st0wandgrow
Well-Known Member
I grew up believing in god. It was something that I took for granted, and never questioned. At some point during my teenage years I began questioning this position. I honestly don't recall a single event, or person that changed my mind, but it started to set my bullshit-meter off quite often.
Fast forward to today .... at the age of 37 I still maintain that there is no such thing as a god. The weird thing is, I've never really examined WHY I feel this way. Reading through this section of RIU has kind of challenged me to engage myself, and really pin down my thinking on this.
Here is why I don't believe in a god:
1) Dinosaurs. If a god is behind this all, and he made us in his likeness (I'm flattered), then why did he fuck around for millions of years with dinosaurs and the like? Did he create them, only to kill them and let them marinate under ground for millions of years so we would stumble upon them and have fuel for our cars?
2) If there *is* a creator, then who created the creator? And who created the creator of the creator? How far back does this creator family tree go?
3) Talking snakes and magic apples. The bible is filled with ridiculous claims such as these. Why would god impress people with his magic tricks back then, and give us nothing to believe in now? My take is that people had no idea what lighting, thunder, rain, etc was 2000 years ago, and a man living in the clouds was all they could come up with to answer this.
4) Religion. There are more flavors of religion than there are Ben and Jerry's ice cream. If there is a god, why are there so many different versions?
5) Science. Science has given us some answers, and will continue to fill in the holes. I don't know if we have the capacity to ever truly know where we came from, and how it all started, but science has at least connected some dots for us. Religion, not so much.
These points obviously don't touch on everything that shapes my belief (or lack there of), but they account for a good deal of why I think the way I do when it comes to god and religion.
What points can you detail that help shape the way you feel about this?
Fast forward to today .... at the age of 37 I still maintain that there is no such thing as a god. The weird thing is, I've never really examined WHY I feel this way. Reading through this section of RIU has kind of challenged me to engage myself, and really pin down my thinking on this.
Here is why I don't believe in a god:
1) Dinosaurs. If a god is behind this all, and he made us in his likeness (I'm flattered), then why did he fuck around for millions of years with dinosaurs and the like? Did he create them, only to kill them and let them marinate under ground for millions of years so we would stumble upon them and have fuel for our cars?
2) If there *is* a creator, then who created the creator? And who created the creator of the creator? How far back does this creator family tree go?
3) Talking snakes and magic apples. The bible is filled with ridiculous claims such as these. Why would god impress people with his magic tricks back then, and give us nothing to believe in now? My take is that people had no idea what lighting, thunder, rain, etc was 2000 years ago, and a man living in the clouds was all they could come up with to answer this.
4) Religion. There are more flavors of religion than there are Ben and Jerry's ice cream. If there is a god, why are there so many different versions?
5) Science. Science has given us some answers, and will continue to fill in the holes. I don't know if we have the capacity to ever truly know where we came from, and how it all started, but science has at least connected some dots for us. Religion, not so much.
These points obviously don't touch on everything that shapes my belief (or lack there of), but they account for a good deal of why I think the way I do when it comes to god and religion.
What points can you detail that help shape the way you feel about this?
Life is just a game.
). He was amazed on his own how vulnerable our minds were to being fooled, and started to speculate on how tricks were done even before the research. He started to figure them out on his own without looking it up, 'She ran off the stage while they were misdirecting us with X', and he'd be correct. His mom's sister and I are professional musicians, and he started Suzuki guitar at 3 years old. We'd regularly gave recitals in churches, so without asking he grew up assuming that each and every church was simply a recital hall, and that all the parishioners were just attending a musical concert each week! At about age 7, we walked into a church while a service was still going on, and while I went to go warm up for my recital he wanted to just watch, seemingly transfixed on the spectacle. He had a LOT of questions afterward: what were they doing? Who were these guys god and jesus, and why couldn't they make it to the service (seemed a bit rude to him that all these folks got together while they didn't bother to show up). I explained their belief system to him and he asked, 'So they are all having fun pretending?' I laughed and explained that they were not. 'Even the ADULTS?' he asked, I nodded. 'What's wrong with them? What happened to them?' That was when I started to explain that most of the planet has this religious belief, and the specific dogma behind the major ones. He didn't think it was funny, and I had never seen him more perplexed. He never even asked why I or our circle of friends didn't believe, only why others did. When he discovered a lot of our own family members believed such things, he would question each until the answers got less and less coherent, and more and more uncomfortable, and I would pull him away. 