I'm curious about your own inner thoughts regarding the Existence or non-existence of God. I don't want a great scientific explanation or examples from religious texts.
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I don't see any evidence that points to the existence of a sapient, intelligent, all-powerful entity. But for myself, it is helpful to visualize something that cares when I'm hurting or visualize handing it control of circumstances I can't deal with. I understand why so many people have a need to believe in something they can't experience with their basic human senses.
Personally, I doubt that he does. Humanity has committed terrible acts and appears poised to continue causing harm to each other, other species, and our planet. If God were indeed real, one might expect some form of intervention, but many continue to revere him as a benevolent entity. Throughout history, people have sacrificed, killed, and ostracized others in the name of this belief. The stigmatization and exclusion persist, all for something that likely originated as an attempt for humanity to explain the world thousands of years ago. Moreover, I don't see any compelling evidence to the contrary. I probably upset some sort of person with a different view of life, and they’ll probably downvote me, but oh well lol.
Dyslexic pet owners say yes.
NO, there is not. Comparative religions should be a required study for the 10-12 age group everywhere, it would significantly reduce prejudices in this terrible world.
I know in my heart and head there is not a god by any name because I am a woman born on planet earth and I am not in any way inferior to any man, yet almost every religion is/was created/designed to oppress me.
There is and was never a god.
We live in a universe that came about and evolved through natural means. For 13.77 billion years it has behaved exactly as a natural universe would. 10.07 billion years into its existence single-celled life emerged on at least one of its planets, and then swam blindly and without thought for a mind boggling 3.1 billion years, until one cell began living in another cell, and multicellular life was born. For another 598 million years life became wildly diverse, spreading to every ecological niche imaginable, but still having no complex, abstract, or philosophical thoughts. Then in the last couple million years (or less than 1/10,000th of the life of the universe) our ape cousins started walking upright, making tools, and thinking amazing thoughts.
So here are our predecessors, naked, wandering the world and wondering how it all works, and where it all came from. They of course know nothing about physiology, cells, atoms and molecules, magnetism, tectonic plates, electricity, germ theory, sperm and eggs, genetics, dinosaurs, gravity, the electroweak force, black holes, etc, etc. They see some stars move in the sky, and do not know they are not stars.* They do not know that stars are suns. They do not know what causes seasons, droughts, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards, tides, heat waves. Disease, cancer, infertility, twins, birth defects, allergies, mental illness, brain damage—all mysteries. They don’t know that the heavens do not revolve around the Earth. And for the longest time they absolutely no way to find out any of these things. But they are creative, crave order, and, like all humans, are subject to whims of confirmation bias and denial. So to explain it all they invent spirits, then gods, then God. When the Old Testaments books were, people were ignorant of nearly every natural phenomenon listed above, yet were propounding the origin and inner workings of humans, the Earth, and the cosmos.
It seems, and I know will find this offensive, laughable to me that for all of prehistoric time God the Father was just…hanging out. Watching untold trillions of amoebas bobbing around, watching fish wriggle out of the ocean, then watching dinosaurs conquer the Earth for 250 million years before falling prey to a random rock from space, and then sitting around for another 65 million years until he could send himself to Earth to die in the form of just one of the human species that has lived here, and then(!) have a stunning lack of foresight and incarnate himself into an illiterate family, leaving his Holy Words to be written down by other men decades later, and in conflicting form.
We don’t know yet where the universe came from, or why it has the laws that it does. Through the hard work, insight, and luck of brave minds we have solved thousands of natural mysteries, and there are uncountable thousands more, but “God” is the answer for those who wish to stop asking questions, to turn their backs on seeking knowledge.
*Say “planet” to a medieval person, and they will think “wandering star.” The Earth and the planets were not the same category of things to pre-Enlightenment people; the stars were not suns. There were fixed stars and wandering stars, the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun. You hear “Mars” and you see in your mind’s eye a terrestrial planet that orbits the Sun between the Earth and Mars, with mountains, canyons and valleys, but the smartest minds of 0BCE saw a red star that moved against the background of other stars, and that all of them revolved around the Earth. Although they knew even then that the Earth was round!
So many typos. If there was a loving god, would he let me post with that many typos?
I think God exists, and we can see signs of His existence from looking around us. Looking at the smallest single cell organism, how it has all the parts it needs to function and thrive and grow. Even to ourselves, how all of the chemical reactions and intracellular processes are timed and intertwined with one another for us to live. Our world is so diverse in climate and geography, yet we have the intellect to take resources from our environment, no matter where that may be, and manipulate them to our benefit. How the sky is there to protect us from the dangers of space. Even within space, how all of the different energies and gravitational fields push and pull the stars, planets, and other celestial bodies to move on their paths, so precise that we can use our own mathematics to calculate where they have been and where they will be given a specific time measurement.
And yet, when all of this is happening constantly around us, regardless of if we see it or not, when you call out in desperation for help, you feel as if you are alone with Him and have His entire attention. Most people feel that as we learn more and more through science, there is less doubt in God's nonexistence. For me, though, it all feels like too much for it to have been a coincidence, just an occurrence. It has taken us hundreds of thousands of years of living on this planet to get the understanding of science that we have today, and how much there is that remains unknown to us, and yet our universe still operates with all of the moving parts in harmony with one another.
That's just my two cents though, I'm not sure if too many people would agree.
“Looking at the smallest single cell organism, how it has all the parts it needs to function and thrive and grow.” I can’t help but see this as evidence of a natural universe. In a universe without a god, of course every cell needs all of its parts to work. In a universe with a god, things could work without their constituent pieces, as the “power of God” could hold them together.