Do you believe in God?

[Noodles]

So here is my take on things. I don't really know that it aligns with any particular religion or anything, and it probably needs some ironing out.

FWIW, I grew up Catholic but I have not regularly attended church for the last 20 year or so, since I was in High School.

I would say I don't really believe in God in the sense of "Space Boogeyman who conjoired the universe".

I do sort of believe in the idea of "God" being sort of, "the will and judgement of society." That said, that will and judgement does, and should evolve, along with society and humanity and everyone else.

I also believe a lot of the idea that Religion tries to teach are good, (Be good to everyone) but these ideas get sonperverted and twisted by too many religious folks.

I think the easy answer is, I don't believe in religion/God, but I believe in being spiritual/generally good, if that makes sense.

 

[Cindy Claveau]

Considering everything He's done for me, I can only return the favor by saying I don't give a fuck

 

[Roxanne Blue]

Well, if you subscribe to the possibility that we live in a multiverse, then at every decision point from the particle level to macro events, everything happens. Each change/decision creates a new universe. So, very early on in the multiverse - maybe at the start - there might have been a point where the decision was "God or No God".

Then the question becomes, "Are we living in one of the Yes universes?"

I can't find any evidence to suggest we are.

 

[Clara D.]

This to me comes a bit too close to a "No true scotsman" fallacy. Declaring that Nazis were not christian because of modern interpretation of their actions while Nazis themselves proclaimed their christian ties.

You may want to read more of those articles, the evidence is pretty damning. Tie those articles in with the Nazis being master propagandists. I actually reversed my stance, as I used to believe that Hitler thought he was God-Sent. Once I clued that Mein Kampf was likely a propaganda piece and not how he actually felt, on top of the other evidence, I had an Oho! moment. It does help that WWII was both comparatively recent and one of the most studied bits of history.

Yes, I have a bizarre WWII fetish. I'd take a T-34 over a Sherman.

But if you judge their claims bullshit, can't you say the same about the God bothering GOP of the USA.

I've dealt with enough "Christians" IRL to know that the more psychotic ones do "truly believe" while completely ignoring what Christ actually taught. "God Hates Fags," white supremacists, etc.

I know Materialistic-as-Fuck Trump is full of shit with the Bible signing -- it was just a book signing for a book he didn't have to pay a ghost-writer to create. My best guess on the GOP is that it's some unspecified mix of the psychotic grade of "True Believers" (ala Glen Beck) and cynics with the scale heavier on the psychotic side.

Catholic Church - another tricky one. Centuries of competing with the Crown for the Hearts and Minds of the people. Crusades as a combination of "smiting the unbelievers" and "land grab."

What it all boils down to: How do you tell where the line is between fanaticism and cynicism?

What makes someone a christian? Who is the judge of that? If someone declares themselves christian or believes their actions are compatible with christianity while performing acts that others may judge incompatible with the tenets of their faith are they christian or not?

Throw in Inconsistency as another "okay, I'm out." The One True God that no-one can agree on...

 

[Zaida Gearbox]

Yes.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

Of course I do! I've seen his face, his beautiful face! He sings to me with his seven tongues and showed me how to lead you all to salvation!

Great wealth on this world and endless glory in the next can all be yours if you buy my book for 7 easy payments of $19.95!

...but really. I've talked before about my issues with schizophrenia. I think you NEED atheism to be fully functional with certain mental illnesses because it is otherwise so easy for us to convince ourselves that god speaks through us. I believe I am nobody special in this respect...

I'm in the camp of "No" as my short answer and my long answer is complicated. I agree with the original post about how I can't reconcile the coexistence of an all loving, all good, all powerful god and how some kids die of cancer or what really happens when an army sacks a city.

I have a materialistic, mechanistic view of the universe in about 99.9% of all things. The only thing that maybe violates my mechanistic view is that I'm not sure it's possible to have a totally materialistic explanation for consciousness. I'm therefore a bit sympathetic to the idea of a collective consciousness.

...I also sometimes like to wonder about unconventional concepts of god. I am certain there is no wholly good, and all powerful god. But Maybe there could be a wicked trickster god? That would actually explain some reality...

 

[Innula Zenovka]

I'm never sure what "believe" means in this context, snce, to my mind, there's a big difference between, on the one hand, statements like "I believe in the Loch Ness Monster" or "I don't believe in ghosts," and, on the other, statements like "I believe in the free market" or "I believe in feminism."

The first kind is a statement about the factuality or otherwise of the proposition "Reports of the existence of a creature popularly known as the Loch Ness Monster are factually accurate."

The other, though, can't be similarly paraphrased, since it means something more like "this particular way of understanding the world and human society makes sense to me and seems to me to offer valuable insights into whole areas of life and behaviour."

When we talk about belief in a deity or deities, it seems to me that generally we're talking about the second kind of belief rather than the first, at least unless we're religious fundamentalists, so it's a question of whether the idea of a divine beings of whatever sort is one the feels right for you, in that it helps make sense of life in general and its meaning and purpose, if any.

Do I believe in God? No, not really. Once I did, but it faded over time, after my partner's death, and now if I believe in anything it's in something like H.P. Lovecraft's Azathoth, as a useful poetic symbol to consider when contemplating the chaos and entropy that govern so much of life, and in the Fates, as another useful symbol for the inexorable workings out of chains of consequences from actions and events, whether planned or entirely fortuitous.

That's what I think religion and belief are, really -- a form of shared conceptual and imaginative framework and set of symbols and cultural practices that help people consider and negotiate common human experiences and emotions.

 

[Ashiri]

...I also sometimes like to wonder about unconventional concepts of god. I am certain there is no wholly good, and all powerful god. But Maybe there could be a wicked trickster god? That would actually explain some reality...

I've always though an incompetent god would explain things even better.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

I'm never sure what "believe" means in this context, snce, to my mind, there's a big difference between, on the one hand, statements like "I believe in the Loch Ness Monster" or "I don't believe in ghosts," and, on the other, statements like "I believe in the free market" or "I believe in feminism."

The first kind is a statement about the factuality or otherwise of the proposition "Reports of the existence of a creature popularly known as the Loch Ness Monster are factually accurate."

The other, though, can't be similarly paraphrased, since it means something more like "this particular way of understanding the world and human society makes sense to me and seems to me to offer valuable insights into whole areas of life and behaviour."

When we talk about belief in a deity or deities, it seems to me that generally we're talking about the second kind of belief rather than the first, at least unless we're religious fundamentalists, so it's a question of whether the idea of a divine beings of whatever sort is one the feels right for you, in that it helps make sense of life in general and its meaning and purpose, if any.

Do I believe in God? No, not really. Once I did, but it faded over time, after my partner's death, and now if I believe in anything it's in something like H.P. Lovecraft's Azathoth, as a useful poetic symbol to consider when contemplating the chaos and entropy that govern so much of life, and in the Fates, as another useful symbol for the inexorable workings out of chains of consequences from actions and events, whether planned or entirely fortuitous.

That's what I think religion and belief are, really -- a form of shared conceptual and imaginative framework and set of symbols and cultural practices that help people consider and negotiate common human experiences and emotions.

Related to this, most people who believe god actually exists still don't believe in god in the way that we believe rocks exist. If they need to really get something done, they will go about their planning with the assumption god won't be there to intervene. People who really are 100% sure god exists in the way trees exist are frightening as they are capable of doing absurd things that really do make complete sense if you hand them that assumption.

Quick side track, I remember hearing that the medieval rationale for why confessions from torture were useful was because if you were a god fearing person, god would give you the strength to resist. It makes complete sense if you really, REALLY believe god is real.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

The late John Mortimer QC, creator of Rumpole of The Bailey, once put it rather well, I thought, when he said that he was pretty sure that a centurion posted to some fort on Hadrian's Wall probably didn't, when he was making the customary sacrifices to the god Mars on behalf of his men before he led them out of the fort on a mission, think there was actually an irascible deity who lived on Mount Olympus and who be angered he if didn't receive his sacrifice from up there at the far end of the known world, but he was damn sure the centurion would have believed in what the god and the sacrifice represented.

 

[EmpressOfCommunism]

I'm a hellenic polytheist, and since Zeus and the family aren't terribly subtle, a vase full of offerings exploding outward in the middle of the night when the cats are locked in the bedroom and there are no breezes or heat vents is what it takes to keep me out of trouble. Not terribly scientific or leninist but I'm certaintly a better and more mentally stable person then 2013 me as a result.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

 

[Ishina]

God is too small and dull an idea to give me any kind of intellectual or spiritual satisfaction. I am literally baffled by the hold these ideas have over otherwise intelligent and deep people. How amazing it would be if something so vapid and easy to think up would placate my wondering mind or my anxiety about the state of the world.

I used to enjoy arguing about it, but after a while you realise that it's just the same handful of arguments being recycled and jazzed up, and that it's a pastime of diminishing returns.

 

[Clara D.]

Since humans aren't purple, the existance of an omniscinent and all-powerful entity is actually disproven.
Checkmate, thus nope!

Now I have to share the pain of the Sha Na Na show because this made me remember it.

 

[Chalice Yao]

Now I have to share the pain of the Sha Na Na show because this made me remember it.

....my private SL group just might, possibly, MAYBE be named 'Pretty Purple People Eater' >_>

 

[Tris]

I don't know if that last part follows. It makes sense that "something like that" would be so far removed from us that we wouldn't understand it; but we can't extrapolate "it wouldn't care about us" from that. Yeah it might not "care" about anything, in the sense that we understand "care"....but on the other hand, it also very well could care about us, for incomprehensible reasons.

The "caring" i meant is more directed towards what religion makes of it. Meaning, something incredibly powerful makes stuff out of nothing and then has nothing better to do than to take part in that creation.

You are right though that if something like that exists, them/it/whatever might accidentally care for us. Like we for example care for bees.

 

[Soen Eber]

...I used to believe that Hitler thought he was God-Sent.

Yes, I have a bizarre WWII fetish. I'd take a T-34 over a Sherman.

That's not a bizarre WWII fetish. Ditching a Ronco for one of the best heavy tanks ever produced in numbers is flat-out common sense.

I've dealt with enough "Christians" IRL to know that the more psychotic ones do "truly believe" while completely ignoring what Christ actually taught. "God Hates Fags," white supremacists, etc.

That's why, although I'm mostly a believer, I keep G-d's commandment to Moses to "not look him in the face" rather literally. The closer you get to a great cosmic mystery, the greater the chance of you losing your mind and individuality. G-d is sort of in the same class as an eldritch horror or a great old one in that sense, although more moral than immoral or amoral.

 

[Sid]

So Nazi Germany and WWII are religions as well these days?

 

[Soen Eber]

I know Materialistic-as-Fuck Trump is full of shit with the Bible signing -- it was just a book signing for a book he didn't have to pay a ghost-writer to create.

Reporting on that was a bit off: I have video of what actually happened.


And don't worry. They're only burning disco records.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

This to me comes a bit too close to a "No true scotsman" fallacy. Declaring that Nazis were not christian because of modern interpretation of their actions while Nazis themselves proclaimed their christian ties.

I suspect you may be falling into the trap of assuming that politicians' policies before gaining power will necessarily remain unchanged after they have attained it (or, indeed, that their policies do not change over time anyway, in response both to events and to the rise and fall of the fortunes of the politicians advocating them).

Certainly that's the case with the Nazi top command; it's particularly apparent with the Holocaust, which developed from trying to encourage Jews to leave Germany by making life as unpleasant as possible for them, to deporting them and confining them to ghettos, to either murdering them (either locally in in death camps like Treblinka) or sending them to concentration camps as slave labourers, to sending them to combined camps that operated both as death camps or labour camps, as required.

The changes in policy there were partly dictated by the outbreak and course of WW2, particularly after Operation Barbarossa, the Invasion of the USSR, began, and partly by the outcome of arguments within the Nazi elite -- the SS, for example, apparently had continual fights at the most senior levels over policy, not only between Himmler and the heads of other departments and ministries (like Goering and Eichmann) but also within the SS, between Himmler and his immediate subordinates, and it was apparently Hitler's general policy to encourage his supporters' rivalry by having several of them produce competing, and often conflicting, plans and to choose which one he preferred at the time.

Something similar seems to have happened with the Nazi policy towards the Christian churches in Germany. I don't know a huge amount about it, but they seemed to have moved from seeking a form of rapprochement with both the Catholic and Protestant churches in Germany, while they were seeking power in the 1920s and early 1930s, to a far more hostile stance from 1934 onwards, in both rhetoric and policy.

This article (which didn't take long to find) provides a very helpful account: Hitler, Himmler, and Christianity in the Early Third Reich

Essentially, according to this article, anyway, Hitler wasn't particularly interested in religion (Christianity, anyway), one way or another, so long as the churches didn't get in his way, while Himmler was actively anti-Christian, viewing that faith as un-German and fatally compromised by its Jewish roots, and needing to be replaced in Germany by some sort of synthesis of Teutonic and Germanic myth and general occultism.

After the Nazis came to power, and particularly after the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler allowed Himmler to get his own way more and more frequently, and increasingly so after the death of Heydrich (who, while hardly a moderating influence, was certainly a pragmatist and viewed his chief's interest in Germanic myth, mysticism and the occult as complete nonsense).

Whatever Hitler may have said about Christianity (whether sincerely meant or not) before coming to power, his government's actions after gaining power reflect increasing official hostility and repression directed towards organised Christianity.