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Post by Deleted on Nov 4, 2017 23:02:25 GMT -5
For myself, my belief in God in started in childhood. And when my parents would fight, I would ask God to stop it. And to my mind, it worked. And I didn't know why I knew about God then and no one told me about it--that I ever remembered. There was never talk about it religion in my family. Never went to church or anything. My dad is Buddhist and has now I know has always accepted my mom's Christian belief. My brother went to a Buddhist belief and has come back to Christianity. Because of my upbringing, my belief is not attached to any religion, but more leans to Christianity because of my early belief although I didn't believe in everything that it says, such as that homosexuality and abortion is always wrong.
Essentially, I was am a searching person, though my heart is with a God belief, and I pray every day.
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Post by raybar on Nov 5, 2017 1:36:32 GMT -5
It sounds as if you believe in God because you always believed in God, at least from childhood.
But my question is: why do you believe in God? I'm not asking when you learned about God, or when you started believing.
People often say they were brought up to believe in God, which means their parents and others adults taught them their religion. Then I say that I was taught lots of things as a child, some of which turned out to be correct, and some of which turned out to be wrong. And I ask again, why do they continue to believe something they accepted decades ago as a young child? What convinces them that this childhood belief is correct?
Or they will tell me about reading the Bible or the Quran (one person) or something. And again it's, yeah, well, I've read lots of things that were true and lots of things that were false. Why do you believe this book (or whatever it was)? What convinces you that it's true?
= = = = =
For me, it went in the opposite direction. I said this all before - - raised Catholic, accepted what I was told as a young child, but by the end of high school any sense of belief or faith had faded to nothing. I can think back and remember some of the stupidity I heard in Sunday School or Confraternity classes, and that was probably part of it, but really, it just sort of evaporated. I didn't use the word "atheist" for a long time. I had stopped being religious but hadn't started anything else, so I just said "none" on the rare occasions when asked about my religion. ((( That's according to old memories, which may be fairly accurate, or may not be. )))
If limited to a single word, I say I'm an atheist. More precisely, I do not believe in God because I see no evidence that God exists. Note that I do not say "I believe that God does not exist," because there is no evidence of that either. I take the default position of "don't believe in something for which there is no evidence," keeping in mind that evidence might appear some day.
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Post by faskew on Nov 6, 2017 9:22:28 GMT -5
As I’ve written before, I was raised as a Protestant evangelical fundamentalist. Then, about 14 or so, I read the entire King James Bible. Discovered that it didn’t say what the preachers said that it did. And there were LOTS of sex and murder bits they didn’t talk about at all. But stayed a believer. In college, I was exposed to more liberal Christianity, like Episcopalians, and discovered that there are more Bibles than the King James. Still was a believer, but no long a fundamentalist. In my last couple of years in college I also read the history and sacred books of other religions.
About 3-4 years after college I began to seriously read about the history of Christianity. (Sort of developed my own grad school curriculum.) Discovered the many, many changes in Christian beliefs over the centuries and the many, many different denominations. Slowly realized that religion was an “incredible shrinking phenomenon.”. The closer I looked, the less was there to see. Eventually gave up religion entirely.
In Deb’s goodbye post, she said she believed that atheists got that way because of something bad happening to them. And that’s true for some, like Mark Twain, who gave up religion after his daughter died. (And, of course, the reverse is true. Sometimes people survive a near brush with death and they believe that a deity saved them.) But for many of us, certainly in the US, we began as believers and slowly, over many year, educated ourselves out of it.
Most Americans give “personal experience” as their reason for belief in a religion. Most atheists give some form of “education” as their reason for not believing.
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Post by debutante on Nov 6, 2017 20:23:34 GMT -5
I was raised Catholic. But the true believing came when I had an accident when I was five. My cervical vertebrae became misaligned and according to xrays were on the verge of snapping the spinal cord. I was scheduled for surgery in the morning.
The doctors told my mother that I would either die during the surgery, or that I would survive but be paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of my life.
My mother sat up all night praying to the Blessed Virgin.
I was up all night too. I couldn't sleep because I was afraid. I was five -- in a children's ward, without my parents and I couldn't move my head. During the night --- I felt a "presence" by the side of my bed but I didn't see anything. Then I felt waves --- the closest thing I can describe it to is as if you were at the beach and standing in water and getting hit with waves of water. But this wasn't water --- it was just waves. And then -- after not being able to move my head since the accident -- all of a sudden I could move it again.
The next morning, when they came to get me for surgery -- they found me running around the children's ward - playing and moving my head. They put the surgery on hold and took me back into xray. Everything cervical vertebrae was anatomically in the perfect position. They cancelled the surgery.
The doctors had absolutely no idea how this could have happened. They called it a "miracle".
And that's one reason I believe in God.
I have, since then, had God show His presence in many ways.
--Debutante
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Post by Deleted on Nov 7, 2017 7:49:51 GMT -5
I was raised a Catholic Christian but like many Austrian Christians my family was never particularly religious. I mostly stopped believing in the Christian God when I left school, became a somewhat Buddhism inspired agnostic.
Then I studied philosophy and at some point I realized that my agnosticism was really just indecisiveness in the face of a complete lack of evidence for my former faith in a divine being. So eventually became a fully blown atheist and also left the Catholic Church, in that order.
I never really had anything that you would call a "spiritual" experience, it really was more of an intellectual thing for me from the get go. I still enjoy reading and talking about theology and metaphysics and the spiritual, but I don't have any real emotional attachment to most of it.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 7, 2017 7:54:16 GMT -5
Most Americans give “personal experience” as their reason for belief in a religion. Most atheists give some form of “education” as their reason for not believing. Ironically for me it was the opposite. I attended religious classes and read a lot of religious philosophy at some point, so for me religion actually had a lot of intellectual cachet. It just didn't jive with my (lack of) experience of the spiritual.
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