Why would a reasonable person believe in God?

[T.G.G. Moogly]

In a violent, chaotic, and uncertain reality would a belief in a god be a reasonable decision? For some I think so.

As to doctors believing in god, that can mean many things. It dos not necessarily man the biblical o Greek kind of a god.

I have listened to interviews with doctors who deal with areas like childhood cancer. It can be emotionally brutal.

You reminded me of an experience I had with an arrogant doctor about 5 or 6 years ago. We were at a Xmas season party at my bro in law's home while he was still married. I was talking to a physician friend of his and mentioned I had just left an atheist meetup. The guy went into a rage, asking me why atheists had to get together. I told him we got together because we are humans and sometimes we enjoy the company of people who have similar beliefs as us, just like Christians enjoy being around each other. He got nasty and I walked away, telling him that I wasn't interested in further conversation with him.

A few minutes later his wife came to me and said that I need to understand that her husband was a pathologist and it's hard for him to be around death. I told her that I was a nurse who had been caring for older people for many years, often watching them deteriorate and die. She didn't know what to say after that. So, sure, religion might be needed for some people who work with the sick and the dying, but I've known quite a few atheist nurses over the years, and somehow we are able to care for the sick and the dying without any beliefs in the supernatural.

What should we call his god? Is it the god of despair, disappointment, chaos and violence? Is it really a god of hope? Is it the god of denial? It certainly isn't a reasonable god no matter how one slices it. Maybe it's just the god of contradiction. In any case, such a position says a lot about the human condition at least for some of us.

 

[southernhybrid]

I honestly don't understand how someone who cares for children who have terminal illnesses is helped by having a god belief. I would be very angry at this god who was giving cancer to innocent children. One would think that oncologists would all be atheists, or maybe deists. What excuse do they give their god for making children suffer? "God works in mysterious ways". I guess that's it.

 

[steve_bank]

If you are an emotionless Vulcan I suppose it makes no sense to you. I don't need it, but I understand how someone can benefit from it.

Are there no irrational raging ranting atheists?

And again atheist is a rejection of gods, It is not an affirmation of any belief. Someone can be atheist and be Wiccan believing they can cast spells. All the stuff I lump as 'new age mysticism'. A mix of science and eastern mysticism and eastern philosophy. It took of starting in the 60s with people rejecting traditional Christian religion. Get rid of one religion and something else appears.

Deepak Chopra appears on PBS. An actual MD. When I watched him on PBS he spins a mix of quantum mechanics and traditional Indian mysticism. People in the audience are enthralled. Back in the 90s he said an earthquake was inadvertently caused by his meditating.

And of course Scientology. There are people who swear by it.

Working to eliminate religion is unrealistic.

 

[abaddon]

I honestly don't understand how someone who cares for children who have terminal illnesses is helped by having a god belief. I would be very angry at this god who was giving cancer to innocent children. One would think that oncologists would all be atheists, or maybe deists. What excuse do they give their god for making children suffer? "God works in mysterious ways". I guess that's it.

They find the alternative, that all the suffering and death is "for no reason", is the most horrible scenario.

 

[atrib]

My wife is a surgeon and she has always been an atheist despite growing up in rural Tennessee. Doctors are highly paid mechanics, you don't have to be particularly bright to become a doctor. Her words.

 

[southernhybrid]

I honestly don't understand how someone who cares for children who have terminal illnesses is helped by having a god belief. I would be very angry at this god who was giving cancer to innocent children. One would think that oncologists would all be atheists, or maybe deists. What excuse do they give their god for making children suffer? "God works in mysterious ways". I guess that's it.

They find the alternative, that all the suffering and death is "for no reason", is the most horrible scenario.

So, it's better to think it's god's will that a two year old suffered terribly and then died? That seems like a more horrible scenario than simply accepting that sometimes children get sick and die. It's sad but unavoidable. How do the religious cope when a 7 year old child is shot and killed by a stray bullet, as a couple were in Atlanta recently? How do the religious accept it when children die in a terrible car accident? Are all of these things god's will in their minds? How does that make it easier to cope or grieve? It makes no sense to me. Maybe my brain is wired differently than the god believers. It doesn't seem reasonable to believe that a loving god would shorten the life of a child, imo. It's easier to believe that sometimes shit happens.

 

[abaddon]

So, it's better to think it's god's will that a two year old suffered terribly and then died? That seems like a more horrible scenario than simply accepting that sometimes children get sick and die. It's sad but unavoidable. How do the religious cope when a 7 year old child is shot and killed by a stray bullet, as a couple were in Atlanta recently? How do the religious accept it when children die in a terrible car accident? Are all of these things god's will in their minds? How does that make it easier to cope or grieve? It makes no sense to me. Maybe my brain is wired differently than the god believers. It doesn't seem reasonable to believe that a loving god would shorten the life of a child, imo. It's easier to believe that sometimes shit happens.

For one person it's easier to believe that "sometimes shit happens". For another person it's easier to believe there's a "reason for it all". So, yes, different brain wiring. Or I'd phrase it as different personalities with different values.

There's a saying, "a person with a WHY to live for can endure any HOW"... or words to that effect. Rephrase it to "can endure any conditions". I'm proposing the theists are trying to ease the dismay and terror by finding a "why".

The horror of a mindless universe that eats us, and not for a reason but because "shit happens", outweighs what's logically consistent. They have a tradition ready-made for them that helps make it all seem less utterly absurd. So, for some, it's not easier to "believe that sometimes shit happens" since that implies a kind of cosmic horror. To you the god is the cosmic horror. To them the universe is the cosmic horror.

 

[steve_bank]

Why did Pete Buttigieg become Christian? A religion based in scripture with explicit prohibitions and punishments for homosexuality?

An evangelical gay Christian. Is Buutigieg unreasonable or reasonable? Careful now, he is an icon of the progressive left. He is gay and it prolifically incorrect to criticize gays.

The Generous Gospel of Mayor Pete

Buttigieg talks with ‘Rolling Stone’ about faith, the religious left, and what the Mike Pences of the world get wrong

www.rollingstone.com

Since the early stages of his presidential campaign, Mayor Pete Buttigieg has made his Christian faith a cornerstone, explicitly attacking the idea that “Christian” and “Republican” are synonymous terms, and eloquently questioning the motives of religious leaders who choose policy over morality and who have become Donald Trump’s faithful apologists on the national stage. “The Republican Party likes to cloak itself in the language of religion,” Buttigieg announced during the second primary debate back in July. “But we should call out hypocrisy when we see it. And for a party that associates itself with Christianity to say that it is OK to suggest that God would smile on the division of families at the hands of federal agents, that God would condone putting children in cages, [that party] has lost all claim to ever use religious language again.”

Pete Buttigieg’s Very Public Faith Is Challenging Assumptions

His tone separates him from many evangelical leaders—but in one crucial way, he might be replicating a mistake of the religious right.

www.theatlantic.com

The mayor of a medium-size midwestern city, Rhodes Scholar, and war veteran who is liturgically conservative and cites Saint Augustine as one of his religious influences is running for president. He’s also a Democrat. He is criticizing the current president, a Republican, for his infidelity and lack of family values. And he’s gay.

 

[Jarhyn]

I honestly don't understand how someone who cares for children who have terminal illnesses is helped by having a god belief. I would be very angry at this god who was giving cancer to innocent children. One would think that oncologists would all be atheists, or maybe deists. What excuse do they give their god for making children suffer? "God works in mysterious ways". I guess that's it.

I don't think one need resort to "mysterious ways" to be able to answer this question.

I do not believe in God. I do not accept any evidence offered nor this as any form of evidence of God. It's just not there, as close as we have tried to look.

It doesn't need to be there.

That said, do you think it's evil to turn something like our universe "on", feed in some garbage in the first Planck second, and just watch what happens, and let that be the glorious complicated mess it is, assuming you don't know what that will be?

It's not evil.

It's just not good, either.

If it's a "universe" of things evolving towards the completion of a mathematical model of their system, then it's going to be harder before it's easier, and more approximate before it is more precise. That's the only way such a thing can ever be: It will contain misses and there shall be tragedies.

If you want to discuss the reasons why some entity might do that, maybe you should ask, "do humans have an interest in creating systems and simulations hosting objects that operate so as to complete mathematical models of their system?" And "what is that interest in such generalized problem solvers?"

Is there interest in making such a thing as a universe in a bottle?

I dare say there is.

When humans run such things, often the behavior is not great... although when humans kill simulated children on purpose, at least they tend towards instantaneous methods.

As such there may be things like child enslavement simulated directly, because maybe whatever the goal is, is to create something that has an experience of such pain as losing children, so that were they to ever meet us they would be able to grasp upon empathy rather than find our pain an alien concept to them.

There are reasons why, and they are not mysterious.

You're in the "won't forgive God if it exists" camp. I'm over the hump on the "I'm going to be the thing that some of the entirely synthetic things won't forgive if it exists".

My own reasons are simply that I live in a universe where kids get cancer, and that the unguided evolution that gave rise to me carries no guarantees of cancer-free existence, and anything I unleash into the world needs to actually be capable of understanding that kind of suffering and hating it for what it is, while accepting that it was always going to be so and could never not.

There aren't necessarily gods. I don't believe there are any. There are zero or more. I think that these facts are rather good reasons to focus on solving our own problems, and just not worry about thinking about gods except where such thoughts help us solve our problems.

I think instead we should accept that Gods are unnecessary except for engaging in hypotheticals that help us solve problems and create models, and in which case they are recognized still as purely hypothetical!

 

[steve_bank]

Adding Buttigieg has an impressive resume.

Harvard, Oxford, and Naval Intelligence. Hardly a superstitious irrational person.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Maybe my brain is wired differently than the god believers.

It absolutely is. Belief in magic beings that live in the sky is definitely normalized delusion, but it's still delusion, an undesirable mental condition. It got itself selected for over eons. In the extreme some folks are schizophrenic or bipolar or some other mental condition that in today's environment is definitely undesirable. Consider yourself fortunate.

 

[lostone]

If you wanted to survive, in the many cultures that have existed over human history, you had to at least pretend to share their religious beliefs, or die. Many who pretended even found it advantageous to become priests.

 

[southernhybrid]

I just want to mention that my quote, "God works in mysterious ways", was meant as sarcasm, since I'm not sure everyone realized that. I used that quote because when I was a child, growing up in an evangelical home, whenever I asked my father why a loving god would send people to hell forever, just because they didn't believe in Jesus, or didn't even know about Jesus, I always got an answer that reminds me of that phrase about god's mysterious ways. It was something like, we don't understand why, but god will explain it to us when we get to heaven.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I just want to mention that my quote, "God works in mysterious ways", was meant as sarcasm, since I'm not sure everyone realized that. I used that quote because when I was a child, growing up in an evangelical home, whenever I asked my father why a loving god would send people to hell forever, just because they didn't believe in Jesus, or didn't even know about Jesus, I always got an answer that reminds me of that phrase about god's mysterious ways. It was something like, we don't understand why, but god will explain it to us when we get to heaven.

Which translates, "I don't know. That's because what I've been taught to believe and what I observe make me question whether what I've been taught is actually true."

 

[No Robots]

The atheist-materialist is a fine study in the paradoxes of God. The atheist-materialist finds profound comfort in his disbelief. "I am your disbelief too,” whispers God in his ear. No one can dodge the ruses of the eternal protean Essence.--Benjamin DeCasseres

 

[lostone]

Given the diabolical, sadistic, monstrous God whose existence that many Christians and Muslims promote, many of those who reject its existence have abundant good reason to hope it does not exist. Fortunately, it has shown no evidence of existing for a long time, if ever.

 

[No Robots]

More from DeCasseres:

Christ as a psychic ghost in the minds of a few mystics. A threadbare basis in fact. Nursed by poets, Jews and pagan reactionaries. The gradual materialization of the emotional need. The Church. Building the Monster through the centuries. Every being has contributed. Takes on diabolistic characteristics. Its destructiveness. Its victims, martyrs. Gets beyond control of its keepers, the churches. Its sadistic tendencies. Its invasion of the Orient—missionaries, consulates, Bible societies and other Christ-fakirs. It has alter-egos—Christian Science, Mormonism and the thousand and one other slushmushgush beliefs. Then into the realm of the imaginative and future. Christ-Golem-Moloch stalks the earth finally with an independent life, slaying, martyrizing, destroying everything in its path. The degradation of the original poetic idea. "I bring not peace but a sword.” Many other texts in New Testament to show how the Idea prophesied its bloody, ruthless future. Finally, all humanity in the Christ-Golem-Moloch as atoms.

 

[SIB]

for me its simple. How well does a claim match what we see? How many people would understand the claim? Is there a mechanism? Predictions?

The belief in something more is more reliable than the reverse belief. What that something is, is open to debate. The reverse claim is on equal footing with a deity. Based on the above cross checks anyway. There is no magical beast floating around. But humans are not the top rung in the system either.

 

[No Robots]

DeCasseres:

There is only one form of my consciousness that will admit of no opposite, nor paradox. It is my immersion in God, the pantheistic God of Spinoza, Goethe, Shelley and myself. My Absolute naturally admits of no relative, no opposite. This God of mine contains all paradoxes, all opposites, all blends. It is the central static Will of me, Proteus and chameleon.

 

[steve_bank]

Some people post quotes like Catholics sprinkle 'holy water'.