Why don't you just say "not embracing a belief" ?

I've never seen god
Never heard god
Never seen a miracle
Almost everything I experience in my daily life can be explained by science.

But everything I know about god came from.....man. And generally the people telling me about god wanted my money, or my free labor in addition to my blind belief.

I finally just decided that if an all powerful god can't do something to clear up all this confusion and make his presence obvious then.....either he's not worth worring about or he just doesn't exist.

I can't accept that there is a way to eternally sustain a body, as is taught in Mormonism. If we are eternally spirits in the body of Christ worshipping god and Jesus I choose to reject that. Sounds like hell.

Also there is no evidence of an afterlife. It makes more sense to me that out brain contains our consciousness and when it dies our consciousness dies.
Also, I can't accept that any god would allow millions of people, his so called children, to starve to death, be murdered, children to be raped or beaten.
So a lot of things. Sorry. Got a little carried away. The main one is how would a body be sustained eternally.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/11/2013 11:39PM by NewPerspective.

I think when physics began to show that a god wasn't necessary; that life could form on its own, without the help of a creator.

If the universe and life can form without the need for any god, then why complicate things by adding a god into the mix? Because then one must explain where God came from.

The likely, simple answer, is that there is no Creator.

Saying that there is a power beyond my ability to conceive or even attempt to conceive is insulting to my intelligence. On one hand I'm supposed to know Jesus and God personally, but on the other God works in mysterious ways so I shouldn't even try to comprehend him/her/it.

Speaking for myself, I will never say that there is no possibility of the existence of a god. That is trying to prove a negative. What I can say with 100% certainty is that there is nobody yet in the whole history of humanity who has come up with anything like independently verifiable evidence of such a being.

The central problem has dawned on me over several decades. It is this: God, as usually presented by most God-believers, is in reality a reification of each "believer's" sense of self/world view. It's as simple as that. So to say to one of "them" that there is no God is to tell them that their Egos have limitations. That is something they simply cannot endure. So they brand every challenge to their Egos as the ultimate manifestation of Satanic influence.

. . . especially when there exists empirical data to explain given physical phenomena--the religious explanations of which believers accept by faith instead of challenging those religious beliefs with the application of actual facts.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 10/12/2013 12:17AM by steve benson.

Along the lines of what NewPerspective said, how does the energy source which is God sustain its energy forever? Where is the source of its energy?

We have no examples in the Universe of anything which has been around forever. How does this god get a pass and not have to live within the known laws of physics, where everything, including our Sun will eventually run out of energy to sustain itself.

Thank you. You said this a lot more eloquently than I did. But yes. This.

Why can't these superstitious people grasp the notion that we might very well be the first of our kind? Or the only ones of our kind?

There has to be a first intellectual species. Why couldn't it be us? It seems like that would be an honor of sorts.

. . . the mathematical odds that we represent the "first intellectual species" and the "only one of our kind" is probably not true--but it is rather egocentric. :)

Well put, Steve. How about this alternative supposition? By the time a species achieves interstellar travel, that species has evolved intelligence beyond the biological, and perhaps even material, state?

I'd been a very active protestant church goer, worker, believer, all my life, yet never hd any confirmational evidence that theres anyone listening to my prayers. Nothing, nada, zip, but I kept trying, believing that I just wasnt listening hard enough, believing enough, or dutiful enough to be able to hear/feel/see/whatever some supernatural response.

I gave up after the lowest point, the immensely painful experience of my wonderful mother's painful death from pneumonia. She was in and out of semi consciousness, trying so hard to respond, but lack of oxygen caused significant brain damage... it was horrible to watch and wait. And where was this supposedly loving deity/parent? Silent. I was alone with her when she died, and the utter aloneness, pleading for *his* presence, comfort - nothing, undeniable stark nothingness. What kind of a supposedly caring heavenly parent or just god would do that?

That was it. And old Serena promptly fell apart for a little while... I had no personal connection to Mormonism, but I was angry. I'd been duped with the most threadbare, whiney excuses foewhat was wrong with ME, that I wasn't perceptive enough. Bullsh*t. Its all a crock of sh*t. Then all the rest of the many semi-shelved items fell into place, and that was it.

I never in my life, either as a Lutheran or as a Mormon, felt there was anybody or anything "out there" listening or responding to my prayers. I never got comfort from a god, never felt a supernatural being was there for me when I needed it and never saw any proof of anything in nature that confirmed an intelligent design.

Not kidding.
As a Mormon I'd had a "personal relationship with Satan" for so long (you know, he's everywhere, on 24/7, in your head all the time, always rigging temptations just for you, and quite a bit more diligent at his job than the more laissez-faire...father, son, and holy ghost...who apparently take Sabbaths off more than every seventh day, while Satan still comes in to the office)...
When I was ready to let go of god, not kidding at all, I was hung up on Satan. I believed in god because I believed in satan.
Mormonism's claim on "knowing the nature of the devil" is just as insidiously manipulative as its claims about god are.

Satan figured in for me as well. I'd tossed out Mormon/Christian god and decided I could believe in "a force for good in the universe" i.e. not much of a god. My hubby said for me to believe in a force for good, I had to believe in a force for bad as well since it was obvious both good and bad existed. Oh. No way was I going to walk around fearing an evil entity that could control me and my thoughts like I had as a Mormon. Both halves of the silliness had to go.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/12/2013 11:54AM by Dorothy.

I stopped believing in any of the God manifestations in the Bible when I was an early teen I guess. Listening to the stories surrounding God and his influence, I couldn't help but pick holes in the stories. They seemed illogical, implausible and often make a perfect God out to be petty, childish and malevolent.

I held onto the belief that there could be a God despite the obvious flaws in the Bible for a long time. The Book of Mormon was pretty much irrelevant to me, as it is to the Mormon cult if you read it and consider how different the teachings within it are from those "revealed" in the D&C.

The idea that a perfect being created us came into question first when revealed that we and Chimpanzees are a couple of very close twigs on the branch with mammals on it, and that humans have quite a few design flaws that a perfect designer wouldn't have included.

The more I learn the less I believe there is a God. To believe in God it seems you have to stop trying to understand life and how the universe works. God-belief is an intellectual cul-de-sac.

Fear of going to hell.

Then I decided I really didn't care about hell.

I'm sorry, serena. That's awful. I'd say that sort of thing was my first clue that there really wasn't anyone listening to my prayers.

My family was in turmoil for a few years and we received no relief at all, in spite of a lot of begging, crying and pleading in my prayers. I was at the point where I didn't even want to be here anymore. Life was too difficult. But, nothing. No answers at all. It was a very lonely feeling.

Catching up on science finished it off for me.

Anthony Flew, atheist, believes in God. Why? Because of DNA. DNA is information. He doesn't believe in an activist God. He is a Deist.

A British philosophy professor who has been a leading champion of atheism for more than a half-century has changed his mind. He now believes in God more or less based on scientific evidence, and says so on a video released Thursday.

At age 81, after decades of insisting belief is a mistake, Antony Flew has concluded that some sort of intelligence or first cause must have created the universe. A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature, Flew said in a telephone interview from England. Flew said he's best labeled a deist like Thomas Jefferson, whose God was not actively involved in people's lives... "[God] could be a person in the sense of a being that has intelligence and a purpose, I suppose."

Flew first made his mark with the 1950 article "Theology and Falsification"... Over the years, Flew proclaimed the lack of evidence for God while teaching at Oxford, Aberdeen, Keele, and Reading universities in Britain, in visits to numerous U.S. and Canadian campuses and in books, articles, lectures and debates. There was no one moment of change but a gradual conclusion over recent months for Flew... Yet biologists' investigation of DNA "has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved," Flew says in the new video, "Has Science Discovered God?"...

The first hint of Flew's turn was a letter to the August-September issue of Britain's Philosophy Now magazine. "It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism," he wrote... Flew's "name and stature are big. Whenever you hear people talk about atheists, Flew always comes up," [atheistic webpage author Richard] Carrier said [infidels.org]... A Methodist minister's son, Flew became an atheist at 15.

http://www.adherents.com/people/pf/Anthony_Flew.html

As I understand it, Flew's stance is, basically, that the complexity of life means it must have been made by some super complex powerful god.

The problem of courses is, he is saying that a complex thing,
"A", requires something even more complex, "B", to create "A". Of course this means that "B" is so complex that it requires something even more complex, "C" to create "B" and it goes on and on.

Come back and present Flew as evidence of whatever point you are trying to make, when he can explain how the first "designer" came into existence.

I guess my "sticking point" was 27 years of living in a culture where belief in some kind of deity is the majority opinion, plus 27 years of indoctrination into the belief in a specific deity. Everyone says there's a God, so it must be true, right? But one day, after a couple of years separating myself from all religion, I realized I had only been going along, that I had never REALLY believed. So it wasn't as much of a sticking point as a realization about myself.

For me it was overcoming me fear of being rejected by my family, which of course happened as soon as I expressed any unbelief whatsoever. I played along in this ridiculous charade until my 30s, and I'm embarrassed I didn't put a stop to it when I was 14 like most of my friends did.

There was no last sticking point. It just became abundantly clear that man invented God and not the other way around. I noticed he had been custom made for each culture. Which means if there were a God, he would be a chameleonesque creature constantly re-inventing himself to please man. Not very impressive.

I like facts, reason, evidence. Make believe gods? Not so much.
And Faith is just a ticket to a brainwashing.

Thanks in part to my grandpa with the pink car, for as long as I could remember, I had been considering the possibility and really more of a probability there was no such thing. I always thought that made the best sense and found it more challenging to believe in a god--especially a man-god, the Mormon one in particular. I tried, but I just couldn't do it.

So I was an atheist long before I realized I was one.

In my mind, however, it's all balled up with the idea of having a soul or some kind of conscious, intangible self that's separate from the body and continues after the body dies.

I don't know what Grandpa thought about that; he only said there's no god, and I don't remember asking what he thought about souls. Somehow I got the idea that being an atheist meant not believing in a god AND accepting the idea of ceasing to exist in any form.

That's what I didn't want to let go of, the thing that kept me from saying I'm an atheist until about 2004.

My last sticking point was emotional. I wanted life to have meaning, and I didn't want my existence to cease at death. None of these have anything to do with physical reality, though.

I realized two things:
1) Life can have meaning outside of any god-centric life; and
2) My desires are irrelevant in the face of reality.

That second one may sound nihilistic, but it's not. Wishing for something won't make it so, and I'm not tied down by what I hope/wish. In a sense, it's made seeking happiness for my family and myself here and now more critical.

I'm more than happy to accept that things happen that we currently lack the power to explain. Humanity has not, and likely never will, acquire a perfect knowledge. People want to draw a line from inexplicable to the deity of their choice, which is a mistake.

The thought process goes somethign like this:
Something terrible is happening --> I prayed to Jesus --> Something inexplicable (miraculous, if you will) happened to save me --> Therefore, Jesus is real

It's that bridge between the third and fourth point I can't cross. If there is a deity, he's either entirely disentangled from our lives or is a capricious flake.

Mormons see Mormon things.
JW's see JW things.
Catholics see Catholic things.

Spiritual manifestations usually reflect the individual's existing belief system. The question...is it an outside source, or self-created?

For example, JWs believe that when you're dead, you're dead. Maybe later Jehovah will bring you back to life. So, JWs never see dead people like mormons have claimed to do. They believe demons exist, though, so those evil demons make appearances to them.

When dead JW's appear to their JW relatives and tell them to join mormonism, then maybe I'll re-consider mormonism. Until then, it's just confirmation bias... all across the religious continuum.

I love the way you put it, Alpiner. "Wishing for something won't make it so," is exactly right. It doesn't mean that I like reality. Quite frankly, I hate it, but there's not a darn thing I can do about it.

So I might as well embrace the 'miracle' of just getting to be here. I already won the lottery by being one-in-a-million of my Mom's eggs which got to be Me.

Mr. Flew needs to explain how God got here and how He/She/It sustains itself. Although I can understand why someone at 81 might really want there to be a creator. I'm already feeling that at 54.

The last sticking point for me was spending time reading facts, science, and also info about the historicity of Jesus. Add what I learned, added to my previous opinion of how could a Loving God allow so many ugly, unkind, horrible, atrocious things to happen in this world? and how God or Gods have different faces and attributes depending in which part of the world you were born, brought me to this conclusion-----until those who KNOW that there is a God offer me proof that I can believe or until I receive a revelation myself, I am content to believe that this world, without a God in the heavens, is what we get and I will try my utmost to enjoy it.

It was the most sincere, desperate prayer of my life. I knew that without an answer, I could not go on trying to believe. I believed that somehow, after all of my doubts about the existence of God, and after all the bad stuff I knew about the church, that God would finally answer, to save me from letting go of what shreds of faith I still had. Because I was still trying to save my faith.

He didn't answer.

That was it for me. He either wasn't there, or didn't care.

That was an extremely shocking and painful moment for me. But it was the start of something better: learning to rely on myself.