What if God didn't exist?

[BobRyan]

Simple question. If you became convinced that God didn't exist, would you continue to practice (going to Church, praying, etc.)?

The Easter Bunny doesn't exist -- I am not going to any services devoted to the Easter Bunny OR to Vishnu or to Brahma etc.

If God did not exist -- we would not exit -- so the point is moot.

I God continued to exist BUT I became convinced that He did not exist - I would be a believer in Darwinism like Dawkins and Provine did.

Check out the new movie "EXPELLED".

in Christ,

Bob

 

[Voyageur]

To me, the practical aspects of Christianity include: love for one's fellow man, faithfulness in marriage, raising children according to a moral ethical code, following that same ethical code, and fellowship with like minded individuals.

Non-Christians, atheists and agnostics alike have love for their fellow man. They, too, can be faithful in marriage; successful in raising morally and ethically-responsible children, etc.

You don't need a religion to see the familial and societal benefits of such right thought and action.

 

[motile]

Simple question. If you became convinced that God didn't exist, would you continue to practice (going to Church, praying, etc.)?

The Easter Bunny doesn't exist -- I am not going to any services devoted to the Easter Bunny OR to Vishnu or to Brahma etc.

You sound like a strong atheist. Why don't you believe in the Easter Bunny, more to the point, why are you so sure the Easter Bunny doesn't exist?

If God did not exist -- we would not exit -- so the point is moot.

That logic is incredibly flawed. If the universe was created by an intelligence then it's a pretty poor design. So, if god did exist would it not be the case that the universe would not be expanding? That the galaxies would be closer together and not flying apart leading to the universes inevitable death? I submit to you that if a deity did exist and if he did create the universe then if that deity did not exist the universe would look exactly the same as it does now because the universe is exactly how we would expect if it had not been designed.

Talking of moot points...

I God continued to exist BUT I became convinced that He did not exist - I would be a believer in Darwinism like Dawkins and Provine did.

That's a huge non-sequitur. It does not follow that if you became an atheist you would automatically believe anything else.

By the way, how long have poodles existed?

Check out the new movie "EXPELLED".

That's a God awful film. Truly dire. Not just because it's utter dross but because it's badly made, dull, inartistic and full of mistakes. That film has so much untruth and propaganda in it...well words fail me. Right down to their use of the Dawkins footage at the end.

Please, don't just accept it because it happens to agree with your own world view, but take it on it's own intrinsic merritts... http://www.expelledexposed.com/

 

[motile]

To me, the practical aspects of Christianity include: love for one's fellow man, faithfulness in marriage, raising children according to a moral ethical code, following that same ethical code, and fellowship with like minded individuals.

Non-Christians, atheists and agnostics alike have love for their fellow man. They, too, can be faithful in marriage; successful in raising morally and ethically-responsible children, etc.

You don't need a religion to see the familial and societal benefits of such right thought and action.

Yes, exactly *claps*.

Thank you.

 

[Vic C.]

To me, the practical aspects of Christianity include: love for one's fellow man, faithfulness in marriage, raising children according to a moral ethical code, following that same ethical code, and fellowship with like minded individuals.

Non-Christians, atheists and agnostics alike have love for their fellow man. They, too, can be faithful in marriage; successful in raising morally and ethically-responsible children, etc.

You don't need a religion to see the familial and societal benefits of such right thought and action.

Yes, exactly *claps*.

Thank you.

Hi motile, I just caught Voyageur's post. This is how we understand morality. It does not come from man, it comes from God. There is a few places in our Bible where it's written that God places these moral laws in the hearts (conscience) and some follow them and some don't. Example:

Rom 2:14 For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves:
Rom 2:15 Which show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another;)

Why some follow and some don't is a theological question not for this particular thread. Our "job" as believes is to help point people towards the source of this morality; God will do the rest as His will dictates.

Question: When did cannibals realize what they were doing was wrong? Just curious as to how you all answer this. 8-)

 

[Devekut]

[quote:7b724]The Easter Bunny doesn't exist -- I am not going to any services devoted to the Easter Bunny OR to Vishnu or to Brahma etc.

You sound like a strong atheist. Why don't you believe in the Easter Bunny, more to the point, why are you so sure the Easter Bunny doesn't exist?[/quote:7b724]

I see where you are going Motile, and it's a typical Dawkinian point: that every theist Christian is an atheist to the religion next over from him. However, when we examine this closer, we find that this is simply not the case. I, for one, am not comitted to the notion that a worshipper of Brahma is in total error. To speak truthfully, a good number of Hindu's have it nearly right. Certainly more so than Greeks worshipping Zeus. In fact...even if someone happened to sincerely attend this worship service for the Easter bunny, I would think him quite deluded....but not in total error. There is a difference between percieving the spiritual incorrectly and denying its reality altogther. Yourself, Dawkins and others fall in the latter camp, and that's a world of a difference.

I am going to quote something lengthy for an online discussion, but I reccomend you get around to reading the whole chapter titled "The Paradoxes of Christianity" in Chesterton's "Orthodoxy":

I take a third case; the strangest of all, because it involves the one real objection to the faith. The one real objection to the Christian religion is simply that it is one religion. The world is a big place, full of very different kinds of people. Christianity (it may reasonably be said) is one thing confined to one kind of people; it began in Palestine, it has practically stopped with Europe. I was duly impressed with this argument in my youth, and I was much drawn towards the doctrine often preached in Ethical Societies-- I mean the doctrine that there is one great unconscious church of all humanity founded on the omnipresence of the human conscience. Creeds, it was said, divided men; but at least morals united them. The soul might seek the strangest and most remote lands and ages and still find essential ethical common sense. It might find Confucius under Eastern trees, and he would be writing "Thou shalt not steal." It might decipher the darkest hieroglyphic on the most primeval desert, and the meaning when deciphered would be "Little boys should tell the truth." I believed this doctrine of the brotherhood of all men in the possession of a moral sense, and I believe it still--with other things. And I was thoroughly annoyed with Christianity for suggesting (as I supposed) that whole ages and empires of men had utterly escaped this light of justice and reason. But then I found an astonishing thing. I found that the very people who said that mankind was one church from Plato to Emerson were the very people who said that morality had changed altogether, and that what was right in one age was wrong in another. If I asked, say, for an altar, I was told that we needed none, for men our brothers gave us clear oracles and one creed in their universal customs and ideals. But if I mildly pointed out that one of men's universal customs was to have an altar, then my agnostic teachers turned clean round and told me that men had always been in darkness and the superstitions of savages. I found it was their daily taunt against Christianity that it was the light of one people and had left all others to die in the dark. But I also found that it was their special boast for themselves that science and progress were the discovery of one people, and that all other peoples had died in the dark. Their chief insult to Christianity was actually their chief compliment to themselves, and there seemed to be a strange unfairness about all their relative insistence on the two things. When considering some pagan or agnostic, we were to remember that all men had one religion; when considering some mystic or spiritualist, we were only to consider what absurd religions some men had.We could trust the ethics of Epictetus, because ethics had never changed. We must not trust the ethics of Bossuet, because ethics had changed. They changed in two hundred years, but not in two thousand.

 

[VaultZero4Me]

Vic Question: When did cannibals realize what they were doing was wrong? Just curious as to how you all answer this.

When we came and killed some, took their gold, used some of the others as slaves, and left the rest to die from the diseases that we brought. 8-)

Btw there were many cultures whom knew nothing of Christianity and never ate or sacrificed their children. Many more in fact.

 

[motile]

Hi motile,

Hi :D

I just caught Voyageur's post. This is how we understand morality. It does not come from man, it comes from God. There is a few places in our Bible where it's written that God places these moral laws in the hearts (conscience) and some follow them and some don't. Example:

Rom 2:14 For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves:
Rom 2:15 Which show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another;)

Why some follow and some don't is a theological question not for this particular thread. Our "job" as believes is to help point people towards the source of this morality; God will do the rest as His will dictates.

Question: When did cannibals realize what they were doing was wrong? Just curious as to how you all answer this. 8-)

There are still cannibalistic tribes in the world today. So to generalise it, as if to say all the pesky cannibals just woke up one day and realised they were being naughty is a little bit absurd. Most of the tribes were wiped out and/or had their land stolen. Some had their cultures destroyed and replaced with someone else's.

But, that raises a good point, these tribes existed for tens of thousands of years, maybe even thousands of years. Cannibalism was a way of ensuring food for the tribe even when glaciers and ice sheets covered the land. Faced with starvation and certain death they ingrained cannibalism into their culture as a survival tactic. But if it so wrong (and who is to say that it is? Yes, I agree, we find it abhorrent and the idea turns us sick but eating human flesh is separate from murdering someone for the flesh, so if they ate the people already dead then is it not just eating meat to survive?) if it so wrong then why did God wait thousands of years to reveal his message that actually it's wrong, and why did he reveal it only to a select bunch of illiterates in middle eastern Palestine that would forget it for 40 odd years only to have to be reminded by divine vision...?

Lastly what about the immorality of the bible itself? God condones slavery and genocide. Ok, in different times and cultures, who are we to judge? But these things are immoral now, in our culture. BUT, people who derive their morals from the biblical texts are faced with out dated morality that is no longer accepted. So, people look at the bible and choose which bits of morality to adopt and which to ignore, you have this ability before you pick up your bible. If God is revealed in the texts of the bible but you can already pick and choose which bits of moral law to adopt or ignore, then logically your morality does not come from the bible. Think of it this way, if God did not exist (I know, unthinkable, but stick with me on a purely hypothetical level) would you yourself be immoral? Would you now rape, murder, steal and lie? I would bet NO, you would not, such things are not accepted in out society and THAT is were we derive our morals from.

I repeat from earlier...

Morals are guidelines for making sociological, personal and everyday decisions. Presented with similar situations, a person's actions will be identical every time depending on their moral code. If one derives morals from biblical texts then their moral code is static. Homosexuality is always a sin, working the sabbath is always a sin, circumcision (or genital mutilation) is expected, pork is banned, sexism is adhered too, etc. Here is the fundamental problem with static morals: the inability to judge every action we humans make with reason and free will. Shouldn't morals stand on their own merits? Humans are fantastic beings because of their ability to examine the consequences of their actions and make appropriate choices, as opposed to wild animals that act on instinct alone. Therefore, morals do not come from religious tomes. Morals would exist nicely without them.
Now, I know you said God puts morals inside us all, but we know that morals differ from culture to culture, indeed morals reflect the culture into which we are born. Your morals differ from those of someone born in the middle eastern Islam, and so on. So, if morals differ from culture to culture then there is no uniform moral installation at work in us all, those people who do not have your moral code do not choose a different path, they are raised in a culture in which their moral code is the only moral code, like yours. Is it not actually true that we are the products of our environments and cultures, parents, friends, schools, jobs, experiences and genetic characters...? Where does the divine installation come in?

One last point...when believers think that as believes their job is to help point people towards what they think is the source of this morality but elements of their own morality is becoming incompatible with modern society (such as judging someone on their beliefs, or lack of beliefs, judging people on their sexual preference, judging and halting stem cell research, etc) then they face problems, one of the biggest being that many people don't believe God exists at all, and the believer, armed only with their own personal faith and no actual evidence apart from their holy texts, which have become out dated (some messages are timeless, such as messages of love and charity but you don't need the bible to tell us these lessons, these notions existed before the bible did after all), directing people towards a moral code that condones slavery and sexism...well it is noble, you motives are pure, but is it moral and is it ethical? Is it not arrogant and self righteous? I would say that impressing personal beliefs onto others, beliefs based on a massive unsupported supernatural element that was derived back in the bronze age, is highly dubious