Is There Really A God?
Entry posted by Thundery wintry showers
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Here's an exploration of various possibilities on issues relating to religions and spirituality. I have some clear-cut beliefs on this, but as you will see, plenty of areas where I believe that the truth could be anything across a wide range of possibilities.
First of all, I don't think there is a god of the kind that the Bible described, that created the world in six days, Adam and Eve etc. There are far too many contradictions, far too many scientific discoveries re. evolution that cannot be realistically challenged while maintaining a literal interpretation of the Bible, etc. For those who are interested in this disproof, check out this link which inspired this blog entry: [url="http://alphacoursereview.wordpress.com/"]http://alphacoursereview.wordpress.com/[/url]
This blog entry is remarkably similar to the experiences I've had with fundamentalist Christian types in the past, which in turn caused me to reject the religion.
But does the above prove that there is no greater power of any kind, a generic "god" of some kind? I don't think so. Yes, many people like to believe in life after death, that there is a "guardian angel" or god or something watching over them and helping them, and that supernatural things exist. It is a comforting way of thinking, and from experience, I also think this is why many children are fond of the concept of Santa Claus. But that doesn't mean that nothing of the sort exists. There might be some kind of extra spirituality that we can't see or hear. People could be using these comforting thoughts to try and assemble these percieved paranormal experiences into something comforting, and perhaps that's where a lot of the religions originally came from. But maybe, just maybe, there might be something real behind at least some of it.
An alternative possibility, which understandably gets up many people's backsides as it attacks comfort zones (I know this, as it attacks quite a few of mine!) but shouldn't be discounted, is that there really is no life after death, no existence beyond what we know. That said, one major reason why I often get defensive when people preach this view isn't that it attacks comfort zones, but rather that many atheists tend to preach with a lot of the same narrow-mindedness and arroagance that many fundamentalist Christians do.
And another alternative that few consider- it may be that there is indeed an afterlife, and/or extra "beings" of greater existence that we don't know about- but that the reality is a lot more mundane than the religions suggest. "God" could be to humans as humans are to ants, in terms of intellectual understanding of things that our brains are too limited to grasp. Getting confused? Well, it serves to illustrate that when you start thinking about this sort of thing with an open mind... well, the possibilities are near-endless!
First of all, I don't think there is a god of the kind that the Bible described, that created the world in six days, Adam and Eve etc. There are far too many contradictions, far too many scientific discoveries re. evolution that cannot be realistically challenged while maintaining a literal interpretation of the Bible, etc. For those who are interested in this disproof, check out this link which inspired this blog entry: [url="http://alphacoursereview.wordpress.com/"]http://alphacoursereview.wordpress.com/[/url]
This blog entry is remarkably similar to the experiences I've had with fundamentalist Christian types in the past, which in turn caused me to reject the religion.
But does the above prove that there is no greater power of any kind, a generic "god" of some kind? I don't think so. Yes, many people like to believe in life after death, that there is a "guardian angel" or god or something watching over them and helping them, and that supernatural things exist. It is a comforting way of thinking, and from experience, I also think this is why many children are fond of the concept of Santa Claus. But that doesn't mean that nothing of the sort exists. There might be some kind of extra spirituality that we can't see or hear. People could be using these comforting thoughts to try and assemble these percieved paranormal experiences into something comforting, and perhaps that's where a lot of the religions originally came from. But maybe, just maybe, there might be something real behind at least some of it.
An alternative possibility, which understandably gets up many people's backsides as it attacks comfort zones (I know this, as it attacks quite a few of mine!) but shouldn't be discounted, is that there really is no life after death, no existence beyond what we know. That said, one major reason why I often get defensive when people preach this view isn't that it attacks comfort zones, but rather that many atheists tend to preach with a lot of the same narrow-mindedness and arroagance that many fundamentalist Christians do.
And another alternative that few consider- it may be that there is indeed an afterlife, and/or extra "beings" of greater existence that we don't know about- but that the reality is a lot more mundane than the religions suggest. "God" could be to humans as humans are to ants, in terms of intellectual understanding of things that our brains are too limited to grasp. Getting confused? Well, it serves to illustrate that when you start thinking about this sort of thing with an open mind... well, the possibilities are near-endless!
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