a small minority".

Religion (natcen.ac.uk)

Edited

And a very recent survey here which shows only 29% of British people believe in a God/Gods.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1415267/uk-belief-in-god/#:~:text=As%20of%20August%202023%2C%20approximately,in%20God%20%2F%20Gods%20at%20all.

UK belief in God 2023 | Statista

As of August 2023, approximately 29 percent of people in Great Britain said that they believed in a God / Gods, compared with 37 percent who had no belief in God / Gods at all.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1415267/uk-belief-in-god#:~:text=As%20of%20August%202023%2C%20approximately,in%20God%20%2F%20Gods%20at%20all.

IncompleteSenten · 07/12/2023 08:04

I think you're probably right but we'll all find out in the end.

I liked what Stephen Fry said about the subject. Basically, if god exists, he's either incompetent or a psychopath.

x2boys · 07/12/2023 08:05

HRTQueen · 07/12/2023 07:59

Sums it up perfectly

I dislike the attacking of people who believe which is so often sneery and becomes personal with attacks on their intellect

Show quote history

Indeed I'm agnostic so no strong faith
But I accept people, s right to have a,faith and find all the insults childish.

FloofCloud · 07/12/2023 08:08

TheBeautifulMoors · 07/12/2023 07:03

:Ive just googled and 37% of people in England and Wales identified as having no religion.

Over 40% identified as Christian , 6% as Muslim, 2% other.

I find the Christian/Atheist split very surprising and was expecting the number of atheists to be much higher, from what I come across on the internet and irl. However, I know when I used to work on collecting data, people who were christened as babies but have never had anything to do with Christianity, still identify as Christian so that could explain part of it.

You’re nbu to not believe in God. It’s your choice not to.
So is it mine to believe in Him, through my experiences.
My faith is very important to me but mostly private in my day to day life. I only talk about it with people who I know share my faith.
I never get into a debate on why God exists or doesn’t exist. If someone approaches me irl and asks me about my faith or how I came to it, then I’d happily share it.

I came across a video of proof of God linked to proof that there are no barbers, which I found quite funny.

I think people are driven into a category early, parents encouraged to get their child christened (or whatever), so they're already categorised. I always used to put down I was Christian as I'd been christened, but in reality I've never believed in gods, I'm a scientist and I believe in science, physics, chemistry and biology - I don't believe gods are in a lab creating.

But I personally suspect that people who are Christian and aren't practising, effectively don't believe just auto complete Christian as it's bestowed upon you as a baby because that's what religions do ... sign you up before you make your own mind up!

YireosDodeAver · 07/12/2023 08:14

It's very lazy thinking to claim that religion causes wars. The most cursory glace at the background of any so-called religious war in history shows that the nain causes are about politics and resources, with religion used merely as a rhetorical justification after the political decision was made.

"Religion" just means a set of regulations which people abide by rather than following their own instinctive impulses.

The concepts of the rule of law, money and the free-market economy have the same amount of "truth" to them as any religion, they only exist by mutual consent because people choose to act as if they exist.

There's no intrinsic reason why society shouldn't be based on an ethical framework of survival of the fittest, might-is-right and that the ethical thing for the weak and unfit to do is go off and die quietly for the greater good. The fact that we mostly instead believe in looking after the weak and sick comes from somewhere, it can't all be explained by enlightened self-interest. One possibility might be the existence of a divine being who inspires people to conceptualise a totally different system of thinking than the selfish impulses created by our evolution via natural selection.

There's no requirement to believe in a divine "being" but anyone who thinks they are living without any "beliefs" is deluding themselves.

Castlerock44 · 07/12/2023 08:17

So the universe just sprang into existence from absolute nothingness, and gave us our very own solar system. The moon and sun in the exact positions to ensure life on earth to be possible. The odds of this happening by chance are impossible.

That takes a far bigger leap of faith to believe than to accept we have a Creator.

Hereforthebunfights · 07/12/2023 08:17

Religions other than Christianity are avaliable. Much of the world hasn't dismissed other Gods

RuledbytheWashingMachine · 07/12/2023 08:17

I don't believe in anything godly or spiritual. It took me years to realise that questioning things was ok and free myself of religious guilt. It was very freeing. I consider myself a humanist now.

SweetFemaleAttitude · 07/12/2023 08:21

x2boys · 07/12/2023 08:02

I'm agnostic but in biblical times people had much shorter life times you can't really compare current times and values .

Show quote history

That's what you took from my comment?? 😂😂 That I was hinting that god was a peado???

That wasn't the absurd bit FFS.

brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr · 07/12/2023 08:22

Nobody sane anywhere on this planet actually believes there really is a “god”. They just go along with the fiction.

CarpeVitam · 07/12/2023 08:22

ABCXYZ17 · 07/12/2023 04:01

Of course God doesn’t exist, it’s an absurd concept. Religion was the easiest way to control people who had no other explanations for things and could easily be scared into compliance etc.
Jesus existed and pretended to be the son of ‘god’ and started the biggest con the world has ever seen. I’m certainly not living my life by ‘beliefs’ that some men in a desert thought up over two thousand years ago and started a cult on the back off.

This....spot on!! 👌🏻

Vinrouge4 · 07/12/2023 08:28

Does it matter? Believing in God gives some people comfort and a purpose while being part of a church community helps with loneliness.

Rainbowsandbutterflies1990 · 07/12/2023 08:29

I do find the idea that all people including religious people don't belive in God as religious people only believe in their own God, I'm very curious what makes their God the speical one and how is it so easy to dismiss all the others. I've always believed religion is a way to control masses of people before science was around and its just carried on. I find it interesting that majority of religious people started beliving due to being 'taught'(indoctrinated)as a child.

HavfrueDenizKisi · 07/12/2023 08:29

Religion is, obviously, a man-made concept.

The type of god you believe in is entirely an accident of when and where you happen to be born.

All of these gods and religions cannot possibly be the one true god, ergo none of them are.

Humans felt the need to explain the world around them and our place in it as the 'thinking' species and religion handily did that.

HavfrueDenizKisi · 07/12/2023 08:32

Also PP mentioned Jesus being the biggest con man around. Actually I say that Mary was the best player here as she got pregnant out of wedlock and passed it off as an immaculate conception. Go girl!

Wendyspotatopeeler · 07/12/2023 08:33

A sky wizard is a pretty odd concept really but I guess it useful to control the masses once upon a time.

bombastix · 07/12/2023 08:35

Agree. I'm going vintage for my deity of choice with Athena.

It makes more sense to me that the patriarchal arrangements of Christianity anyway

BoobyDazzler · 07/12/2023 08:36

Of course, it’s all nonsense and the cause of most of the world’s evil. Religion was designed by powerful men to subjugate others.

crikeymikeydoyoulikey · 07/12/2023 08:37

YireosDodeAver · 07/12/2023 08:14

It's very lazy thinking to claim that religion causes wars. The most cursory glace at the background of any so-called religious war in history shows that the nain causes are about politics and resources, with religion used merely as a rhetorical justification after the political decision was made.

"Religion" just means a set of regulations which people abide by rather than following their own instinctive impulses.

The concepts of the rule of law, money and the free-market economy have the same amount of "truth" to them as any religion, they only exist by mutual consent because people choose to act as if they exist.

There's no intrinsic reason why society shouldn't be based on an ethical framework of survival of the fittest, might-is-right and that the ethical thing for the weak and unfit to do is go off and die quietly for the greater good. The fact that we mostly instead believe in looking after the weak and sick comes from somewhere, it can't all be explained by enlightened self-interest. One possibility might be the existence of a divine being who inspires people to conceptualise a totally different system of thinking than the selfish impulses created by our evolution via natural selection.

There's no requirement to believe in a divine "being" but anyone who thinks they are living without any "beliefs" is deluding themselves.

Exactly.

Communists who are anti-religion, for example Stalin, killed many thousands.

Communism Killed 94 Million People in 20th Century

Communism Killed 94 Million People in 20th Century (reason.com)

Add to that all the deaths caused by fighting for resources and so on.

Religion has never been needed to fuel man's inhumanity to man.

Communism Killed 94 Million People in 20th Century

94 million perished in China, the Soviet Union, North Korea, and Eastern Europe, easily exceeding the 28 million that died under fascism.

https://reason.com/2013/03/13/communism-killed-94m-in-20th-century/

TheBeautifulMoors · 07/12/2023 08:44

FloofCloud · 07/12/2023 08:08

I think people are driven into a category early, parents encouraged to get their child christened (or whatever), so they're already categorised. I always used to put down I was Christian as I'd been christened, but in reality I've never believed in gods, I'm a scientist and I believe in science, physics, chemistry and biology - I don't believe gods are in a lab creating.

But I personally suspect that people who are Christian and aren't practising, effectively don't believe just auto complete Christian as it's bestowed upon you as a baby because that's what religions do ... sign you up before you make your own mind up!

Show quote history

Surely, by the time one is an adult and doesn’t step into a church (except perhaps at christmas to ‘feel christmassy, whatever that means)’, doesn’t pray or read The Bible, etc, ticking christian on a census form doesn’t make sense?

Ive heard oh “we’re a ‘Christian country’ so will choose christian”. “I was raised c of e but don’t go now, Christian”. I think these mean the statistics are not a true reflection.

People only have to identify with christianity to be able to tick it. If a grandparent was a christian, it’s enough for some to tick it. As if it’s passed through the bloodline.

Stephisaur · 07/12/2023 08:49

I believe in a God, not necessarily the God from the bible though. I would say I'm quite spiritual - I like to believe in an afterlife, but not necessarily heaven/hell in the traditional sense.

DH is an atheist.

DS goes to a CofE school (only because it is our catchment school). I have enjoyed hearing him learn about God, and I like that the school are teaching him "Christian" principles such as kindness, compassion and honesty.

It's nice to believe in something bigger than yourself sometimes.