Reasons for God...

I think emotional judgement can be right or wrong; it depends on the situation.

And it makes turds on the sidewalk.

Oh wait... thats dog...

Thanks again fresco. I always value your input.

What I think of as a personal belief is a belief I know has no relevance outside of my own conceptual "playground". I know a bit of how language works, and I realize that the word "god" is loaded with cultural and social implications or assumptions.
The fact is that I have an idea of god that I relate to, and it makes me feel connected to the cosmos in a way that makes me happier. I know that there is no factual basis for this belief, and I know that for most aspects of practical life there are more appropriate sources to turn to, and my belief doesn't discredit them. For me it is a matter of choice, and the only time this belief is relevant is when I meditate, seeking a moment of non-dualistic perception. But I will almost never admit this belief to anyone (anonymous discussions on the interwebz excluded), because I know that if I say I believe in god, the person I speak to will immediately assume that he knows something about what I actually believe.
So I usually try to avoid answering the question, often by calling attention to the nature of language and the fact that what I communicate will rarely be what is heard when the topic is something as controversial and biased as god.

Cyracuz, I think it's somewhat similar about how I think about kharma; it's not really about god, but it rewards and punishes one based on what they do to help or hurt others.

The way I see it there is no conclusive evidence that there exists anything that fits the description of "god", and there is no conclusive evidence to suggest that the notion is false. I think of it as a matter of conceptualizing an understanding of the cosmos. I realize that this isn't exactly what is usually meant by "god".
When I use the term "god" I tend to think of "everything that exists as one". It is perhaps foolish to use a word for this that has so much bias...

Actually, I don't think it's foolish. This usage of the word "god" has a long tradition, going back to Aristotle. You'll be fine as long as you stay consistent. That is, as long as you don't slip into the notion that this "everything" created the universe, intelligently designed species, listens to your prayer, obsesses about your sex life, and things like that.

Yes, I wouldn't go that far. And I have the attitude that if scientific fact contradicts my belief, I will revise my belief, not deny the facts.

I'm currently reading two great books... The History Of God and If The Church Were Christian. they address this question and are an informative and thought provoking read.

Thanks. I'll check those out

Agreed Thomas...that simple !

Benefits us the most? Well that is pretty subjective. I have seen dozens of de-conversion videos and one of the reoccurring themes that they all seem to share is that the fear they had as a believer was so overwhelming to them that once they let it go and came to the conclusion that no god exists. Their anxiety subsided over time and were glad to be rid of it. So you tell me that fearing something that is a childish superstition is beneficial?

However; your question completely misses the fact that you are basically saying, "Well if it is not true it doesn't matter because it makes me feel good so that makes it worthy to believe."

There is a very common response to your idea. What if I believed that I had a hundred million dollars in my bank account. Wouldn't that give me a great feeling? But the fact is, that I don't but what you are implying is that I should kid myself because believing I have the money makes me happy.



That is only one aspect. Love might fail between two people but that does not mean that it would always fail. But your conclusion is also a very simplistic and perhaps naive way of looking at love. I know some people who live their life by the love that comes and they know that it might not always last but while they are in love they cherish it and that makes it mean more than expecting to always be there. To put it another way, if there is no chance of losing it, then what is the value of it really? It is the fact that it can disappear that we cherish it so much. So if there were some god who's love was never wavering then basically it is meaningless.



Like my previous argument. I don't see love as something so great as you are trying to put out there. The emotion is very fleeting and chaotic not to mention that it is conditional. It can't be unconditional yet that doesn't stop people from trying to say that it can. But that all might be meaningless to you so I'll just say. If there is a god and that god was supposedly loving, why create such a disastrous situation for these beings? What do I mean? Well if you must believe in this god or suffer an eternal torment. Why is that god placing you in such a position that you would have to face eternal torment by making a simple mistake? That is the farthest from loving that you can get in my opinion.



It might serve you but only because you ignored all the other aspects of your idea. If you are happy with lying to yourself to make you feel better then that works for you, but it doesn't work for everyone including me.



I disagree, I think we can know. No one ever has this problem when we talk about goblins or dragons. For some reason everyone can determine that goblins are not real but when it comes to the "god" term there are so many that can not see that goblins and gods reside in the same box. They are both unsupportable in this reality and thus that makes them mythological. Since they are mythological then it is logical not to base your reality on them existing. Those who do are being delusional.

Goblins and dragons are very well defined. It is not hard to understand what they are. God, however, isn't so well defined. There is just about as many definitions of god as there are people thinking about it. You have defined it for yourself as something impossible and absurd and chosen to believe in that. Others define it (or are taught the definition of their elders) as something that evokes fear and guilt. I understand it as something that gives me a sense of connection to the cosmos.
I've been where you are at, and I didn't much like the way it made me feel and the person I became as a result. Maybe you do, and if so, that is fine. I do not really need a name for this trancendental oneness, but I could call it God. That doesn't mean I adopt all the notions ever concieved about this concept when I consider the word.



I am sorry to hear you say that, because it implies that you have not experienced something that is completely wonderful. Perhaps we could discuss the differences between love and the subjective need to "own" what we are inclined to have these feelings about. Many think of this obsession as love, but it is not.
And my parents have always loved me unconditionally, and I return the feeling. I love my brothers unconditionally.

Somebody posted in the funny signs thread this quote.



That's about as absolute about god as one can express.

That is an interesting choice of analogy. Given the fact that money is most assuredly a human construct.
Your individual belief, in the money you have in the bank, matters not one wit. It is the mutual belief, by other members of society, that gives it any value.

The same with gods.

As far as religion is concerned, yes. But a personal faith, not at all.
The value of ones personal faith is independent of anyone else's belief.

Hardly true; religion is learned. Others must have practiced it before anyone else did.

The emotional surrender of individuals to their religion is more similar than not no matter which god they believe in.

Atheists do not have that "problem." Emotional attachment to any religion or god does not exist.

My post was simple, and could be understood by a 5th grader, so I'll attribute the complete tangential gobbledygook of your response to an unwillingness to cede an obvious point.

Sure. You said,

I say, bull ****!

That you need to use ad hominem to attack me rather than the subject tells me you are a child.

The main reason to believe in God is that you pretty much have to believe in evolution not to, and only idiots believe in evolution any more.

The big lie which is being promulgated by evolutionists is that there is some sort of a dialectic between evolution and religion. There isn't. In order to have a meaningful dialectic between evolution and religion, you would need a religion which operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, and the only two possible candidates would be voodoo and Rastifari.

The dialectic is between evolution and mathematics. Professing belief in evolution at this juncture amounts to the same thing as claiming not to believe in modern mathematics, probability theory, and logic. It's basically ignorant.

Evolution has been so thoroughly discredited at this point that you assume nobody is defending it because they believe in it anymore, and that they are defending it because they do not like the prospects of having to defend or explain some expect of their lifestyles to God, St. Peter, or some other member of that crowd.

To these people I say, you've still got a problem. The problem is that evolution, as a doctrine, is so overwhelmingly STUPID that, faced with a choice of wearing a sweatshirt with a scarlet letter A for Adulteror, F for Fornicator or some such traditional design, or or a big scarlet letter I for IDIOT, you'd actually be better off sticking with one of the traditional choices because, as Clint Eastwood noted in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:

God Hates IDIOTS Too...

The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.

Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.

For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.

In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.

All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.

And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.

Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.

Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.

And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record (despite the BS claims of talk.origins "crew" and others of their ilk) to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:



You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.

But it gets even stupider.

Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.

Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).

Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:

• It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). In other words, the clowns promoting this BS are claiming that the very lack of intermediate fossils supports the theory. Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could SEE them, they wouldn't BE witches...) This kind of logic is less inhibiting than the logic they used to teach in American schools. For instance, I could as easily claim that the fact that I'd never been seen with Tina Turner was all the proof anybody should need that I was sleeping with her. In other words, it might not work terribly well for science, but it's great for fantasies...
  
  
  
  
• PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...
  
  
• PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.
  
  
• PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.
  
  
• For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.
  

The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.

And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:



They don't even bother to try to provide a mechanism or technical explaination of any sort for this "punk-eek"


They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:



Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.

I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that? What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?