insanecarbonbasedlif's Journal: Meanderings from Insomnia

Well, it's 3:02 AM, and I'm awake - my wife thinks I'm crazy, I'm sure, but I just can't sleep. Serious, but maybe disjointed, thoughts to follow.

I've read two books recently - I would recommend them both to many people, though perhaps they aren't as interesting/informative to other people as they were to me. The first was

Is Belief in God Good, Bad or Irrelevant?
A Professor and a Punk Rocker Discuss Science, Religion, Naturalism & Christianity
Edited by Preston Jones

Publisher link
It contains a record of an email conversation between Preston Jones, a history professor at a Christian college, and Greg Graffin from Bad Religion. The title and sub-title are an accurate synopsis of the book as a whole. I found that I agreed with about 95% of what Greg wrote, and about 20% of what Preston wrote.

The second book was

Under the Banner of Heaven
A Story of Violent Faith
By Jon Krakauer

Publisher link
This is an examination of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints, their history and practices, and how that intertwines with the acts of Ron and Dan Lafferty. I found it on the whole to be a very shocking and revealing examination of how religion can cause men to commit evil.

In the end, this all ties into questions I've raised here before, and a current self-examination and all that I'm going through. It's hard to look at the dogma of Dan Lafferty, and not see how the door for immoral (religiously or humanistically immoral) acts can be opened by dogmas... It's hard to read what Greg Graffin writes, and not question whether there's even a point to believing in God.

Thoughts and comments on all the above are welcome and I'd actually like to hear as many peoples' thoughts as possible - all of you on slashdot have (well, the people that I'm fans of at the very least, we'll ignore the trolls here) earned my respect and I value your thoughts and opinions.

A final question - if you believe in God(s (gender irrespective)), what compels you to? (If you don't believe in God(modifier of choice), feel free to comment on this as well, though you're probably not going to be describing a reason to believe...)

interesting

[stoolpigeon]

I'll be checking that first book out.
 
As for the final question - I believe in God because his existence seems to best fit my understanding of the universe.

Re:

[insanecarbonbasedlif]

My understanding of the universe is in a bit of turmoil right now... not sure what I can hang a spiritual hat on in there right now.

Tried not believing, didn't work for me

[sanctimonius hypocrt]

"If you believe in God... what compels you to?"

Maybe God compels me to. I tried not believing. It didn't really work, and I just ended up believing a whole bunch of nonsense, avoiding black cats while denying I believed in God. At one point I realized I was stuck with a belief in God, and might as well stop pretending and deal with it. For me the question has become, what to do about it? What people really believe is what they act on. If believing in God (or not believing) doesn't make any difference in wh

Re:

[insanecarbonbasedlif]

I went through the type of thing you're describing 10+ years back - who knows, this may be the same rigmarole again for me, and I'll end up firmly believing something after I wrestle with it all. At this point, though, I'm needing something more concrete than "My mind assumes there's a God"...

10 years; maybe I'm on some sort of weird decasodic path.

I don't believe

[Tet]

I don't believe in a God. The existence of a God seems so utterly improbable that it would take a significant amount of evidence to change my mind. So far, we have precisely zero evidence. Furthermore, the very existence of a God seems to be an attempt to answer the ultimate question ("why are we here?"), yet it fails to even do that, making said existence even more unlikely in my mind. So while I'm happy enough for others to believe in a God[1], I can't quite understand how they arrive to such a conclusion

Re:

[insanecarbonbasedlif]

I dare say that you have (at least in synopsis form) a fair amount in common with Greg Graffin's views on the topic. This has been a fairly challenging (and coherent, well thought out) thing for me, probably the biggest impetus to my current questionings and attempts o understand.

I feel like pure naturalism misses what I feel is the fact that we have choices and affect our own lives (and other lives), but that's not something I can prove - in the end I have to agree (with Graffin) that we may not be choosi

Re:

[Abm0raz]

What he said...

QFT

-Ab

I believe in God because

[Degrees]

I believe in God because there are some things that just don't make sense without believing they came about because of a higher power. Out of nowhere, on Friday afternoon as I'm leaving work, I ask myself: what should I do tonight? A thought pops in my head clear as a bell: you should call Marcus tonight. Never mind that I hadn't thought a single thunk re Marcus in the four months since he left California for Texas. Never mind that I didn't have his phone number and would have had to find friend's phone num

Re:

[insanecarbonbasedlif]

Yeah, I felt that way before, but the more I think about it, the more I feel like maybe I'm just filtering/pattern matching coincidental thoughts and occurrences, and ascribing the resultant thoughts and feelings to a supernatural force. I don't mean to marginalize your experience at all, and it's very possible I'm actually naturalizing truly supernatural events... I'm not sure. I'm just not sure at all that I've experienced something truly supernatural - Dan Lafferty thinks he did, Oral Roberts, Pat Robert

Re:

[Degrees]

I can 100% see your point. It really does come down to faith.

I do think that faith is a choice, and that only you can decide if it makes sense to you.