People who believe in God but aren't part of a religion.

[Animavore]

'I don't believe in the god of the bible, but I do think there is something huge out there which loves us all'.

What sort of like a big pixie

Sort of like your aul one.

?

Oh sorry. let me rephrase it in American.

Sort of like yo' momma.

[Robert_S]

It was a stage in my journey toward the light.

'I don't believe in the god of the bible, but I do think there is something huge out there which loves us all'.

Ok, Ok, I'll put it back in my pants. Sheesh, no need to go ballistic over it.

[Rum]

'Like I think the universe is conscious and *everything* is god and it is our job as humans to join up with the thing that is both the universe *and* god and realise we aren't separate at all, but in reality we are the universe and part of is consciousness. And like this is what the garden of Eden story was about - the fall from grace and loss of innocence - really about forgetting we are part of the godhead and really it is amazing when you think about it don't you think? This all happened - discovering this that is - on an acid trip by the way. Have you tried acid? You should you know'.

[Thinking Aloud]

'Like I think the universe is conscious and *everything* is god and it is our job as humans to join up with the thing that is both the universe *and* god and realise we aren't separate at all, but in reality we are the universe and part of is consciousness. And like this is what the garden of Eden story was about - the fall from grace and loss of innocence - really about forgetting we are part of the godhead and really it is amazing when you think about it don't you think? This all happened - discovering this that is - on an acid trip by the way. Have you tried acid? You should you know'.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Ask them if they believe there can be a god that has no believers.

[charlou]

'Like I think the universe is conscious and *everything* is god and it is our job as humans to join up with the thing that is both the universe *and* god and realise we aren't separate at all, but in reality we are the universe and part of is consciousness. And like this is what the garden of Eden story was about - the fall from grace and loss of innocence - really about forgetting we are part of the godhead and really it is amazing when you think about it don't you think? This all happened - discovering this that is - on an acid trip by the way. Have you tried acid? You should you know'.

For me it wasn't like that at all. I'd been raised from infancy to believe that the explanation for everything was 'God', so my belief seemed as natural to me as breathing ... but I hated churches and the madness and hypocrisy within them, the admonishment to believe without question, the rituals and the group think mentality. The nonsensical ideas (miracles, biblical morality etc) that defied my observation of reality .. the Jesus story, good/evil, sin/redemption, heaven/hell .. and the whole bible as a source of knowledge thing never sat well with me. So I believed in my own nebulous version of 'God' for a while before eventually reasoning my way to atheism.

[LaMont Cranston]

Rum, I agree with you on this one. (Considering my reputation, I may not be the best person to have in your camp.) For me, it is quite easy, based on real life experience and everything else I can find, to believe that there is something oh-so-much greater than myself or the rest of us, and that entity has a consciousness.

I've been living in Hawaii for over 20 years now, and you really feel very close to the powers of nature over here. When I first got here, I heard a bunch of stuff about respecting the ocean and not doing a bunch of other things that were "kapu," kind of like forbidden or taboo. As a haole, I dsimissed a lot of the stuff as local superstitions and all that. Now that I've been here for this long, I believe most of it. When people come here, they can be as skeptical as the want to be, but I would respectfully tell them that if they turn their backs to the ocean, they do so at their own risk.

LordChhaya, you can put me down as one of those crazy mofos who is a theist and happy to be one. I've never had much to do with organized religions. In fact, I grew up in a not-very-religious family in a disorganized religion. It's called being Jewish. It may seem to you that some of us, including your friends and myself, are deluded or whatever, but believing that an entity called God exists is not something that I take lightly. I'm also a life-long fan of the sciences, and I believe evolution happened.

Anyway, it's nice to meet you, and I hope you enjoy your time on this forum.

[charlou]

Nature has always, always had the opposite effect on me, Lamont ... It's awesome and powerful and completely indifferent ... unconscious ... and I've always regarded it in terms of my place within it and been aware that my perception of it is ego driven. I've always felt most at peace in isolated contemplation of nature and how I fit into it ... insignificant, yet an intrinsic part at the same time. My life and my own death make more sense to me with this understanding.

Even when I believed in 'God', that was somehow separate in my mind ... 'God' never came to mind when I faced or contemplated nature. I never integrated the two on a fundamental level. I appreciated nature for what it is, despite my belief.

Various cultures' affinity with nature and sense of spirituality about it is a source of fascination for me. Perhaps if I'd been raised in a culture where 'god' and nature and I were integrated I'd feel differently about it too, but 'God' was introduced to me in a culture that uses god belief to 'explain' and to manipulate and to control.

Either way, nature doesn't require 'God'. 'God' was and is superfluous.

[Hermit]

I've noticed a rise in this within my circle of friends and in the school I attend recently and so I ask, have any of you noticed this trend recently and what are your thoughts on them? Personally I see them as a step in the right direction and I can at least respect them for finding their own belief rather than the supposed voices of God that preach the organised bollocks.

Yes, it can be "a step in the right direction". Deism was a stopover on my way from roman catholicism to atheism. Here is an account of how it happened. It's a reply to a member in another forum, but most of it seems relevant to this thread:

• I regard my atheism as the result of freeing myself from brainwashing. Before my parents married they both converted from protestantism to catholicism. They wanted a really personal god, and all of us children were brought up according to their beliefs. We went through the whole gamut: Mass every Sunday, catechism lessons, first communion, confirmation, regular confessions - the works, and the indoctrination started very early indeed. I remember reciting the following prayer, the start of which went like this, every night before lights out before I was even old enough to go to kindergarten:
  
  Müde bin ich, geh' zur Ruh',
  schließe beide Äuglein zu.
  Vater, laß die Augen dein
  über meinem Bette sein.
  
  Now there was a truly personal god. I took the line "Father let your eyes over my bed" very literally at that age, imagining two divine eyeballs of human proportions and appearance perched on my bedhead after I went to sleep. God was guarding me, but he also was very fearsome. Sinfulness - and everybody is a sinner - is sure to be punished with eternal damnation unless we regularly went to confessions and did x laps on the rosary by way of penance. There was a distinctly cruel, unforgiving and brutal aspect to my loving god.
  
  Somewhere around the mid 1960s (I would have been somewhere between twelve and 14 years old) a train driver failed to heed a speed limit sign. The train derailed killing a dozen or more passengers. The following Sunday's sermon consisted of the priest admonishing us not to regard our god as a cruel god. No! On the contrary, the accident must have been in fact a good thing because god allowed it to happen. It's just our limited, merely human mind that prevents us from understanding just why it was actually a good thing in the grander scheme. A couple of weeks later I read an article in a magazine explaining how this accident could have been prevented if a mechanical safety device had been installed at that particular section of the track, and if similar devices were installed in another 12 or so locations, this kind of disaster could never again happen in Germany. I came to the conclusion that the priest was full of shit. Accidents are caused or prevented by us humans. God doesn't give a fuck.
  
  I rejected any and every kind of institutional religion that advocated the existence of a personal god, but convinced that since everything must have a cause, there must be a first cause - or uncaused cause - that brought everything about. I became a deist. My new god was sort of a divine watchmaker. He set everything up and then let it tick away, big bang, universal laws, evolution, the works.
  
  In 1972, just as I was about to finish school, Gough Whitlam lead the Labor Party into government, and among other things he made it possible for people that lacked the financial resources but qualified on academic grounds to avail themselves to tertiary education. Possessed of an insatiable curiosity, but lacking any ambitions to prepare myself for a career of any sort I enrolled at Sydney University, taking Anthropology, Sociology, History and Philosophy in the first year. Philosophy turned out to be of most interest to me (closely followed by History), particularly the courses dealing with epistemology. David Hume was a bastard. He attacked everything I held dear regarding the classical view of science, but, try as I might, I could not find anything to counter his critique of naive inductivism. Not even Karl Popper, who came the closest in circumventing the problem, was ultimately of any use. I had no choice but to concede that while no matter how often correlations (such as, say, the rising of the sun and the appearance of daylight) can be demonstrated, proof of causality never follows. The assumption of causality is of course an essential component for our survival, both as individuals and as a species, but it can only ever remain an assumption. The best that can be said of us is that we are superior inductivist turkeys. Now my attitude concerning the divine watchmaker was that since the assumption of causality is pragmatically of vital importance for survival, but philosophically bereft of any justification, he has become an item of supreme irrelevance. More than that, his existence (among other objects of metaphysical nature) is beyond the remit of what we can even discuss with any prospect of usefulness. The watchmaker may or may not exist. We cannot know either way, and it does not fucking matter either way.
  
  And that is the short account of how I became an agnostic atheist. I hope you can see that rather than being brainwashed into it, it was a result of me rinsing the brainwashing out of my system.

Oh, and welcome to the forum.

[roter-kaiser]

Müde bin ich, geh' zur Ruh',
schließe beide Äuglein zu.
Vater, laß die Augen dein
über meinem Bette sein.

Haha, what about this one:

Lieber Gott wir danken dir,
dass du gibst zu essen mir.
Mach auch alle Armen satt,
hilf, dass keiner Hunger hat.

That's what we used to say before every meal when I was a kid (and my parents still do it).

[LordChhaya]

LordChhaya, you can put me down as one of those crazy mofos who is a theist and happy to be one. I've never had much to do with organized religions. In fact, I grew up in a not-very-religious family in a disorganized religion. It's called being Jewish. It may seem to you that some of us, including your friends and myself, are deluded or whatever, but believing that an entity called God exists is not something that I take lightly. I'm also a life-long fan of the sciences, and I believe evolution happened.

Anyway, it's nice to meet you, and I hope you enjoy your time on this forum.

I shan't be grouping you yet, I take it upon my self to get to know people before labelling them as anything and even then I usually ignore the label and thank you for the welcome

[LaMont Cranston]

Charlou, You are correct when you say "Nature does not require God." However, whether or not an entity that many of us think of as God exsits does not have to be about what is required or needed.

By now, I've been a member of atheist forums for long enough to have heard virtually every piece rhetoric and every argument from non-believers. It's very common for people to say things like "I don't require a belief in God to appreciate the beauty of nature," or "I don't need God to be a good human being." I happen to believe that both of those statements are true, but whether or not God exists is an entirely different issue.

If God exists, God exists; that's a statement about what is. no need or requirement is necessary. If God doesn't exist, God doesn't exist. Once again, that's a statement about what is.

If I appreciate the beauty of nature or live my life with the intention of being a good human being, those things are about decisions I have made. Whether you or anybody else want to believe it or not, the belief that God exists is not the result of laziness, the "need" to believe in the supernatural or any of those other things. It's a result of examining my life's experiences and every other source I can find, including checking out the viewpoints and opinions of some truly brilliant non-believers and asking them all of the tough questions I can think of.

I get it that many non-believers want to see hard evidence, and there is none forthcoming. What's also true is that non-believers have absolutely no evidence to offer, and what science can actually explain is quite limited. I'm familiar with that thing about trying to prove a negative, but, by me, you can either prove what you do or don't believe or you can't, and, in this case, neither side can.

When I add everything up, what I get is a "beyond a reasonable doubt" case that a force/power/energy/consciousness/intention called God exists. The case works for me, and it's good enough for the legal systems of virtually every country that considers itself to be civilized. For those who want or demand scientific proof, one way or another, of the existence of God, hey, I'd love to see that too!

[HomerJay]

A high profile convert to this has been Karen Armstrong, described herself as 'freelance' god botherer in the introduction to her latest excreta, The Case for God (sic).

Although her devotion might be suspect, as when she started the Charter for Compassion ordure, her initial speech and proposal to Templeton only mentioned the abrahamic religions and it was subsequently widened to be more inclusive.

Most forms of universalism should drive people away from doctrine and down the route of dismissing the individual religions as cultural expressions.

Er, except, the truth of the whole schtick relies on the veracity of revelatory experiences, so is jesus or mohammad a representative of god or just a cultural artifact?

If it's the latter then the whole thing falls apart.

[Robert_S]

I see it as a positive trend though that more people are rejecting dogma, even if they still have the habit of belief. I remember some of the mental gymnastics I used to do to maintain belief in the face of the logic and evidence. I pieced together some clever arguments for a very nebulous superduperbeing that could exist without oxygen, water, heat or any kind of matter or energy and survive logical inconsistency... well upon examination, I was very good at explaining why there was a reasonably solid case that there might exist a deity whose attributes could possibly seem to include omnipotence and love if looked at from a certain perspective that you must train diligently to achieve... But somehow I made it sound good to myself and a few friends who were also doing the belief without dogma thing.

In my own time I just dropped the whole project because it became too tedious.

[charlou]

By now, I've been a member of atheist forums for long enough to have heard virtually every piece rhetoric and every argument from non-believers.

mmmhmmmm ....

Charlou, You are correct when you say "Nature does not require God." However, whether or not an entity that many of us think of as God exsits does not have to be about what is required or needed.