Hey I've been wondering about religion for some time now. I'm sort of an Atheistic/Satanist. Like i Mean, why do people believe in God? I would like to but i mean... it just doesn't make since. And if god is real why is the world so bad? Why do people have cancer? And don't say "God doesn't work that way."

B.T.w. When I say I'm a Satanist. I don't really mean im a Satanist. It's more like Antichristism. Satan is just more of a symbol. I don't sit there and light candles and praise the Devil. And not all satanist go around all in black in stuff. I'm not goth or anything and I have Christian friends.

Thanks for any responses

Well those questions you ask like "I would like to but i mean... it just doesn't make since. And if god is real why is the world so bad? Why do people have cancer?" sounds like a question more directed toward people who are jewish, christian, or muslim, not really toward people who believe in God. If you're like me you just believe God created the world and that's that, he doesn't answer prayers or performs miracles. But why would I even believe that a supreme being created the world? Well, I've done some research before and some thinking and concluded that this whole universe would be hard to create without a supreme being(like "God").
I guess it doesn't really matter what you call him/her/whatever it was that created this universe, but I just believe that someone or something created us.

8 months later edit: wahaha I cant beleive this topic is still going on....

The satan symbolism never the less gives atheists a bad name.

There is no proof of God. But you see, neither is there any proof against God's existence. At least, not against the concept of a universal cosmic creator anyway. If God exists the world is bad because It simply doesn't see enough reason to intervene. I highly doubt the Jeudo-Christian God exists but I do think there is something incomprehensible outside of time and space that programmed our universe and may have some opinion of us.
Or maybe not.

God is impossible to prove or disprove due to vagueness and metaphysicalness(yes I'm making up words). Same for the afterlife. There's only one way to find out the truth, and it's a one way trip.

Real atheists don't believe in Satan either by the way.

Mostly because the thought of no afterlife scares the crap out of me.

Funny thing is, there's so much evolutionary proof, but yet not much proof of god. But in my opinion- believe whatever you like and don't let people make you think otherwise.


That ones going in the newspaper.

There are arguably more frightening possibilities.

Like there being an afterlife where you continue to exist from your point of view, but there being absolutely nothing there. Like in Torchwood and Death Note. You can still think, but that's it. To me, that's way scarier than just ceasing to exist. Ceasing to exist is eternal rest, going to a black void afterlife is eternal unrest. Of course, you have plenty of time to make peace with the reality, but still...

... anyway, we got another topic on that.

All in all, it's perfectly reasonable not to believe in God. But there's no sure-fire way of saying there is no God. But I seriously doubt It's the Jeudo-Christian God if it does exist. I think, if there is a God, then It will be like Guthix.

God created the big bang so he set everything in motion and made everything.Therefore, evolution was created by God so, that makes evolution not a valid argument in this topic. Simple as that and you can't disprove it.

I think that the average laymen who is uneducated and morbidly obese with prejudice will misinterpret it, like the herd always does. Satanism as defined by Anton LaVey, I actually sympathize with, it's pretty much a reinterpretation of Nietzschean values, which most people know, I am a big fan of. LaVey's Satanism is little more than radical individualism and an affirmation of life. But I would not identify myself as a Satanist.

Proof of G-d, has been tried for since the idea of G-d was born. It is really only in the Western Tradition that we see a sustained and critical inquiry into some kind of rational and logical proof of G-d. Aristotle, Aquinas, Dun Scotus, etc, etc, all tried to find logical, proofs of the existence of G-d, and all failed.
Does this necessitate halting your belief in G-d? No.
Belief in G-d can never, be rationalized, because that which is dependent on belief in G-d, is faith. And faith by its nature is absurd, it is a leap, from a secure mountaintop, to another one. One must make as Kierkegaard said a "leap of faith", and never seek to rationalize G-d's existence, because to do so would negate G-d himself.
And it is the duty of every person with religious convictions to return to the original source material, and read it in a Humanistic light. Read the text in the lens of "love" and "peace". Root out hypocrisy wherever it is found, never let your faith be corrupted by those who simply use it as an excuse for their incarnate will to power.

Theistic evolution is a bigger load of baloney than the belief that Stalin was "misunderstood".

If God (or a god if you prefer that) started it then why the hell wouldn't he finish it?? That's like me building a building (or rather having one built) and then just letting it sit and saying "the hell with maintenance. Let the thing run itself".

Just saying.

I don't believe there's proof for God per se, however, I believe in him because I think that the last year or so cannot be explained in coincidental terms.


I've never actually seen evidence in favor of evolution. Maybe I'm just retarded.

EDIT: emphasizing things

I cannot explain thunder. I create Zeus.

I cannot explain love. I create Venus.

I cannot explain seasons. I create some other god.

I cannot explain the beginning of life on this planet. I create God. Yes, I'm bad at making up names, I know.

That's your opinion, not a fact.


Or maybe that's like an architect designing a building, and letting construction workers build it, rather than building it himself. After it's finished (and during construction), the architect watches his baby being built. He has no reason to interfere as long as the plans are being followed.

Meh.

I'm not religious - but I'll try and have a stab at your questions.


I think it's because we have a natural urge to try and understand our surroundings and ourselves, and God helps us explain this.



I think you want be part of a large unified body, perhaps you feel a little lonely and want to be a part of things? *I sound like I'm off CM *



God gives everyone free will - we are each responsible for our actions, whatever the cause that comes from them. If bad things weren't to happen, we'd have to have a cap of free will - which would be useless. Though I often think that the world may be better like that. Then you'd have to consider that where would the line be drawn etc.?

~Magical

How in the world does being born with congenital defects that lead to cancer have anything to do with free will?

How does being born with a cranial aneurysm that randomly decides to burst and kill you at age 11 have anything to do with free will?

The real point of christianity is not to convince that their little fiction book is all real and that jesus really did make mircales and all that fiddlesticks. The point of christianity was to get people to be good to each other and live good lives. The whole thing about the bible is obviously not true, it was just a way to convince or scare people because they did not see why we should all live in peace. The problem is: idiot christians will yell all day who powerfull god is and tell you all about jesus' miracles, but they put it all before the real point: being good to each other and stuff.

There will never be any proof of this god because its all fiction. But there can always be proof that god does not exist. Like, if god really did exist, why didn't he introduce his religion in the begining of humanity? People believed in all kinds of stupid stuff for a very long time before monotheism.

I forgot to mention my second point. Many founders of religions came from harsh, difficult backgrounds - they made the best out of them. God is testing them so to speak. Or if you believe in reincarnation - they lived a bad previous life.

~Magical

WOW, Magical giving theistic answeres.

Actually, I agree with Magical's reason involving free will. If God came down and fixed everything that we humans think are wrong, then we would have no police force, no firefighters, no anything but watching T.V. and waiting for God to stop the robbers taking our stuff away. Also, people can think that God is a dictator by coming into our lives too much.

I won't consider you an atheist, it makes me look bad in a way. C'mon, a little tolerance here. Antischristism is BAD. INTOLERANCE.

We wouldn't be waiting for God to stop the robbers, robbers wouldn't exist in the first place.

And we wouldn't think that God was a dictator, because we wouldn't know any other way. It'd simply be a pleasant, non-violent normal.

Well thanks everybody. I've gotten some questions answered. Also thanks for not being rude about this. Im going to ponder all this religion stuff some more.

P.S. Somebody can close this.

Meh. There's evidence for both Christianity and Evolution, but there's no solid "proof" for either viewpoint. That's where faith comes in. You can either believe in a God or not. That's how I view.

-I'm a Christian, btw.

Then you can say a theist who believes in a God and who sends down demons and whips of fire onto his enemies is making theists look bad - if I got your point.

~Magical

Just to butt in a bit:



Or to put it very simply: How the blazes can anyone following a religion claim to be right when his neighbour does exactly the same thing. At the end of the day any religion is/has been an instrument of destruction.

Oh, almost forgot. If you wonder where that quote came from, it is from "2008 God's final witness - Ronald Weinland"

Honestly, a kid of six MAY believe the world was created 6000 years ago in just seven days, with just two people on it.

Common sense tells us that if we d 6000 years to evolve from just two people, the amount of people living on this planet now would have to be divided by 10¹⁰, just as a rough guess of course. Yes, that's a very large number, children.


While the proof for your so called creation, that only extremists and extremely naive people believe in (even your friend the pope believes in evolution), has the following proof: a book. And I have to say, it contains extremely detailed information about the creation, no?

While also being extremely accurate considering population rate and historical sources.

You're not faithful, my children, you're blind.


Did you have to bring in hypocricy?

I thought I was the only one.

I personally find the possibility of a lifetime of torture (and the existance of someone who would send you there!) much more frightening that there being nothing.

You either have faith in God or you don't, it works for everything. If you believe in something, your under faith. Whether or not God is real or not should just come down to your faith. I'm pretty sure I could live without having any belief of God, then I'm pretty sure i could have a 'better' life with faith if I wanted to.

By your logic: God does not exist, therefore god did not create the world, so god creating the world is not a valid argument in this topic. Simple as that and you can't disprove it.



That sums it up for me, too.

I usually go through debates, quoting posts of interesting. As all of them were Kwinten's from now on, I have to say I agree completely with Kwinten.

That's just a lame excuse. You just WANT a god so badly, so you create one. If your theories are disproven, you say your god set it all in motion. That's just ridiculous. You first make up a theory, seems it doesn't make sense, so you 'infiltrate' the other theory, warp and deform it a bit and tada! There is God, explaining every phenomen in the world! It just doesn't work like that.

Just because you can't disprove something, it doesn't mean it's true. You have no way of disproving that it's cloudy where I live (unless you know where I live), yet you have no way of disproving that it's sunny either. Hence according to your logic, it is both cloudy and sunny at the same time.

Indeed. The absence of evidence may not be the evidence of absence, but it's not evidence of presence either.

The truth, for now, is unknowable.

Well - I am glad that this subject remains open.

A theist will tell you that his "faith" is sufficient proof for said theist that "god" exists.

Ironically, the said can be said for Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Binky the 50-foot Carrot and, of course, my own personal favourite "The Invisible Pink Unicorn".

Don't forget about the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

From my own experiences, and, much more, the experiences of others I know, the sheer amount of inexplicable things achieved by prayer (and the kinds of them) is more than enough to justify faith in itself. Those who do not understand the basics (the basics, mind you) of science and psychology and religion are often at a loss to pair them, but fortunately I've met enough wise and open-minded people (and these are intelligent, mature people who have gone through college and studied a variety of subjects), that it's easy for me to understand what most people would consider to be anomalies.

The pathetic thing is, if I listed the things many of these people have seen and done, most atheists would just scoff and say they were lying, because "omg science doesn't take into account laws that we don't fully understand so all this stuff must be made up." It's circular logic to say God doesn't exist because there's no proof, and then when there's things people claim to have done and been through that are living proof, it's not real because God doesn't exist. Yet some people believe that, then get annoyed when Christians say "atheism has to be true because God doesn't exist." It's pretty much the same thing.

Sorry, I'm just kind of annoyed right now. It's ridiculous to expect people who have different environments, lives and experiences than you do to believe the same things you do. My bad, I guess.

The above is pretty much why I never post here anymore, that and people grouping me with radicals whenever I express an opinion different from theirs. I need a thicker hide to exist here.



We wouldn't be humans if God didn't let us think for ourselves. God running the show without us having the ability to choose right from wrong would wreck any free will we had for ourselves. Life is a game of good moves, bad moves and discipline, where we try our best to accomplish whatever purpose we think we have using all of our energy, resources and control. Sprinkle in some idle, carefree joy, and that's pretty much what our existence is.

But people who think God hasn't done anything for 2,000 years certainly do not have full knowledge of what they speak about.

This totally strengthened my belief in God. Plz take time to explore the site......

The Star of Bethlehem.

Watch this video too...

Wat was the Star of Bethlehem?

And this is the start of the actual movie...

Star of Bethlehem Part 1

Plz watch the entire movi. It trully is interesting and eye opening. I drew tears near the end. This is wat really got me to believe with certainty that God is real.

No, I can't disprove it. I'm athiest, but i'm pretty sure creationism\evolution are intertwined. When humans make the first A.I someday, we are it's god and we give it life. That would be creationism and might not be to far off of how we came about (plus evolution over a very long time period). Unless you somehow think this is impossible, but then that's ignorance and misunderstanding of what humans will one day be capable of.

Generally, debates about some creationism\evolution are dead ends because no one knows -- just speculation.

Another possibility for inexplicable events supposedly caused by prayer is a sort of reality warping mechanism that we unwittingly tap into when we pray. Of course, our wills have to compete with many others in that system so those prayers are aren't guaranteed to get through. And there are clearly limits as to what its capability is, seeing as nations or people in poverty can't pray themselves out of it. It cannot violate the laws of physics and cannot do anything severely drastic. It just manipulates luck. Significant action(as in getting up and doing something other than praying) would need to be taken on the part of the person who prays depending on what is contained in the prayer, and it would need to be repeated incase it didn't get through the first time what with the competing wills.

Other than God or sheer coincidence, this is just as possible as anything this metaphysical. I have experienced a few lucky incidents that could be explained this way.

That would depend on what the definition of God is. If it's just creating life- then any parent would be God.

~Magical

An astronomical event. Normal people don't know how to explain it. It must be a godly power.

I wish people would stop reasoning like that.

And honestly, 'prayer'. Solve things for yourself and don't ask for someone else to do that.

I'm not sure if this has already been posted - but isn't prayer mainly phycological. For example if someone prays that they'll ask someone out and get accepted, they then belief they have God on their side and act differently to what they would do normally? I know people getting cured etc. is different, though.

~Magical

Intelligent Design is the belief that a higher power created the world (a more religion-neutral form of creationism).
What you are describing is theistic evolution.

I also see very little, if any, evidence for evolution and much more in favor of ID/creation (one example is the Cambrian Explosion).

And you can prove that God created the Big Bang?

Waah I forgot to finish my post like a n00b

There is no proof, only evidence, for each side.

What exactly is the difference?...

If you prove something is real, you mean it's real 100%.

Nothing is entirely provable, simply provable within ability.

1) I believe in God because of the miracles and experiences throughout history that have happened to myself, other family and friends, and, like I said, throughout the course of history.

2) Man caused sin to be in the world, not God, so evil exists because of our downfalls.


There is no such thing as evidence that something doesn't exist. That's just not possible.

1) Have you ever considered another cause for those 'miracles' other than God?

2) 'Sin' is something purely fictional and a matter of opinions and morals, which are also fictional. We created our own morals over time. And because of our so called intelligence we marked things as either good or bad. If we were another species the things might have been turned around. There's no good, there's no bad. There's no sin, and there's no right.

Indeed. There are certainly supernatural happenings around the world, but God is far from the only explanation for those. Like my psychic luck-altering prayer system I brainstormed up a few posts back.

It's too bad we can't use Runescape prayers. Protect from Range would effectively render a gun useless.

1) Unless you can provide another explanation for those miracles, for why people have miraculously been cured and puzzle scientists and doctors, why things I have prayed for to become reality, and things like that, then I think I'll stick with God as a reason.

2) Morals are real. Every single human knows it, and you can surpress your conscious and do whatever you like, but you will always know in the back of your mind that there are certain things that are wrong.