I'm not trying to get into an argument here, this is purely discussion based;

My parents are as religious as it gets. It is the foundation of their beliefs, and faith has fueled their lives. They go weekly mass etc. and have always stressed its importance to me and my sister. Their vacations have always been making some sort of pilgrimage. The walls of our house have holy pictures and nothing else.

But I have always been the type of kid to question everything. When kids were running around playing on swings I was wondering why religion was such a big deal, why I had to go to sunday school, why everyone believed in God when no one actually interacted with him, and how it was ridiculous to just believe hearsay when we hadn't even visited other planets yet. I always understood the morals of religion, but it was an enormous strain between me and my parents.

Fast forward a few years and I have completed a physics degree, along with a core of pre-med classes. I see that while science has figured out a lot of things, they are plenty of areas where it is abundantly clear that they have absolutely no idea what is going on. It starts to seem obvious to me that humanity as it exists on Earth cannot be the highest form of life that has ever existed, and that the idea of God was not as ridiculous as I used to think.

My current stance is that I do not believe in anything. The plausible possibilities of what Existence truly is, to me, are infinite. God is possible to me now, but I cannot justify deciding on any one belief with the amount of knowledge that I have. I also doubt that I will come to any decision in my lifetime.


So at this point I want to see how other people feel about it. I've reasoned as much as I can on my own, so I want to see how other people of all backgrounds feel. So tell me, what do you believe, and why? I'm not going to argue with you, I just want to know your opinion in true detail

I believe in Jesus. I believe the Bible. All the other idolatry involved with Catholicism, Paganism, [insert religion], most forms of Chrstianity, make me sad.

That is interesting.

Can you give examples?

I believe that to know something implicitly means to translate it into your own thoughts and in the process you lose a lot. You know something inside your own head, and you might be able to translate it back to reality really precisely, but what you know and how reality is are still two different things.

I'll believe whatever is required to form a more robust internal model of anything. I don't believe assuming the existence of any God leads to a better or more useful understanding of things.

We are currently the most highly developed form of life on this planet.

We are obviously animals, chordates, mammals, primates, and Hominids. Each one of those classifications is a further refinement of the one before it, and the progression has taken over 500 million years.

Our society has a lot of superstitious remnants from long ago. They got a boost from the Roman Empire, and conquests and colonization by Spain, Portugal, and England.

I lost you here.. "Highest form of life"? In what sense? Are you talking about the knowledge? If you are talking about the knowledge part then this is the point in time of human existence where our knowledge is the biggest we ever had about this universe, yet I will agree that we still know little about it.

Huh? You don't believe in anything? I don't understand.. You must hold some type of beliefs.


So basically you are saying that there is no knowledge that could prove or disprove the existence of some type of GOD, which is basically agnosticism.


I am an atheist (atheism is simply the absence of belief that any deities exist). I am a weak/negative atheist but I do believe that some definitions of a god/gods can be disproved.

I believe i dont know whats going on in this universe. As far as why idk. Well im just a walking talking ape.

Also possible we live in a Matrix controlled by machines.
Or that you are a test person in a staged environment, that everyone knows about, but you don't.
Or that the universe will collapse tomorrow.

That's where I appreciate the positivism. Basically, theories that cannot be proven or falsified are useless. I can construct theories all I want. If I can't prove it, like maybe make a prediction, or if you cant falsify it, like showing where it fails, it's a useless theory. Might be entertaining though if you make a movie or a book out of it

It doesn't matter as much WHAT you believe but WHY you believe it.

I would submit a useful heuristic for believing something is that this something has a reasoned and evidential basis. The stronger the evidence and rationale, the stronger we ought to believe. There are other heuristics, of course, for example one might appeal to scientific authority on whether to believe in the big bang or not - going through the research for this claim oneself might be difficult.

Once we agree on the heuristics we ought to use of how to go about believing things, we can see whether a deity satisfies those heuristics. I have never seen any compelling evidence of any kind for the existence of one and so, for me, it does not satisfy the heuristic.

Knowledge is one way to look at it, power and capability another. Also of course the possibility of that which we have not even imagined

No I don't really believe in anything, because I'm not sure what is truly real and what is not. When dreaming, experiences feel real; moving around, interacting with environments and people. But of course those are not considered real.

I used to shadow at a forensic psychiatry hospital, and got to see a few schizophrenics. I remember one guy who was completely convinced that an employee had come in at night, and injected him with something. The nurse had checked the bump he was talking about, and it was an in-grown hair. Not only did he refuse to acknowledge the possibility, he claimed to remember the experience. The confidence with which he spoke was incredible, and yet, we would not define his experience as reality. This didn't fade my faith in my own perception, but it certainly made me wonder what the value of perceptions truly is. In my opinion, the answer is very little, even my own.

An omnipotent being beyond our comprehension? Creators? Something of that magnitude yes, I guess I have an agnostic view.

However I don't think that more developed Life forms fall into that category. In my opinion, they are very close to a logical certainty

What do you think can be disproved?

I believe I am truly incapable of understanding what is happening around me. It is a mystery that I imagine I am not even close to knowing, but I am so far from understanding it, even thinking about how close I am to understanding it is beyond me.

Yes this is something that I think about a lot. How can we truly know anything? and how can we know what reality truly is? Disagreement over perceptions of reality is a part of daily life, and current human knowledge seems quite puny in the grand scheme of things.

Could you elaborate? Something like combining agreed, perceived truths, in pursuit of unified structure?

A determination of the usefulness of a heuristic is only as useful as the heuristic one uses in making the determination. Etc, ad infinitum.

I doubt humanity will ever "agree on the heuristics" beyond certain self-evident examples in the realm of the senses. Even the ideological totalitarian states of the 20th century couldn't accomplish this.

I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and right now sits at the right hand of Father God.
I believe that you can fellowship with God in a personal way, and don't have to simply worship Him from afar.
I believe He will speak to you through the Holy Spirit, which dwells inside of believers.

I believe that God responds to faith. I believe that any believer can move mountains by faith, as Jesus said in the Gospel of Mark 11:22-24.

I believe that Jesus Christ was crucified at Calvary, and was raised from the dead three days later.
I believe the evidence for this event is more than compelling.
I believe that everybody must be born again, as Jesus said in John 3:7.
I believe that unless you are born again, you cannot SEE the Kingdom of God, as Jesus said in John 3:3.

I believe that anybody who claims that God does not exist has his heart veiled, and his mind is blinded by the god of this age. (2 corinthians 3:14+4:4)
I believe that salvation comes by believing in your heart that God raised Jesus from the dead and confessing with your mouth, Jesus as Lord (Romans 3:24, 10:8-10).

I believe that all believers are entitled to, and should expect and earnestly seek the promise of the Father, the Baptism of the Holy Spirit, according to the command of Jesus Christ. With this comes the endowment of power for life and service, the bestowment of gifts and their uses in the work of the ministry. (Luke 24:49; Acts 1:4-8; 2:38-39, 10:44-46, 11:14-16, 15:7-9; 1 Corinthians 12:1-31).

I believe in the Evidence of the baptism in the Holy Spirit: The full consummation of the Baptism of believers in the Holy Spirit is evidenced by the subsequent manifestation of spiritual power in public testimony and service (Acts 2:4, 10:44-46, 19:2, 6, 1:8).

Sure, if one needs absolutism, but them one is not talking about a heuristic any longer but an absolute procedure for determining belief. I am not talking about that don't think such a thing is possible. However, I do think "believe things for which their is evidence" is a heuristic we use ubiquitously and provides great success (or perhaps appeals to authority who have studied the evidence). This is why we believe in horses but not unicorns. We don't want to go down the road of relativism where all claims have equal epistemological certainty.

In fact, there is only one facet I can think of where people would widely say "no no, evidence is silly one doesn't at all need it for belief": religion. However, I see absolutely zero reason why religion deserves special treatment as a topic of discussion and rationalization.

Personally, I don't believe in any revealed god(s) and I see no need for an unrevealed one to explain anything.

I think the main difference between me and you come in how we view absolute truth. You seem to view the lack of absolute truth and/or the lack of whole truth as token that anything should be seen as possible...I see them as a token that things should be seen as unknown; x+y/2=15 doesn't necessarily imply that x can be anything....we'll have to wait for another piece of the puzzle.

The inevitable conclusion then, since all things are uncertain...is that the only thing we can do is to compare models to eachother...as this allows us to ignore the inherent uncertainty of the models when evaluating them.

Or maybe rather...if we say...

1) There is an oak tree
2) There isn't an oak tree

Both these come with an inherent uncertainty (how can you really know there is/isn't an oaktree. Your senses might be faulty, you might be mad, it might be just in your mind...blablabla)...but this uncertainty applies to both - thus we can ignore it and instead compare them to eachother. So if we see an oak tree, then 1 is better. Yay.

Everything gets into your mind through the usual channels. Inside your mind you begin to make certain assumptions, laws, definitions, etc. which help you form internal models to help figure out up from down from the incoming signals. By constantly pulling predictions from these understandings and measuring them against nature or other known-to-be robust models, they'll evolve to become more accurate over time.

The ultimate measure of the correctness of those models is pragmatic. Does your understanding allow you to accurately predict the future? -to accurately predict the next signals? Does it accurately predict how nature will seem to act? If not, the model needs a changing. If it seems it does, well then you're golden for now.

In that sense, there isn't much reason to believe any of the models which you hold in your head are accurate to how things are. Nature isn't sights, sounds, feelings, memories, etc, that's just the nature that manages to get into your brain.

So no, I don't think that you can truly know anything. Rather, I believe that you can be equipped with a great arsenal of internal models for which you can be very practiced in translating nature into the model, using the model to understand/predict whatever, and be very deft at translating those results back into nature. But to have even one unified internal model which answers everything doesn't mean that that model is the truth of reality, it just means that it's a great tool for humans to use to manage their way through it.

I'll believe whatever is required. If it really seems like our universe is spread across the surface of a blackhole in a more highly dimension-ed universe, then that's what I'll believe. The belief necessarily needs to lend itself to a more robust internal model.

I agree

Certain definitions of God can be disproved. So if someone defines a god in a particular way and those definitions can be disproved then to me those gods are disproved.

i believe in love, the potential of humanity (especially once we overcome this religious mind-virus), and the beauty of the universe.

Did you move one yet?
You seem to have enough faith, try and move one. If you succeed, you will the first person to do it in the history of this planet.

I simply want the best for humanity.

I want humanity to advance technologically as fast as possible, and I accept the baggage that comes with that desire. From my perspective, to maximize humanities chance to survive we must maximize technological advancement which is in direct conflict with superstitious worldviews such as Christianity, Islam, Judaism, ect..

Just take a look in this very forum and observe all these self-proclaimed Christians and how many are totally oblivious about the scientific method, general science knowledge or just general logic fails. It's embarrassing and certainly isn't helping our STEM competitiveness against other countries.. I simply see this as a microcosm of the entire problem.

As the great Carl Sagan said: "Subjectivity may not freely reign"

Basically that.

I don't believe in anything either. Remember:

"Science is not about truth, it is about what works"

"Over the years, as we have continued to grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ, we have recognized that some of the things we once held as true, in fact, are not; and therefore we will not "cast in stone" a statement of our beliefs. We reserve the right to be wrong and to repent of such error when we discover it."

But with a few minor tweaks this comes close to my beliefs and elaborates on some of God's providence:
http://www.stonekingdom.org/sof.html

I believe that all forms of religion are based originally on Man's need to explain the unexplainable and can be accurately summed up as superstition.

I also believe that it's very likely that my understanding of 'the way things are' anything close to reality, as I'm not so arrogant as to assume that we have it all figured out. If folks want to refer to that as 'agnosticism.' so be it.

I believe in the large body of evidence available supporting the afterlife and what “the dead” have to say about the nature of our existence and that of the universe.

The website below contains of wealth of information and links supporting evidence of survival of consciousness. I’ve been studying this evidence for the better part of a year and find it very convincing.

http://victorzammit.com/

Anyone who doesn’t first study the evidence in support of the afterlife before expressing opinions on things such as the validity of psychic mediums and so on is doing so from an uninformed position. I am not interested in debate or supporting my position. Many people are unaware this evidence exists I am merely passing it on.