I found this interesting article called "Proof that there is no god", and it had an interesting argument that no one believes in God. Now, I don't claim this is true or false, but I find it interesting and wanted to share it.

quote:Schopenhauer once said something like:

"Man can do anything he wants, but he can not want whatever he wants."

My thesis is that people who claim to believe in god do not really do so. They just wish to believe in god. They somehow feel that their lives are meaningless without god, so they choose to close their eyes to evidence against the existence of god. The christian view is well expressed by Cardinal Ratzinger:

"Religious liberty can not justify freedom for divergence. This freedom does not aim at any freedom relative truth, but concerns the free descicion for a person to, according to his moral inclinations accept the truth." (The times, June 27 1990, p9) [Translated to Swedish in the Swedish version of (Baigenth, Leigh, 1991) and then translated back to english by me]

It's as clear as it can be! For a christian you accept the "truth" according to your moral, and then have to be strong in your faith to keep your believes. You decide a priori what to believe and then try to convince yourself and others that it is true. But theists don't really believe, because to believe something is to take it for true, and just like in Nazareth's song Sold my soul there is no sign of god in the world. When you have the evidence for and against something your sub-conscious works on it and makes a conclusion. The process can't be affected by your will, only delayed or suppressed, which will lead to psychoses, and those are far more common among (catholic) priests than any other group..

I have personal experience of this believing what you want to believe. When I was a child I believed in a lot of crazy things. I thought my stuffed animals were intelligent. I believed in Santa Claus. I thought there were monsters under my bed at night. I even believed in god after I heard some of the tales from the old testament. Then I became older and realized that these things weren't true. When I look back I don't understand how I could believe in them, it must have been that I wanted to do so. (Except for the monsters, which had to do with fear of the dark)

When many religious people are confronted with criticism of their religion they convert to atheism or agnosticism. Examples of people who became critical to the dogmas of christianity are Charles Darwin (Darwin, 1958), Dan Barker (Barker, 19??), Ernest Renan plus many former "Catholic modernists" in the 19th century such as Alfred Loisy and Antonio Fogazzaro (Baigenth, Leigh, 1991). The Catholic modernism evolved in the late 19th century and was banned in 1907 by the Vatican (Baigenth, Leigh, 1991). These people are to me clear evidence that an enlightened person will after considering the facts, reject christianity and other religions that contain deities.

Note: This is not the "Plead to authority" fallacy. I'm talking people here, who were trying to prove the existence of god and turned atheists. They did not want to do this, but had to after reading a lot of books and doing a lot of thinking on the subject.

source (http://www.update.uu.se/~fbendz/nogod/no_god.htm)

I agree, to an extent. I think that people to believe in God, but simply refuse to apply the dogma associated with said god to the entirety of humanity. Such people would soon realize just how terrible their god is.

For instance, consider the Christian belief that there is a heaven and a hell, and the only way into heaven is by believing in Jesus. They fail to consider the history of Native Americans. A Bible, or any word of Israel, Yahweh, or Jesus, didn't reach the Americas until at least 1492 when Columbus came here. That's about 1500 years that humanity was bound to the "believe in Jesus or go to hell" rule, that these people weren't even exposed to the idea of such a thing. And this is no small number of people. Including the North American tribes like the Algonquin and Iroquios, plus the massive Aztec, Mayan, and Incan empires, over such a long period of time...there is no doubt that if Christianity is true, hundreds of millions of people were sent to hell with no opportunity for redemption merely for being born on the wrong side of the world!

Christians fail to apply their beliefs to situations like this. They believe, but they refuse to think (and there are a few who are sincerely evil and think that God is just in sending hundreds of millions of people to hell who've never even been exposed to the idea of Jesus). And I think that that refusal to think is coupled with a subconcious acceptance of the fact that thinking would do away with their illogical faith and bring on the cold, crisp reality.