Do you believe in God?

I stopped believing in God when I was four/five - roughly the same time I stopped believing in Santa Clause.

To me, it just didn't make sense - it seemed contrary to what I was being told about the world.

Yes.

Lord Raffles said:

To me, it just didn't make sense - it seemed contrary to what I was being told about the world.

Don't always trust what the world tells you.

The world is Satan!

Yes, and fortunately, otherwise if we don't believe, God ceases to exist.

Do you mean a god or the christian God? If either are the case then no.

no I don't believe in any gods.

Many people claim to believe in god but only believe in power and money...

Not only do I believe in God, but I also believe that She is a woman. Why? I realize it's kinda pointless, as by Its very nature, God is ungendered, but on the other hand, it's very interesting to think about how the fact that God was seen as man has affected humanity's view of God. So I've decided to basically flip the coin, and reconsider how God would be perceived if God were viewed as being a woman.

On that note, I don't see why it's so hard to believe in God. The Universe had to come from somewhere, right? It didn't just create itself... Then again, perhaps it did create itself. In that case, would not the Universe itself be God? Along those lines, I would like to point out that it's not necessary for God to be some old man with a beard sitting on a cloud and throwing down lightning bolts at His enemies or whatever... Such a naive point of view.

I don't see why believing in old bearded cloud-riding men with the ability to smite enemies and whatnot with lightning bolts is less naïve than to consider whether the universe was created by something else or if it created itself. Who is this universe anyway, a guy or a girl? Nothing wrong with him or her, though... I've heard about such a one here and there.

geekmarine said:

On that note, I don't see why it's so hard to believe in God. The Universe had to come from somewhere, right? It didn't just create itself... Then again, perhaps it did create itself. In that case, would not the Universe itself be God?

You are using god as an answer to the unanswerable. The real answer to where the universe came from or how it was created is "I don't know".

Why can't we just consider the universe as a brute fact? If we suggest that the universe could not create itself we can also assume that God can't have created himself either.

I believe in Satan Claus

Wait, do I believe in God? No. I thought you were asking about Santa Claus. The sidetracking got me confused.

Janderson said:

Why can't we just consider the universe as a brute fact?

Maybe it doesn't exist at all.

Fredrik said:

Maybe it doesn't exist at all.

Maybe YOU don't exist at all. I'm pretty sure I exist, by my definition anyway. I can't confirm your existence.

Yup, I do. Even...*gasp*...the (non-denominational) Judeo-Christian God. But not the Catholic one. Their interpretation of Him is somewhere off in left field.

I have no faith in any wild or wacky flavor of god. Born and raised catholic. I lost my so-called "faith" when I was about 15 or so.

Yes

I just know that some people believe in something, like a cat mews at a fly stuck on the ceiling to make it go down: I’m philosophically an agnotic and morally an atheist, but I like nice myths as long as they remain myths and not excuses for greedy and/or megalomaniac bastards.

Quast said:

I have no faith in any wild or wacky flavor of god. Born and raised catholic. I lost my so-called "faith" when I was about 15 or so.

I hear Catholicism will do that to you. :P

I was raised a Christian kid. Somewhere along the line I started to wonder if maybe it was all bullshit. I lived a few years completely discounting the possibility of a god existing, and I actually just recently saw the movie Dogma. I realized then that it was only the kind of stuff discussed in that movie that had turned me off of believing in the first place. So now I'm in the stage where I'm trying to see around the bullshit, and really trying to open up to the whole thing.

I believe in God. Why? Because think about it. Everything we do, our existence, the good and the bad, they all exist. If everything ceased to exist, what would happen? What if nothing ever existed at all? Then what existence would there be? Nothing? What is nothing? We had to have been created, and God is the only thing powerful enough to do such a thing.

Yeah but who created God?

insertwackynamehere said:
What is nothing?

Perhaps... God? Ain't nothing powerful enough to create us?

I think this is a very funny take on the whole "does God exist?" question.

On SA's many teen christian webmines(or whatever), I found a child saying that God stopped him masterbating. He never stated that it was his willpower which 'saved' him, it was God. If God affects everything we do then individual achievments become impossible, it's just God doing them, not us. I like to belive that I have actually done something myself.

Good and Bad are simply opinions. To us humans Hitler was an evil man. But to an observing alien we could all just simply be mobile matter reacting. Good or Bad is a human concept, there are many examples of Hitler in the animal kingdom (mainly insects).

If everything ceased to exist or never had existed then nothing would happen at all. But what if everything was already there? This concept is almost ungraspable as most humans find it difficult to contemplate eternity. But then so is the concept of God. If everything needs to have been created then what created God? If God has always been there, then why can't the universe have been there?

I'm not trying to sway people here by the way, I just like this subject a lot.

Fredrik said:

Yeah but who created God?

:)

That's the Mystery.

@Janderson: There are no animals which kill members of thier same species because they are different, except humans.

False... many do so. To supply just one example, many ant species do that; the ants of one nest will kill the ants of another if they meet.

Terra-jin said:
That's the Mystery.

Actually, a more real mystery is the concept of creation... applying it to anything we know or experience, that is.

insertwackynamehere said:

@Janderson: There are no animals which kill members of thier same species because they are different, except humans.

Black widow :P

insertwackynamehere said:

@Janderson: There are no animals which kill members of thier same species because they are different, except humans.

Animals don't have exclusive "clubs" to join. But a great many animals will happily kill their own kind for a number of reasons. Including us.

myk said:

Actually, a more real mystery is the concept of creation... applying it to anything we know or experience, that is.

Well, I believe in eternity, timelessness rather than actual creation. Eternity would imply that things weren't created, they were just always there. Creation would imply that there was a beginning... and I don't believe there was.

However, both concepts go beyond human comprehension... at least mine. I did once think of time as 'curved', so you would basically return to the point of origin at some time. To illustrate this, think of a globe as a curved 2D world.
A circle has no end, but it's not infinite. Sort of. I don't know. This sort of philosophizing makes my head hurt.