just wondering

8/9/2005 7:58:18 PM

fear of death, fear of the unknown, fear of the future, loneliness, need to explain natural phenomena.

8/9/2005 7:59:44 PM

I mean some good reasons! :-)

8/9/2005 8:00:23 PM

When one is raised from birth to be Christian, it seems to be the default.

8/9/2005 8:01:01 PM

It should be illegal to bombard kids with that kind of brainwashing information until they are old enough to understand it, which is after the phase when a child will belive anything their parents tell them!

8/9/2005 8:02:12 PM

Yes, teaching your children what you think is right SHOULD be illegal.

8/9/2005 8:03:00 PM

It would probably be best to not let parents raise their kids at all, because, let's face it, that they will brainwash their kids to some extent is inevitable.

Or here's a thought, shut the fuck up until you can say something that isn't straight up retarded. I mean, those are both options at our disposal here.

8/9/2005 8:05:12 PM

I dont literally mean it should be illegal, or would I want it to stop. I was brought up in church my whole life, my parents still hate the fact I dont "get it" and its just because when I moved out, I was able to break myself from it, once I was able to think about the whole thing for myself.

8/9/2005 8:07:09 PM

Yeah

It's also true that people who think for themselves invariably reject religion

8/9/2005 8:09:34 PM

^^Okay, so why you gotta shit on other people's parades?

^I wouldn't say that.

[Edited on August 9, 2005 at 8:10 PM. Reason : ]

8/9/2005 8:10:10 PM

I just want to know why other people believe and what makes them believe

8/9/2005 8:11:19 PM

You won't get many open answers from the people themselves when you say that what they do should be illegal.

8/9/2005 8:11:57 PM

Yeah. The basis for people's religious principles is sort of an important personal issue that they aren't likely to throw out to the fucking jackals. (Hint: that means you!)

8/9/2005 8:33:37 PM

As an athiest, I often find myself wishing that I could find it in me to believe in some higher power; something that would comfort me when the world seems horrible, something to look forward to in death, something in control. I can't seem to do it though, but maybe those are reasons why other people believe in God.

Also, I have a great deal of respect for people of faith. I found out recently that one of my co-workers is Catholic and I felt so happy that she has a belief system; she is still in highschool and it seemed like when I was in highschool, everyone was suddenly deciding to be athiest just because it was the popular thing to be at the time (I became athiest around 2nd grade, so I don't group myself with the pop-athiest crowd). I have respect for people who are willing to believe in something that they can't necessarily see or prove to exist, even though others say it's stupid to believe for those very reasons.

Now, when they start trying to get me to join with them or won't be my buddy because I don't have the same beliefs that they do, I have a problem with it. But to raise one's children in the family religion is not wrong. When you have a system of beliefs that govern what is right or wrong and what will, as you see it, save you from eternal hellfire or constant rebirth, or some other unpleasant future after death, you teach it to your children because you love them and you want them to be smiled upon by whatever deity you have.

Generally speaking.

8/9/2005 8:40:02 PM

There's no room for such thoughtful commentary in this forum.

8/9/2005 8:43:17 PM

how do you become atheist in second grade? you sound like those scene kids, who say that they only liked the band back before everyone else started liking them. "oh, their first album is sooo much better than their second one"

8/9/2005 8:46:16 PM

Quote :

"how do you become atheist in second grade? you sound like those scene kids, who say that they only liked the band back before everyone else started liking them. "oh, their first album is sooo much better than their second one""

I mentioned it only because knowing the assholes here, someone would be like "OMG U WERE ONE TOO!!!1," but it would seem that no matter what one says around here, they get shat on by some asshole. I think that attempting to show that one's personal philosophy was not brought about by pop-culture is far more legitimate than attempting to show that they are cooler than you by how long ago they liked some crappy band. Save that kind of talk for spookyjon. The first thing out of his mouth any time you mention a band is "I used to like them... IN MIDDLE SCHOOL."

8/9/2005 8:53:20 PM

in spookyjon's defense
the fucker had a subscription to Spin when he was like 9

8/9/2005 8:54:50 PM

Quote :

"I wouldn't say that."

pretty sure he was being sarcastic. In my experience, Jews in particular are very good about questioning their faith, and using those questions as a guide to become closer to God and better understand Him, and I know at least two Christians with similar attitudes.

but listen, there are thousands of different reasons people believe in God, in many different forms, from the reasons sarijoul listed (which are perfectly "good reasons" - what exactly were you expecting?) to personal experiences, all of which are different.

[Edited on August 9, 2005 at 8:58 PM. Reason : ..]

8/9/2005 8:55:43 PM

Oh yeah, he's a republican. He's probably Christian.

8/9/2005 8:57:01 PM

Quote :

"It would probably be best to not let parents raise their kids at all,"

hell, by today's standards, most kids raise the parents anyway.

8/9/2005 10:09:29 PM

I think the part that gets me is the heaven/hell issue

8/9/2005 10:13:34 PM

8/9/2005 10:18:10 PM

there is no reason not to, and a HELL of a lot of reasons to.

8/9/2005 11:57:24 PM

i sometimes envy people who have faith. i don't particularly respect them (or disrespect them for that matter). i just see no reason to believe any of that stuff. and if you believe in one thing, why that one thing and not some other equally baseless faith?

^ that sort of instilled fear logic is retarded. i better believe in god, or else some big monster is going to punish me!!! i mean really people, haven't we gotten past this


[Edited on August 10, 2005 at 12:15 AM. Reason : the second bit]

8/10/2005 12:13:33 AM

Quote :

"It would probably be best to not let parents raise their kids at all, because, let's face it, that they will brainwash their kids to some extent is inevitable."

We agree on something

But to believe something illogical for a reason illogical as eternal torment after death is just something I could never do. My gf still goes to church though so it's a subject I don't discuss much,

8/10/2005 12:19:14 AM

There is nothing wrong with religion... just fundamentalism. Most Christians in this country aren't the type of Christian that most non-Christians really hate. We all laugh at the garden-variety, buffet, hypocritical Christian, but at least they realize on some level their priest is shoveling poop their way. It's the fundamentalist that swallow the 7-day, 6000 year-old Earth crap that deserve the hate. But, it's not even them who cause the biggest problems of religion in society, it's the politicians who feign religiousness. They usually fall in to the buffet-Christian category, but they are primarily politicians and because they are in a position of power, their abuse of Christian (and other religions, accordingly) for their own personal gain is especially disgusting, and gives them their own classification. Not only does it make all the Christians look bad, their underhanded tactics actually work, and corrupt the global society for the rest of us.

8/10/2005 12:20:34 AM

I believe in God because I've had too many experiences that point me in that direction. It's just something I feel. But I think believing in God is like a relationship -- you have to actually pay attention to it for it to develop into anything meaningful. I don't think a person can have a solid faith in anything without working on it.

Also, about this whole parents thing... sometimes it's just good to have somebody in your life who tries to show you something positive. I'm not talking about the judging, condemning, pointing-fingers types of Christians... I have a big problem with that representation of Christianity. I'm talking about the love part of it, the forgiveness, the acceptance. I think all parents should work to teach their kids about those things... whether it's based on Christianity or just general kindness.

I read this in a book by Donald Miller called
Blue Like Jazz. It kinda represents what I'm saying:
"I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside Bagdad Theatre in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxaphone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.
After that I liked jazz music.
Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.
I used to not like God because God didn't resolve. But that was before any of this happened."


[Edited on August 10, 2005 at 1:14 AM. Reason : ]

8/10/2005 1:02:47 AM

what's the psychological term for when people see figures when they look at clouds?. . . i put god in that same category. our brains want to make sense out of things, make reasons for things, etc. if you look for "proof" of god, of course you're going to find it. if you wait long enough, you will see order in things and purposes for acts of randomness that happen to you.

and as for kindness, i prefer acting kind for it's own sake, not because of some external force. it means more to me to act kind out of a general respect for other people. not some ghost in the sky.

8/10/2005 1:34:10 AM

Pattern recognition.

8/10/2005 2:15:50 AM

yeah. i guess. i coulda sworn there's a quarter word for it though.

8/10/2005 2:22:08 AM

Booblebobblepoopiepoeiauex

8/10/2005 2:26:53 AM

it's a lot easier to believe in god when you take away some of the christian assumptions often placed on the concept:

-god needs to be worshipped
-god is testing us/punishing us for being sinners
-god will punish us/reward us after we die

god for me is just a way to explain what, up to this point, is scientifically unexplanable--how we got here and why we exist. a really cool book to read on the subject is God's Debris: A Thought Experiment. Maybe the best book i've read all year. written by scott adams, the guy who draws Dilbert.

8/10/2005 2:52:25 AM

That's how you KNOW it's good.

8/10/2005 2:56:12 AM

^^you're just not being creative enough

8/10/2005 3:12:50 AM

God is an imaginary friend for grownups.

8/10/2005 3:18:51 AM

agnosticism is a lot more common and a lot more accepted in today's society.

some would have you believe america is morally bankrupt -- or something intangible like that.

8/10/2005 3:53:27 AM

Quote :

" -god needs to be worshipped -god is testing us/punishing us for being sinners -god will punish us/reward us after we die"

Here's my take:

-If you assume god is perfect then worshiping anything else is worshiping something that is less than perfection - thus causing you to derail from where a perfect being would want you to be
-If you assume god is perfect then you also have to assume that he already knows everything. Why would god bother testing us if he already knew the outcome? This life isn't so much a test as it is a discovery of who we are and what we want to become.
-God really doesn't punish us for doing bad things and reward us for doing good things. We earn that ourselves. If you assume there is an afterlife and that there are consequences for our actions then you will realize that we will have no one to blame but ourselves

Quote :

"fear of death, fear of the unknown, fear of the future, loneliness, need to explain natural phenomena."

Funny. I believe in God and I have answers to all of those questions. I would think that the atheist would fear those things more. Maybe your viewpoint dictates that a religious person fears these things so much that they feel the need to create answers to these questions in order to feel better about the situation?

8/10/2005 7:45:13 AM

People have been trained to believe in god. Since the popularization of Christianity in Rome around 1100 A.D. people have been trained to obey the laws of this religion. The leaders of Rome during this time found that they had a mass of unruly people from several nations. Rome had conquered most of the known world which left cultures ruined, whole cities full of refugees and thousands of lives disrupted.

The Rulers of Rome at that time needed a solution to controlling all of these different types of people. After all the wars Rome had to now govern all these nations.
Christianity was introduced with a fire and brimstone consequences for not following gods law.

All through Europe Christianity was used to control non-Civilized people. It wasn’t long before people learned that using Christianity they could make lots of money. At one point people in Europe were killed for not being Christian.

So small groups of religious fanatics sailed to the USA and stole it. They also killed those who were not Christian but they called them witches and savages. Churches moved in. The USA became a new Market for all variations of Christianity. Money flowed back to Europe. Punishments for sinning included being locked in the center of town for everyone to see and read about your crime.

When I used to go to church when I was a kid I remember people always looked at what car someone was driving, how much $ they put in the thing, what clothes someone was wearing, What did sally do with Jon last weekend, Aunt Gene is getting ready to die, who farted?, Wake up and pay attention, Am I old enough to drink the wine yet?

Basically the belief in god is installed in a person by method of a few things in modern day:

1. Parents believe it and everyone around me does. We have this big part we play at church. Since I was a kid I’m trained to snap right back at non believers.

2. I just repeat stupid things I hear in church or love having something that you can never prove false to help me win arguments.

3. I need something to ask for help because I am weak. When I feel helpless I can ask a higher power for help and then I temporarily feel better until the outcome is reached. And if the outcome is bad I can also say “its god’s will” to make me feel better.

4. You are insane or uneducated. You are not able to form rational thoughts or have not been educated enough to make a choice for yourself. You are not capable of distinguishing reality from fantasy.

Karl Marx compared church to opium. He thought that people who go to church to feel better about what they have done wrong can get the same effect from smoking opium. And before you say well uh opium is a temporary solution like alcohol and blah blah. Ask yourself why do you go back to church over and over?

And then ask yourself: “If I announced that I no longer believe in god, what would the out come be on my parents or friendships or life or anything?”

8/10/2005 7:58:10 AM

it always gets me how generally christians say they respect other religions, but no one ever seems to bring up the differences in the beliefs of origins between religions, sorta like some of christians get the runs at the thought of an ape ancestor (the ears just give everything away o.0) or evolution, and instead push ID but no other beliefs are mentioned

dont u dare argue about the latter 2 here

christians make up 33% of the world population, so are the other 66%'s god(s) not real?

8/10/2005 8:30:35 AM

Yeah and what about all the gods that were worshiped by the egyptians, Incas, Myans, Sumoans, ect...

How come none of those could have been the real higher power? How come it has to be the god of fat white people that is real?

8/10/2005 9:03:56 AM

http://media.ebaumsworld.com/index.php?e=fp4.wmv

8/10/2005 9:27:21 AM

Other Gods are obviously false because their people are either no longer with us (Their God(s) just let them die out) or are POOR. Any real God would endow his people with prosperity, at least relatively.

While I realize it is not Gods place to provide prosperity, A real God would shape the tennets of the religion in question to encourage belief structures which promote advantagious activity. Is it any wonder that economic liberty, and later the industrial revolution, was started by protestant christians?

8/10/2005 9:30:34 AM

People believe in god on many different levels. Some people think god is an old man in the sky with a grey beard. Others think god is one of many other gods who control various parts of their lives. Some don't care about god at all. I for one believe in "god" as the life force of the world and the universe. You can call it whatever you want, chi, god, energy, whatever. It's the concept behind it that matters to me, not the name. People like Jesus, proclaimed son of god, just realized and connected with this world life force in a way most people can't. So in a sense, yes he was one of many sons of god, but not in the traditional sense that he was god's offspring.

I guess my beliefs of god lie heavily in eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism. I believe in reincarnation and karma. God doesn't punish or reward people, their actions determine those things (ie karma). God doesn't send you to heaven or hell, they are both here on earth and your actions determine "where" you go, for lack of a better term.

My belief in "god" stems from the fact that I think "god", or whatever you want to call it, is an undeniable force in the universe that is there always and constantly. I don't care if you believe in the Christian god or the Muslim god or whatever god, they are all the same IMO. Different cultures have just developed different ways to express their understanding (or lack thereof) of god.

The problems with religion don't come from a belief in god, they come from the dogma and stigma surrounding belief or disbelief in a particular expression of god. In other words, self-righteousness.

8/10/2005 9:51:09 AM

"My most recent faith struggle is not one of intellect. I don't really do that anymore. Sooner or later you just figure out that there are some guys who don't believe in God and they can prove He doesn't exist, and some other guys who do believe in God and they can prove He does exist. And the argument stopped being about God a long time ago. Now it's about who's smarter and honestly I don't care. I don't believe I will ever walk away from God for intellectual reasons. Who knows anything anyway? If I walk away from Him, and please pray that I never do, I will walk away for social reasons, identity reasons, deep emotional reasons... the same reasons that any of us do anything." ~Donald Miller~

8/10/2005 10:35:00 AM

Quote :

"Any real God would endow his people"

someone is upset about his size.

dont blame God, blame your dad

[Edited on August 10, 2005 at 10:43 AM. Reason : d]

8/10/2005 10:43:15 AM

Quote :

"Other Gods are obviously false because their people are either no longer with us (Their God(s) just let them die out) or are POOR. Any real God would endow his people with prosperity, at least relatively. While I realize it is not Gods place to provide prosperity, A real God would shape the tennets of the religion in question to encourage belief structures which promote advantagious activity. Is it any wonder that economic liberty, and later the industrial revolution, was started by protestant christians?"

I don't know if you're being serous or not, but judging by the other stuff you say on here, you probably are. Therefore, allow me to point some things out to you:

Alot of those people who are either no longer with us or are poor who believe in another god than yours got that way because of the way the followers of your god treated them. They were subjugated, missionized, killed, or had their livelyhoods taken away by followers of the christian god. Others were made that way by followers of the muslim god. The original followers of your god, the jews, have lived in hardship for as long as they identified themselves as a race or group, and only recently hae a few of them become rich and powerful enough for people like salisburyboy and the like to start talking like they're going to take over the world. However the truth is that it's still a minority of them who hold these powerful positions as entertainers or bankers. That's obvious, but it needed to be pointed out.

Africa wasn't a starving, squalid place until "white" civilization got its grubby hands on it and started making the people live the way it did. Before then, they obviously weren't affluent, but that's because they didn't need to be. They had their own way of doing things that worked for them. Now alot of them depend on money, their lands are polluted, their people were sold into slavery (yes, some by other africans, but that was because of the incentives brought by the white man).

Finally, most of the poor people in America are likely some sort of christian. How's that for God endowing his people with prosperity?

My point, I guess, is that it's absolutely ridiculous to talk about America as though it's prominent and powerful because it worships the christian god. Maybe because its beliefs in the christian god casued it to think it could use manifest destiny to its advantage, but not because the old dude with a beard in the sky smiled down on them somehow.

[Edited on August 10, 2005 at 10:50 AM. Reason : .]

8/10/2005 10:49:40 AM

The absence of a species-wide alpha male.

And I liked this...

Quote :

"And the argument stopped being about God a long time ago. Now it's about who's smarter and honestly I don't care."

[Edited on August 10, 2005 at 10:56 AM. Reason : ...]

8/10/2005 10:54:15 AM

Quote :

"Funny. I believe in God and I have answers to all of those questions. I would think that the atheist would fear those things more."

That's the point. He was saying those were reasons to believe in god.

8/10/2005 10:58:54 AM

Quote :

"While I realize it is not Gods place to provide prosperity, A real God would shape the tennets of the religion in question to encourage belief structures which promote advantagious activity. Is it any wonder that economic liberty, and later the industrial revolution, was started by protestant christians?"

So what then do you attribute the success of the many other groups of people in history if god takes credit for our success? Can god take credit for the great success a certain group of devout white christian protestants in germany in 1930?

You can't really say "hey, we're doing good right now, obviously this is god's doing" and then ignore the possiblity that we will fail just like every other civlization, and also not attribute every other nation's success to god.

8/10/2005 11:08:14 AM