Do you believe in God and why

[thaibeachlovers]

2 hours ago, yodsak said:

On 4 July 2012, the discovery of a new particle with a mass between 125 and 127 GeV/c2 was announced; physicists suspected that it was the Higgs boson, also known by its nickname the “God particle’’ Peter Higgs and François Englert were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for their work in identifying and discovering the Higgs boson.

 

Finding a Higgs-like boson validates much of how scientists believe the universe was formed. The media calls the Higgs boson the God particle because, according to the theory laid out by Scottish physicist Peter Higgs and others in 1964, it's the physical proof of an invisible, universe-wide field that gave mass to all matter right after the Big Bang, forcing particles to coalesce into stars, planets, and everything else. If the Higgs field, and Higgs boson, didn't exist, the dominant Standard Model of particle physics would be wrong.

 

"There's no understating the significance" of this discovery: says Jeffrey Kluger at TIME. "No Higgs, no mass; no mass, no you, me, or anything else…..  Taking all of those costs into consideration, the total cost of finding the Higgs boson ran about $13.25 billion'’.  

 

HTH.  The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.

Soooo, explain how the Higgs boson came to be in the first place. Was it created by magic?

[Fat is a type of crazy]

15 minutes ago, thaibeachlovers said:

Whether there is a god or not, saying the origin is necessarily a god may give comfort, but doesn't add anything to the debate and just adds the further issue, that children even ask themselves, which is who created god. 

 

Straying somewhat from the OP. The subject is do we believe in God and why. If one doesn't believe, then they can say why, without delving into the weeds.

I believe in God because of a personal experience- a road to Damascus sort of moment- so dry science isn't going to change that.

I concur that there are lots of different reasons to believe in god and most aren't based on how stuff and energy started. In a sense the post was an attempt to put an end to the comment 'What happened before that'. In the very next post you asked what caused the singularity...

[Walker88]

What's not to believe? Simple story, really. There's this guy who always was---no need to ask where he came from---who spent from the beginning of time to about 13.8 billion years ago alone, totally alone. No drinking buddies, no one on the other side of the ping pong table, no prom date....nobody nowhere nohow. The guy got bored. And lonely. Also, all that solitary-ness can fool with your mind, make you think you're alone because there's something wrong with you.  He needed confirmation that he wasn't a miscreant or unlikable.

 

Of course, being omnipotent, the guy had a solution, though for reasons unknown it took from The Beginning of Time until 13,800,000,000 BC for Mr Omnipotent to come up with the answer.

 

He decided to create a giant Universe, stock it with hundreds of billions of galaxies, with each galaxy having as many as a hundred trillion stars. Most of those stars would capture planets, so there's maybe 10^60 planets out there in this huge space and time. Then, on one obscure planet orbiting one rather average star in one galaxy in one nondescript part of the huge Universe, he set in motion a process where little proteins would form, then join to create cells, which would join to create little organisms that could reproduce, which would......well, then there would be sentient beings eventually.

 

Those sentient beings would, of course, be extremely thankful for the existence of which they became aware (I mean, isn't that what sentient means?). They would look around for someone---anyone---to thank for their existence. Lonely Guy---aka God---would then have little beings on this one planet telling him how great he was and how perfect and endlessly thanking him for everything from rice to cheeseburgers to their kid getting a good grade on her 3rd Grade Spelling Test or a boy hitting a home run in a Little League baseball game, or not getting swept away in a tsunami that took the lives of about 400,000 other folks who probably didn't have their women cover their faces or ate meat on Fridays (from around 1300 AD to the late 1960s) or had thoughts of schtupping some woman who wasn't their spouse, or decided they wanted to eat oinking animals, or worse think Lonely Guy had competitors or compatriots who handled different chores like keeping the sun afire or making crops grow or taking care of the oceans.

 

Anyway, Lonely Guy had a Master Plan, so who are these sentient beings on this obscure planet who could dare question that Plan, even if it involved putting kids through horrific pain with things like cancer?

 

Lonely Guy also had a Plan so that he'd never be lonely again. He created some Celestial Country Club with a really cool Initiation Policy. That involved schtupping an Earth woman (even though she had a boyfriend, though they had never dallied), then playing Deadbeat Dad to the resulting offspring, then allowing some Imperialists who'd taken over the kid's hometown to kill the kid when he reached adulthood and kept telling stories about the dad he's never met, and how "Dad" was really Biggest Boss and Big Boss was not some descendant of Julius Caesar. So kill the kid who resulted from the rape of the Earth woman, and everybody who had refrained from lyin', cheatin' and stealin', or who maybe did it those things but regretted getting caught, could get into the Country Club in the sky and spend eternity telling Lonely Guy how special he is.

 

Pretty simple, really, if you know the One Truth.

Edited April 22, 2021 by Walker88

[mauGR1]

3 hours ago, VincentRJ said:

There are many, many clues that support the theory of the Big Bang

Big bangs and smaller and bigger bangs happen, and scientists try to understand and explain how they happen. 

So far i guess we can agree on that.

What we seem not to agree with is the existence of 'something ' eternal which is the source of everything. 

I can call it God,  or other names, that is not very important.

In some Hindu books God is called the "non-born", because he has no beginning and no end.

That's for the ones who are incessantly asking "who created God "

 

[thaibeachlovers]

1 hour ago, Fat is a type of crazy said:

I concur that there are lots of different reasons to believe in god and most aren't based on how stuff and energy started. In a sense the post was an attempt to put an end to the comment 'What happened before that'. In the very next post you asked what caused the singularity...

That would be the singularity created by God, so relevant.

[thaibeachlovers]

20 minutes ago, Walker88 said:

Pretty simple, really, if you know the One Truth.

Nice fantasy, except why would the creator of life the universe and everything need to be a "dad". Surely the creator of all could just magic up as many companions as the creator wanted?

[jvs]

1 hour ago, thaibeachlovers said:

 

I never said the universe was created from nothing- try reading what I say more carefully. I asked where the matter ( not nothing ) that makes the universe came from, if before the universe existed there was nothing.

You still refuse to explain how such a singularity came to be. If before the singularity there was nothing, then ergo the singularity came from nothing. What science theory claims that something can come from nothing?

So where did all your gods come from?

This is an endless discussion and like many other topics i find it slowly growing into another' my god has a bigger xxxx than yours.

[thaibeachlovers]

3 minutes ago, jvs said:

So where did all your gods come from?

This is an endless discussion and like many other topics i find it slowly growing into another' my god has a bigger xxxx than yours.

Your post has zero relationship with any of my posts, so why quote me? For starters, where did I refer to Gods ( plural )?

[VincentRJ]

22 hours ago, mauGR1 said:

What we seem not to agree with is the existence of 'something ' eternal which is the source of everything. 

 

I have no personal knowledge of anything which is eternal and have not come across any scientific evidence demonstrating that any 'thing' or 'entity', whether an atom or subatomic particle, has an eternal lifespan. As I understand, everything is subject to change and decay, although that rate of decay (or change) can vary enormously according to the surrounding conditions and the nature of the substance. Protons, for example, are very stable, but do not have an eternal lifespan, according to the best scientific/mathematical models.

 

However, such scientific models are not totally reliable, so no-one can be certain about estimated lifespans which are billions of years, just as we can't be certain that the Big Bang theory, describing the beginning of the universe, is correct. These are just the best explanations that fit the current scientific evidence and data.

 

The concept that nothing is permanent and everything is subject to change is one of the fundamental teachings of Buddhism which impresses me. It makes sense because one can observe for oneself that everything that one perceives and experiences, in life and one's surroundings, is subject to decay and change.
 

[mauGR1]

1 hour ago, VincentRJ said:

The concept that nothing is permanent and everything is subject to change is one of the fundamental teachings of Buddhism which impresses me. It makes sense because one can observe for oneself that everything that one perceives and experiences, in life and one's surroundings, is subject to decay and change

That's a great teaching, and something which i always try to keep in mind.

...but I've been taught since very young that every rule has exceptions, thus it's quite possible imho for eternity to be the other face of the impermanent. 

 

[jvs]

On 6/17/2019 at 10:28 AM, jimmyyy said:

Won't be doing that, perhaps it was the children that i had after the war, perhaps one of them will have a go at curing something, perhaps they influence someone that does something great.  Perhaps there children do something great.  I just leave it to god, i don't control such things.  

That man came so near to killing me that I thought I should never see Germany again; Providence saved me from such devilishly accurate fire as those English boys were aiming at us.^{[ quote by hitler.}

^{Think about this.}

[VincentRJ]

2 hours ago, mauGR1 said:

That's a great teaching, and something which i always try to keep in mind.

...but I've been taught since very young that every rule has exceptions, thus it's quite possible imho for eternity to be the other face of the impermanent. 

 

It's fine to speculate that there might exist some truly permanent, unchanging thing or entity. However, to actually believe that there is, doesn't seem sensible or reasonable to me, although I can understand the emotional need to believe that there does exist some sort of permanent soul or Creator. The idea that one can ascend into a Heaven after one dies, and meet again those one has loved in this life, must be very comforting.

 

The Buddhist goal of removing oneself from the 'Wheel of Life' cycle by reaching a state of 'Nirvana', which results in not being reborn or reincarnated after death, is a different type of heaven. This type of heaven is 'total freedom from all types of suffering'.

 

What actually happens to a person who dies after reaching a state of Nirvana and has been liberated from rebirth, seems to be beyond human understanding, which makes sense to me.

 

"Even when the Buddha spoke about this, he indicated that no words in our vocabulary could express what happens to an Arahant after his death." (Arahant being the word for someone who has reached a state of Nirvana).
 

[mauGR1]

32 minutes ago, VincentRJ said:

It's fine to speculate that there might exist some truly permanent, unchanging thing or entity. However, to actually believe that there is, doesn't seem sensible or reasonable to me, although I can understand the emotional need to believe that there does exist some sort of permanent soul or Creator. The idea that one can ascend into a Heaven after one dies, and meet again those one has loved in this life, must be very comforting.

 

The Buddhist goal of removing oneself from the 'Wheel of Life' cycle by reaching a state of 'Nirvana', which results in not being reborn or reincarnated after death, is a different type of heaven. This type of heaven is 'total freedom from all types of suffering'.

 

What actually happens to a person who dies after reaching a state of Nirvana and has been liberated from rebirth, seems to be beyond human understanding, which makes sense to me.

 

"Even when the Buddha spoke about this, he indicated that no words in our vocabulary could express what happens to an Arahant after his death." (Arahant being the word for someone who has reached a state of Nirvana).
 

In my humble opinion,  heaven and nirvana are different words with the same meaning. 

Of course many details are open to discussion. 

Once one's is free from attachments is free from suffering. 

Sleep is called " the little death, and apart from being useful to rest the physical body and its organs, it helps understanding what life can be between incarnations. 

I don't find comfort in the eternity of consciousness, and of course no discomfort either,  for me it's just logical, even if I find difficult to explain how and why.

 

[Sunmaster]

1 hour ago, VincentRJ said:

although I can understand the emotional need to believe that there does exist some sort of permanent soul or Creator.

This is a common view, but doesn't reflect reality, at least not the whole reality. It is also annoyingly condescending imo.

For some it may very well be a comfort blanket to believe in a Creator. On the other hand, there is a very high number of people who have a different approach. These people came to the conclusion that there is something like a Creator, an ever present entity or consciousness, not by blind faith and not by religious dogma, but through direct experience. Like I said many times, I consider myself one of them. Doesn't make me or my experience special, but still, I think it is worth considering and shouldn't be dismissed with the platitudes we often read in this thread.

 

Please consider these points:

1) spirituality is first and foremost experiential and subjective 

2) While those experiences can wildly differ on the surface (different people have visons of different gods for example), there is an underlying theme that unites them all. Once you can see it in yourself, you can recognize it in others too.

3) What we see around us, is only the outer reflection of spirituality, coded into different systems that we call religions.

4) Science, or the scientific method should live up to its most noble and important duty: finding the truth, as inconvenient as it may be and research consciousness with every tool it has at its disposal.

5) This can't be done if the subject of research is not taken seriously, is dismissed out of hand or even worse ridiculed. Such an attitude is the total opposite of what science stands for and is a great disservice to humankind in general.

 

 

Edited April 23, 2021 by Sunmaster

[VincentRJ]

6 hours ago, Sunmaster said:

 

4) Science, or the scientific method should live up to its most noble and important duty: finding the truth, as inconvenient as it may be and research consciousness with every tool it has at its disposal.

5) This can't be done if the subject of research is not taken seriously, is dismissed out of hand or even worse ridiculed. Such an attitude is the total opposite of what science stands for and is a great disservice to humankind in general.

 

If you do some searching on the internet, you should find there are already a number of neurological studies on the nature of religion and spirituality. In fact, there's now a new branch of science called Neurotheology which uses Neuroscience and fMRI scans to study the effects of religious and spiritual experiences in the brain and the effects on mental health.

 

Here's one study, which you probably won't consider very flattering. ????

 

"A recent study that Medical News Today reported on, found that religion activates the same reward-processing brain circuits as sex, drugs, and other addictive activities."
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322539

 

And here's another interesting discovery mentioned in the following Wikipedia article.

 

"What Andrew B. Newberg and others discovered is that intensely focused spiritual contemplation triggers an alteration in the activity of the brain that leads one to perceive transcendent religious experiences as solid, tangible reality."

 

"If you block sensory inputs to this region, as you do during the intense concentration of meditation, you prevent the brain from forming the distinction between self and not-self," says Newberg. With no information from the senses arriving, the left orientation area cannot find any boundary between the self and the world. As a result, the brain seems to have no choice but "to perceive the self as endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything." "The right orientation area, equally bereft of sensory data, defaults to a feeling of infinite space. The meditators feel that they have touched infinity."
 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_religion#:~:text=The neuroscience of religion%2C also,hypotheses to explain these phenomena

[OmegaRacer]

8 minutes ago, VincentRJ said:

"A recent study that Medical News Today reported on, found that religion activates the same reward-processing brain circuits as sex, drugs, and other addictive activities."
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322539

Religion is the outer manifestation of spirituality. Not the topic discussed here.

 

8 minutes ago, VincentRJ said:

"What Andrew B. Newberg and others discovered is that intensely focused spiritual contemplation triggers an alteration in the activity of the brain that leads one to perceive transcendent religious experiences as solid, tangible reality."

 

"If you block sensory inputs to this region, as you do during the intense concentration of meditation, you prevent the brain from forming the distinction between self and not-self," says Newberg. With no information from the senses arriving, the left orientation area cannot find any boundary between the self and the world. As a result, the brain seems to have no choice but "to perceive the self as endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything." "The right orientation area, equally bereft of sensory data, defaults to a feeling of infinite space. The meditators feel that they have touched infinity."
 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_religion#:~:text=The neuroscience of religion%2C also,hypotheses to explain these phenomena

This is indeed interesting and already closer to the point. 
Not sure why you think this should not be flattering. Do you think this "discovery" negates what spiritual practitioners experience?

Edited April 23, 2021 by OmegaRacer

[OmegaRacer]

10 minutes ago, VincentRJ said:

The meditators feel that they have touched infinity.

What's wrong with touching infinity?? ????

[mauGR1]

12 minutes ago, OmegaRacer said:

What's wrong with touching infinity?? ????

The real mystery is why one who's quoting Buddha so often would quote a study aiming at discrediting meditation. 

Mind boggling if you ask me.

[VincentRJ]

11 hours ago, OmegaRacer said:

Religion is the outer manifestation of spirituality. Not the topic discussed here.

 

The topic is about 'belief in God'. Such beliefs are almost always associated with and bound to religion, and include, and/or are related to, spirituality.

 

[quote]Not sure why you think this should not be flattering.[/quote]

 

The 'not flattering' comment referred to the first article. Wasn't that obvious? I wrote 'Here's one study, which you probably won't consider very flattering.'
 

[VincentRJ]

11 hours ago, mauGR1 said:

The real mystery is why one who's quoting Buddha so often would quote a study aiming at discrediting meditation. 

Mind boggling if you ask me.

 

If you were to read the articles I quoted, your mind would probably not boggle so much. ????

 

Science is about discovering the processes involved in nature, or how things work, so we can use that understanding to create tools, devices and engage in activities which can potentially increase our prosperity, health and security.
If you read the articles I quoted, you would have come across positive statements such as the following.

 

"Religious belief can increase our lifespan and help us better cope with disease.
The researcher, who literally “wrote the book” on neurotheology, draws from his numerous studies to show that both meditating Buddhists and praying Catholic nuns, for instance, have increased activity in the frontal lobes of the brain.

 

These areas are linked with increased focus and attention, planning skills, the ability to project into the future, and the ability to construct complex arguments."

 

There are often both positive and negative aspects to many situations. For example, pharmaceutical drugs can have very positive benefits but sometimes serious side-effects. Likewise, Buddhist meditation can sometime have serious consequences for those who already have mental problems and who try to fix those problems through meditation practices, which is why certain Buddhist Meditation Retreats require applicants to sign a form, before they are accepted into the Retreat, stating that they have no history of mental problems.

Edited April 24, 2021 by VincentRJ

[mauGR1]

52 minutes ago, VincentRJ said:

There are often both positive and negative aspects to many situations

Yep, there you nailed it.

Did we really need that lot of words, and reading some boring essay to get to this half truth ?

..But the icing on the cake is warning the mentally ill on the " negative aspects " of meditation... what would you suggest to them, flying planes ? ????

[VincentRJ]

2 hours ago, mauGR1 said:

Yep, there you nailed it.

Did we really need that lot of words, and reading some boring essay to get to this half truth ?

 

Yes you did. This failure to see both the negatives and the positives related to an issue, is a huge problem for humanity. Religion, Politics and the Media tend to specialize in promoting one aspect of the narrative which supports a particular agendum, whereas Science, at its best, tries to address all aspects and influences.

[mauGR1]

12 minutes ago, VincentRJ said:

Yes you did. This failure to see both the negatives and the positives related to an issue, is a huge problem for humanity. Religion, Politics and the Media tend to specialize in promoting one aspect of the narrative which supports a particular agendum, whereas Science, at its best, tries to address all aspects and influences.

It sounds a bit like propaganda.

Of course you know very well the difference between what science could and should be, and the sad , worsening reality of the consumerist society.

Intellectual honesty, however is attainable by the individual researcher, amen to that.

 

[thaibeachlovers]

1 hour ago, VincentRJ said:

Yes you did. This failure to see both the negatives and the positives related to an issue, is a huge problem for humanity. Religion, Politics and the Media tend to specialize in promoting one aspect of the narrative which supports a particular agendum, whereas Science, at its best, tries to address all aspects and influences.

What is negative about spirituality?

I'm spiritual, and have nothing to do with religion. Many non spiritual people are religious for their own reasons, none of which may include a spiritual experience.

[thaibeachlovers]

4 hours ago, VincentRJ said:

here are often both positive and negative aspects to many situations. For example, pharmaceutical drugs can have very positive benefits but sometimes serious side-effects. Likewise, Buddhist meditation can sometime have serious consequences for those who already have mental problems and who try to fix those problems through meditation practices, which is why certain Buddhist Meditation Retreats require applicants to sign a form, before they are accepted into the Retreat, stating that they have no history of mental problems.

What unwanted side effects can spirituality have? Spending too much time looking at sunsets perhaps?

Spirituality isn't religion, no matter how many times you try and equate them.

 

Meditation is a tool to achieve a different mental state, but it's not spirituality per se, IMO. For some it may open the door to spirituality, but spirituality can come without doing anything special, if fortunate enough.

[thaibeachlovers]

16 hours ago, VincentRJ said:

If you do some searching on the internet, you should find there are already a number of neurological studies on the nature of religion and spirituality. In fact, there's now a new branch of science called Neurotheology which uses Neuroscience and fMRI scans to study the effects of religious and spiritual experiences in the brain and the effects on mental health.

One could probably get similar results for those that believe in man made climate change, or that gender is fluid etc.

Changes in brain activity are only indicative that a person responds to a certain stimuli, not just spirituality.

I do wish you'd stop conflating religion and spirituality. They are not the same thing.

[thaibeachlovers]

16 hours ago, VincentRJ said:

The meditators feel that they have touched infinity.

If they could invent a machine that caused that they'd make megabucks.

[thaibeachlovers]

On 4/23/2021 at 12:27 PM, VincentRJ said:

The concept that nothing is permanent and everything is subject to change is one of the fundamental teachings of Buddhism which impresses me. It makes sense because one can observe for oneself that everything that one perceives and experiences, in life and one's surroundings, is subject to decay and change.
 

Which applies to the physical world only. Given no one can know the creator, everything beyond this existence is a closed book. Being spiritual can give us a glimpse of God but not more than that. It's not like being spiritual makes us wealthy or clever- at basic it's just a state of mind that is open to spirituality. I'm sorry for those that have no spiritual experience, as if they had they wouldn't be on here trying to explain why God doesn't exist.

[VincentRJ]

7 hours ago, thaibeachlovers said:

I'm sorry for those that have no spiritual experience, as if they had they wouldn't be on here trying to explain why God doesn't exist.

I've stated hundreds of pages ago that God does exist. He exists as a concept or experience in the mind of certain individuals. However, I'm not aware of any evidence that such a God exists outside of the mind of those individuals.

 

Perhaps you can provide such evidence. ????

[VincentRJ]

8 hours ago, thaibeachlovers said:

Given no one can know the creator, everything beyond this existence is a closed book.

I find it very strange that someone can believe in something that he believes no-one can know. How do you explain that apparent contradiction?