Why

coz i enjoy church and its fucked up that it conflicts with your beliefs especially when people start talking about jesus.

but thats the thing, church or religion isnt just about exploiting it for emotional gain. maybe it is implicitely, but the way it works, that you do it usually warrants faith and belief. looking at sometging as an illusion compromises that. it makes you feel, why do you need to go by these rules or whatever. illusion is a shit state of affairs.

>tfw to intelligent to be happy

Without God, right and wrong are simply matters of opinion.

The Ten Commandments established that ALL humans must live by the same moral code, regardless of their status in society.

Without God, setting an objective moral, saying "murder is wrong" is ultimately like saying "I like vanilla ice cream"

Therefore, objective mortality depends soley on one supreme lawgiver... God.

Just be a deist. Take God to mean some ether that binds yourself to life and your community. And then you can join a church and happily be a part of community and believe in "God".

>tfw can't delude self into believing fanciful bullshit

>Without God, right and wrong are simply matters of opinion.

Why is this a problem? It's in our collective interests to hold murder as wrong, and so we do, enforcing it on those that disagree through the force of the state. This works, and it is just (by the standard of justice outlawed by philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, etc.).

Dude, just do Drugs. Same effect.

I don't think people like us are all that different from the christfags. at my old church my pastor made appeals all the time to making a "leap of faith" and comforting people with "everyone has doubts". Only the thickest headed christians have no doubts. It took me a long time to grow out of this phase where you know it's irrational but you're still emotionally invested. hope you can too OP

Why is belief in God looked at as "blind" or "illogical?"

Are you not doing the same when believing and studying modern day science? Evolutionism has just as much fallacies as creationism. Thats why there is faith on both sides.

Why do you believe in science if majority it is based on theory?

Because it is illogical. So is blindly believing every aspect of evolutionary theory. However, you cannot deny that evolutionary theory has evidence for many of its claims while the existence of God has absolutely ZERO. So things are looking a lot better for evolutionary theory.

I agree that it is illogical, but to hold one in a "higher light" than the other would be circular reasoning, and that in itself would be a logical fallacy. Although I can see where I contradicted myself by saying belief in God is illogical, you are correct they both are.
If we are all blind who is to say who can truly see?

Well we can't all be nihilists. At some point you have to hold something in a "higher light" lest you would be a man of no convictions or ideals. Truthfully, it's not about being "truly seeing", it's about finding ideas that have some empirical basis. For evolution, we can observe micro-evolution in several species. For religion/God we have nothing of the sort. It may not be a perfectly logical belief for there are some leaps of faith that must be made, but it is far more logical than believing an idea based entirely on making a leap of faith.

a conclusion based in empirical observations is less illogical than some blind belief in a deity though. no one really disputes that at some level you cant no nuffin. even if the world is an illusion using evidence to create predictive models has merit, even if it is just knowledge of patterns within a simulation. at the very worst science is akin to figuring out how to make yourself fly in a lucid dream.

Who's in this painting.
Can't recall his name
I like his story

Go to talk with your nearest Orthodox priest. God loves you, Christ loves you.

i'm an nihilist and honestly its not as bad as people make it out to be, or maybe they just dont understand nihilism very well. At least i know i understand it very differently than them.

Eastern Orthodoxy has a wonderful theological tradition

Nobody can force you to become a Christian. You just feel it, and know. Read his words, they are worth knowing.

Believing in God is the most logical thing a human being can do...or do you also believe monkeys had a life span of over a million years?

You don't need a god to tell you what is right and wrong. seriously half of these guys on Veeky Forums are just LARPers trying to be contrarian ever since atheism became hip and cool.

>or do you also believe monkeys had a life span of over a million years?
what did she mean by this?

Believing in God ≠ institutionalized religion. Not that I'm arguing for deism.

>do you also believe monkeys had a life span of over a million years?
>God
????

That is why life is all about faith, belief, and acceptance in your on illogical "-ism" what ever that may be. From our current perspective and understanding we don't have enough evidence or proof to be certain. That is why you see so many diffrent beliefs. No sane human disagrees the sky is blue.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flammarion_engraving

If you could believe anything you wanted, why the fuck would anyone pick an Abrahamic religion?

I had suffered the same problem. You just gotta brainwash yourself. Whatever works for you. I started off not really believing but seeing the benefits to Christianity, now I believe and am on my way to finding god and Jesus .

I know you're probably shitposting, but the scientific meaning of theory is not the same as the popular meaning of the word.

Observing the Ten Commandnents, it is the perfect set of rules to live in a perfect society without tyranny or cruelty. Regardless or race, or status you must live by the same moral code.

wew lad. why is worshiping a single god a necessary rule for society. if you think this doesn't result in a society with tyranny or cruelty I think you need to reread Kings, especially a certain King named Josiah:
2nd Kings 23
>19 And all the houses also of the high places that were in the cities of Samaria, which the kings of Israel had made to provoke the Lord to anger, Josiah took away, and did to them according to all the acts that he had done in Beth-el. 20 And he slew all the priests of the high places that were there upon the altars, and burned men’s bones upon them, and returned to Jerusalem.

if god is real, why do black people exist?

Well we can't all be nihilists. At some point you have to hold something in a "higher light" lest you would be a man of no convictions or ideals. Truthfully, it's not about being "truly seeing", it's about finding ideas that have some empirical basis. For creationism, we can observe the psychological benifits, and a plethora of coincidence. For atheism, in essence have the same thing. It may not be a perfectly logical belief for there are some leaps of faith that must be made, but it is far more logical than believing an idea based entirely on making a leap of faith.

its not about hope, its about being convinced.

Scientists are humans and we take their word for these theories though

you can, or you can look into the evidence and reasoning yourself. this isn't so much the case with religion which depends primarily on emotional appeals. there are some logical arguments used by some but I find them quite weak personally.

You believe that the evidence is real because of the way they described it and that's the only way they think it is but a lot of these theories have been disproven by other theories. Religion is based on faith and you can't disprove nor prove faith. We barely know anything about the universe and even ourselves. So we'll never know if any religion is right or not.

So much worthless fideism in this thread.

That which gets in the way of believing in God tends to be different for every person. As a Christian I've never not-believed, but what has really cements God's existence for me is seeing the world as radically contingent, and thus in need of a sustaining cause. This sustaining cause must have all the traditional divine perfections, because it must be original being and every divine perfection is a divine perfection because it is one way of describing that original being (e.g., power is original being considered in its range of effects, intellect is original being considered as the unifying principle of reality, etc).

A truly divinely perfect being would be a static entity. It could not have will, or actions, or desires, as if it were maximally perfect it would be fully fulfilled in and of itself. Any 'creating' caused by it would be the emanations given off by its very nature, but such things would necessarily be imperfect due to their separation. Hence us and the physical world.

What I'm saying is, Plato was right and jesus wuz gay. YHWH is a laughably absurd vindictive toddler, hardly perfect in any sense.

So an impersonal force, not a god

I honestly find life more enjoyable without believing in a god or afterlife.

The idea that this is all here by no intention, and that we get to observe it for such a short time with our own ways of processing it just makes me want to cry its so incredible.

With god out of the picture man is the arbiter of all things. We as a species are beholden to no external will and our existence is up to us to decide. Anyone who is displeased with this simply doesn't think much of their own judgment. They are willing slaves.

Sure, God is unmoving and immovable, but that is not to say that He has no will or actions. Will is simply the relation of an intellect toward its object, and every created thing is an object for God as an effect of himself. Thus created things are the result of divine activity, and willed by God.

Moreover, since created things cannot justify their own being, their being must be wholly gratuitous, and thus freely chosen. Such acts of choice do not, of course, entail any sort of change in God, but changes in the creature. In any case, the sheer contingency of creation entails that it cannot be the result of any necessity, but free intelligent action.

Nah. God is pure intelligible being itself, that which our finite intellects only approximate. There's nothing less impersonal, if by "person" you mean an intellectual being.

Funny how the most intelligent species approximates the highest being the most. Almost like God is humanlike.

Almost like humans are made in the image of God. But no, anthropocentrism goes out the window when one realises that the human intellectual act, which attempts to unify a finite amount of being under a finite principle, is only a shadow of the being of God himself, the original unity from which all other reality comes.

It's part of the paradox of human existence that man is unintelligible in purely human terms, but can only be properly understood in light of something more fundamental than he is.

Almost like coincidentally humans are the only ones in the image of God and no other animals, because humanity is tied to God in some way... I wonder how?

I made friends with a bunch of Christians over the span of a year. They seem enjoyable and honest. One even calls me his close friend even though he knows I'm an atheist.
The thing is, I can't see what they seem to be seeing. The evidence they put forth doesn't seem like evidence at all for what they are preaching.
Even if we disagree on these things, though, I don't mind as long as they strive towards good.

Everything is tied to God in some way, since God is the origin of all being, but human beings as rational animals are capable of knowing God in a fashion analogous to the way he knows us.
This is simply a result of reflecting on what the intellectual act entails.

Funny how god knows things the exact same way humans do, and that we seem more godlike than anything else by virtue of being human. I wonder why?

Who says that he knows things the 'exact same way' humans do? Humans have to know reality after the fact and through the medium of material sensation, which yields partial, limited successive unity, with that which we know. God, on the other hand, knows reality as its eternal creator, timelessly as the original unity from which their diversity derives. There couldn't be a more obvious gulf between the way in which God knows things, and the way in which we do.

We are just enough like God to want to know him, but not enough like God to actually achieve the object of our desire.

Also, angels are more like God than we are.

Well you kind of said it
>capable of knowing God in a fashion analogous to the way he knows us.

Also the fact that god has a mind at all, or is aware of anything at all, or has intentions at all

>Also, angels are more like God than we are.

Proof?

Why should the fact that God has an intellect be surprising? If one admits that reality in general is intelligible, there must be some principle in virtue of which this is so. And this source of intelligibility can only be an original unity in relation to which all created diversity exists, which must, in virtue of such a nature, be all-knowing.

We approximate this unity in the act of thinking, when we understand diverse particulars by the common forms which make them what we are.

It is only surprising that God is intelligent, if you bind up with the notion of 'intelligence' all of the things which result from our materiality: passions, sensations, particularity and changeability. These are obviously the result of privations of being, and thus have no place in original reality.

If one doesn't anthropomorphise intelligence to begin with, but contemplates it as it is in itself, one can avoid the problems of anthropomorphism.

As for angels, angels are by definition non-divine immaterial beings. Whatever is immaterial, given that matter is a principle of potency, is greater in act: it is neither individuated nor subject to change nor time nor extension, and its intellectual faculties are also therefore unlimited by the necessities of sense and the corruptibility of animal nature.

Whether or not there actually are angels, the basic metaphysical divisions of reality (i..e, act and potency, form and matter) yield a hierarchy in which man has a middle place. First, there is the distinction between original reality and contingent reality: God is original and everything else is contingent. Among contingent things, there is material and immaterial reality: animals, humans, etc., are material, while angels would be immaterial. Among material things there is the wholly material, or the partially material. Since the rational act of knowing is precisely to know the individual in a formal, immaterial mode, knowing animals- i.e., humans, are partially material.

>Why should the fact that God has an intellect be surprising?
The fact that an intellect requires a brain?

Why think this? What do you mean by 'intellect'?

What I mean by intellect is the capacity to unite with the being of something else, apart from the individuating principle of matter.

This is something which original reality, as the original unity from which everything else derives, is certainly capable of. It is something we also do, in our limited human fashion, when we use our brains. It is not in the least surprising then, when one understands what intellect is, that it should be something both humans and God are capable of.

Now certainly, if to begin with one does not think about intellect as the capacity of abstraction from matter, but identifies it at the outset with some material operation, one should be surprised that God operates in the same way. Insofar as the act of the intellect is identified with a material operation, as it is in your mind, I too deny that the same operation is found in God. But that does not at all deny that God has an intellect in the traditional sense in which this is asserted.

>Why think this? What do you mean by 'intellect'?
Agency, awareness, and intentionality.

Causal agency (if you mean instead intelligent agency, your definition is circular) is found in just about everything, and causal capacities in general are possible only through natural intentionality. Neither of these distinguish between living and non-living, let alone intelligent and unintelligent. Since everything has such features, it's not surprising that both man and God should have them.

'Awareness' is ambiguous between sensation and knowledge. Sensation is a material operation, that which puts one in contact with other particular beings, without distinguishing between their formal essence and their particular accidents. Unintelligent animals have this. Intellect, on the other hand, is at least partially an immaterial operation, since it is directed at the formal components of things apart from matter. The latter unifies the intellect with the reality of the thing known as distinguished from its particularising accidents.

Once broken down in this way, it is obvious that the key requirement of intellect is the capacity to become united to the reality of the thing understood, and when one understands what it is to be God, it is equally obvious that God must be capable of this, as the original, immaterial unity from which everything comes.

No, awareness isn't ambiguous, it means that the thing that is aware knowledge of what it is aware of. You claimed before that god is able to know things, and knowing requires a brain to do. Mechanical apparatuses can sense things but it takes an actual mind to know things.

Of course it is ambiguous. I demonstrated this by dividing it into its component parts: sensation and knowledge, the latter of which is intellectual, and accomplished by formal union with the thing understood apart from matter. You have attempted refutation by asserting a circular definition of awareness, which is no definition at all.

Secondly, you're simply asserting that intelligence requires a brain. When one understands intellect as Christians do when they predicate it of God, however, it is demonstrable that this assertion is false. If there is an original unity from which everything else comes, then there is a uniting principle in reality more perfect than what we derive with our brains via sensation. Since God just is this unity, it follows from God's existence that God is intelligent.

It is compatible with the Christian assertion that God is intelligent, that God is not 'intelligent' in whatever confused sense you are thinking of: having a human sort of mind, entertaining sensory models of his surroundings, as we do, etc. We are not interested in that sort of anthropomorphism.

If you take the Bible or any other religious text literally except for some of it's obvious laws, you need to take a step back and realize that it's all symbolism for divine architecture. The ancients discovered how the soul operates in the universe, but takes a lot of research and mental training to understand. The average human cannot comprehend such things, so stories and legends were made in alignment with the divine in order to bring the message to the common people without needed them to be very intelligent.

If you desperately want to believe in a God but you cannot rationally believe, it's due to an incorrect mental process. God (The Divine, oneness) is completely rational. Not only that, but there are political forces at work that actively encourage atheism.

Search St. Aquinas and his argument for God. There's lots of rational and highly intelligent theories on the existence of a higher power. Not only that, but feel safety in the fact that many people reaching the end of their scientific careers align with the fact that the universe is guided, with a purpose, or that it would be impossible to happen randomly.

Try reading the Secret Teachings of All Ages.

>When one understands intellect as Christians do when they predicate it of God, however, it is demonstrable that this assertion is false
Why should I think it's false simply because it's what Christians believe? The idea of "perfection" is in itself a human construction, that's what I'm saying. Arguing that it isn't anthropocentric doesn't make it not anthropocentric.
>having a human sort of mind, entertaining sensory models of his surroundings, as we do, etc. We are not interested in that sort of anthropomorphism.
But you are, in the sense that you claim God has knowledge of things, is aware of things, intentionally does things, is able to speak words, is able to communicate messages, is able to feel, is able to love, is able to be aware. It's natural that you don't realize this, since we're not aware of our own biases, but we have a distinct tendency towards humanlike constructs and anthropomorphizing things. The idea and construction of God is just another example.

An Aquinas fag!

I don't see many around. You should come here more often!

If god doesn't know whether or not a person is going to hell, then that being is not omniscient. If god does know, then from whence comes free will?

The concept of god makes so little sense past a basic need for their to be a 'chief above the chief' in our distant history.

And no, saying that there is no proof of god does not say that I believe in anything else (nihilism included).

>Why should I think it's false simply because it's what Christians believe?

If you mean to deny what Christians assert when they say God is intelligent, you will have to use "intelligence" as they are using it. And used thus, as I showed, it is demonstrably false that God is not intelligent.

Perfection is clearly not an anthropocentric concept. Things can, for example, be more or less perfectly circular independently of human construction. They can more or less perfectly resemble each other, and they can more or less perfectly execute operations, like finding food and knowing reality, and they can be more or less perfectly pure in their constitution.

>in the sense that you claim God has knowledge of things, is aware of things, intentionally does things, is able to speak words, is able to communicate messages, is able to feel, is able to love, is able to be aware.

Sure, but again, when we work out what this means in the context of God, it is perfectly apparent that it is not an anthropomorphism. In fact, understanding precisely the sense in which God has a more perfect intellect than us, makes clear precisely the extent to which our own animal intelligence contains many elements that cannot be extended to God, at least in a univocal sense, since they are impairments to the intellect rather than aids. Anthropomorphism is helpful in understanding God, of course, and God is not less-than personal, but that should not be confused with a systematic-theological way of understanding the divine attributes.