Poll: Who believes in God?

Your beliefs

  • I believe in God

    Votes: 135 13.4%

  • I do not believe in God

    Votes: 445 44.1%

  • I used to believe but have lost my faith

    Votes: 42 4.2%

  • I used to disbelieve but have found my faith

    Votes: 7 0.7%

  • I believe there is "something" but not sure what

    Votes: 200 19.8%

  • I'm Agnostic

    Votes: 167 16.6%

  • I believe in multiple deities

    Votes: 13 1.3%
  • Total voters
    1,009
Mansize_tissue said:
Hypothetical situation:

Let's say I claim to have received words from "God", with which I am told to record in some sort of structured way thus producing a document, much like the Bible. Will this then be regarded by believers as, I don't know... legitimate, and followed in similar ways as the Bible is?
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Unlikely, unless lot's of people experianced such as the stories in the bible.
 
Mansize_tissue said:
Hypothetical situation:

Let's say I claim to have received words from "God", with which I am told to record in some sort of structured way thus producing a document, much like the Bible. Will this then be regarded by believers as, I don't know... legitimate, and followed in similar ways as the Bible is?
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Try it...?:)
 
wedgie said:
I said there's no logic in picking certain elements to believe, and ignoring others from the same religion.

That's like saying, 'well I believe in the 10 commandments, but only rules 1, 2, 4 and 7'.
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Religion is a personal thing. Interpretation of an established religion is also personal.

One person may understand the bible to mean one thing, while another may understand it to mean another. That doesn't make either person 'right' and neither does it mean either is necessarily wrong.
 
wedgie said:
And it will do fine for me until something comes along to make me have a strong belief one way or another.

Until then, random chaos fits the bill perfectly.
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For you it may do, but it's no more 'correct' than any assertion about the involvement of a deity. It's your faith, not verifiable information, that leads you to the conclusion.

What worries me is why so many people, especially those who lean toward atheism, believe faith to be a bad thing. There's nothing wrong with faith, providing you understand when you are using it and what it's limitations are.
 
AcidHell2 said:
Yes, but I also find it sad that people judge peoples faith, based on extremely narrow minded knowledge of mainstream religions.
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I hope that isn't directed at me, I'm not judging anyone's faith and have a reasonably wide knowledge of quite a few religions, mainstream and otherwise. It is just irritating that the same old lie is trotted out time and time again to basically belittle the choices that Darwin made and bolster the Christian faith by "some" people.

FWIW I am agnostic and believe that people should fee free to believe whatever they want. It is when those beliefs start impacting me do they actually bother me.
 
What worries me is why so many people, especially those who lean toward atheism, believe faith to be a bad thing. There's nothing wrong with faith, providing you understand when you are using it and what it's limitations are.
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Quite so. I think it's the challenging of fundamental assumptions that causes the problem.
 
So Yantorsen, do you believe in Sin and that Sin is responsible for "bad things" happening I'm asking what you think, your view.
 
p4radox said:
Agreed. The distinction between:

"don't believe in God"

and

"believe there is no god"

is subtle, but extremely important.



edit: is this strong/weak atheism?
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Sort of, although it depends how you define belief and disbelief. Generally in philosphy and theological debates, there's a difference between don't believe and disbelief, one being simply an absence of belief, the other being something more positive.

Weak atheism generally is that you disbelieve in God, either through lack of evidence or through assumption driven inductive reasoning, strong atheism is the position that you 'know' there is no God. This is probably going to lead to a big debate, because in the last 20 years or so there has been a major effort by some atheist groups to change the definition to include everyone who doesn't actively have faith in a god in their frame, but I prefer the classical definition as it's far more useful in this sort of discussion.

The other problem is the use of the term believe in as being equivilent to having faith in. Take myself, I don't have faith in the christian god, I'm not a christian, but I wouldn't say I have enough information to disbelieve in their existance (although I would argue the whole only god deal, although that doesn't actually appear in the text, only the intepretations). I simply don't care whether they exist or not, I have no belief either way on the issue...

It all gets very confusing...
 
Mansize_tissue said:
I may continue with this idea.

Let's say I got enough atheists together to say they had the same experience with "God", would we then be able to do such a thing as I mentioned in my previous post.
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It is an interesting idea. I'd like to know what you'd base your book on. Would it champion science as the 'be all and end all' and a provider of ultimate truth?
 
HEADRAT said:
So Yantorsen, do you believe in Sin and that Sin is responsible for "bad things" happening I'm asking what you think, your view.
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I think that something along the lines of what Sin is has an effect on people which in turn causes bad things to happen, directly or indirectly.
 
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