Belief or disbelief: What are your reasons?

In my travels, I've learned that is never just one reason for belief or disbelief in God. There are always 3 basic reasons for why people believe, and why people disbelieve. They are:

1. Intellectual

You read the arguments for belief and find them compelling, and you believe. If you think the arguments don't stack up, you don't believe. It's the intellectual, or reasoning proper.

2. Personal

One thing that I've found in people that I've personally met, or have chatted with on a message board, is that nobody believes or disbelieves in God purely for intellectual reasons. There are always personal reasons. An interesting tidbit: most people, at some point in their lives, will go through a very trying time where they are dealing with a terrible experience (tragedy, disappointment). Some people interpret that in meaning they that need God to help get them through that. Others who have the exact same experiences interpret that in meaning that they can't believe in a God who can lets stuff like that happen.

3. Social

This falls under the category of the sociology of knowledge, that says that the people that are in your community, or the community that you want to be part of, that their beliefs tend to be more plausible than the beliefs of the people in the communities that you don't like or don't want to be part of. You believe or don't believe because of the social support.

Those are the 3 reasons. Now, what you can't do, is reduce belief or non-belief to just one of those reasons. It's always all 3. It's wrong and almost exploitative to say that one's position is based only on reasoning and another's is based on cultural and personal reasons.

So, I pose this question to all here, both believers and non-believers: what are your 3 reasons?

 

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I still don't follow why it can't just be one reason. I started as a theist and became intrigued by the intellectual side of the debate, did a bit of research and was left unconvinced of the existence of gods. That was it. The people in my community were predominantly Muslim and Christian at the time and I had very good relations with most of them, and that didn't play a role in my becoming an atheist. Nor can I think of any personal reason that led me this way.

 

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1. Absence of evidence + where science goes 'God' disappears.

2. I've had more fantastic experiences than I suspect most theists have had. The mere sample size of those experiences have allowed me to correctly identify them as natural forms of human hallucination: dreams (while asleep), hypnagogia (while awake), and hypnopompia (while awake).

3. The community I live in (fortunately) has no means to impact me in a negative way if I don't share their beliefs so it's irrelevant; however, not all communities are like that and if I were a part of one of those I might be inclined to 'fake it'.

 

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People who preach about God seem to never follow what they preach.

People who believe in God never seem to tolarate others with differing points of view.

People who wrote the Bible as well as other religious books only perpetuate a myth about a non existant thing wanting others to follow them to make everyone the same.

 

4. Spiritual

I have had some tripped out spiritual experiences happen to me that have proven to me the existence of a spiritual realm and a god and that jesus christ is indeed the messiah.

 

So?

Other people have had precisely the same revelations about wholly contradictory religions. Still others have had the same kind of revelatory experiences about pink elephants and ice cream.

 

I had a great moment of classic hypnagogia during a trip to Seattle. It was a full blown musical hallucination with dancing penguins, rotating chocolate bars, and some unique techno-rock song playing with the vocals being filled in by school children in what sounded like Japanaese.

It was shockingly real and emotionally uplifiting... but in the end it was all internally generated.

 

I wonder if people who have disorders like full-blown synesthesia enjoy it, or would rather be rid of it.

 

I can see memory benefits to such people. For example, if you are introduced to Bob and his name tastes purple then you are more likely to remember his name without any effort on your part vs. someone whom simply hears the name.

On the other hand, if the face of Aunt Bertha makes you see golden auras around everything then you might encounter a visual distraction that could make daily routines like driving more dangerous.

 

Daniel Tammet.

 

Drugs ?
Pardon, this is a serious question

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Wow, well that certainly validates the hypothesis.

 

Do you mean you got high and :bugeye: saw god?

 

What's your point? I can speak for myself and not for others.

 

no not drugs, that's just an expression.

 

Your visions, if true, necessarily make the visions of millions of other people lies or misinterpretations.

Why should we regard your experience with any more validity than the other experiences yours necessarily invalidates?

 

no they don't. why would you say that?

 

ggazoo,

I strongly disagree. My position is entirely intellectual. I have experienced personal tragedies (deaths of close relations, a parent, and sister, for example). My intellectual position was not challenged by those. I.e. I can maintain a reasoned view that overrides my emotions.

And where I have been in cultural scenarios contrary to my intellectual position, I have simply disagreed with them and moved on. I noted that I was not invited back by those groups once they knew my religious position was opposite to theirs.

So, no, you are quite wrong.

 

You said you had a vision that Jesus was the Messiah. That invalidates every vision that anyone has ever had which supports a different religion, almost all of which contradict Christianity.

 

As a Christian, I couldn't agree more. And of course, it's a two way street, and unfortunately there are those here at sciforums who fall into this category.

The only way that we'll all be able to get along is to get sympathetically into one another's shoes. If you don't believe in God, you need to try to understand why anybody does, or we're not going to be able to work in a pluralistic society.

When the new atheist books (Dawkins, Hitchens, and company) say that religion is bad, that's not a new thesis. What's new about those books is that they say respect for religion is bad.

If you counsel one section of your population to belittle and disdain the beliefs of another group of people - who's beliefs give them great joy and meaning if life - and do nothing to understand the other group - that's a recipe for social disaster. I've actually ignored replies on these boards just for that reason alone.