What make you Believed in God Our Not believing in God?

Answer 1

Both love and amazement. Hey man, humor me a sec. Yank a hair out of your head and look at it. Go ahead. If YOU lived to be two thousand years old, you could NEVER make one of those from scratch! Now look at all the REALLY AMAZING THINGS He has made!

Answer 2

Nobody can prove any gods, much less a specific god, exist. People believe in specific gods because of indoctrination from an early age, tradition, hallucinations, fear of torture (for gods sadistic enough to threaten it) and other similarly illogical reasons. But no gods exist in reality; these are all stories, created for people who were scared of the world long before we understood it. Now we have no more reason for these superstitions.

What's the harm in religion:
http://www.abarnett.demon.co.uk/atheism/harm.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_religion

How harmful the bible is in particular:
http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/
http://www.evilbible.com/

The origin of the Jesus stories:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_jcpa5.htm
http://www.near-death.com/experiences/origen048.html
http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_jcpa2.htm
http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/jesus.html

How illogical religion is in general:
http://godisimaginary.com/
http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/

The alternative:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/
http://www.infidels.org/
http://www.positiveatheism.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarian_Universalism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_humanism

Answer 3

To believe means to "hold as true". Belief is therefore a choice and not forced on us. If I want to know the God who created me, then I need to seek Him. I have to "hold as true"/believe that He exists in order to seek Him.

Answer 4

Because of the fact of the "Gift of life", the fact that WE have transformed through time through various cultural, genetic, and sometimes spiritual direction. People, who through time transformed into contemporary people. (lol) ! : ) Those mechanisms, spiritual (sometimes unexplainable), and/or classifiable, that could provide a belief in an higher power.

Answer 5

never met him

Answer 6

Why I Don't Believe in the Existence of Gods:

=== 1: Simple Common Sense ===

Nothing in life has ever made me suspect that any gods really exist. I see no divine revelations, no miracles, no answered prayers, no preferential good fortune for people of any particular faith, no divine retribution for evildoers, no protection for the virtuous, the innocent or the weak. Life is exactly as we would expect it to be if there was no divine influence in the world - i.e. good and bad things come to good and bad people alike. Our lives are subject to chance, and the actions of other people, but that seems to be all.

=== 2: The Natural World ===

"Nature does all things spontaneously, by herself, without the meddling of the gods." - Titus Lucretius Carus (c.99-55 BCE).

We can see no sign of any divine involvement in the natural world. Galaxies, stars and planets form because it is in the nature of matter to do so. Living organisms evolve and diverge by the unthinking, undirected process of evolution. There is no plan, no design, just the effects of probability and the properties of matter and forces. Many people will claim to the contrary, but as far as I can tell this just reflects an ignorance about how the natural world really is, rather than the perception of any higher truth. Certainly, their arguments always evaporate in the light of reason.

=== 3: Logical Arguments ===

1: Science gives us a way to distinguish between good ideas and bad ideas - i.e. to show which explanation is the most consistent with observable reality. Science shows us that great complexity does not just arise spontaneously. It is inconceivable that even the simplest bacterium could exist without something being responsible for the complexity of its structure, its biochemistry and so on. It would take the lifetimes of a billion universes for it to appear spontaneously, by pure chance - in fact it is probably safe to say that it simply could never happen. This goes all the more for human beings. It's surely no coincidence that the only thing that we regard as truly intelligent - the human brain - is also the most complex thing in the known universe. Intelligence requires enormous complexity, far beyond anything that could conceivably exist without something being responsible for its existence. By the same reasoning, it's infinitely more unlikely still that an intelligent entity capable of designing and creating an entire universe and everything in it could just exist from nowhere, from nothing, without anything being responsible for its existence. Complexity, and especially the massive complexity required for intelligence, can therefore only arise from an antecedent, non-intelligent process - In the case of life on Earth, this means biological evolution, a fact which is attested to by a vast amount of real objective evidence and valid argument. So, to the extent that science allows us to reliably distinguish between plausible ideas and implausible ideas, it effectively rules out the possibility of an intelligent entity as the uncaused cause of everything that exists.

2: We've known for thousands of years that the 'tri-omni' gods of classical monotheistic religions cannot exist. If an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent deity existed, then human evil could not exist. Since human evil unarguably does exist, the classical monotheistic deity cannot exist (objections about 'free will' notwithstanding).

3: Quantum Mechanics strongly suggests that nothingness is a state that cannot exist in reality, since that would be 100% deterministic, and QM says that existence is probabilistic rather than deterministic. Experimental evidence supports QM. If true, then this also precludes the existence of a creator, since it would be impossible to have a state of 'nothingness' from which a 'something' could be created.

4: David Hume proved that moral values are subjective - i.e. they describe a person's response to events, rather than objective properties of events themselves. Since morals are personal and subjective, there cannot be an external, objective source of moral values - Indeed, the idea is simply incomprehensible. Therefore, any god which is claimed to be the objective source of moral values cannot possibly exist. This includes the gods of most monotheistic religions, by their usual definitions.

5: Argument from design: If everything was designed by an intelligent creator then we would have no basis for identifying things that clearly *are* designed (things made by human beings) since we would have no non-designed (i.e. natural) things to compare them with. Therefore the natural world (everything that has not been designed by humans) must be non-designed, and therefore there can't be a designer god.

6: Anything that holds information or knowledge must be made of discrete parts, such as a brain (neurons and their connections) or a computer (memory locations). Anything that is made of parts cannot be self-existent - it must be made of something pre-existing. Therefore an intelligent entity cannot be self-existent and cannot be the source of everything that exists.

7: If a 'tri-omni' god existed, then it would be his desire that all human beings have an unshakeable belief in his existence and a perfect knowledge of what behaviour he wants from us, and it would be within his capacity to achieve this. Since many people neither believe in a god nor agree on what is the right way to behave, such a god does not exist.

8: All attempts at arguing *for* the existence of any gods through logic and reason can be and have been comprehensively debunked.

=== 4: Religious Belief, Literature and Dogma ===

If any religion were true, we could reasonably expect it to produce some ideas and beliefs that people couldn't have thought up by themselves. Similarly for 'holy texts', and the rules and practices that derive from them. In fact though, religions only produce what we would expect humans to imagine or decide for themselves, on the basis of aspects of human nature such as superstition, moral judgments, xenophobia and so on. There is no sign of any divine influence here.

Religious literature, if divinely inspired, ought to be factually correct and free of contradictions, immoral ideas and absurdities. None of the holy texts fit the bill.

=== 5: Society and Culture ===

It's an observable fact that people overwhelmingly adopt the religion of their family and culture. If there was any external truth to religion, which human beings could perceive with some kind of supernatural sense, then we could reasonably expect there to be some consistency in religious belief. Instead, the distrubution of different religious beliefs is exactly as we would expect it to be if this were pure mythology, handed down through family and culture like any other kind of purely fictional story.

=== 6: Intellectual and Moral Progress ===

Religion has consistently been the enemy of intellectual progress, suppressing rational investigation of the world where it disagrees with and thus endangers religious belief (often by torture and death). There has never been, to the best of my knowledge, one single fact about the world that was brought to us by divine inspiration rather than rational investigation. How could this be, if religion were a source of truth? Religion has also consistently been the undisputed cause of much conflict, discrimination and persecution in the world, belying the existence of any kind of benevolent or moral guardian of the world.

=== 7: Rational Explanation for Religious Belief ===

As part of our evolutionary 'toolkit' of survival strategies, we have a highly developed awareness of other entities in our environment - We often notice human faces in carpet patterns, rabbit-shaped clouds and so on. There is more survival value in seeing what really *is* there, and also seeing some things that *aren't* really there, than in missing things that really are there and going hungry, or worse, ending up as someone else's lunch.

The consequence of this undeniably true aspect of human nature is that we have a natural tendency to imagine 'agents' (intelligent entities) behind natural phenomena and events in our own lives that aren't really there - i.e. gods and goddesses, demons, angels, spirits - a whole menagerie of supernatural characters. Society and culture binds up these characters with our wishes and fears, our desires for dominance and submission and shared identity, and we end up with religious belief and ritual and dogma, in thousands of different flavours throughout the world and throughout history. Religion is formalised superstition - It's just a common flaw in human nature, rather like the way we see optical illusions. We can account for the existence of religious belief perfectly well with this fact-based, rational explanation, rather than believing that there really is a supernatural realm of existence.

=== 8: Human Nature ===

Religious people will argue that humans are unique amongst all the animals in having an eternal, divine component that exists independently of the physical body - Usually referred to as a 'soul'. What exactly could a soul be? What properties could it have? What part of a person resides in the soul?

If it's postulated that consciousness, or awareness, or sense of self resides in the soul, it's difficult to see how this can be reconciled with the complete oblivion which accompanies general anaesthesia. How could a straightforward chemical, injected into the bloodstream, anaesthetise a soul so that it effectively ceases to exist during this time? If consciousness, in the form of a soul, were some kind of supernatural faculty, it would seem implausible that it could be completely disabled by a chemical.

How about some of the other things which we regard as essential parts of what makes a person what they are? How about love, compassion, reason, empathy, memory, conscious thought, character, 'spirituality' and so on? Well, there is really no plausible doubt that all these things are properties of the physical brain - We can alter all of these properties very simply with alcohol or other drugs, and observe how they change in people who have suffered significant brain damage. Previously placid people become uncontrollably violent, intelligent people become imbeciles, and so on. Stimulate the brain artificially, and the subject reports corresponding mental activity, e.g. 'religious experiences'. We can see from brain research that all these things - thought, emotion, sensation, character traits and so on - are correlated with activity in the brain, and some things can be identified with specific areas of the brain.

So, if all these faculties and characteristics of what we regard as the 'person' reside in the physical brain, as seems to be undeniably the case, and they all cease when the person dies, then what is left to be attributed to a 'soul'? As far as I can ascertain: Nothing. If there is no part of us that can continue after death, then there is no 'afterlife'... and if there is no afterlife, then most of religion is null and void.

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There are other reasons too, but that'll do for now...