Do you believe in God? Why or why not?

Do you believe in God? Why or why not?

No, because I'm a one with the universe kind of hippie.

I've recently been thinking about this a lot.

We are currently at the precipice of technology that can vastly change our way of life. How can belief in god really survive in the face of the life extension "wave" (i.e immortality through successive generations of life extension technology) and controlled virtual reality?

If we don't fear death or uncertainty, why would anyone believe in an afterlife or a god? Religion has always operated on a bedrock of certain human truths but technology is now approaching the point where those truths can be challenged and even reversed. It's almost like Pascal's wager, in the sense that we can continue to believe in god so long as its psychologically convenient to do so, but the moment we can create perfect virtual reality we can discard those notions.

Belief in god is fundamentally flawed in that it relies on the incorrect presupposition that other people exist.

I'm an animist, so, Everything, Everything, and Everyone is God. So, yes.

I believe there is something else. Something external to or in addition to our universe, or to what we can observe. But we're not currently intelligent enough, or able, to have any idea what it is.

No it doesn't, it has no axioms other then you exist

Yes, I am a Christian

Nah.
I have no reason or basis to do so.

I do, but I doubt constantly.

Yes.

Because of objective morality.

You would happily live in a perfect virtual reality?

>everybody using that shitty meme painting as a book cover
makes me mad for some reason

I believe God exists, but i also believe he isn't worth worshipping.

but God granted you those digits

No.
I don't know why, I just don't. Wish I did, tho.

It easy to think if he really cares about me he wouldnt make it necessary for me to worship. He doesnt do that though, he asks for gratitude and worship is that in it's highest form.

What I do is thank him for things I feel as though I should. Whether or not it's an exactly correct method it makes me more grateful for what I have and more positive in general.

yes, but i also believe that he was created by man because God is a necessary tool for survival and that people who have abandoned him have abandoned their will to live and their will to create, maybe there is a "real god" out there but that's completely beyond my or anybody's understanding

I believe God exists, because I'd be really bummed out to think that death really leads to nothingness and I'll never get to see my dead family again.

So call me an optimist. I feel it's better psychologically to believe than fight Nihilism.

I'm agnostic, but I could become a deist or something in the future.
While rational analysis points to God being a human construct, humans aren't very rational beings. Perhaps belief is the best road to happiness and in that case, why not believe?

Why do so many people put Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog as a cover for books when it's not relevant? I suppose it has some romantic link with Shelley here , but I once saw it used for Seneca's on the Shortness of Life

>Solipsistic faggot
What is language, niggernogger?

Only insofar as God constitutes the entirety of the nature. But at that point, you've stretched God beyond any reasonably definition, so I'd have to say no.

>Animist
>Not taking it to its logical conclusion with pantheism
Why lad

I want to place my faith in something real and accessible.

its also a zarathustra cover

I believe god does not exist, because I find the argument in favor of God's existence to be weaker than the arguments in favor of his nonexistence.
this is r/atheism tier nonsense.

I'm ignostic

I don't believe any of the Abrahamic religions and don't know enough about other religions to really say. I think the deist view of God is entirely possible because it's very difficult to argue solidly against, but on the other hand a universe made by a deistic God looks very similar to a purely materialist universe so I'm agnostic about that.

I believe God is energy.

No, it's an illogical idea. Having said, theism shouldn't be attacked or scorned - it should just be dismissed.

but i exist so youre clearly not the only one

So you believe in he universe as your God

We're never gonna reach the point where we live together, and I'd gladly avoid it thanks

It's never too late

>I only trust in trivial, finite and ephemeral things
y tho

>Only I exist
>Other people don't exist
>I'm 'other' to other people
>I don't exist

kek

Yes, because he's woven me in the womb of my mother

>We're never gonna reach the point where we live together
I meant to write *forever, of course

>y tho
I can believe in God as an abstract.
But the problem with religion these days is that it is all belief and little to no teaching and ritual, at least where I'm from. I know Christians and even Muslims who don't follow their teaching and are all talk and no walk. Besides that I have some problems with the faith itself that are - as of now - incompatible with my values.

Nice freudian slip my pal

I'm broken inside

Does being agnostic count?

My education in physics made me realize over time that it is impossible to proof beyond doubt the existance or non-existance of a god. I don't care either, knowing the answer wouldn't influence my life significantly.

no
it's impossible and doesn't even matter

I believe that there is a prime mover for the universe and that it is entirely possible that certain people throughout history were able to communicate with or have some sort of experience with It (I don't believe in a personified, gendered deity but that It could have appeared in the form of man to make communicating messages more expedient)

That being said I think religious institutions are good for society so I participate in one as an act of good faith in my community, although I reserve a certain amount of skepticism for any organization of man.

maybe God as in something that created the universe and all its rules. But nothing more than that

Marxist theory ultimately made me realise that religious debates on purely philosophical grounds mean nothing and convince nobody. Religious belief needs to concern us only as a material force in society, namely the manner in which it is tied to or perpetuates economic and institutional power. Individuals acting on their religious belief are perfectly harmless in a society where they couldn't collude and exploit the population based on their ideology.
We can observe, for instance, how Christianity in America is extremely corporatized and fundamentally subservient to the interests of US imperialism and its apologists. Thus, the debates on atheism in America have a very different character from more secularized states, since they are thinly-veiled political clashes. Of course, the atheists themselves are extremely politically differentiated since they aren't properly conscious of the social function of Protestant Christianity, believing it to be a civil issue separate from socioeconomics. We can see this contradiction at work in neocon opportunists like Hitchens, who promoted american exceptionalism and radical atheism in the same breath. Ultimately, religion is only a front and not overtly necessary for modern imperialism.

Neoplatonic Muslim. This.

I would argue its impossible for God not to exist, since matter exists for no logical reason.

No. Because everything I've read gives me no reason to. I wasn't brought up religious nor non-religious, so I really just came to these conclusions after I started reading more as a teenager and haven't been dissuaded yet 8 years later.

If by 'God' we mean an omnimax entity I think the 2000+ year history of philosophy of history shows that no such entity exists. Divine command theory is such a shitshow that no sense can be made of God's moral perfection and providence at the same time. A perfect God would have no morally sufficient reasons to create if antifrustrationism or any other negatively based theory of welfare is the correct one, and all positive ones face absurd conclusions like the repugnant conclusion. There are Cantorian paradoxes showing the concept of omniscience is incoherent. Problem of evil when formulated probabilistically is insurmountable for theists when the inference to the best explanation points to naturalism/atheism, even skeptical theism can't help the theist there. Divine foreknowledge is incompatible with free will, which the non-calvinist theist needs to make sense of their belief system. Open theism is herecy and essentially makes God a fuckwad kid playing Sims with the universe. Divine hiddenness hasn't been answered satisfactorily.

philosophy of religion*

Yes because my prayers are always answered. When I'm atheistic my life goes to shit.

God must exist.

>Divine foreknowledge is incompatible with free will
And this is how I knew you were dumb

Care to spell it out?

It's interesting you mention that nothing you've read convinces you because I'm the same way but was raised Roman Catholic. I was flying into JFK airport one night and it struck me quite heavily that the cars navigating the ordered blocks of the city looks almost exactly like the chlorophyll navigating the perfect blocks of a plant cell. I still don't know for certain about the nature of God in specific, but I believe that the spark of divinity is physically manifest in community. There is this driving urge in our universe from atoms to the most complex multi celled organisms to group together and form ever larger and more complex communities. What's more amazing is that this process goes on over and over again through various mechanisms in the face of a universe that is in a constant state of entropy as implied by it's continuous expansion, yet every piece of matter is constantly looking to form a bond of some greater level of cooperation and organization. While science can answer how each thing creates the bonds it cannot answer why. Why does a universe in explosive entropy desire connection so much?

Death scares me because it's the end of me, i will cease to think and imagine, i will cease to look and to feel, i will cease to enjoy and discover. That said, i wish i were able to believe in God, that there's something out there after we're trough, because death is the biggest fear of the thinking man, so they search for more, always for more, always to feel again and think again. Maybe i want to live forever because i'm scared to die, maybe i'd want to die if i lived forever. I'm too atached to this world to just let go, even if i'm forced to let go at any moment, and that scares.

It's the same and the opposite for me, everything I've read still gives me no reason to not believe.

It's never too late to start believing.
On a side note, the end of death is not a culture universal, since it's plenty of people who are not afraid to die, or even willing to. I may give the example of an amazonian tribe in which many people commit suicide at the age of 30-40 because the nostalgia they feel for their dead family is too strong, and so they decide to reach them in the afterlife; but christian martyrs are a good example too. My point is, we are afraid of death only because we live in a secular society that doesn't believe in (a good) afterlife.