not to marry someone, but because you felt another religion made more sense to you than your past one, or lack of one. did you ever learn anything about another religion and think, "hey, they've got some good points?" athiets/agnostics also, did anyting in particular make you choose your belief? talk amongst yourselves.
have you converted/would you convert religions?
- Thread starter dolph
- Start date
Used to be Christian, I'm now agnostic. Went through a period of self-examination and knowledge-gathering, realized that I couldn't strongly say I believed in the Christian faith.
I'm agnostic, but I'm open to suggestion. My g/f is Christian, and if I felt that there was adequate proof that accepting Christ would better my life, I would consider switching.
Does God exist? sorry to hijack but i posted this in the other thread too
Take these 3 statements:
1. God is all-loving
2. God is omnipotent
3. Evil exists
They cannot all be true because:
1. If God can prevent evil, but doesn't, then He isn't all-loving.
2. If God intends to prevent evil, but cannot, then He isn't omnipotent.
3. If God both intends to prevent evil and is capable of doing so, then how can evil exist?
If a Christian makes the argument that, "God lets some bad things happen for a greater good".
You answer, "What greater good can explain the systematic genocide of 6 millioin Jews during WW2"?
If a Christian makes the argument that, "God gives humans free will and does not interfere".
You answer, "Then why do so many religious people pray to deities for divine intervention, such as a cure for sickness, or a good grade in an exam"?
We all make choices. We can choose to do good or we can choose to do bad. An all-knowing god would know what we are going to do at every instant of our lives, in which case we would not be free to do the alternative to whatever that god knows we're going to do. Thus, free will is an illusion. And so, if we choose to do bad, it can be argued that we have not done so out of free will.
Ok so now you got your Christian buddy up against the wall, he'll respond with, "You just gotta have faith mang". Based on arguments from personal incredulity, this patronising appeal is generally the final retreat of all religious argument. Don't be alarmed. Stand your ground, fair non-believer, for no theist is able to explain faith in terms other than "I just know it" or "I feel it in my bones" or "But there just has to be a god". Faith is an act of will driven by religious indoctrination, unconscious beliefs, and insecurity.
How do you define faith though? thats a goood question. Faith is when your beliefs on something is greater than the evidence that is presented to you. There is a flaw in that however. Take the example of the Christian scientest. A Christian scientist is sorta like a witch doctor in a way because they believe in prayer to heal wounds. Lets say the guy's son is sick with a disease that is easily curable with pencillian at the hospital, but instead the christian choses to have the boy stay home and pray. Two days later, the boy dies. The Christian's faith in god to cure the disease was greater than the evidence presented to him, ie. the pencillian at the hospital, therefore he let his son stay home to pray resulting in his untimely death. Now ask yourself, Is this morally and ethically right?
It can be argued that those who cling to religious ideologies are actually morally "inferior" because their standards are not borne of serious contemplation; they are received, unexamined, unchallenged in any real way.
Religious arguments are like a game a chess......checkmate!
Take these 3 statements:
1. God is all-loving
2. God is omnipotent
3. Evil exists
They cannot all be true because:
1. If God can prevent evil, but doesn't, then He isn't all-loving.
2. If God intends to prevent evil, but cannot, then He isn't omnipotent.
3. If God both intends to prevent evil and is capable of doing so, then how can evil exist?
If a Christian makes the argument that, "God lets some bad things happen for a greater good".
You answer, "What greater good can explain the systematic genocide of 6 millioin Jews during WW2"?
If a Christian makes the argument that, "God gives humans free will and does not interfere".
You answer, "Then why do so many religious people pray to deities for divine intervention, such as a cure for sickness, or a good grade in an exam"?
We all make choices. We can choose to do good or we can choose to do bad. An all-knowing god would know what we are going to do at every instant of our lives, in which case we would not be free to do the alternative to whatever that god knows we're going to do. Thus, free will is an illusion. And so, if we choose to do bad, it can be argued that we have not done so out of free will.
Ok so now you got your Christian buddy up against the wall, he'll respond with, "You just gotta have faith mang". Based on arguments from personal incredulity, this patronising appeal is generally the final retreat of all religious argument. Don't be alarmed. Stand your ground, fair non-believer, for no theist is able to explain faith in terms other than "I just know it" or "I feel it in my bones" or "But there just has to be a god". Faith is an act of will driven by religious indoctrination, unconscious beliefs, and insecurity.
How do you define faith though? thats a goood question. Faith is when your beliefs on something is greater than the evidence that is presented to you. There is a flaw in that however. Take the example of the Christian scientest. A Christian scientist is sorta like a witch doctor in a way because they believe in prayer to heal wounds. Lets say the guy's son is sick with a disease that is easily curable with pencillian at the hospital, but instead the christian choses to have the boy stay home and pray. Two days later, the boy dies. The Christian's faith in god to cure the disease was greater than the evidence presented to him, ie. the pencillian at the hospital, therefore he let his son stay home to pray resulting in his untimely death. Now ask yourself, Is this morally and ethically right?
It can be argued that those who cling to religious ideologies are actually morally "inferior" because their standards are not borne of serious contemplation; they are received, unexamined, unchallenged in any real way.
Religious arguments are like a game a chess......checkmate!
i converted from heaven's gate to scientology. heaven's gate just didn't have enough craziness for me.
I like the comment about religion being a cop out, because it really is. People should think about things for themselves. Religion has caused death, war, and suffering beyond words for thousands of years now. It is funny how something as simple as a belief that has little factual basis can be the difference that causes people to fight to the death defending something they are not even sure is true. I also find it interesting that if you think about it, Christians are the greediest people on Earth if they really believe in it, they want eternal happiness in the afterlife, what a completely self serving idea. If all this death and mayhm is what it takes to get to heaven, I'll be glad to not exist when my time comes.
Tim
Tim
Human evolution, the way we evolved, has created for us a terrible dilemma. We transmit our culture through language, but through language and in concert with the anatomical and function related features of our brains, we have a huge vulnerability. Language abstracts reality. The word tree is not a tree, it is a sound, a noise we make or lines we put on paper to evoke that sound. We experience pleasure and pain from our evolution. We want pleasure and avoid pain. We have a capacity for enormous pain. We have invented concepts we connect to these experiences, pleasure is good pain is evil, the good is God the Devil is evil. We teach our children about these things. We cause them pleasure and pain to control them. We put them down when they do what we don't want them too. We make them feel bad about themselves.
How bad? As bad as a human can feel pain, rejection, negative comparison, Johnny is better, why can't you be like Johnny, and so on. We have all felt as bad as a human can feel because long ago we had no defense, no protection, no escape. The human mind through evolution has some tricks to deal with this pain. We could not survive if we consciously experienced that pain continuously. The pain gets repressed along with all memory of it. It gets buried in the unconscious. We develop a persona, a defense mechanism we call the ego. We, who we know ourselves to be, is a front, a wall of denial, a pretense that we are good, because our real feeling is that we are the worst in the world, as worthless as the extent of our capacity to feel pain.
We go through life then, with one overriding motive, deny the truth of how we feel, defend against remembering, attack anything that threatens to remind us. We are trapped in a complete catch 22. We had to become sick to survive. Everything we fear has already happened, but we can't remember because we can't feel it. What we paid for our survival was our real life, who we really were.
Occasionally, somebody, for some reason or another gets free. The Buddha sat under the Bo tree and felt it all. He realized he had been tricked and escaped. He found a door. Christ found a door, Meyer Baba found a door, down through history men and women find a door back to their original selves, they recover the capacity to feel. These people are like magnets to the souls of others because they are real people, what we were all supposed to be. They are mirrors in which we can see our real nature, who we really are.
Religions are pointing fingers, words, techniques, a experiential science of the mind, road signs on a road walked, offered by enlightened beings, people who learned to love themselves, to make it possible for us to do the same.
But we are sick and everything we touch turns to sh!t, and anything that even remotely calls us to remember our pain, to look within, we sh!t on. We know what waits there in our dark, we know very well.
So the religious make a circus of their religion, and those who laugh are even more lost. We have those who think they know and those who think there is no knowing.
My personal opinion is that at least the fact that the mind is capable of a higher order functioning has been understood explored and elaborated on for millennia and the fact that the catch 22 keeps people from wanting to know has also spawned work-arounds. I have a feeling that somewhere on earth at all times there are enlightened beings or guides who guard and pass on the truth to those few who really want it.
How bad? As bad as a human can feel pain, rejection, negative comparison, Johnny is better, why can't you be like Johnny, and so on. We have all felt as bad as a human can feel because long ago we had no defense, no protection, no escape. The human mind through evolution has some tricks to deal with this pain. We could not survive if we consciously experienced that pain continuously. The pain gets repressed along with all memory of it. It gets buried in the unconscious. We develop a persona, a defense mechanism we call the ego. We, who we know ourselves to be, is a front, a wall of denial, a pretense that we are good, because our real feeling is that we are the worst in the world, as worthless as the extent of our capacity to feel pain.
We go through life then, with one overriding motive, deny the truth of how we feel, defend against remembering, attack anything that threatens to remind us. We are trapped in a complete catch 22. We had to become sick to survive. Everything we fear has already happened, but we can't remember because we can't feel it. What we paid for our survival was our real life, who we really were.
Occasionally, somebody, for some reason or another gets free. The Buddha sat under the Bo tree and felt it all. He realized he had been tricked and escaped. He found a door. Christ found a door, Meyer Baba found a door, down through history men and women find a door back to their original selves, they recover the capacity to feel. These people are like magnets to the souls of others because they are real people, what we were all supposed to be. They are mirrors in which we can see our real nature, who we really are.
Religions are pointing fingers, words, techniques, a experiential science of the mind, road signs on a road walked, offered by enlightened beings, people who learned to love themselves, to make it possible for us to do the same.
But we are sick and everything we touch turns to sh!t, and anything that even remotely calls us to remember our pain, to look within, we sh!t on. We know what waits there in our dark, we know very well.
So the religious make a circus of their religion, and those who laugh are even more lost. We have those who think they know and those who think there is no knowing.
My personal opinion is that at least the fact that the mind is capable of a higher order functioning has been understood explored and elaborated on for millennia and the fact that the catch 22 keeps people from wanting to know has also spawned work-arounds. I have a feeling that somewhere on earth at all times there are enlightened beings or guides who guard and pass on the truth to those few who really want it.
I have always doubted the existence of God. I, however, did attend a Methodist church and enjoyed reading the stories and learning. As I grew up, I found the Dogma to be unbelievable and far-fetched. I distanced myself from all forms of religion and began reading. I have piles of printouts arguing for/against religion. I have read several books from each point of view.
The result? I have been atheist for almost 10 years.
Good reading:
The Christ Myth by Arthur Drews
Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce
Atheism: The Case Against God by George H. Smith
What is Atheism by Douglas E. Krueger
The Holy Bible: King James Version
The result? I have been atheist for almost 10 years.
Good reading:
The Christ Myth by Arthur Drews
Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce
Atheism: The Case Against God by George H. Smith
What is Atheism by Douglas E. Krueger
The Holy Bible: King James Version
I think everyone should either be Atheist or Agnostic, it'd rid the world of alot of problems with this freaking ridiculous religions people are into, that make them do stupid things.. meh.
I am agnostic i guess.
I am agnostic i guess.
Mani
Diamond Member
- Aug 9, 2001
- 4,808
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Religion's nice for some people because they need the sense of security, the friendship of a church group, the emotional crutch it provides.
I just can't delude myself enough to believe in the crap the major religions spout. I still believe in a God, but don't imagine myself "converting" to any of the major religions - there's just far too much ridiculousness in their "holy" books for me to take them seriously.
I just can't delude myself enough to believe in the crap the major religions spout. I still believe in a God, but don't imagine myself "converting" to any of the major religions - there's just far too much ridiculousness in their "holy" books for me to take them seriously.
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