River

TiredJim

Nowhere did I say you had to prove beauty or the balance of nature. What the hell are you even talking about?

For the first section of your post, you didn't show how anything you spoke of proved, or even related to, religion.

For the second section of your post, you made a claim about every human being on the planet, and then gave nothing to prove it true.

In either case, I have no burden of proof, and YOU are the one being arrogant.

aatayyab

patiently awaiting some SANE reasoning from anyone for NOT believing in God, especially TiredJim, since you should tired enough by now fighting over with "River"

Many thanks "River" your words definitely float like river on my emotions but I need more REALISTIC reasons from you other than just quoting Quran.

Farren

aatayyab

I'll try, without trotting out some of the stuff you've no doubt seen before.

First some background. I went from Catholic through Hare Krishna, miscellaneous mysticism and yes, dabbled with Islam before becoming an athiest.

I hasten to add that I don't define myself by my disbelief in God. Its not central to my existence. I have little or no burning resentment of religion and I believe that happiness comes from focusing on what you believe, not what you don't, so my athiesm is more a lack of interest and faith than a militant stance. I hang around here for the open minded mindset and intelligent dialog more than the athiesm itself.

I also feel I can empathise with you slightly because one of my best friends is a former muslim who was muslim for most of the time I've known him, and has only recently shifted to, as he puts it, a "Unitarian" stance - i.e. still believing in God but believing there's something fishy about imams, mullah's, prophets and books that claim to have a monopoly on faith.

Firstly, you've obviously from yourt posts at least stepped back and said "But what if I wasn't born into this religion? Would I still believe in the same thing. How would Islam look to me if I was introduced to it much later in life?"

Perhaps you've examined why people believe in other religions and asked "Why do they believe that. Have they been mislead? Brainwashed from birth?" or even the hard possibility "If I can consider that others have been misled, why can I not consider that I and my kin have not similarly been misled?"

Of course, your belief provides a handy catch-all for such things. Satan, ever present, has a vested interest in misleading humanity. But this is the belief of Christians too, and Jews and Parsi. So we're back to square one. And if the possibility of being mislead exists, then rationally the possibility that Satan (the same for both Christians and Muslims) has mislead Muslims so that Christ (as messiah, not prophet) will not allow them entry into heaven.

The problem is of course that you can't verify who has been mislead by any rational means. The reasoning behind different and opposing beliefs in the world stops dead at the simple and dogmatic statement of faith.

Now consider another dillema. There are Christians who deeply and devoutly believe in thier faith and constantly try to live lives that are moral in the terms thier faith dictates. Jews, too. Don't doubt it.

If you can accept this, that there are people living in good conscience and devout belief in ideas that deny some of the necessary principles of Islam, then you accept that there are people who in good conscience will be rejected by God.

Is this compatible with what you have been taught about God. It certainly didn't make sense to me when I slid into apostasy, and it still doesn't.

So this is my first argument, which may be reinforced forthwith: the qualities we are taught to believe God has are logically incompatible and practically irreconcilable with the practice of the faiths ostensibly dedicated to that God. Not in itself an argument against God, but definitely an argument against the faiths (religious structures, books of law and dogma, practices) who claim to speak his truth.

Second argument: God is clearly and uneqivocally shaped in the image of man. The religions of the book get around this by saying that man is shaped in the image of God (Im not sure if Islam does, but I suspect it is so).

If you were not born of the religions of the book, and someone approached you an gave you just the basics: "God is the infinite and ever merciful creator of us all", what kind of God would you imagine? Would he be jealous? Have the capacity for anger? I have met people who never get angry. Never. If God can be angry, is he less at peace than some ordinary humans?

Would a God imagined by an innocent give his creations these terrible qualities? Jealousy? Fury? Hatred? Envy? Then punish them for acting on the emotions he has equipped to betray them? Advocate that this one loses a hand, that one is stoned to death?

I respectfully submit that only the blinkers of faith prevent you from seeing that, were you an innocent, you would not imagine a truly infinite being to be so petty and nasty, and see that the God of the religions of the book is man's projection on the heavens, not heaven's light shining on earth.

Believers in the religions of the Book see religion as a bulwark against the world sliding into decline, but for those on the outside the reverse is true. Because your beliefs tell you that the beliefs of others are evil and wrong, and set you up for conflict, whereas ours tell us that we must each make our own decisions, take responsibility for our own destiny, and allow the possibility of being wrong all the time, rather than clinging to a fixed set of ideas come hell or high water.

Now, if I were a god, and had created an intelligent being, I would want him to grow, and learn and change, and use the brains I gave him to question everything and becoming greater with each step. I would not create a puny being who's mind was shackled and who's path was set by people who lived in another time, in another world.

So, the religions that claim to speak God's truth give us a God who

- gives his love conditionally (only to those who prostrate themselves before him), when some humans give their love unconditionally
- Shackles his creations minds and limits their intellectual freedom
- Gives his creations powerful urges and flaws to make them stumble, then
- instructs his worshippers to punish them cruelly when they do, like a child playing a nasty game
- Creates an opposite number (the devil) to mislead them, and
- allows him to mislead billions, in good conscience,
- and finally, represents himself through peadophile priests,
- authoritarian fathers who sell their daughters for marriage before they even reach puberty,
- husbands who throw acid on their wives faces for infidelity, with impunity in some societies
- Gun crazy, militant baptists who want to either exterminate or convert everyone in the middle east
- Fierce mullahs who advocate utter extermination of the jews,
- and despite this refuses to reveal himself or actually get involved, show even a shred of proof, to the victims of these horrors, but reserves punishment for them if they lapse in their faith

Can you see it? This is not the description of a God, it is the description of an unbalanced parent, an sometimes-loving, sometimes cruel and irrational creator. It is clearly the creation of man, maintained by a priestly cast for there own ends, and sustained and given succour by millions more out of fear than hope.

It admits an inability to understand or accept that there can be a universal love and beauty that doesn't require hate and ugliness to complement and make it evident.

The buddhist faith, for example, has no devils, no "enemy of God and man", no "Evil", no "Hell", no stoneable offenses. Neither do humanists. Now if you were innocent of all beliefs and free from cultural pressure, to which would you turn for truth and beauty?

I submit that humanism is not an easy way out. It is the final destination of someone who truly wants to know the truth, and live in it, and celebrate it. Religion is the darkness, masquerading as the light.

River

-Farren

Is it not possible that man is at wrong and not " the Book"?.For example G-d created man for a reason. Yet, we can not honestly say he created us in vain. Look at the classic verse frome the Holy Quran.

I have Behold, thy Lord said to the angels: "I will create a vicegerent on earth. They said: "Wilt Thou place therein one who will make mischief therein and shed blood? Whilst we do celebrate Thy praise and glorify Thy holy (name)?" He said, "I know what ye know not" (HQ 2:30).

I understand that many want to verify G-d . There is only 3 logical ways of Proving G-d's existence.

1) The Universe and Cosmos. Unfortunately pointing at what may be the Obvious , no longer appears obvious after Neo-Darwinian Propaganda.

2) The Quran. This is the Uncreated Word of G-d and is the only religious text that has remained unchanged for 1400 years. But Unfortunately. You do not want this proof either....okay next.

3) The Messiah. Jesus Christ is said to be the Created Word of G-d. He is called both the Sign , the Messiah, and The Word of G-d in the Quran. Only one problem I can not present you this proof. His 2nd coming in Damascus, Syria is Imminent, but still there is a few years left.

So....How can I prove the existence of G-d. Verily, G-d will not just unveil himself. The Creation and design argument is quite obvious but few people still see this harmony. The Quran is self evident, yet the Muslims today do not adhere to it. and Jesus Christ is still in heaven.....So , you guys have placed me in a difficult place. I can not show Proof without using Proof....errrr...but still yet proving that G-d doesnt exist is a much much more difficult argument to support.

Demosthenes

aatayyab,

I'll try to keep the post brief and to the point. No doubt you'd rather not wade through extravagant details which you can easily research yourself.

The reason I became an atheist and an infidel so to speak was because I had to be honest to myself.

Simple as that. But the journey itself wasn't quite that simple.

I was raised as a Catholic but I've always had weak beliefs. The earliest recollection of realization of the contradictions in religions I can recall was when I was in second grade or so. I was reading a book of Greek mythologies. I noticed how their conception of afterlife was vastly different from Catholic's. That got me to wondering, if both of the cultures had such different views, then how can they be both right? I then made a quite leap of realization, frightening to me at that time; what if both of them are wrong and there's nothing out there except our desires?

It was years before I conceptualized those thoughts. I fell in with the new age thing for a while but fortunately I thought my way out of all that shit and learned how to be intellectually honest with myself.

What I see is a beautiful universe described by a set of laws and we the human beings are part of those laws. There is so much beauty and ugliness in the world. I've always grown up intensely fascinated with science and mathematics as well as art. A concept of a loving and benevolent God is a beautiful and warm idea. But sadly there is nothing to indicate that it's any true. So, I accept that there isn't anything except ourselves.

Perhaps that's a even better thing, because we have only ourselves to create beauty and desires. In other word we make our lives with every ounce of our sweat with no other supernatural aid. Would you rather have somebody always looking over you and checking on his list whether you've been naughty? Or to stand forth on your own with only your fellow humans' help and garnered resources to stride our way resourcefully into the universe?

There's plenty of resources to explore and understand our position better. All I ask of you is to be honest to yourself.

There are a few good links for your convenience

Ragged Trouser Philosopher

positive atheism

magazine

For a spiritual bent

Pantheism

and a humanism site

Institute for Humanism

and lastly an interesting article at nytimes.com

Confession of a Lonely Atheist

I hope I haven't frightened you away, I just wanted to offer you the best of what we have

TiredJim

Don't believe in God because he can't be proven, or even begun to be proven.

That is of course not the same as "believe God doesn't exist," because that also can't be proven. Just sit back and embrace the ignorance that we all share.

Philosoft

I can't really pin down the focus of this thread - there appear to be at least two different topics - so I'm sending it to GRD for the time being...

Magus55

No one is born muslim. I don't even claim that anyone is born Christian. Judaism is the only one of the Abrahamic religions where you are a Jew by birth ( although, not necessarily a follower of that religion).

Religion is something you choose, not something you are born with.

Straight Hate

Has your faith made your life (and the lives of those around you) better?

When I apply that question to my religious past, it's a concrete 'no'.

There are many ways to approach this issue. In my view (for what it's worth), you're miles ahead of most people by actually wanting to hear what us infidels have to say. Thank you for that.