Topic: Why do you believe God exists? - page 4. (Read 7889 times)

Cool, so it is not "what" you believe but "how" you use your belief to benefit humanity.

I like this take!

What doesn't?

That's not a real argument here. All distractions, education... Human activities in general do that. It's just that it fits your moral code and your views of society but why should your point of view be superior to others?

Some people use science to improve mandkind, others to create horrible products they can sell for their own sakes. Some people use religion to get power and abuse the weaks, other as a path to make humanity grow.

L'Abbé Pierre is a French Resistant who created one of the best association completely devoted to the poors, and he did all that because of the stupid religion that doesn't solve anything...

Religion is a path and it's up to you on how you walk it.

Why is it that when a Muslim goes on rampage it's all "He's not real muslim" or "that's not Islam" but when a Christian does something bad everyone forget all the positive things Christianity has brought to us?

1. Again, why don't you worship Zeus?

2. Saudi Arabia is a very good example of what the Judeo-Christian state would look like.  Have you seen what Hasidic Jewish communities look like?

3. Just because your carefully constructed delusion provides you with some psychological comfort, it does not mean it is the right thing to do.  Illicit drugs or alcohol have the same effect yet we warn people not to use them as they are addictive and cause long-term harm, just like your delusion,  BTW.

Yes this is my position.


I am unaware of any other organizing framework that appears capable of sustaining the necessary cooperation over time without collapsing into tyranny. Certainly if our goal is only maintaining order there are lots of dystopian options available. Absolute tyranny is good at order.


If you understand the a priori of God you understand that God is infinite. Thus it logically follows that the God of Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and any other branches of monotheism are the same God. Infinite by definition means all encompassing.

The differences between these religions represent different understandings of the optimal human relationship with regards to God not different Gods. The three faiths by and large all acknowledge this.

Similarly if an infinite God exists it follows logically that any possible polytheistic entity must either not exist or exist as a dependent of God a creation of God if you will. This again is simple logical deduction derived from the first axiom that an infinite God exists.

As for Saudi Arabia that is a sad state of affairs. The Quran has numerous verses that emphasize belief in the one universal God who judges people according to their behavior. The Quran also states explicitly that in matters of faith there shall be no coercion. Sadly we know that other interpretations and xenophobic elements often predominant.

Borrowing the words of Dennis Prager:
"Muslims need what most Christians and Jews have experienced - separation of church and state; interaction with other faiths and with modernity; and reform. Islam needs to compete with secularism, not outlaw it, and to allow competing ideologies within Islam. In religion, as in politics, when there is no competition, there is corruption and intolerance."


It's no surprise you feel this way. I have accepted a first axiom that you have rejected. I believe in an infinite creator and you do not.

You therefore feel that I am "full of it" and I in turn feel you are blind.

Wow! You even admit that you are the one who is speehless! And then you think that the education system has failed me? LOL!

So what you are saying is human beings need Bronze Age God-given moral rules to have a 'properly' functioning society. 
Anything else will fail in your personal assessment?

Would this work with any God, or only with your God?

So I am guessing Saudi Arabia picked the wrong God, even though it is Judeo-Christian God 2.0.  How about Osiris, Zeus, Ra?  Would they work?

You are full of it and you don't even know it.

Why are you rejecting all these other Gods?  Why?

Provide proof that these other Gods are false Gods, and you'll have a proof why your God is a false God.

As always, you leave me speechless. 

The education system has failed you.

Since you know this about religion, get away from you faith-based science that has nothing to back it up other than speculation... before you turn it into a religion any more than you have already.

At the end the day the character of the government is dependent on the character of the people. If a population is greedy, lustful, envious, and slothful they will favor leaders and support causes that pander to these vices. Quality of life and governance in general will worsen and the best a systems of checks and balances can do is slow the decay. Similarly if a population is prudent, just, courageous, and charitable then they will elect leaders and support causes promote these virtues.

The real challenge of improving governance over the long term is how do we improve the moral character and virtue of human beings?  This is no small task. Indeed it is the most important aspect of progress. Technological advancement is secondary.  

There is where the Atheist go wrong. Their solutions here always fail. They sometimes go totally nuts and assume humans are some kind of perfect creature if only the environment was adjusted. Thus leads them to crazy ideas like communism which if you read the actual ideology might work ok for a population of perfect selfless sinless angels but predictably collapses into contradiction, horror, and tyranny when applied to actual human beings.

Or they go the other way and embrace total relativism. They deny the existence of good and evil altogether everything is just preference. There is no value in anything. Anything socially accepted is "good" anything not is "bad". This leads to a willful self-annihilation as I noted a few posts back. It also lead many atheist leaders to favor drastic population reductions as a way of maintaining control. They grow fearful of an unruly population and their dependence on an unsustainable debt bubble to keep that population happy thus they start to desire the extermination of said population. This is a time honored strategy of tyrants and well documented. It is even described in the Bible as widespread at the time of Moses birth.

The answer to the challenge of good governance is that every generation must prioritize the moral improvement of each individual citizen. This is the necessary prerequisite to ensure future generations will be better off then current generations. God is necessary to this process for without God we are lost in a sea of moral relativism. Without God we can't even define objective good and evil let alone moral improvement.
 
How Do We Make Society Better?

I am an engineer, I would never design nature the way it is.  No engineer would.

Nature is more like a wild, self-evolving energy monster, that eats everything in its path, releasing matter and energy that forms other monsters. There is absolutely no design in it. Energy conversion, that is about it.

There is an appearance of design to an untrained eye because one looks through a very small time window without understanding what came before and why.  Thanks to Biology we have a pretty good handle on how life evolved over time.

We are on an energy yo-yo cycle that started with the Big Bang and will most likely end with the Big Crunch, and the cycle will repeat itself with a different set of physical constants.  The process will repeat itself until a new, stable universe will be formed with physical constants suitable to sustain observers.

Nature is cruel, unforgiving, but pretty cool in its own way.

There are a lot of unknowns in nature.  Science uncovers and solves them one by one.

So don't jump to the "magician did it" answer when you don't know what the unknown is, never mind how it came about.

And for fuck's sake stop the "Judeo-Christain ideology is the answer to everything" BS.  If we stuck following it, we would still be hungry and wet in some caves, wiping our asses with leaves, waiting for the Sun to come up.

Religion does not solve anything, it just takes away your money and your time.  It makes you emotionally dependent on it and blinds you so that you cannot see the world the way it really is.

"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others." Winston Churchill

Even far from it!

There is no way to prevent tyranny in a group of different individuals in my experience. Whatever the group and its members, whatever the system, there will always a time where a large majority will say "we do this" ignoring de facto a minority who will get imposed something they don't want.

Democracy is a beautiful word but hiding a complex submissive/dominant reality. People are uprising when you say that democracy isn't perfect and isn't moraly good, that it's just an organization system that has its flaws...

I would say that democracy is a bit better over complete dictatorship but there must be even better forms of organization keeping more freedom directly in the hands of the people.

I agree.

Unfortunately, religious organizations don't know the answers in a logical way. Their faith is logical (because we all live by faith; nobody can see an instant into the future), but they don't use it to logically find out the answers. And they take it out on people who use logic.

The closer we get to micro machines, the more we find out that operations in the universe (and especially life) are super micro machines in the extreme. We use them as such. We are applying DNA to computers to make them "think" better. We are using DNA natural machines with man made machines: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/synthetic-biology-building-machines-from-dna/ and https://www.cell.com/chem/pdf/S2451-9294(16)30111-5.pdf and many more if you search for them.

The question we seem to be ignoring is, who or what made these natural machines and the machine of nature? Evolution and Big Bang are nice ideas, but they are sadly lacking in real life application. The thing we see in machines is, machine makers. So, who or what made the machines of nature and the universe?

Forget the word "God." Forget, also, the silly notion that stuff simply springs into being all by itself. We don't have any example of real spontaneity happening anywhere. Rather, look at science and see the machines, and then apply this kind of thinking to the idea of machine making. Who or what made the machines of the universe. Whoever or whatever made the machines of nature had super-great ability.

If you ignore the machine maker(s) of nature, or that there could be any such thing(s), you are turning away from science and what science is discovering and using... that nature is made up of machines, and is collectively a gigantic machine. In addition, you are turning away from the kind of logic that made you question the nuns.

I was born into a Catholic family.  That was not my choice.  I did not choose God to later reject him.

I ignored stories about God the same way other kids ignored stories about Santa Claus.  

Then my critical thinking skills did the rest when I turned about 12.  I started asking questions for which I got a wholesome beating from a holy nun.  Nasty, old, big nosed bitch she was.  It became a routine, I asked a question, class laughed, I got a beating, back to drawing Jesus feeding the hungry and raising some schmucks from dead.

I rejected God the same you reject Santa Claus.  The same reason:  fictional character.

BTW, why did you reject Santa Claus?  Please do tell.  

God rejected him, in any case. If god wanted us to know about his existence, he would know exactly what to do to show us. And no, this wouldn't take away my free will, he wouldn't need to force me, just show me enough proof. Logically god makes no sense in any way you can think about it.

Every society follows some kind of moral code.

Sometimes that code can be as simple as the strongest rule and the weak are slaves.  Usually it's more complex.

Democratic rule does not prevent tyranny it is not exempt from injustice and immorally. Review the history of Athens if you want to understand this better.

Tyranny of the majority was one of the greatest concerns of the US founding fathers. It the reasons they took such great effort to limit the power of direct democracy. Everything from the selection of Senators by state representatives, the selection of the president via the Electoral College, and the limits of voting to land owners were all attempts to lower the risk of a tyrannical mob rule.

Your stated standard is "you are automatically a good person if you are following the moral code that your society accepts." This is a very problematic code that highlights the profound detachment from reality your philosophy and atheism leads into.

I noticed you did not really refute my examples above. Via your standard any horror if accepted by a society becomes "good" and the perpetrators of said horror are "good people". With this standard you are lost in a morass of relativism a natural consequence of rejecting the divine.



You lack an understanding of the pivotal role of the Judeo-Christian tradition in facilitating coordination and driving progress over time.

I discussed this topic in some depth here:
Religion and Progress


You were raised religious and brought up to accept and worship God. You and later rejected both that tradition and God. We have real issues of dispute we should not waste our time on word games.

Dictatorial regimes don't follow moral codes.  Are you new here on Earth?  Your Bible did not save Christians or Jews who were killed in Auschwitz, nor it prevented Christians from killing other Christians or Jews.

Are you sure you thought your examples through?

I am all for progress, for what is best for all people and society as a whole.  That includes gays, lesbians, women, unlike your Bronze Age God.

You think the Bible will save you from a dictatorship?  You are confusing your delusional religious beliefs with political systems.

You can have a secular, democratic system with check and balances to prevent the sort of brutal regimes you are thinking about.

Trust me, you don't want to go down the route of a moral system driving a political system based on a Bronze Age scripture. 
You'll be killing gays and adulterers sooner rather than later.

Judeo-Christian ideology is no different than other inhumane ideologies.  Nazism and Communism included.
Any political system lead by people who believe in supernatural magic is a recipe for disaster.  Delusional people should not be near the nuclear codes.

I did not reject God.  There is nothing to reject.  Why can't you get this through your head is beyond me?

Let's see so according to your logic:

The Soviet Gestapo who forceably resettled presents to collective farms in 1932 leading to the starvation of 8 million were swell folks because they were following the Soviet code.

The Nazi's guards who starved and gassed millions were great guys too because Hitler was elected and widely admired and supported by the German People.

According to you these folks were paragons of virtue following the moral code their societies accepted at the time.

Similarly if you can get a majority to support your desired re-education camps and book burnings that will be great too. I think I understand you better now.


Here is a short video that describes your fundamental problem. You have rejected God, and without God one can no longer properly define good and evil.
Can You Be Good Without God
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxiAikEk2vU

You really don't know me.  Who says I dismiss the results of quantum mechanics?

You are full of yourself, IMHO.

You jump to whatever supernatural conclusions you need to validate your delusion.


You are a good person if you follow the moral code that your society accepts.  

You don't need a Bronze Age boogeyman.