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[Sergius]

Atheistic Religions? You realise that's a contradiction in terms?

Buddhism in its original form is an atheistic religion, as there are no gods or belief in gods.

Of course everyone went and started considering the Buddha a god or something. Funny because he explicitly told them not to.

[Sergius]

People are allowed to believe in invisible pink unicorns, just like they are allowed to believe that God does or doesn't exist, but I do get a bit pissed when they start stating God or no God, or even worse, creationism, as absolute truth.

The thing is, you're giving equal weight to both possibilities, when the body of evidence heavily weighs on one side. Consider this: there's a building and we perceive it as being blue in color. We know that someone used blue paint on it. Some guy comes and says that the building isn't blue, but that it's green and that there are little gnomes in front of our eyes playing tricks on us, making us think that the building is blue, and that they also substituted the blue paint with green paint. Someone comes and they plainly state that it's ridiculous and that the building is blue and that there aren't such things as magic color-swapping gnomes. According to you, you should be equally pissed at both of them, for plainly stating something as fact, when the second guy should have said "there's a 99.9% possibility that you're wrong, but we can't possibly know so..."

[Sergius]

...screw this.... you guys are just so set in your ways... you do not listen... total dicks... you guys will even put words into my mouth and the mouths of others... hate religion for the sake of hating religion... intentionally misinterpret or misread posts...

  I totally didn't see THAT coming 

[Emperor_Jonathan]

There's an edit button.

[Sergius]

There's an edit button.

Yes, there is, thanks for the information.

Also there's a quote button.

[G-Flex]

You made some good points, but yeah, I don't know that triple-posting was terribly necessary there.

[Neruz]

Atheistic Religions? You realise that's a contradiction in terms?

Buddhism in its original form is an atheistic religion, as there are no gods or belief in gods.

Of course everyone went and started considering the Buddha a god or something. Funny because he explicitly told them not to.

Buddha isn't a god, but he definitely fits the mould of 'god-like entity'.

Personally if i was to worship a God, it'd be one of the old Norse gods, possibly Thor or Odin, because as afterlives go Vallhalla kicks ass, that and the Norse gods were interesting bastards who actually did stuff instead of floating around going "I'm incomprehensible, look how incomprehensible i am!"

[Pjoo]

People are allowed to believe in invisible pink unicorns, just like they are allowed to believe that God does or doesn't exist, but I do get a bit pissed when they start stating God or no God, or even worse, creationism, as absolute truth.

The thing is, you're giving equal weight to both possibilities, when the body of evidence heavily weighs on one side.

It doesn't. You have no solid evidence for or against God, again, depending on definition.
No solid evidence against colour-swapping gnomes either, there's just no reason to explain it that way when building being green is way simpler way to explain it.

[Emperor_Jonathan]

Atheistic Religions? You realise that's a contradiction in terms?

Buddhism in its original form is an atheistic religion, as there are no gods or belief in gods.

Of course everyone went and started considering the Buddha a god or something. Funny because he explicitly told them not to.

Buddha isn't a god, but he definitely fits the mould of 'god-like entity'.

Also, Buddhism is the set of teachings of The Buddha. (I make the distinction of The Buddha to refer to The Supreme Buddha, [Siddhārtha Gautama] Buddha being the title or term for an Enlightened One.)

Personally if i was to worship a God, it'd be one of the old Norse gods, possibly Thor or Odin, because as afterlives go Valhalla kicks ass, that and the Norse gods were interesting bastards who actually did stuff instead of floating around going "I'm incomprehensible, look how incomprehensible i am!"

Yeah, the Norse Gods are the best. On Valhalla: You only go there if you die as hero in battle. Although you have a 50/50 chance of going to Fólkvangr instead (if you're a woman you cannot go to Valhalla, but can go to Fólkvangr). Then there's also Hel and Helgafjell.

Still, Valhalla is the best.

[Neruz]

It doesn't. You have no solid evidence for or against God, again, depending on definition.

Unfortunately logic doesn't work that way due to the extreme difficulty of proving a negative. You start at the negative position and prove the positive position.

Feel free to try and work it back the other way, but bear in mind that in doing so you are acting illogically, and will be treated as such.

[Pjoo]

It doesn't. You have no solid evidence for or against God, again, depending on definition.

Unfortunately logic doesn't work that way due to the extreme difficulty of proving a negative. You start at the negative position and prove the positive position.

Feel free to try and work it back the other way, but bear in mind that in doing so you are acting illogically, and will be treated as such.

Logic works exactly like that. You give premises and based on them, you can figure out if something is true, and evidence or hypothesis based on evidence usually work to build premises on. In science. You do not believe in things unless they are rationally backed up by empirical evidence, as some things are extremely hard to disprove. Science gives you information you can use for thinking, creating stuff, whatever. But it doesn't, and never will, cover anything that cannot be empirically tested and falsified. Dropping ball from 10 feet doesn't cause "Law of God" to apply, cause usually we just rather call it gravity. And if thunder would strike ball every time it is dropped from 10 feet, we would have some kind of theory explaining why it happens, or not. Yet God cannot be accepted as explanation, because it's not fallible theory. It might be the best one, but it's still not objectively any better than other similar theories.
In philosophy, however, you can base things on evidence, but you can also base something simply on thought. Like atomism. You couldn't have based the idea on evidence, it was just based on though about what the world is like. Rational thought of rational person. "Hey, maybe everything is built out of blocks?" It would've sounded only a bit more crazy to materialists than some higher being, but turns out it was true.

I don't believe 3 billion people can be any more right than one, I've seen enough of idiotic belief in authority to think it isn't true. I also do not think matter or laws of physics need a creator, I've no problem believing cyclic or just infinite universe is possible. Thus, for me, rational thing is not to believe in God. I don't need God for my world view to work, nor I do need it for my mental health. I however cannot impose this on other, as I cannot expect everyone to see world as materialistic, reductionist and deterministic, with ethics based on same thing I base ethics on. These are philosophical questions everyone has their own answers to, or doesn't, and it builds up the subjective universe for them that really doesn't matter to anyone else.

Saying God doesn't exist is kinda like saying Ethical non-naturalism is wrong. I can say I do not believe Ethical non-naturalism is true, I cannot say it's not true. Well, I can, but then I also assume only my world view is correct.

[Ampersand]

I don't think anyone here is claiming that god does not exist. I think what they are claiming is that the claim that god DOES exist is not one that has any supporting evidence, and is not a claim people should stand by just because it might be true.

[G-Flex]

Atheistic Religions? You realise that's a contradiction in terms?

Buddhism in its original form is an atheistic religion, as there are no gods or belief in gods.

Of course everyone went and started considering the Buddha a god or something. Funny because he explicitly told them not to.

Buddha isn't a god, but he definitely fits the mould of 'god-like entity'.

You're very far off base there.

He fits more the mold of a prophet (albeit sort of an atheistic one) than a god-like entity. I know I've mentioned it before, probably in this thread, and possibly more than once, but the Buddha STATED that he wasn't divine or particularly special in any way. His only claim was being enlightened, something he tried helping other, normal, humans achieve.

[Pjoo]

God is a fantasy, as is all religion, get over it and become atheist.
Facing reality will make the world a little better, thank you.

Personally, I find this to be sufficient justification for pursuing religion.  Not enough to prove it, naturally.

Anyways, what I kinda was posting is...

Well, if a theory has no evidence for it, you have to presume falsehood.  Otherwise you'd end up believing pretty much everything.

God does have arguments for and against, which are based on rational thought. Some people decide that disbelievers is enough to prove religions wrong. Others believe that life is enough to prove religion right. Both are rather rational reasons to believe or disbelieve in God. If you think "God has given us free will so we can choose what to believe" is bad argument, you might not believe in God, but if you think there is just this universe, it's unlikely life exists without a creator(based on our current knowledge on how life came be, and all the laws of physics determinal to life, etc), you might want to believe in a creator. Etc.

Atheist doesn't feel God's existence is likely, theist does. It's just a difference on how you see the world. But everything related to religion gets really stupid the moment people start forcing their view on others. Science on the other hand is cool in that way, cause it's objective, if someone doesn't agree with science, they can just prove it(or more often, themselves) wrong. Don't believe in gravity? Try dropping a ball that doesn't fall to the ground. Don't believe in evolution? Fruit flies!

[G-Flex]

God does have arguments for and against, which are based on rational thought. Some people decide that disbelievers is enough to prove religions wrong. Others believe that life is enough to prove religion right. Both are rather rational reasons to believe or disbelieve in God. If you think "God has given us free will so we can choose what to believe" is bad argument, you might not believe in God, but if you think there is just this universe, it's unlikely life exists without a creator(based on our current knowledge on how life came be, and all the laws of physics determinal to life, etc), you might want to believe in a creator. Etc. [/quote]

Yeah, except that those arguments are only rational if their premises are rationally. Believing in God for reason X can be totally rational, but reason X itself might not be rational, screwing up the whole thing. For instance, I'd take issue with the rationality of thinking that life in this universe is improbable, so I'd find that person to be irrational, or at least ill-informed about the actual evidence at hand.