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Poll: What is your religion?

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Re: Poll: What is your religion?

#301

Post by bad_user »

djacobs wrote: post #226
bad_user wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fluctuate constantly between being an agnostic and being a believer in God. Truth of the matter is, when misfortune/tragedy strikes (like the loved ones having health problems) it really helps to believe in God. My wife just gave birth to a premature child. He's a boy and he's in very good health, but he was born at 30 weeks (now he's at 32). Her water broke at 27 weeks. We were on the cutting-edge with this pregna…

1. I'm not sure why forcing yourself to believe in god (if that is even possible—I don't think it is) helps in times of tragedy. One, you know you're just telling yourself stuff to make yourself feel better. This, in itself, can't feel good. Two, it is not comforting to know that there's this benevolent god up there who exists but is doing nothing to stop your tragic situation. 2. I know of no documented miracles. In…

> 2. I know of no documented miracles. In fact, such a proposition is unproveable, as is the claim that "miracles do happen".

Thing is, anything can happen ... it's just a matter of probability. Think of any impossible event (like an angel, i.e. a shiny humanoid with wings, integrating in front of your eyes) and that's possible. It's just highly unlikely.

In that light I consider miracles to be very unlikely events. Life on earth is such an event, especially since we haven't found proof that life exists on other planets yet, although we have found the proper conditions (like water).

And if life exists on such a planet, did it manage to evolve like us? This is even more unlikely since we may not have the means to observe bacteria from a distance, but we could observe artificial lights and non-random radio signals coming from other planets.

And then ... if we manage to build interstellar ships and expand to other planets, that will be prof in itself that no other intelligent beings managed to do that ... simply because aliens had a lot of time to expand to earth before we appeared (after all, if you have enough room to expand, the growth rate is exponential).

You can say that life happened by chance, but currently intuition suggests otherwise.

Not only that ... but the miracles you witness everyday stop being miracles. Babies being born are a miracle, simply because this probably doesn't happen in any other of the billions of galaxies. And you being able to transcend your original condition and reason about such things is another.

Re: Poll: What is your religion?

#303

Post by jswinghammer »

etherael wrote: post #198
jswinghammer wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way I know about to get started is to pray which is hard for anyone. Say hi sometime. If God is there he'll say hi back. You know what freaks me out? The idea of seeing an angel. No idea why but it freaks me out good. I hear kids often say they see them and it freaks me out whenever they tell me that. I am no one a kid would ever try to impress mind you. I just hear these things because kids are so free to s…

This sounds like you just started having an internal dialogue with yourself labeling the personification on the other end of your consciousness as "god". If this is the case, and this is really all it takes to qualify as having "spoken to god" then probably the vast majority of humanity have done it. They could even push it a little further and say ludicrous stuff like the bible is true, etc etc etc.

I admit that possibility freely. I'm not sure what you're trying to say that I didn't already. I do claim the Bible is true as well based on these experiences.

I'm not sure a 22 year old programmer goes from reading Russell and Nietzsche one day to following Jesus the next day without something having happened. Whether that's psychological or spiritual something happened to me.

Re: Poll: What is your religion?

#304

Post by loewenskind »

revolvingcur wrote: post #31
csomar wrote: post #11

Interesting question. I have lot of theories regarding religion and I wonder if the HN community is interested discussing them. Just one question now (for Atheists): Why don't you believe in God. Do you have a good reason? Is it because it doesn't interest you? Is it because of a scientific theory that proved to you that God don't exist?

From someone raised in the Christian church: I was taught from a very young age certain things about God and man: that God was all-knowing and all-powerful; that God was the creator of everything; that man was irrevocably prone to sin and therefore needed a savior; that God chose certain people to save; that heaven was the ultimate destination for those who were saved; etc... As I grew older, I began to realize that…

>much of the unrest in civilization is now caused by the differences in religious prescription rather than differences in morality.

[citation needed]

Most of the unrest in civilization has the same source it's always had: fighting over wealth and/or power. Often leaders of these fights will claim some religious reason but what you have to ask yourself is; if you took religion out of the equation would they stop fighting or would they come up with some other reason.

I presume what you had in mind was the US vs. Iraq/Afghanistan but given that we know there were no terrorists (nor WMDs) in Iraq what "religious" component was there exactly? There are some pretty obvious "power" components though.

Re: Poll: What is your religion?

#305

Post by tome »

_polos_ wrote: post #297

Wrong question. The real one would be "what is your faith?", because all of us need to believe in something (that is, nobody is auto-sufficient, we all depend on many many things outside of us, we base our existence on a long history etc.). And (very important), if you ask "what is your faith/belief?", nobody can escape the question saying "not relevant".

Interesting point. I'd like to see that poll. I'd also like to see a poll "What sort of atheist/agnostic are you?". I'm sure there are lots of interesting different sorts of thinking to be discussed along the same lines as we've seen here.

Re: Poll: What is your religion?

#306

Post by jswinghammer »

pavs wrote: post #187
jswinghammer wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well there is evidence but it's not evidence that you're presently accepting. The Bible is a sort of evidence and people's testimony is as well. For my part I believe in God because he speaks to me regularly and I'm the last person you'd expect that to happen to. I was minding my own business when I started hearing from God. Everyone I knew at the time was totally shocked and it took me over two years to accept what…

> I split my time between serving adults (pastoring type stuff), children (Sunday school stuff), and the poor (I run a temporary food pantry). I also run a business to support my family, help my community, and build wealth. I keep busy and wouldn't change anything. Lets say, for the sake of argument. You don't believe in god. What would stop you from doing the above things you mentioned? Would it be fair for me to ma…

Nothing stops me from doing anything but I did none of those things prior to following Jesus. So the notion of the motivation behind works is important to understand. Also I typically give myself a B- to a C+ for what I do. I'm not always great at it.

Faith without works is dead. Works without faith is just work. Faith and works is a living faith supported by a living God. If you have faith but do nothing in response then you should work that out. If you have no faith and works Jesus says that you already got your reward and you're all set. He has nothing to give you. I pretty much summed up the book of James in the Bible.

As for the afterlife everyone who follows Jesus gets a pretty awesome deal and while there is some hinting at a bonus for doing well it's not really that interesting because level 1 heaven is pretty awesome. There is a law of diminishing marginal utility after all.

So to be clear works get you little and faith is the source of everything.

Re: Poll: What is your religion?

#307

Post by alan-crowe »

csomar wrote: post #11

Interesting question. I have lot of theories regarding religion and I wonder if the HN community is interested discussing them. Just one question now (for Atheists): Why don't you believe in God. Do you have a good reason? Is it because it doesn't interest you? Is it because of a scientific theory that proved to you that God don't exist?

cats have four legs, but Gods has four letters. Sometimes a word is only a word and when a word isn't a pointer it is futile to discuss whether it dangles.

Re: Poll: What is your religion?

#308

Post by semanticist »

philwelch wrote: post #151
hugh3 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Paganism a religion, or a large collection of (now defunct and poorly-understood) religions? What are the ontological claims of paganism? Precisely which supernatural beings does paganism assert the existence of?

There's actual paganism, which is gone. If you ever hear someone say "nobody seriously thinks Thor exists anymore", they're talking about paganism. In recent decades, people (for whatever reason) decided to try and restart paganism--if you meet a "pagan" today, they're actually following one of these reconstituted religions. I personally have trouble taking neopaganism seriously, largely because I've never known any…

If your only experience of OSS was Richard Stallman, you might dismiss everyone who contributes to open source software as a bearded lunatic.

There's a lot of very serious and studious Pagans out there, but they don't tend to be as obviously 'look at me, I'm SPOOKY' as the kids you're talking about. For a trivially easy to find example, consider the Pagan Federation. In Scotland they work with government interfaith groups and are consulted for things like religious diversity training material and non-denominational chapels in hospitals.

Most Pagans I know look a lot more like RMS than someone who shops at Hot Topic.

Re: Poll: What is your religion?

#309

Post by juliend2 »

petervandijck wrote: post #95
juliend2 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who created him? I just believe he's eternal.

So you find it hard to believe that nature/the universe can just "be", there has to be an entity that created it, but you find it easy to believe that God can just "be", correct?

Yes

Re: Poll: What is your religion?

#310

Post by ugh »

juliend2 wrote: post #46
dannytatom wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no reason to believe in a god, and no evidence to support it. I'd like to know why people do believe in a god, as not believing in one is fairly easy. So, a question to your question, is there a good reason you believe in it (assuming you do)? Edit: petervandijck said it better above me.

I personally cannot imagine a creation made by pure hazard to be this beautiful. I know that beauty is subjective. But i find that nature is so wonderfully created that -- for me -- it's hard to believe that there is no artist behind it. Like, when i see a nice piece of code, i know that there is a really good programmer behind it. :-)

We are built by natural selection to fit into this universe. Our perception of beauty seems like a useful hack to find our way in this universe. Probably recycled by the brain to be used for very different things (from sexual attraction to finding tasty food) and maybe even misfiring at times (when listening to music or reading poetry).
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