Religous Believers, please help

It was unfortunate that you've been with people who clung to their faith because that is what their parents, school, and friends taught them. I also feel sad that your exposure to Christianity is limited by the examples you mentioned in your post which to me are not role models of what faith in God is. If those around you are not comfortable with you being an atheist, chances are they haven't had a real encounter with God nor understand God's love. What I can say is there are many people who have found their lives in their faith and relationship with God and have peace with Him and with all men. I am a believer in God but I don't go for any form of organized religion. You said you are comfortable in being an atheist and these people are comfortable in finding God for in Him they have found meaning to their existence.

To each his own ya know....everyone needs to believe in something including you..you have the belief that not believing is right...and for you it is...I am non believer myself when it comes to a "higher power" such as God, Allah etc etc and from my PERSONAL Buddhist and Pagan beliefs I feel WE ARE the higher power if that makes sense...Why? because it fits for me, it makes sense to me, its logical to me....IMO its the same for ppl who DO believe in God etc etc...it fits for them..it makes sense to them...As for the tv types though...I'm sorry but they just seem flatout nutty to me..its one thing to believe in something and have strong beliefs when it comes to that somethign but its completely different when some of these ppl go crazy fundie over it....THAT I'll never understand myself...

I want to say that I am sorry that you feel the way you do. God is very real and He created you and He loves you more than you will ever know! There is NO WAY I could have gotten thru the things I have gone thru without Him. He is my everything and He has blessed me beyond any human comprehension. He is the Creator of all...the Almighty...the Everlasting. He is our Heavenly Father. He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to save us from our sins. That is how much He loves us. He is so good! I can go on and on about how wonderful He is and how happy I am to know Him! I pray that one day you will open your heart to Him and His amazing love! He has a plan for your life! You just have to be willing to accept Him.

I'm purely agnostic, I figured that was a safer word than dealing with the Athiest word, that way if there is a God, so be it, and if not oh well, guess I am worm food thing. Why do you have to understand anyone elses explanation? what do you want to believe, or what traits do you personally find admirable? I mean, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Jewish, Wiccan, Druidic or whatever has a whole range of belief, anything you want practically! And, even then, you could just pick 'none' I mean, if you do not believe in any creator after seeing the cosmos, than so be it. Some would choose not to believe they were the only ones in the creation of all things. When I think about GOD what erases all my doubt is when I feel my hair, my skin my body, and all the wonderous things it does, and yet today feels so typical, however tomorrow, I could exist no more. my spirit feels so separate from my body. And, since I have learned that GOD is a part of me, and I am a part of GOD, I would have to believe that my soul will one day find it's final destination. It is not beyond me to believe that there is a GOD and that he has a purpose for each one of us. And, we are on a mission. however, this takes thought on what, and how GOD is. I dunno. Think about it. Think, if you were GOD, what would you be doing outthere in the cosmos? how would it all tie together?

WOW powerful question, it is hard to help someone understand the belief in god, divine being, divine source, allah, buddha, All THAT IS, goddess, higher being, higher energy. It is simply not your value system at least you are smart enough to question and try to understand yourself and those around you. I was raised catholic and I to knew a really cool nun for a teacher. One thing she did was to have us learn something about another religion, then instead of asking us what we learned, she asked us why we were given the assignment, answer: different is not right, Different is not wrong, different is different. I was taught to believe in god, and while I do think there is more so much more to the UNIVERSE, than we realize or comprehend, I do not accept most religious dogma that has been taught. My own personal experiences tell me there is more than just the physical reality that I know. There is more to the synchronicity of life than mere coincidence. Is this god? is this goddess? is this allah? is this jehovah? is this zues or any other form used? I found for me it is a learning questioning journey so as of yet why I believe is so complicated that I can't explain it to myself, and yet it is simple, there are things and events that happened in my life to tell me that there is more than the physical realities before us, a power, that has been labeled as divine, or labeled as magic, or labeled as miracle, and for me I am seeking understanding of it. Unfortunately to often people get trained for want of a better word and don't even question what it is they are trained in. Psychological study done years ago, five rats in a cage, the best cheese was put up on a higher level with a place to climb, every time the one rat went for the cheese he got it, every time the other 4 did, they would get an electric shock. Eventually the one who tried to go for the cheese when it was safe was being stopped by the others who knew for them it was not safe. They took out the rat that knew it was safe put in a new rat one who didn't know one way or the other, removed what caused the electric shock so that any of the 5 could now get the cheese from the higher level safely. The four did not even try, the new one did try, but whenever he did try the other four would try to stop him to the point of attacking him, once this one no longer went for the chese at the higher level they removed one of the first four rats and brought in a new, who tried to get the good cheese but was stopped, attacked. Eventually they removed all of the original four rats who had actually recieved the electric shock, and still none of the rats would go for the chese, yet none of the new rats knew why they didn't go for the cheese just that there was a reason that they were being stopped by those who were with them. It was training, training by the other rats, even though the new rats didn't know why they also didn't go for the climb to the better cheese. Sometimes people believe something because they have been programed trained to believe in a thing and don't even try to question why. Sometimes people like me find that they question, and yet find reason behind some of those early teachings, yet questions behind the others, and so still seek and hold onto the pieces that work for their lives. Sometimes people are trained well to believe but that alone is not what keeps their faith, sometimes they keep their faith simply because they experienced something that makes them believe. I don't know if this helps you to understand how some believe. I know how confusing it can be. I sometimes think it might be easier to be atheist, because it is confusing blending pieces of spiritual values that work for me from such varied ideologies and having it make sense in words rathar than just in faith.

The question of why a particular person believes a particular thing can be a very complicated issue. Sometimes, the thing we were taught first carries a lot of weight. A person can see this in the scientific community arround the time that the atom bomb was invented: letters from scientists all over the country poured in to the presidential office saying not to spend any more money on the atom bomb because it was based on junk science. They maintained the then classical view that mater and energy were not interchangable. Once they were faced with the results of the Manhattan project and the bombs dropped on Japan, do you really think these high-ranking old guard scientists all just suddenly said, "Oops, we were wrong... continue!" Today you'd have a hard time finding a scientist whou didn't accept that mater and energy can be transformed back and forth, but at the time there were probably a few very bizare and extreem explinations for what was going on that made sense to the people who believed them. The same was true for Quantum tunneling. Reliable or not, particles do exhibit faster than light speeds under some conditions sometimes, and when the results were first released showing this, it was taken with a lot of skepticism among scientists since the accepted conventional wisdom was that nothing can go faster than light. All of that is just to say I'm not trying to change your mind. I'm going to present the evidence that supports what I believe, but you're approaching the arguement with a certain set of pre-supposed ideas which no ammount of evidence may overcome. Fine. I'll present the evidence anyway, and if you decide to continue on, I suppose we'll find out at the end of our lives who's right and who's wrong. So the question "Is there a divinity" is pretty much a yes/no question. If there is a divinity (a God or set of gods that exist eternally with complete power and control over the universe) then there can't not be a divinity. If there isn't, then there can't be one. It's either true or false, and belief doesn't really play into it. There can't be one for me but not be one for you. Either I'm right and there is or you're right and there isn't. Whoever is not right is wrong. There's no in between. You can't prove there isn't something. If I say there isn't any such thing as a unicorn, then you proceed to show me every animal on the planet in turn to prove to me there's no unicorn, I can say you missed one, or that you and I just didn't recognize it for what it is, or that it exists on another planet. That isn't to say I believe in unicorns, just to say you can't prove there isn't one. Therefore, persueing that proof is pointless. You have to start with the assumption that it's there and start looking for it. If you can't find it, then it's acceptable to start considering the possibility that it doesn't exist. I haven't personally devoted a lot of time to hunting unicorns, but some people in the past have, and they came up empty handed. If they're out there, they're hard to find and don't leave any detectable evidence. Therefore, I feel pretty confident when I say that unicorns don't exist. So we start out assuming that there is a divinity. With that in mind, either that divinity wants us to find him/her/them/it, or he/she/they doesn't. (There are other intermediate answers like he doesn't care or he wouldn't mind, but depending on severity of thought they kind of boil down to either he does or doesn't.) If he didn't want us to find him, then I doubt the thought could even enter our minds that he might exist, and at any rate since he's so much smarter and more powerful than us, we couldn't find him against his will. We'll therefore put that on the same level as he doesn't exist. For our purposes, they mean the same thing. So then we're to the point where we're assuming he exists and that he wants us to find him, just to see if we can. If we can't find any evidence of him, we'll let it lie. I'll admit that I've never seen a duck-billed platipus. I find the descriptions of the animal rather fantastic and fanciful. If they didn't come from reliable sources and photographs and other sources that I can trust and sets of evidence I can believe, then I would not believe in such a creature. But it does seem to me that the photographs, the people I've known who have seen them, and the science journals written on them are enough evidence for me to believe they exist. Now, there is a trap a lot of people fall into here: the "If I were God," trap. "If I were God, I'd drop a lolipop factory in Seatle and put my name on all the lolipops and send one to everyone so that they'd know I was the real God." It's not a question of how you would reveal yourself if you were God. If I were a spiecies, I wouldn't just live on one continent, I'd spread out over several. So much for me being platipus. If you look at human history, there are only two things that are universally avaliable to all people everywhere at all times: nature, and other people. That means that anything other than nature and people is going to be a bad place to look for evidence of a divinity that wants to reveal itself. When I started my seeking, I started with nature. To me, if there were people who claimed to speak for God but there was no natural evidence for God, then they'd have to have some pretty profound proof that they spoke for God. To me, the simplest and yet most compelling evidence for God found in nature is the number 5. Consider: five petals on most flowers, five points on many leaves, five fingers/toes on most hands/feet, five planets visible from the surface of the Earth to the naked eye, etc. etc. etc. And yet, there are enough examples of each of these same classifications where the number isn't five to prove that there is no reason to prefer the number five. Five petals doesn't make a flower any more likely to survive, we'd do just as well with four or six fingers as we do with five, starfish spiecies with seven arms are just as healthy as the majority of starfish that have five arms, etc. It's like a personality just liked using the number five. As I said before, there's no evidence I can offer that will "prove" there's a God, but if you decide to be an athiest, this is the one peice of natural evidence you can easily see yourself and you just have to say, "Hu, what an amazing coincedence." There is other natural evidence for God, and there have been volumes of books written on the subject. Now, this kind of God, revealed only through natural evidence, is only slightly more useful than the God who exists but doesn't want us to know about him. Great, we know he exists... what does he want from us? To answer this type of question, we have to turn to the revelations he has given us through people. These need to be aproached with the utmost skepticism. I've already gotten to the point of believing in a god, now they have to prove to me that the being speaking through them is that god. I like the test proposed by Moses in the books of the Law of Moses: if a person says something comes from God and it doesn't happen that way, then it's not from God. Simple enough. And if a person speaks as though something comes from God and it isn't, then that pretty well proves he isn't really speaking for God. Obviously as a Christian, I think the Old Testament prophets fulfil this requirement, BUT I think there's an even better example in Joan d'Arc. If you really want to see what I mean, there's a translation of her trials online somewhere. There, she made three prophesies, all three of which came true. Now, when I say prophesies, I mean she said they came to her from God through her voices. There were also a couple of things that her voices didn't tell her, and her own opinion on the subject was wrong. But when she's not speaking for God, she's the same as anyone else. Also keep in mind that the people recording the trial were her enemies. If anyone had a reason and means to alter the records, it was them, but not to prove her right. They would have changed it (if at all) to prove she was a false prophet. But it doesn't appear to be the case.

I am a Catholic and so were my ancestors as far as I know. I also practise all the rituals of the church and received a religious education in the best Catholic school in Sri Lanka. But when I study all religions, I think the Buddhist philosophy is the best which does not believe in a God. It is based simply on the fact that if you do good you will get good in return.

Hi Gigglygrrl (nice nick, easy to type...). I am also an atheist. I know the whole "you hate god story". So, about the discussion you created (nice one, by the way). First there is not one single reason that can explain it about everyone around you feeling unconfortable. A few reasons come to my mind about the unconfort. 1) People were taught from early childhood about God and they are just unable to understand a world without God, they have a need to have a big father in the sky watching for them, so , when they meet an atheist they react the way they were conditioned to react : Atheists are evil, they hate god. Other people (preachers in general) have already tought for them and they don't think for themselves, they react as their conditioning orders. 2) Other people even try to understand this, but for them, God is a logic thing to believe, they cannot understand certain aspects of life without a god, so there must be a god , not necessarily the Christian one, and they also feel unconfortable, because they also cannot understand how can one lack belief in god existence. Why people believe? Many reasons. First there is indoctrination, from early childhood they are taught to believe, and this is hard to fight. Also the need to feel special, people cannot accept the idea that we are primates and share ancestor with monkeys for example. Fear and the need that our life cannot be all that exists, that there must be something else, because this world is unfair and the next will be not, are strong reasons for people´s belief in God. Hope it helped a little.

Don't you hate it when you ask a question and people don't answer correctly? Seems to me people are ready with their response before you get to the punchline. Anyways, I like yourself grew up very indoctrinated, but I was raised Jehovah's Witness so they are on an extreme side. I was raised to fear God and his judgement and nothing I ever did was good enough for God. But I was a fighter. When I was a teenager I saw so much hypocrisy, gossip, slander, jealousy, etc. in the church that I couldn't stay anymore. At 18 I left, which in a small community is hard to do, and started to rewrite my life. I forgot about religion for a while until one night, while partying we got into a debate. Me, a vague Christian, a Mormon, and an Athiest. After all the discussion I had some doubts in my mind and questions in my heart. I stepped outside to clear my head; it was a cold crisp night and the stars were awesome (I love Alaskan nights) and I just looked up and said, "Are you there?" and in an instance I knew. The sky got so big and I got so small. It was like He was looking right at me. Like a kid who finds the tiniest little bug to pick up and admire. In that instant I knew that He was there and that I was loved. Shortly after that, my dad wrote me a letter telling me 'the time is near the end', get back to the church. I said my first whole hearted prayer on my own and asked for Him to give me something to tell me I am going in the right direction, something real that is my reminder. That week I found out I was going to have my first baby. And she is 5 now and a constant reminder of the love He has because the way I love her is the way He loves me. And no, I didn't go back to that church. Any true Christian does not pity you or try to "save" you. They show love for others as Jesus did and do not judge others because that is for God to do. God is love, not judgement. He is kind and merciful, and He knows everyones heart.

Hii my dear Frz, I too am an atheist,well I have been mulling on the same topic for the couple of years,could any one help us out in getting the answer........ Plz could u explain us.........

I really admire ur quality...........I would say one thing what makes u really atheist...is the abundance of confidence you have rather than beleiving in other things...Some people are so focussed to acheive their goal that they keep on working hard so that they dont have time for beliefs...I would say those who lack confidence beleive in Gods....thats what all i can say...THE KEYWORD HERE IS CONFIDENCE...IT MAKES MOST OF THE MAN...

I would just like to let you know that I have a very similar background and outlook, with regard to religious faith. I find it a lot easier to be a confirmist, not ever questioning what others have taught you than to keep questioning them. It takes more faith and conviction to stay an atheist than to be a believer, I guess. Well, I am pasting a poem by me, originally published in triond. This speaks of some of my views, though a bit irreverantly, which not really characteristic of me. But when I attempted the poetic medium, I just simply could not help it. GOD QUESTIONS Why does my god look like me? Do the dogs have a god that looks like them? And the donkeys and elephants too? Why is it a sin to worship a god That doesn’t have my color, my race And my special thoughts on things? Why do I punish me when I worship Someone else’s god? Why do I not love my God as much as I love myself? Why do I terrorize my god? And why is my god not complaining? You can find more poems by me at triond.com, under the name ashwin.

its better to believe in one god think god is one

Here is a link you can learn a lot from it do tell me if you do not understand anything; http://www.turntoislam.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2268 there everything mentioned is with prffo so check it out!!

Sorry Im with you I dont believe in god. To me it makes no sense how people can believe in something they have never seen. Also why would god let so many innocent people and children die? For these reasons alone are why I dont believe.

if you believe that everything in this world has a purpose then you also are in this world for a reason or purpose...have you ever questioned your self as to why r u a human and not an animal...?Why is it that only humans have the capability to think and nothing else on this earth...?don you think there is something special about humans on this earth...if you r puzzled get back to me and i will help you out with your problem

Well First of I can understand why ppl around you arent comfortable when your a atheist. I once were. The same age as you were starting to believe that god doesnt exist. When my buddy came n told me about God n this n that. I used to tell them that there were no one who is called god. That ppl only made it up so other ppl may follow a rule to be pure. Well wot happened is that my friends got kinda opposed by me. To explain it. Even buddhism is not religion its way of life n Lord Buddha never told ppl to worship him. He just simply said this a way of living but ppl around the globe made it a religion. If read he writings you will find that Lord Buddha mentions that there is someone great than him who has created this world. Well I tell you how i can proof that the world is somehow made by someone. Just imagine yourself that watch is in front of you. Ok than just imagine that watch were dissambled into pieces. Well can those pieces just by itself assemble again to a watch. NO!!!. Its the same thing This world can't just have being by itself created. Take even a bicycle. Can a bicycle be built without someone. So it that way we can say that there is God. N we call as the creater

You didnt reply me! anyhow if you really want to know then firstly empty your mind with any kind of thoughts either possitive or negative.Now tell me how do you think you were created at the very first time i mean humans, oh! you might be believing in the bibbang theory and that of evolution.ok they might be true but what created the fire ball at the first place out of which the universe came into being.ok let us assume it was created it self than who is the one running all the universe who told the moon to revolve round the earth and the moon to revolve round the earth?who told the honeybee to suck the sugary syrup from the flower and then make honey out of it? When ever you see some beautiful painting or sculpture you must think of the painter or artist then why can;t you think of someone whose creations are more than fabulous no human mind could even think of creating such wonderfull things. Suppose someone slaps you,now its hurting there isn't any mark that you can show to anyone else,how are you going to make the other person believe that it hurts.You won't have any proof yet you feel the pain.God is just like that ,he is present all around you all that you need is to feel him.

just believe there is something divine my friend... think about life's simple yet amazing ways of showing u there is indeed something or someone watching over...yes, science can explain what goes on into every living and non-living thing but it could never explain why we "live", not just "breathing, eating" kind of "live" but why we are able to decide, feel and comprehend...why the sun is at a distance that would not be so hot nor so cold, why the weather changes that fast...try explaining why you're reading and thinking on what i am saying at this point...and probably then u'd understand.

As a devoted Christian, it is not my nature to judge or criticize other religion even Atheist. All through my life, I have to admit that my relationship with God is on and off. Meaning, from time to time, I will totally forget about God and just lead my lives in my own way. What really prompt me to call back to Him is when I have a major problems that is too much for me to carry on. I remember a time when I thought that I couldn't escape from my dilemna. I will drop by to a nearby church, kneel down, and pour out my burden to Him. When I step out of the church, suddenly I felt this lightness enveloping me. It is as if the weight of tmy problem had vanished. I can't explain precisely what happened but I know God heard me. Maybe because I believe in Him and have complete faith in Him. We were all here on this earth temporarily. We were given this life in order to learn about the greatness of God and His son,Jesus. You can't understand because your heart resist to believe in Him. Why not try reading the Bible and get to know Him for you to understand better. You see people in TV during evangelical services raising their hands, weeping and so on...all because they can feel God's presence. I hope this answer your question.