Because I can at least see spaghetti without DMT.
Yeah sorry, there’s nothing.
But we should behave towards each other as we’d like to be treated. Otherwise it doesn’t work.
Now, there’s this unsolved issue of people harming all of us…
I spiritually disbelieve in everyone’s religion
I just have a deeply rooted appreciation for pasta.
I have personally experienced librarians and they have helped me when in need.
I do not really know. I was not raised in a practicing family, and my country is very secular.
Philosophically, I’m agnostic. I’m not convinced either by arguments for or against the existence of God. I think a being which could exist outside time and space is not approachable by our reason.
But I can’t stay neutral, the question is too important. And I feel the presence of God in my life. This feeling came first, and when I tried to understand it, I went to the culturally nearest place of worship, and it was Protestantism, and I felt at home. I read the Bible, not as a theology manual, but as the story of people who try to understand the presence of God; sometimes they’re right, sometimes they’re wrong, but their quest is mine, and theirs inspires mine.
I rejected christianity sometime as an early teen.
I don’t remember my full reasoning but I did not like the idea of getting up early Sunday morning to do the church stuff.
It never got replaced by anything.
I find it funny that there was a time where atheists on the internet were just called edge lords (or still, idk) for not believing in god and voicing that opinion. I remember being like 8 years old and thinking: wow that is stupid, why would anyone believe that. That was pre internet, i didn’t have to be influenced by other edge lords and i didn’t read any books about it. But somehow it’s in certain parts of the world weirder to come to that conclusion than believing in the all mighty super being.
I don’t. Not Buddhist anymore
Buddhism looked appealing to me until I actually looked into it (I come from a Western culture)
What didn’t you like?
My religion is fundamentally based on the idea of gay catgirl supremacy and worship. Service to the catgirls may come in the form of headpats and sacrifices are accepted in the form of baked juicy chicken :3
The sun is real.
How can you definitively prove it, though?
I’ve read through the Bible cover to cover three times. Amplified, NIV, and New King James with a copy of Strongs.
I’m an atheist now.
I understand the reaction. The Bible is sold by a lot of churches as “the word of God”, and if it’s the case, God is a lying asshole. But nowhere in the Bible it is written that the Bible is the word of God; according to the Bible the word of God is Jesus-Christ so… it may not be the right approach according to the Bible itself.
I love the Bible, I read it (almost) every day, I use it as a guide in my material and spiritual lives, I studied the story of its interpretation in the university, I even thought about making that my speciality. Yet I don’t understand how someone could believe in biblical inerrancy. It’s very clearly a human work, written by error-prone normal humans. I believe that God spoke to its redactors, but it’s still a human work. And ours is (according to me) to listen to the voice of God through the human form; and that’s why we have the Church, as it’s not something one can do alone.
What made you an atheist?
Not op, but for me it was the fact that the supposedly ineffable word of God turned out to be pretty effible
It wasn’t the first step towards losing faith, or even the last, but it was pretty troubling to a young me
I think they are saying reading those books are the reason.
Because someone has to; otherwise it wouldn’t be a religion.
When I was a little kid, I took what I was told at face value and didn’t question it.
Magical thinking is normal for little kids. By about age 7 you’re supposed to have grown out of that shit though - like it’s normal to still enjoy the concept of magic, but there comes a point when you should have a pretty intuitive understanding that it’s fiction.
For some reason we give religion a pass.
Some old dude in a dress raving about how ghosts built the pyramids is instantly recognized as crazy; but some old dude raving about how the chief master ghost shat out our entire universe in a week is… somehow worthy of respect?
So, my religion is no religion: I believe what can be tested and verified.
The most concise test to disprove the notion of God is one of simple logic: the Epicurean paradox, which recognizes the mythology of God being composed of three core pillars: that he is 100% good (complete absence of evil), 100% powerful (his will is our reality), and 100% omniscient (he knows everything about everything)… but despite those three pillars, it takes no time at all to recognize evil behavior all around us, and for evil to be able to exist in our reality, one of those pillars must always fall.
He either doesn’t know evil is happening in his universe, is powerless to stop it, or is okay with it.
Every single time a religious person attempts to address the Epicurean paradox, the just shuffle the pillars to fill in the gap left open by the missing third (feel free to take that as a challenge if you think you’ve got the answer).
Anyway, it became clear that at the very least, my religion wasn’t being honest about the nature of its own god, and that realization was the final nail in the coffin for me.
I think for some people the scale of God simply doesn’t compute, which is why old man with big beard image persists. Look at the size of our galaxy, and the size of the universe as a whole. If any being was the creator of such a vast and complex universe as ours, that being would be to us like we are to a “Hello world” script.
The analogy is flawed, but that is what we are saying if we believe in a being capable of creating our universe, defining its laws and bending them to create us. We could not truly begin to comprehend such a being, and largely we are left to our own. However, if you believe, then this being does care about us in some way. And it has shown us this through inspiring humans to share its path for our improvement.
That is the reason I believe in the teachings of the Christ. The path of loving your enemies, of caring for everyone as one would your own family, forgiveness, that is the path to a better world, revealed to us through a man and his story. I am unable to fully live up to such ideals, but like Data says, the struggle yields its own rewards. Those who take such ideas to heart are worthy in the eyes of the creator, because if all people were such, there would be little suffering in our world. We have the means to reduce our suffering, but we choose not to. God could, remove it for us, but then we will not become the free and good beings we are meant to be.
You don’t need God to have such ideals as the Christ demonstrated, but I find such ideas so much better than any of the alternatives, that I suspect they have divine origin. And even if they don’t, if I follow them, then I will contribute to making the world better regardless. God could take away my struggle and suffering, but that would leave me still flawed and unable to improve, and so it would be for all humanity as well.
(feel free to take that as a challenge if you think you’ve got the answer).
Muslim here and sure (I’ve wanted to try this for a while now): The criteria for the first pillar are arbitrary. What’s being proposed is that a good creator wouldn’t allow their creation to suffer, or—taking it a step further—wouldn’t create a world where suffering is even possible. However, that would require human (or, really, lite in general) not to exist; give humans free will and suffering will happen. You could argue then that the act of creating humans was evil, which would be logically consistent, and in that case my answer is: I’ll drop (your conception of) the first pillar. God knows about suffering and is capable of stopping it but tolerates it for one purpose or another.
I used to, because my parents did and I went to church and all that.
But then I started to actually think about it.
Now I don’t believe in anything supernatural.
There are parts of nature we don’t understand (yet) but I don’t think there’s any ‘higher power’ that created the universe, and especially not earth or humankind specifically.My religion isn’t really based on belief, just practice. And I do the practices because they make me feel better and more connected.
