What is the reason behind the fact that people do not belive in God/?

Question

My question is why some people do not belive in God or those who don't, give some reasons why you don't and what do these people think will happen after we are dead?

Answer 1

There is insufficient empirical evidence to support the hypothesis of a god or gods.

Nothing will happen after one is dead except decomposition.

Answer 2

I actually dont have a problem with the possibility of a God. But the Christian God, or other gods specifically is what bothers me. How could a loving God, find justice in punishing finite sins with infinite punishment? An infinite punishment, for being born with a nature of sin, into a world that HE created, where he left Adam and Eve alone, unsupervised, and planted an evil tree RIGHT SMACK IN THE MIDDLE of the garden he gave them. Now, something doesnt seem right there. As a father, I would never leave my son or daughter in a room by themselves with candy on the table and tell them "if you eat this candy, I will punish you very very harshly!" knowing full well, that they are but mere children and they looovvvee candy. But as for a God...Im undecided...I may become a deist, or perhaps pantheism is calling my name.

Answer 3

Ok, but you must answer my question as well after.

1- there is absolutely no proof of god's existance.

2- what people would label "proof" is simply fairy tales that people make up. I can make up a "god" too and say "heres your proof" however I don't have to. the creator fo the FSM (flying spaghetti monster) already did.

3- I feel that god is just one of those things that is an emotional security blanket for people who demand answers and are afraid of the unknown, rather than saying "I don't know" they are desperate to seek out answers. in this day and age, when we actually have much of an understanding of the world around us, I feel that believing in a "supreme entity" that will look out for you and all things are "part of god's plan" is simply a sign of a weak minded individual who is ruled by thier fears.

4- we just die, thats it, no afterlife, we die and decompose and our bodies go to feed the soil. I feel that belief in god is also a person's attempt to evade this simple reality and truth. people fear death, and the thought of not bieng around is too much for thier minds to comprehend so Ironically they waste thier lives preparing for an afterlife that doesn't exist.

My question to you:

I now ask you, given the fact that there is absolutely nothing that proves the existance of god or heaven outside of what you want to be true, why do you believe?

Why waste your time and the only life you have when simply being a good person for the sake of bieng a good person would suffice instead of wasting even one second of your precious life praying to something that doesn't exist and doesn't qualify as entertainment?

Answer 4

I actually became a Philosophy and Comparative Religion major to explore that very question. I was raised as a conservative Jew and I believed in God my entire childhood. When I got to college, I encountered atheism inside and outside of the classroom. Philosophy basically breaks down all of reality - politics, religion, morality and shows you how arbitrary everything is. After realizing that all of these things are man made. They proceed to question the existence of the ultimate source of reality - God. At this point, I was convinced of the arbitrariness of our laws and morality, but I was not ready to give up on believeing in God, so I decided to study comparative religion. I felt that by studying what all the major religions throughout history thought, that I would be able to arrive at some truth. As I learned about Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hindusim, Daoism, and Confucianism to name a few, I saw what they all had in common. All of them were started by prophets who understood what God was. What ended up happening due to political manipulations over centuries and centuries of these religious doctrines is that all religions were made to be dogmatic tradition-focused faiths. The irony is that this is not what the original prophets intended. The original philosophy behind all of the mystic traditions of virtually all religions is the idea of a non-theistic deity or God. This is where people get confused. An atheist is someone who does not believe in God (as a person or spirit looking down and judging us). The mystic traditions in all religions speak about God as non-theistic deity. Nothingness, that which is not in existence now. To answer your question once you realize that the God you were brought up to believe is a mythological tool used to preach the morality and lessons to the common followers, you can see that God is so much more than that. To personify God and make him a person who cares about what we do is to take away from what HE/SHE/IT really is, which is something that transcends anything we could imagine. The mystics believe that all living things are connected and that when we die we return to God, nothingness, everything, thus the origin of the idea of Heaven (the best metaphor our ancient ancestors could come up with to teach the concept).

Answer 5

No evidence. But it's ok. We don't need some magical guy in the sky for fulfillment. We don't need the promise of heaven or the threat of hell to be kind to each other here on earth during our lifetime.

Many Atheists and Agnostics started out wishing that there was a heaven and a loving god, but in time spent searching for evidence in support of the myth, atheists decided it was made up by man, agnostics think there is not enough evidence to make a conclusion.

Why would anyone believe in anything that is purported to be true in some book, or by some man, without critically evaluating the evidence.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." - Carl Sagan

Answer 6

Because there is no evidence, because the concept of an omnipotent god is highly illogical and contradictory, and because if I were to believe in deities the biblical one would be the last one I would believe in.

I don't know what happens after we die. All indications are that nothing happens, that death is the end of life, and we cease to exist. Only way to know for sure is to die. And no one has died and come back to tell about it. (NDE don't count as the person was not really dead.)

Answer 7

Another question would be, why DO people believe in God? I mean people like most of us, who've never seen God, never heard Him speak, never seen or heard Him do anything, for that matter. People who look at this rationally rather than emotionally, and without an agenda, see no indisputable evidence of God's existence.

Not to be flippant, but if one believes that flying saucers exist, the burden of proof is upon them to prove that they exist. It is not the responsibility of those who don't believe in flying saucers to prove that they don't exist.

When one makes a claim, such as the existence of God, the burden of proof is upon them to prove that claim, not upon those who doubt the validity of their claim.

I have no evidence to prove that God exists, especially the Christian God of Love. On the other hand, I have many reasons to believe that such a loving, caring God does not exist. The current fires in California, the deaths of innocent babies from AIDs, even the hatred of Jesus's followers against gay people and anyone who disagrees with them (well demonstrated here on Yahoo Answers), are all evidence that God, at least the Christian God, does not exist.

Answer 8

Personally, I believe in God, but I think that people don't believe in God because he's left us no proof. There is absolutely no proof whatsoever that God ever existed, unless you count the Bible, and the first written Bible was written in about 600 AD, which was almost 600 years after Jesus walked the Earth. The Bible isn't completely accurate (imho), but it does give the general story of Jesus. I believe that Dan Brown could be right; that Jesus was a mortal man, but his "status" was changed by the Church to give them more power. It makes sense to me, because the men of the Church aren't the same as they are now. Priests then would burn villages because they didn't believe in God.

Answer 9

No evidence, and I find the idea of blind faith in something dangerous and silly.

I've yet to find a believer who can give me a real answer to any question I ask that makes sense

I grew up in a christian church, and from a young child I thought it was all based on hypocricy and terror

It bothers me that so many people think that they can just pray and get what they want, and they don't actually TRY to achieve goals and dreams and desires through working hard and earning it.

And so on and so on...

And nothing happens after we die. The time we have on earth is our time to do great things and live and be happy. And no, I don't fear death. I had a cancer scare a couple of years ago, and every christian I knew asked "Aren't you scared? Aren't you terrified?"

I wasn't. Whatever happens happens.

Answer 10

According to Paul, ignorance about God and the things of God comes from a hardness of the heart. This develops early in life when people first start denying their conscience. People's desires for their own self-first longings results in them tuning out the natural thinking towards God in them, that is originally in place:

Ephesians 4:18 Their minds are closed, they are alienated from the life that is in God, because ignorance prevails among them, and their hearts have grown hard as stone.

This is why we need grace, so we may be born again, when we hear and believe in Christ. God plants new life in us, and gives us His Spirit so we start wanting what is right and don't unconsciously through selfish desires and resultant bad conscience run from Him.

Answer 11

Well, I'm not going to speak for anyone but myself. Unlike some people here, I don't think I can see into the hearts and minds of others.

I don't know if the God of the children of Israel exists or not - I have no experience with that God

But either way, I refuse to honor that God as described in the bible.
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