Is it so bad if you don't believe in God?

What if each and everyday brings me further and further away from him?

Lets say there is a God and circumstances in my life has led me to believe that he doesn't exist, would he punish me for that?

Jojo, the problem I see is that from birth, most of us are programmed to believe in a god. That programming gives us very little choice in whether we believe or not believe. It is like asking Microsoft word to not print when you hit the print button. To back up those programs there are fortresses of shame and guilt that are used to imprison you. You are told that if you don't believe in a god then you will painfully burn in hell for eternity. That is a very impressive motivator for a young child. It makes it almost impossible to not feel some emotion when you question that implanted belief that has no possible means of logical proof.

When YOU ask the question "Is it so bad if you don't believe in God?"
What happens is your programming kicks in, the very core of your psychological development tells you that it is bad because every neural connection in your body formed while being told there was a god and if you don't believe in him/it then you are bad.

Your question presupposes how you must feel. You feel bad and it isn't your fault. It was programmed.

So, is it so bad, no, but you will more than likely feel bad anyway.

I am sure there are those that are reading my response and saying. He is so going to hell for all time and eternity and going to have the flesh ripped from him while burning in the fires of hell.
Well, enjoy the program, hope it doesn't have a virus!

JoJo,

As you know I am Catholic and I do believe in God - from a pure dogmatic standpoint my Church expects and understands crises of Faith - they offer programs to aid in these times of challenge if you are so inclined - I am sure other churches do too.

Personally, I don't believe we can ever fully and totally reject God because we simply lack the maturity or spiritual development to do so. We may reject our understanding of God, or of organized religion (and they are NOT the same thing), at any time - but the limiting factor is and will always be our imperfect nature.

Do I think God would 'punish' you for a crisis of Faith? No, I believe God to be infinite, without limits of any kind and that means even if you can not or choose not to believe, He still understands, loves and accepts you without limit or prerequisite. The vengeful God of the Old Testament is not the God of the New Testament.

I have found that the more challenging times in my life have tested my Faith, to the point that I once considered myself agnostic - but I have also found, especially as I get older, that the simple poem about footprints in the sand holds real meaning for me - when you think you are the one doing all the heavy lifting, when you feel like there is nobody there to help or carry you, that is when God is closest.

Take your time, He will always be there.

If you really believed that no God existed, would you question His existence...???

.

Nope, not so bad.

Is it so bad if you don't believe in God?

What if each and everyday brings me further and further away from him?

Lets say there is a God and circumstances in my life has led me to believe that he doesn't exist, would he punish me for that?

the only problem is if you chose to feel bad about this.

there may or may not be a specific creator of the universe but he/she/it is not going to lose sleep about one person not performing rituals.

Religion sucks. it is the cause of much suffering.
the world would be a better place without it.

in my opinion religion and the need for god are simply dysfunctional patterns of behaviour within the human mind and nothing to worry about. about on a par with phobias and addictions in value.

Thank you everyone for your responses, it made me feel much better.

Sham, I do believe and I want to continue believing. I'm just having a hard time.

you might think about sending henk a PM.

I'm just having a hard time.

That because you want to play games with Him and he won't play.... :D

.

Nope, not so bad. :thumb:

That because you want to play games with Him and he won't play.... :D

.

Is that a Canadian joke? ;)

Is that a Canadian joke? ;)

In retrospect, I believe that I should have kept my mouth shut... I was assuming and it's always wrong to assume...

What I had in mind is a game that some people play which is called: Unless You give me what I want, I won't recognize Your existence...

He has already given us the ultimate gift which is life... and He will not bargain with us as to how it shall unfold...

As, I said, I spoke without knowing all the facts and I apologize...

Wishing you all the best...

.

Don't apologize silly, now that you splained, I understand.

God has always been very good to me and I don't want to question his existence. It's the people in today's world that anger me and therefore I begin to question my faith.

Serious Question, one I always wonder about.

"God has always been good to me?"

IN what way, how specifically and what makes you believe it was God.

Serious Question, one I always wonder about.

"God has always been good to me?"

IN what way, how specifically and what makes you believe it was God.

Well if it wasn't God then I've been one lucky chica :thumb:

This will be long. I have transcribed it (not all of it) from a highly intelligent writer (Think William F. Buckley level of intelligence, before he became a celebrity, ok?)


A psychopath is incapable of feeling guilt. He is incapable of feeling the suffering of someone he has hurt. It sounds terrible, actually about 2% of the total population is psychopathic. They have been forced to act as if they had a conscience, but they really don't understand it.

How is it that those of us who are handicapped with a conscience survive? at all. Having a conscience is a handicap. Not only that, it's a Painful handicap. On the other hand, a society made up entirely of psychopaths is not going to survive. There has to be some instinct for a society to survive. There has to be loyalty, fellow feeling...we're societal animals and therefore we have to have some feelings which a psychopath does not have. But once again, the question comes up, "Yes, but how do we survive in a one-to-one environment against sociopaths?" who will do Anything to achieve their ends (one of the ends, of course, is having sex and having children, and here we are us guys who worry about how women feel or love or all this stuff and here's a psychopath whose only interest is "By God, I feel horny, I'm gonna relieve it").


Women are interested in men who are "fun." They're interested in men who are able to tell them the right thing at the right time, well Nobody is better at telling Anybody the right thing at the right time than a good, solid psychopath. Psychopaths actually have a terrific advantage over the rest of us because whereas if you or I were hit with a piece of horrible news (and I've been in that position a lot of times having to give people awful news), our reaction maybe really weird (we could lol, sometimes we just draw inside ourselves, and if you were to bring up our reaction in a court people would say, "Well, he didn't Really express real regret"). Well, I'll tell you something, the psychopath will express real regret. The thing about psychopaths is that all those years we developed normal impulses, they learned to live in our society. The fact is that intelligent psychopaths can come up with the Perfect reaction, whereas you and I (since our reactions come from within ourselves) will not be anywhere near perfect. Here I strike people as weird.

That's why the pulpit is so full of psychopaths. Think about the kind of person who can stand there look you straight in the eye and say, "God (who is in control of heaven and hell), is going to judge you and I am going to speak for God." Most of us would be terrified of saying that. So the pulpit Has to be full of people who are not terrified of that at all. They treat it as a game because they know from Their point of view, they've Always been puzzled by this Game that 98% of us who are not psychopaths play. It's sort of like a tone-deaf person who's listening to music. You really can't believe he's sitting there and listening to all these people shouting in the choir and these people hitting these notes on the organ that all sound the same to him and he absolutely is sort of puzzled that somehow all these people are getting something out of these random noises he keeps hearing.

A psychopath is in exactly the same position, but he Has to learn how to act guilty, and he learns it very well, lemme tell you something. An intelligent psychopath can act guilty in precisely the right way, in a way that you or I could simply Not match. Even a 99% Atheist like me who is from the Bible belt simply could not stand in the pulpit and declare that he represents the infallible will of God. So all those pulpits (not all of them but a heavy proportion of them) are occupied by good, solid psychopaths who have no problem with this sort of thing and I think we found that out with the scandal of the Catholic priests (and not the Catholic priests so much, but the Catholic bishops). There was not a single Catholic bishop who did not know that children were being repeatedly abused and that other bishops were taking the priests who abused children and moving them around.

Let me tell you something about the Catholic church. You'd have to be a real idiot to be a bishop who did not know this was coming on, this was going along, and you don't get to be a bishop in the Catholic church if you're an idiot. They ALL, every single bishop, knew it. A lot of them may not have been psychopaths. I'm supposed to say that. But I don't believe it. And this is by No means confined to a Catholic church. I have had experience with the mainline Protestant denominations, Jerry Falwells, Pat Robertsons, and I Still am waiting around to find a major clergyman who is not a psychopath.

Well, that's a horrible condemnation. I am waiting for people to come down on me, but in the meantime, the question still remains, "Why is it that consciences survive?"




You and I have heard all the conventional wisdom. The ruthless guy wins. Good guys finish last. And while we may quote that as a joke, we believe it. The fact is that we've read books like "How to succeed in business without really trying" and Parkinson's law and all those things, so reduce everything to the fact that if you are rational, if you REALLY seek your self interest, YOU will be the survivor and everybody else won't. The natural conclusion of this is that the psychopath should be the ultimate survivor in terms of genetics and in terms of ruling the world.

So why aren't psychopaths instead of being 2% of the population (and even that percentage sort of surprised me because we're talking about a pretty extreme condition here. We're talking about people who could throw acid in children's faces and not feel bad about it at all. Let me repeat that: We're talking about people who could throw acid into a child's face and not feel particularly guilty about it). Now These are the people who (according to all the macho ideas I keep hearing about survival and getting ahead), These are the people who should constitute the 98% of our gene pool and 2% should consist of sort of suffering people like me who has an actual conscience.

I've given myself a break, cause the fact is that they Do survive, so it's not a question of abstract argument. It's a question of understanding why.

It occurred to me that consciences survive because you can't herd cats. We are a social animal and we have been a social animal at least a million years. So Our society survives as a result of loyalty. This loyalty of course is a rather silly idea from the point of someone who is writing a self-help book or somebody who is telling you how to get ahead or somebody who's telling you how to be macho. It really don't make any sense being part of the group, being loyal to the group. I remember reading books about how animals would sacrifice their lives for the good of the group. Now I'm not talking about mother love, I'm talking about some unattached male who'd give his life to protect the group. Now that doesn't make any sense at all in terms of our current literature, but that's the only way you survive.

A group which is made up entirely of a bunch of psychopaths (each of which is only interested in himself) is not a group. They can't defend themselves. It's sort of like the movies we see by Jewish producers were everybody's shoving everybody else up in front. You really Do need somebody who says, "These are my people" and he goes and sticks himself in the front.

I was watching a Woody Allen movie where he was in the Russian army and he was saying, "Well, let me find the man I'm supposed to be opposing and I'll come to a reasonable accommodation with him." Well, that's fine for Woody Allen and the Jewish outlook, but the problem IS if the entire army tries to do that it will collapse.

So maybe what I'm saying is so obvious that nobody notices it. The fact is that for a social animal, treason (a lack of loyalty to the group), is the ultimate sin. In fact I think in our ancestors (and again I'll say our "monkey" ancestors or our common line with the monkeys), maybe they had a little more morality than we do. If some member of their group had decided to make a separate peace with the enemy, they would have ripped him to pieces.

You cannot survive without loyalty. Now in logical terms (that is to say in the terms We talked about getting ahead in the organization, about being a macho male, about persuading females to go to bed with you and all that stuff), this whole loyalty bit is absurd.

And I have come to this conclusion because I knew that there had to be a reason we're not all psychopaths. But I talk it out with myself, but the point is Reality is real, not theory, and for some reason we really Are a group where psychopaths were much more comfortable in their lives..psychopaths, the people who seek their own advantage the way every self-improvement book tells you to do, are a Very tiny minority. So there has to be a reason for that, and the reason for that seems to be that we value loyalty, despite All the things about a woman is desperately interested only in a man who tells her that she's beautiful or tells her that she's smart or tells her the right things at the right moment. Apparently it's just not true. We are a social animal and loyalty shows. And I think in the end we can tell the difference between a man who is loyal to his own group and a man who is seeking the best deal he can get at the moment. Well, I sort of hope so because I'd like to think I'm in the latter category.

As you can see, LORD, is my eye untrained.

It's the people in today's world that anger me and therefore I begin to question my faith.



Hi Joanne,

I know that the bad people and the bad things happening in this world cause some people to doubt their faith in God.

God created humankind with a free will to do as they please. God did not make us puppets or programmed robots.

Some people choose to do terrible things while others choose to live a life of love and good value.

As many people know on this board, I am a Born Again Christian. As a child, I was raised in a very good moral family; however, I was not raised in a Christian family or a home of any kind of faith.

I did not become a Born Again Christian until the age of 29 and up until that experience I could not figure out if God existed or not and could not believe how scientifically it was possible.

It was not until I asked Jesus Christ to come into my heart to be my Lord and Savior and I was Spiritually Born Again by the Spirit of God that everything became crystal clear to me! All the doubts that I had all my life went away and I knew 100% that God is real, Jesus is real, the Holy Spirit is real, heaven is real and being Born Again Spiritually of the Spirit of God is real! :)

It was like a whole new Spiritual realm of God was opened to me when I truly opened up my heart to Jesus, God and the Holy Spirit! If you truly seek God with your whole heart, you will truly find God! And the best part is I was at home in my living room all by myself! There was no influence from anybody else! :)

In other words, before I was "Spiritually dead" and could not receive nor understand the awesome things of God. Now, I am "SPIRITUALLY ALIVE" and receive and understand the awesome things of God! Being Born Again Spiritually of the Spirit of God is the most amazing, powerful Spiritual experience and one that makes everything crystal clear! This is just not my personal experience but one also shared by many Born Again Christians. :)

My post is just a quick version of my personal Spiritual awakening to God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit and my hope is that it blesses you in your time of doubt. :)


Hugs & Prayers, :hug:
GGG

GGG - I love the way you tell your story. Not all preachy or anything, just the truth, the whole truth, and nothin' but the truth! (so help you God!) I was a born-again Christian for about 8 yrs, but chose to walk away from it all. :o

Joanne, I hope you realize by now that there is nothing wrong with questioning your faith, or doubting God's existence (IMO). He gave us minds to think with and free will to choose what we believe and will do with our lives. Obviously you believe He exists or it wouldn't even be a concern to you. Just take your time and work it out with Him, or talk to someone one on one about it.

Blockade... you've confused me with your psychopathic talk. ;)
Seriously, you did confuse me.

GGG and Awake, thank you both very much.

I've realized that I will always believe in God and instead of doubting my faith in him, I have doubted my faith in people that I have grown to love and trust.




[B][COLOR="Blue"]
It was not until I asked Jesus Christ to come into my heart to be my Lord and Savior and I was Spiritually Born Again by the Spirit of God that everything became crystal clear to me! All the doubts that I had all my life went away and I knew 100% that God is real, Jesus is real, the Holy Spirit is real, heaven is real and being Born Again Spiritually of the Spirit of God is real! :)

Do you believe in the devil?

I've realized that I will always believe in God and instead of doubting my faith in him, I have doubted my faith in people that I have grown to love and trust.I can understand why you would lose your faith in other people Joanne. Lets face it, some people make it really difficult to believe in them when they are constantly screwing up so badly...:rolleyes:

GGG - I love the way you tell your story. Not all preachy or anything, just the truth, the whole truth, and nothin' but the truth! (so help you God!)

Hi Awake,

Thanks for letting me know that you enjoyed my personal story! :)

And also thanks to the people who let me know in private that they enjoyed my sharing of my personal faith! :)

All of your comments really touched my heart! :hug:

Oh, and I forgot to mention the incredible, tremendous and overwhelming PEACE that consumed my whole entire being!
A PEACE that is not from this world, a PEACE that could only come directly from God!
A "100% SUPERNATURAL PEACE" from a supernatural God! :thumb:

Also the incredible, tremendous and overwhelming JOY that consumed my whole entire being!
A JOY that is not from this world, a JOY that could only come directly from God!
A "100% SUPERNATURAL JOY" from a supernatural God! :yippee:

In One Word...... WOW! :cool:
In Two Words...... 100% God!!! :cool:
In Three Words...... Absolutely Mind Blowing!!! :cool: (In an awesome way!!! :thumb:)


Big Hugs, :hug:
GGG