Do you believe in a higher power?

  • Yes

    Votes: 403 21.9%
  • No

    Votes: 1,153 62.5%
  • Unsure

    Votes: 288 15.6%

  • Total voters
    1,844

saenima

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
11,892
Religion has been mostly harmful throughout the ages and i really wish that people got over that particular nonsense once and for all. It had its place at times, but, on aggregate, it has been an impediment to questioning authority, human relations and also the societies we have built. It has been, more often than not, an oppression tool, an excuse for bloodshed and a panacea for enlightnment.

Spirituality is just an attempt at connecting with what we don't understand. It's trying to get a leg up on science with wishful hopes and dreams.

Heh
 
Oct 28, 2017
30,449
There is no evidence of the universe's time-zero, or anything before the big bang. I would just say to be careful when asking questions like "where does the cosmic dust come from?" because when you start implying that something had to make it or someone did, you start placing human-like characteristics to the answer. An answer doesn't have to align to human values or understanding. It's similar to the fallacy of flipping a coin several times, having a vast majority land as heads, and then believing that the next one has to be tails since there were so many heads. It's placing human values of tangible balance on something that doesn't require them


That is my point. So many good people in here are asking for "evidence" when thier own science requires a "First Movement" (in certain arguments) that which is put in motion by no other force. Evidence is science but has not science been dead wrong even with evidence? I'm not trying to use my small earthly intelligence to disprove the nature of everything nor do I require it to accept that which I don't understand.
 

oreomunsta

One Winged Slayer
The Fallen
Oct 25, 2017
4,559
I mean, I don't think it's necessary to tie the moral system with what that philosophies rendition of God is or could be. I don't see why there could be a pantheists with differing views of morality.

Hmm not sure if I get what you're saying with your second sentence, but yeah, it's not really necessary to tie in some kind of moral cognitivism with Spinozism. The wiki page seemed to be leaning that way, from what I got after a quick read
 
Oct 25, 2017
13,261
"The Tao that can be explained is not the everlasting Tao"

I have no clue where God comes from but I understand his reason to exist. I also have no idea why I have seen the things I can't explain outside of the almighty but I am sure they happened. Sorry boss, I ain't got the answers and those who claim they do are not to be trusted.
If you don't need an answer for where God came from, you don't need one for: I always ask "where does the cosmic dust come from is nothing was there?" What evidence do we have of that which came before?
That is my point. So many good people in here are asking for "evidence" when thier own science requires a "First Movement" (in certain arguments) that which is put in motion by no other force. Evidence is science but has not science been dead wrong even with evidence? I'm not trying to use my small earthly intelligence to disprove the nature of everything nor do I require it to accept that which I don't understand.
If you want to believe in a prime mover, go ahead, I highly highly doubt that is what people mean when they say God. Obviously you do you.
 

Air

User-Requested Ban
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
1,262
Hmm not sure if I get what you're saying with your second sentence, but yeah, it's not really necessary to tie in some kind of moral cognitivism with Spinozism. The wiki page seemed to be leaning that way, from what I got after a quick read

It read like you felt you had to accept all the tenets of spinozism. I was just clarifying that you dot't have to accept spinozism as a comprehensive guide to all your views. I just wanted to give you the underpinning for your belief which I think is classical pantheism. The morality and determinism question are a completely different ballgame
 

TwntyOneTwlv

Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,762
Ohio
No.

I grew up Christian. Became an atheist in high school, which morphed into anti-theism. Then I realized that was stupid to care that much about it.

Now I consider myself a Zen Buddhist.
 

Wulfric

Member
Oct 25, 2017
6,018
Yes, I believe in some form of spirits or otherworldly beings beyond our understanding.

I'm shocked by those poll results though. Wow.
 

ninjabot

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
734
Non believers only believe when they are about to die.

Ah, the "There are no Atheists in foxholes" thing.

You know, I once almost flipped a forklift on an old job and screamed "OH GOD-!" while flailing my hands in desperation. I didn't actually think a god was gonna magically stop me from falling over, but I was horrified at the moment, and I'd been conditioned to say such things since childhood, so it's just natural for me (especially since I don't use profanity very often).

I guess the point I'm getting at is your claim is flat-out wrong. People don't believe when they're about to die. They hope beyond all hope that there is a god that can stop their death.
 

oreomunsta

One Winged Slayer
The Fallen
Oct 25, 2017
4,559
That is my point. So many good people in here are asking for "evidence" when thier own science requires a "First Movement" (in certain arguments) that which is put in motion by no other force. Evidence is science but has not science been dead wrong even with evidence?

When I answer from the side of science, I do it from the point of view of physics, since it's what I'm most familiar with, and one of the most closely tied sciences to questions of universal origin. Science has been wrong in plenty of cases, yes, but it hasn't often been the case because science itself is bunked. What's happened throughout the past several hundred years is that scientific inquiry helps build a theory - or framework - to understand phenomenon in the world around us based on observation, inference, testing, and evidence. What eventually happens is that the theory hits points where observations are made that can no longer be explained by the theory, or the theory starts predicting unreasonable things (like the blackbody crisis, or the orbiting electron model).

It's when these gaps between theory and reality occur that theories are revised, or new ones are developed to improve upon what the previous ones stated. So, even though physics today has to deal with things like matter/anti-matter inequality, or implementing gravity into the standard model, it doesn't make what we understand really well already "wrong". While we probe further and further into extremities of reality, we don't burn everything that came before, because we're still by-and-large correct about it.

If you look at how far our understanding has come in the past several decades, it's amazing how far we can reasonably theorize into the beginnings of the universe. Maybe one day we can even come to a good answer about what happened at time zero. If it turns out that something even deeper than that isn't quite right, it doesn't mean we were wrong about everything else. Rather, we have an opportunity to come to an even deeper understanding of what we already know
 

Air

User-Requested Ban
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
1,262
As an aside, I find the "what came before the big bang" a curious question. I know the scientific consensus is that there's no "before", but a lot of scientists seem to buying into the multiverse, so i think the question of what came before is valid in that context.

Regardless of what you want to call it, it seems obvious to me that there had to be something which has a quality of timelessness that the universe/ multiverse was able to spawn from. Whether the universe regresses infinitely or not, i think it'd have to be apart of that overarching system or "base"
 

Deleted member 7130

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
7,685
giphy.gif

There's a shit ton of energy in the actual Universe that makes whatever we can imagine in myths seem comically feeble.
Non believers only believe when they are about to die.
GTFO
 
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Oct 28, 2017
30,449
If you don't need an answer for where God came from, you don't need one for: I always ask "where does the cosmic dust come from is nothing was there?" What evidence do we have of that which came before?

If you want to believe in a prime mover, go ahead, I highly highly doubt that is what people mean when they say God. Obviously you do you.

People ask for evidence of God but they don't have it for their own idea. I'm just asking for the same. Seems reaasonable.

And of course the prime mover is God, maybe not the one from the stories but still.

Who knows? I certainly don't. I'm not sure that is a way to justify a belief in a god though. It's still an argument from incredulity fallacy.

Then I call it a push.
 
Oct 29, 2017
4,450
Australia
Yes, I do.

The main reason why is because I refuse to believe that something as complicated and intricate as the human body or as our planet came into existence by "accident".
 
Oct 25, 2017
13,261
People ask for evidence of God but they don't have it for their own idea. I'm just asking for the same. Seems reaasonable.

And of course the prime mover is God, maybe not the one from the stories but still.

I'm not asking for evidence of a prime mover, I'm asking for evidence of a personal god, i.e. Allah, Jesus, Yahweh, etc. I don't give a rats ass about Spinoza's/Einstein's god, its a worthless discussion at that point.

Seriously no one is asking for evidence of that type of god, because it does nothing. I'll even say okay I believe in that (which I don't), what have I gained?
 
Oct 31, 2017
4,333
Unknown
It's not a faith like belief for me. It's a certainty there are a plurality of gods, or three, or two, or one, or none that have a coterminous existence.

Proselytizing of belief or non-belief is wearisome to endure and read. Atheists seem the worst for this behavior online. They seldom seem to pass on an opportunity to espouse their non belief. Never had an atheist show up at my door to advocate their non-belief though.
 

Static

Avenger
Oct 25, 2017
6,211
Yes, I do.

The main reason why is because I refuse to believe that something as complicated and intricate as the human body or as our planet came into existence by "accident".
I appreciate this may not be entirely welcome, and apologize if that's the case, but the process by which complex structures may come to evolve from simple organisms was most helpfully explained for me by the NDT version of Cosoms, in this segment, but you may very well have already seen it. I appreciate that even with this explanation, it may simply seem unfathomable that something like this could happen 'by accident.'
 

JMeth

Banned
Oct 29, 2017
251
Illinois
I stopped believing in such things years ago. Ultimately there isn't any compelling reason to believe in such things since the needed evidence that would support such a being is entirely nonexistent.
 

Air

User-Requested Ban
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
1,262
It's not a faith like belief for me. It's a certainty there are a plurality of gods, or three, or two, or one, or none that have a coterminous existence.

Proselytizing of belief or non-belief is wearisome to endure and read. Atheists seem the worst for this behavior online. They seldom seem to pass on an opportunity to espouse their non belief. Never had an atheist show up at my door to advocate their non-belief though.

Could you elaborate? Don't worry, I have no intention of arguing with you. I think it's curious how beliefs form and I am definitely interested in your ideas. If you're too uncomfortable to answer in this thread, but still want to engage, you can PM me
 

Deleted member 7130

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
7,685
The intelligent design theory has many flaws though.
True. Like that fact that if there was a designer, it was kind of shit at designing. The evidence is stacked on the side that there was a blind selective process (natural selection) that lead to the diversity of life today. Evolution equipped us with what was good enough for surviving long enough to serve as vehicles for DNA replication with no real bias towards elegance or even corrective measures - things an actual engineering mind might take into consideration after billions of years.
 
Oct 31, 2017
67
Ah, the "There are no Atheists in foxholes" thing.

People don't believe when they're about to die. They hope beyond all hope that there is a god that can stop their death.

Iol...anyway really talking about ppl like Robin Quivers of Howard Stern. Denying God at every turn on national airwaves. Then getting diagnosed with cancer with high possibility of not making it. Turning to God for deliverance one way or the other. All to deny God once again when delivered. I hear and see it all the time.
 
Oct 26, 2017
6,315
Nashville
Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindi, Buddhist Era where y'all at
/s

Anyway I think what we need to truly focus on is to respect beliefs or non beliefs unless they interfere with others. Yes both sides have had some bad apples in history(I will admit religion has had more). However, as a human family(we are all related from the first apes or whatever we were), we just gotta be there and support each other.
 

Static

Avenger
Oct 25, 2017
6,211
I honestly do as well sometimes. I understand that billions of years of development is a long time, but then you have shit like this powering the movement of fucking bacteria:

IFzT1gy.png


OZro14p.jpg


It's a literal motor.

This sort of complexity seems irreducible at times.

And then you have processes like electron transport, telomeres, photosynthesis, transcription regulation...it's just OVERWHELMINGLY complex and trying to reconcile that with simple and gradual evolution just makes my brain melt.
God has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering.

Iol...anyway really talking about ppl like Robin Quivers of Howard Stern. Denying God at every turn on national airwaves. Then getting diagnosed with cancer with high possibility of not making it. Turning to God for deliverance one way or the other. All to deny God once again when delivered. I hear and see it all the time.
In his defense, so too do ultra orthodox religious people turn to modern medicine when ill, and then thank god for saving their lives.

Desperate people with literally nothing to lose and a growing awareness of their own uncertainty are a thin criticism of atheism or proof for god.
 

Rendering...

Member
Oct 30, 2017
19,089
No. If there is some being out there that qualifies as a diety, it's obviously not any of the gods from mainstream religions.

The evidence just plain isn't there. Secular arguments against a theistic god are too persuasive, religious apologists still can't talk their way around the problem of evil, and the beastly idiocy of the dime a dozen anti-science "thinkers" who are taken seriously in religious circles says an awful lot about the religious majority's standard of evidence and how much they really care about gaining knowledge and discovering truth, versus reinforcing the beliefs that make them comfortable.

People's fear of death, combined with our bullheaded tendency to double down on our dumbest biases as long as they point us toward the answer we want to hear, is extremely important to acknowledge in matters of religious belief.

I think the history of religion, the common tactics of religious apologists, and the goalpost moving involved in relying on God as a catch-all explanation for the ever-shrinking category of scientific mysteries paints a clear picture of a species struggling against its animal nature and grasping for meaning and comfort and security, and inventing a big magical daddy to make life make sense, and make life fair, and listen to their wishes, and save them from dying, and let them hold on to the people and things they love even though all of existence is defined by change and impermanence.

Maybe I'd have a different view if the majority of well informed scientists could make a good case for god without relying on faith and fallacies. What really, really gets me about believers is the way so many of them dismiss science and rational thought. These areas of knowledge are so fascinating and vital, but people can't be bothered to learn.
 
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Oct 28, 2017
30,449
I'm not asking for evidence of a prime mover, I'm asking for evidence of a personal god, i.e. Allah, Jesus, Yahweh, etc. I don't give a rats ass about Spinoza's/Einstein's god, its a worthless discussion at that point.

Seriously no one is asking for evidence of that type of god, because it does nothing. I'll even say okay I believe in that (which I don't), what have I gained?

Oh ok. I'm not sure the prime mover is different than Jesus or Tao or Buddha.
 

onlySpicySalsa

Avenger
May 29, 2018
280
Nope, I don't believe in a higher power.
Do I believe there MIGHT be a higher intelligence out there in the universe? Sure.
 
Oct 27, 2017
487
Given infinite time in such a uniform medium, entropy bumps will occur. And there you are, a universe appears as a bubble of low entropy before slowly fading back to uniformity.
You know, this is a very nice idea, but unfortunately it doesn't work in detail. If the universe came from a low entropy fluctuation, it would be overwhelmingly more likely that if we looked a little further in space, we would find it in a completely scrambled high entropy state, with our neighborhood just a little bubble of order. Instead, it looks just as ordered, which suggests it is not the result of a fluctuation.

Another way to say this is that because low entropy fluctuations are so overwhelmingly rare, the most likely state to explain your conscious experience, if it was due to such a fluctuation, would be that you are the only ordered thing that exists, created with all your memories and knowledge inside, like a brain in a jar, and that you will once again fluctuate out into thermal equillibrium in the next fraction of a second. This is the Boltzmann brain argument.

I believe the origin of the low entropy initial state in cosmology is still an open problem, although how serious it really is probably depends on who you ask.
 
Oct 25, 2017
13,261
Oh ok. I'm not sure the prime mover is different than Jesus or Tao or Buddha.
Yah, there is a vast difference between a Jesus type of creator and something that Aristotle, Spinoza, and Einstein are talking about. The latter really shouldn't even be called God. The former you have a personal relationship with, they intervene in the material world, offer an afterlife, etc. etc. etc. Basically the two are so completely different that the term loses all meaning.

So if you are asking if I believe in a personal creator, no. There is zero evidence for it at all.
 

Jadow

Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,200
Not at all, nothing I have seen makes me believe in a higher power or whatever religious nonsense. How about life outside Earth? I sure hope there is life out there, otherwise it would be depression "we" are the most intelligent beings.
 

Deleted member 2145

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
29,223
also I think people focusing on the extremely recent (relative to all time) development of a human made and defined higher power for a single group of a single species on a single planet in a single galaxy are really short changing what "higher power" could mean. maybe it's the word "God" and how that frames things to be specifically about certain human created organized religions but I see it a lot with non religious people, they position themselves as the opposite side of the same coin; one side says "yes" and the other "no" but it's the same question and it's the same rigidly defined set of parameters.
 

ninjabot

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
734
Iol...anyway really talking about ppl like Robin Quivers of Howard Stern. Denying God at every turn on national airwaves. Then getting diagnosed with cancer with high possibility of not making it. Turning to God for deliverance one way or the other. All to deny God once again when delivered. I hear and see it all the time.

Even so, that shows that they flat out didn't believe there was an actual god. They were just frightened and desperate and figured it couldn't hurt to call for help. Likewise, they don't have anything in the form of evidence to confirm that there is a god even if they are healed. We know for a fact cancer sometimes goes into remission. It'd be different if they were amputees begging for a god to return their lost limbs to them. THAT would be something miraculous. Not cancer remission.
 

TheBeardedOne

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
22,189
Derry
I always worry that I don't believe enough, and will end up in Hell because of it. I'm very scared of what's after this, and know I could've lived a better life.
 
Oct 31, 2017
67
You made the baseless assumption about non believers. Implying that they lack the conviction of their beliefs or lack there of. So yeah, get the fuck out of here with that shit ass disrespectful argument.

Baseless assumptions about believers all through this thread so again....GTFO. u could have wrote that at first but u got all sensitive.