Pluto

Yes i agree. We believe what suits us and there are many beliefs to choose from. The most prevalent fear is the fear of death, the fear of the unknown. Man invented God in order to cope with his fears. It's a coping mechanism.

All religion is nothing more than an attempt to control a population by enforcing 'laws' that come from a higher authority that is beyond challenge. It is used as an extremely powerful tool to keep people 'in line'. It is particularly useful in circumstances where the population are under duress, be it poverty, starvation, tyranny or whatever, because then the powers that rule will assure you that you must accept your lot, lead a good life, don't rock the boat and cause any trouble, and you will be rewarded in the next life.

Nash

its easy to insult something you dont understand or dont want to understand.Mankind cant be that stupid if we believe in God it lead us to studying the earth more.


mankind needs order, Gods order is the best! now however governments rule a society without religion and look how fucked up we are now. Population control? Every society needs population control without that people would just do as they please(rape,murder, steal ect.ect...). You are opposed to order you want chaos, this is the worst form of authority.Religion helps keep community in order correct order but we have strayed away from what God wants for us and we follow our own laws. Which in a way is very funny because what ever you have listed as moral or good behaviour God has given to mankind as such.We take what God says as good yet we reject that there is a God,

Capxeno

Nash, I have no need to insult things. I was just listing the more negative traits of God and the devil.

I'm more or less saying that to be sane we need hope and structure. religion provides both.
Personally I'll stick with my delusional, fatalist, and just mostly insane ideals.

What I think is stupid is anyone reacting anymore emotional to the death of a human than a cockroach.
Live has no more meaning than procreation. Also death has no significant in anyway. Be it a child or a murderer.

Also if your going to question my understanding.
Until you've been though so much traumatic life events that your broken and on the edge of nuts. You understand nothing and do not deserve respect or a opinion.

Another thing is that authority has no place in society actually society has no place in anything.
Chaos, death, murder, maiming, genocide are at the top of the list of things hat need to happen. Without a living hell a person will never truly live.

Pluto

God is an easy answer for everything. It's an argument from ignorance. And there is a danger in easy answers. We believe in God because we are ignorant about the world that we live in. With scientific advancements, this God has become the God of the gaps. God shrinks in power with each new scientific advance. For example, after the work of Galileo and Newton, it was no longer thought that angels pushed the planets across the heavens.

Matthew.lincoln

Well I have came to a new conclusion.....Smart people (majority of this forum) are proclaimed philosophers in there own righteous minds. In there Ideas the majority rule that god is a childish game of control. I rest easy knowing that intelligence over rules ignorance.

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Charlie_Harper

Right on. I think it's healthy to believe in something; to a point anyways. People desperately want to believe that there is something after this life, they can meet up with old loved ones. We are afraid of death so we manufacture all sorts of histrionics to attempt to soothe the feeling. Years ago there were all kinds of excuses believer's had in their portfolio to answer the unanswerable- why does it rain? God did it. Now those excuses are slim pickens, and those same people are maneuvering around trying desprately to keep their God out of a box.

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GlobalSmiles

This is a problem I have, it seems atheists have taken a position in which no one can have any level of God. This is hateful and blind to too many to be acceptable.

How about this? With each scientific discovery God gets more powerful and even more beautiful. The mechanics of the universe is most elegant and I attribute it that natural order to the good Lord.

Pluto

Depends on how you define God which is a poorly defined thing. There are hundreds of different and sometimes contradictory god beliefs and there is no objective verifiable evidence that any gods actually exist except in peoples imaginations. Any REAL god would surely make it abundantly clear, that he is the real god and all the others are fakes. He would surely use his unlimited power to expose and eliminate all the fakes but since he doesn't do it or communicate with us in any way, it's reasonable to assume that this God doesn't exist. An all powerful creator of this huge universe would have no need or desire for people to sing hymns and waste their time on their knees in adulation and building expensive churches that no god ever visits from his elegant heaven. This type of thing is the practice of greedy leaders with a need to satisfy their selfish egos.

Any all powerful creator, all loving and caring intelligent designer, would not create plagues, tsunamis, tornadoes, droughts, volcanic eruptions, earth quakes, wars, cancers and hundreds of debilitating diseases, serious body malfunctions and starvation all of which punish millions of people indiscriminately regardless of their behavior or religious beliefs. If he did he would not be an all loving all caring god but a brutal malevolent creature or nothing at all. There are 12,000 known diseases that torture and kill man. The reality is that no all loving and all powerful god would create or permit these diseases to punish men of all religious persuasion and particularly totally INNOCENT CHILDREN.

Religion is things hoped for but not yet seen or proven. Science is things seen and proven but not necessarily hoped for. Humans have a panic fear of the finalty of death and the end of life (which is perfectly understandable). To assuage this fear we invent God and an afterlife.

ThresholdOutlet

God exists. For one, something cannot come from nothing. Our minds have emotions that are beyond the physical world. Life has to have meaning. God gives life meaning, connects our minds to the beyond, and is the designer of all things.

This is a deductive argument that appears reasonable, but is not.

Because we do not know how things were created, to assume God is the creator is an argument from ignorance. We don't know how A happened, so we assume argument B is correct. This is how it goes for every premise the pro-God activists produce.

The argument for God is highly unlikely to be true.

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Its true that atheists have become as zealous as any evangelist on TV. When it comes to belief it seems that any hard, inflexible, concrete system is one that is brittle and easily shaken. This is true for both the god believer and the atheist. When one gets angry at beliefs that are in opposition you really need to ask yourself, "what am I so afraid of?" People need a structure to live within, a framework upon which everything else depends. When that "framework" is tested or questioned it often times rocks the foundation of a persons life and that is where we get this reactionary type rebuttals that you hear on both sides of the argument. This is why my personal belief system is very flexible, based on factual intuition and old fashion values that have little to do with what is "right and wrong" and more to do with what is practical and just. I spent a good period of my life praying and asking and crying and generally being confused about my role and the role of my god. At a pivotal point in my life I abandoned these practices much like a child abandons toys at a certain age. It took some time before the feeling of betrayal went away. After the fact, I have realized that these feelings of betrayal were not so much about God but more about my social standing and the unease I felt when people would ask me about my religion. Now I have no god belief in the strict sense of the word but like GlobalSmiles stated above:

"With each scientific discovery God gets more powerful and even more beautiful. The mechanics of the universe is most elegant and I attribute it that natural order to the good Lord"

Now I can have that same sense of awe in our universe and not have to buy in to any particular religion or god at all.

I can simply revel in our worlds wonders and get lost in it without loosing my common sense in the process.

I am neither pro or anti-religion. But I am anti, you shovin your beliefs down my throat. I do not find that amusing at all.

By the way............who the hell asked you anyway

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