I keep the "faith" in myself that way I blame myself for the bad and good things that I do and no one else.
People are controlled by believing what they want to be true or what the fear to be true. This mechanism of control is unavoidable and can only be poorly fought with awareness of what you believe.
You're asking a question that has no answer. People can't really tell if God exists or not, since it would be impossible to believe in something spiritually when you already know it as a fact.
God, as a concept, is a state that is above and beyond humans. By using this ideal as a goal, a person will strive more toward human advancement. For example, if you were a young budding athlete, there is a difference between wanting to be like the best person on your team, and wanting to be like the MVP of the professional sport you like. The first goal can only bring you so far until you are content, while the second goal, if you take it to your limit, brings you beyond yourself into the future. The atheist don't have an ideal that requires they strive that far. While the religious concepts set the bar and the goal way beyond that of the atheist. If one is into short term thinking, long term goals toward an distant ideal is almost seen as a conflict of interest. You may need to lower the bar by discounting the ideal goal in favor of an easier goal.
Plenty of atheists are decent people who strive to better themselves and the world around them. In fact very few of them are the evil baby eating stereotype that is thrown around by theists to make themselves feel better about their faith. I wouldn't want to make most of history's gods ideals anyway. Short of the vague deistic vision, most gods have human fallacies...because they are reflections of ourselves.
Atheists say there is no convincing evidence that God exists. That is not quite the same thing as declaring that God isn't real, although some do that too. Why would somebody have faith in something that he didn't believe was real?
Yes, I often see this assertion. But I also often see people that make this assertion are unable to give a proper understanding of the concept of God or at least THEIR OWN informed view of it. Classical theists of course see reality just as the evidence for obvious reasons. For them it is not a question of "evidence", they accept reality as it is including all the empirical discoveries.
Why would there be a god... Furthermore why would he make people... To play with them and force them to praise him??? Otherwise they will suffer damnation?? To make it even funnier God never reveals himself but to random people centuries ago and we have to pretend its a fact?? Organized religion is for the meek to dumb the masses into thinking if they are content in this lifetime they will get a better "after life" The elitists want everybody to be as tuned out of reality as possible.
If there is a god this world would be completely different. All the important people in the world know that religion is a joke and pay no mind to a authoritive god or jesus or whatever.
@Techne -- But it's not on us to define god, it's on those who posit god's existence. We can only discuss what has been defined by believers, so any failure to give a "proper" understanding of god(whatever the fuck that means) is really a reflection on the theist's failure to properly define god.
What does the word 'God' mean? 'Real' in what sense? I'm not a follower of any theistic religion. I'm not sure what you intend the word "faith" to mean. Nor am I sure why I should 'keep' this 'faith', whatever it is. And yes, I don't believe that anything closely corresponding to the 'God' of Judeo-Christian-Islamic mythology even exists.
The problem with the word 'God' isn't so much that it doesn't have any meaning. It's that 'God' has too wide a range of meanings. There's the polytheism/monotheism question. Leaving that aside for the purposes of his thread and just restricting our attention to monotheism, there's the mythical Yahweh of the Biblical Old Testament and the mythical Allah of the Quran. There's the Vishnu and Siva from Hindu theistic mythology. There's Advaita's impersonal Brahman and Neoplatonism's ineffable One. All of these are supposed to be the single, unique, one-and-only divine principle. So what's the relationship between all of the very divergent names and stories? Is only one of them supposed to be real and true? If so, how can we know which one? Or are they all supposed to be true, just different mythical personas worn by a single ineffable power? Theists disagree, often violently, about those questions. How does this hypothetical One God manifest in human history? How does God reveal "him"-self to human beings like us? How can finite human human beings, from their end and given all of their limitations, ever be sure that they have been touched by a God? How can we distinguish between true revelations and false delusions? Must this God be omni-everything? Omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent? Must this hypothetical divine power be a person like we are? Most theistic religions seem to insist very strongly on that element of their myths. But how could we know that? And given all the divine attributes that tradition tries to load onto the God concept, how is human-style personality even possible? What about all the problems that arise from trying to imagine a "person" who is absolutely unique, one of a kind, and alone? Can personality even exist outside a social context? Would emotions like love have any purpose or meaning to a One without a second? What about the conceptual problems that arise from trying to imagine a "person" that conforms to all the omnis in logically consistent fashion while "living" outside time entirely? How could a timeless being react to temporal events or discover anything new? Or is God a set of abstract philosophical functions? Is God whatever the first-cause of the universe's flow of causation might be? The foundation of being itself? The universe's hypothetical designer? The goal towards which everything supposedly proceeds and evolves? Even if all of these philosophical functions make sense, which isn't clear, how can we be sure that there's one single being that ties them all together and somehow embodies all of them? And what, in turn, connects and identifies all of these philosophical functions to the tales of the personal deities from the historical religious myths? Of course simply by definition, a classical theist is already embedded in his or her religio-mythical context. He or she is already a Christian, Jew, Hindu, Sikh or Muslim and has already embraced most of the presuppositions that are native to his or her version of one of those traditions. Agnostics like myself don't just absorb a religious tradition through an accident of birth or whatever, and then commence our thinking from within that context of a-priori faith. So, as a result, a whole galaxy of questions about this 'God' concept present themselves to us that Christians, Muslims or whatever will typically just shrug off and ignore. They already have their God concept, as far as they are concerned the only true and legitimate one, the one that's native to their own strand of tradition.
I'm not convinced that what remains completely transcendent could fall within the ordinary classification of "real". The latter concept was surely extracted originally from what isn't dependent upon inference, theory, and personal revelations. In the sense of something having the capacity to be empirically present or manifested in perception slash external experience, thus subject to acquiring direct evidence in being witnessed by many -- and from whence then other evaluative standards can get a foothold. Those other brands of realism being of lower status, supported by arguments, customs, methods, etc. IOW, it is by conforming to the rules and properties of phenomena (the content of extrospection) that any metaphysical influences would be made concrete -- given a place, time, potential description / taxonomic status, and empirical world to "exist" as knowledge. If a person could somehow magically step outside the cognitive system of the mind / brain while still contradictorily maintaining those faculties, what (s)he would encounter is nothing at all, the absence of everything. That is the manner of existence in itself, independent of emergent consciousness (or at least in the context of metaphysical materialism, where the speculated monism is non-mental or non-experiential). If switching to Immanuel Kant's scheme, the influences of either a hypothetical or prescribed noumenal potency like God would be converted into the natural-order of the empirical world. Which is to say, perpetually disguised in the extrinsic, space/time relations of nature's causal processes. So unless also appealing to Kant's take on practical reason, agnosticism is as far as one can get in terms of theoretical reason and critical public activity -- the turn to "faith" becomes a personal and emotional matter, not a scientific one.
