Inconnu

My search feature seems disabled and I am sure this question must have already been asked.

Why is it necessary to believe in a god? No matter what you believe, any end result that is obtained via belief can be obtained without a god belief. We dont need god to explain how the world came about, about life, death, humanity and inhumanity. We dont need god to explain why we are here and why things happen, and the way they happen. We dont need god to wax lyrical about kindness, generosity and friendship. We dont need god for these things because we dont need the answers, we just want the answers. Take away the want and you remove the god.

All these things and much more are defined, attainable, explainable, rejectable, ignorable and executable by people without a glimmer of mysicism. From science to human "feelings", there is no need of a god. Even without science, we dont actually NEED to explain and reason these things out, we CHOOSE to, as we also CHOOSE to, or not, believe in a god. We dont need science but we choose to do it because we are a curious breed, but its not a cosmological truth that science must exist and must be pursued, we choose to, its our makeup. There are things to be discovered, but they dont HAVE to be discovered, there are no rules. Any why question does not need an answer, its just a human peculiarity that yearns for one. IF EVERY QUESTION WAS LEFT UNANSWERED, THE UNIVERSE WOULD NOT CEASE!!!
All that is left is the threat of eternal damnation and life after death, hmmm. I will not be threatened and I will die eventually and accept that it will be the utter end of me, and care less.
If there is no need of a god, there may as well not be a god. The fact that questions do not have to have answers is my rather odd sounding proof of the non existance of god just as science would not exist unless we decide it should be so!

Darth Dane

My questions along the same vein is this:

Why do we need a God to tell us how to behave?

Haven't we taught ourselves by now?

Why do we need a God to tell us why natural disaters occur?

Even if God was the originator of tornados, it doesn't remove the effects of teh tornado, and the same goes if you don't believe in a God, the effects of teh tornado remains teh same.

The cause will be undetermined, but it doesn't matter what the cause is, because we still need to protect ourselves.

What is important is not the cause(past) but the effect(present), what and how we deal with tornados NOW is more important than where it came from, it seems more practical anyways.





DD - Love Spliff

Jet Grind

I answered this in another thread, here's what I said.

Believing in God gives people hope when they fall on hard times. When something terrible happends in your life, it feels comforting to believe that there is an all-powerful being caring for you. That's why I'm not particularly anti-religious. Like drgus, religion can serve some good purpouses.

Inconnu

I must learn to be more concise

Pyrrho

I think it is mostly just what people are told when they are growing up. Those who are taught to be religious are usually religious when they are older, which is really the same as most aspects of our lives. The way people are raised affects pretty much every aspect of their lives. For example, many people have an aversion to eating insects, but not an aversion to eating cows. This is generally because, when they were young, they were conditioned to believe that eating cows is a good thing, and eating insects is 'icky'. And, due to early conditioning, people regard their own preferences as "natural" and "right". Most people cannot even consider the alternative with anything approaching fairness. This has nothing whatsoever to do with rational thought. The same idea applies to more extreme cases: Those who were raised in cannibal societies have generally regarded cannibalism as right and proper; those who have been raised in societies that reject such practices tend to object to cannibalism.

Most people don't apply reason to much of what they do, so why should religion be any different? (Most of the time when someone claims to be applying "reason" to what they do, they really are just rationalizing what they do, rather than entering into a genuine examination of the question of whether what they are doing makes sense or not. I defy anyone to come up with a good REASON why eating a cow is good while eating insects is bad.)

"Man is a rational animal" is mostly a myth. (It is worth remembering that even Aristotle, who is credited with saying that man is a rational animal, did not think it applied to most people. And it obviously doesn't.)

diana

Ironic that it's the times when there's the least evidence of deistic intervention in their lives that they find the most comfort in believing.

That was very concise, Inconnu. I never thought about it quite like that before.

That's downright quotable.

Thank you.

d

JerryM

Human beings will always want to know things. Our brains have evolved to seek explanations, and if an explanation isn't obvious, we'll invent one. What's difficult is how to convince people that supernatural explanations are useless and counterproductive. We'll never eliminate weird beliefs entirely, because for many people, they are psychologically comfortable. But the quality of science education needs improvement, and the media should resist programming which promotes or otherwise sustains unscientific beliefs (and I'm thinking about entertainment involving angels, or spirits, or demons, or ghosts, or reincarnation, or aliens, etc.)