Ok well I have a t Rex who lives in my garden, he's invisible, makes no noise and leaves no impact in the world around him, but I say he's real. This cannot be dissproved so would it be rational to accept the possibility, or is it more rational to stop me looking after kids and to keep me away from pointy objects as I'm clearly a mental?

Im not a "militant atheist" who would refuse to believe in god even if there was evidence, but it doesn't make me stupid to not believe in something there isn't a scrap of evidence for.
(Mong goose, Mon 7 Mar 2011, 22:11, 2 replies)

God isn't real
same as love isn't real, neither is truth or conscience real. That's kind of how faith works - it's the logic of the emotional world, the opposite of ego essentially.

Trouble with religion is that thick (non or psuedo-spiritual) people take it literally and tag a whole lot of stuff onto a basic premis of the idea that there is a right thing to do that defies all logic and reasoning.

The OP might want to explain to their muslim friend that the word Islam means surrender. Surrender of self will and acceptance of "god's will", anything else above this is the work of a bunch of mad mullahs much like first centurary christianity was pretty pure until St Paul had his madcap "Spiritual experience" and fucked it all up with his ideas of Jesus being the literal son of god, the virgin birth, original sin and all that other holy roman empire baloney. Add ego to spirtuality and what you get is religion.

It is perfectly possible to believe in and surrender to a power other than your own self will without worshiping a deity. Spirituality and anti-thiest (athiest) are not mutually exclusive, mankind was doing it for hundreds of thousands of years until around 6000 BCE when all this ego driven religious nonsense took hold chiefly as a result of the desertification of north africa and the middle east.

This book is a pretty comprehensive text on the differences between theism and spirituality. Well worth a read, though probably makes more sense to athiests than religious types for obvious reasons.

www.amazon.co.uk/Fall-Insanity-Human-History-Dawning/dp/1905047207/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1299578308&sr=8-1


HTH
( buffet_the_appetite_slayer ٩(●̮̃•)۶ jacked in to the ICE on, Tue 8 Mar 2011, 9:44, closed)

Ahhh
Love IS real. It's a chemical imbalance in humans 'designed' to make us act out and go after the real goal, which is to procreate.
Hence, once pro-creation has occurred, love is more akin to habit.
(dchurch bah, Tue 8 Mar 2011, 17:52, closed)

All human behaviour is attributable to electrical/chemical impulses in the brain,
but you have to start hanging simple labels on them at some point, or you're going to have trouble functioning in society.

I hear that the human mind is predisposed to perceive the existence of god (or be receptive to the concept of god, depending on how you approach the issue). Chances are, we're predisposed to argue about it, too!
( monster munch person, man, woman... camera... TV?, Wed 9 Mar 2011, 10:16, closed)

"it doesn't make me stupid to not believe in something there isn't a scrap of evidence for"
Quite. But you would be stupid to claim to know the very nature of the universe. There may well be things in this world which are intangible to us (like your t-rex), but I doubt that either you or I are going to change our lifestyles in reaction to that possibility. Likewise, there may well be beings beyond the limits of our universe that spin it around for their own amusement, but that's neither here nor there, to me.

Organised religion and a personal relationship with god, are worth arguing about, the existence of god is not.
( monster munch person, man, woman... camera... TV?, Tue 8 Mar 2011, 17:07, closed)