To believe or not believe? That is the question?

I believe In retroactive reincaration. It Is like infinite continues in a video game.

I don’t believe in that stuff because it seems that most of it is based on fear or desire.

UGG!

UFOs, Ghosts and God. I’ve been open minded to all three for better than half a century and I’ve not seen the least little evidence of any.
In my mind that probably precluded Heaven and makes the odds of an afterlife make the lottery look like a sure thing.

Edit: I have no problem with others believing, as long as they’re not invested in me not believing.

I believe.

I used to believe in Heaven and an afterlife. I also used to believe in reincarnation. More accurately, for a short time after losing my faith in the Christian god, I hoped reincarnation was a real thing. It seemed such a sad thing that most people would lead lives full of pain and suffering, and that would be all they get. I fervently hoped that, should Heaven not exist (as I then believed), people’s souls would at least get another chance at life.

But then I realised that all my hopes and dreams won’t change the way the world really works, and no one has yet presented a mechanism for a “soul” (an as yet undefined and unidentified matter, if it exists at all) to transfer from one body to another, nor explained where it goes and what sustains it in the meanwhile.

So, basically, yeah. Life’s a bitch sometimes, but it’s all we get. So we should just deal with it.

I’m a Jesus follower. (Christian has become a political party in the US and I am not the type of Christian that you might first think of.)
When I think of Heaven and Hell I think of CS Lewis description in his tiny little book The Great Divorce. It’s a super quick read.
If you’re heaven bound, you are probably already creating heaven here and now. Not in your circumstances, but in your attitude and approach to those around you.
If you’re hell bound, you’re probably already creating your own hell by being a miserable SOB.
I was having this conversation with my daughter just this morning, about how Grace is easy, it’s free. Damnation is harder to come by. No one is irredeemable. I don’t subscribe to the notion that you have to say some incantation (the sinners prayer) in order to be rescued form some chauvinistic super power who demands we jump through hoops. I think more than half the people who find themselves in a place we call heaven after this life will be surprised they are there. And I think a lot of people who think they will be sitting up next to Jesus might just be surprised at the nosebleed seats they get. (Metaphorically of course.)

No, neither heaven nor hell, nor the afterlife.

Two reasons:

- neither heaven or hell (or the afterlife) are empirically provable. You have to take it on faith, and faith is inherently subjective and irrational. I’m not closed to the concept, but I would like to have some evidence, some repeatable facts, before I can buy into it.

- and as someone above said ( @Symbeline ) heaven and hell are coercive techniques to cause behavior modification. That’s not only irrational belief, but it is immoral in that a person is being forced (or coerced) into acting in a particular way in order to receive some potential reward (or escape some punishment). In either event, it’s an external force no better than blackmail.

If you have ever heard about Pascal’s Wager (easy to look up if you care to), his idea was that our time on Earth is very limited compared to a potential infinite time after our death. So, if Heaven and God were / are real, it’s a relatively small bet to live our entire earthly existence with that in mind so that we could spend that infinite time after death in Heaven with God. And if he was wrong, and God / Heaven do not exist, but the end of our mortal lives is the complete end for us, then we shall have lived a good life on Earth, though not dying rich and powerful, etc.

Looked at in only those terms, “there is a Christian-type God and Heaven OR there is not”, his wager made sense: to live a good life for that chance at an infinitely good life after death.

But his wager failed to account for the fact that the God he posits may not be a Christian God at all. It may be a completely different god: Zeus; Zoroaster; a forest god with no name; who knows what God or gods may be in charge? (It would have been a blasphemous thought for him to consider “other” gods, and I’m sure he caught enough heat just for imagining “what if there is no god”, but that was the particular set of blinders that he wore.)

So … I’m on the other side of his wager. Enjoy your life and live a good life anyway, because when you’re gone, you are fully and irretrievably and completely gone.

No evidence to support the notion. So in the most objective sense, no evidence means nothing to believe.
But if people take comfort in denying the oblivion of death- something we are all familiar with since that was our status prior to our own births- then so be it.
It is the coercive demand for behaviours in this life as a ticket the afterlife, some of which are contrary to human nature, that sort of create a problem.

In recent years I’ve become increasingly suspicious that there might be something to reincarnation. There are a bunch of reasons why I’m drawn to this explanation for “the way things work”, but they are numerous and probably as illogical as all the other explanations foisted on us by organized religions. I don’t know about heaven, but there are millions here and now whom I would describe as “living in hell”. In the end, I wonder if religion is the inevitable result of an inborn need in us to reconcile existence with justice.

As a Atheist, if there is no “god” then there is no heaven, no afterlife. When you die you are dead and GONE! No consciousness, no experience, no awareness. Nothing.

I don’t believe in heaven but then I didn’t believe in this world yet here I am.

@CWOTUS I think Pascal’s Wager says that, odds-wise, it is much better to believe than to not believe.
In a nut shell, Pascal’s Wager is this: If there is a God, and you believe, you can have eternal life. If there is a God and you do not believe, you will be damned and spend eternity in hell. If there is no God and you believe, you haven’t done yourself any harm. If there is no God and you do not believe, then it’s all meaningless.
I think Pascal must have liked being confrontational.

That only works if the god that actually exists (or not) is a god that cares whether you believe in it, and plans on granting believers everlasting life for the sake of believing.

I have a shaky and inconsistent belief system that is vaguely animistic, probably pagan (in the dirt-worshipping, tree-hugging sense), upholds creativity as humanity’s closest collusion with the Divine, is influenced by the water cycle, and that borrows from Christian mysticism, Sufism, and Shamanism. It’s almost Kierkegaardian in that I take a bold leap of faith in putting any energy into it, almost Nihilistic in that I acknowledge that it’s definitely absurd, but paradoxically- I take it very seriously and it gives me comfort and meaning.

too long; didn’t read Aaron Weiss sums up how I feel about God through song

Also, Cloud Cult

I do not believe in such things, but if I die, and turn out to be wrong, I’ll be okay with that.

Nah.

No to the H & H. If the afterlife is some kind of purgatory where we wait on our way back then maybe. At this point, and for some time now, I have tended toward reincarnation

But, I am beginning to have my doubts.

I am a Christian. I believe.

I do not believe in things that have zero evidence.

I do not believe for many reasons, lack of evidence being only one.

I also do not believe in an objective morality by which people can be definitively judged. You can lay out a general rule of not hurting others, but how do you balance all the competing interests? How do you account for the fact that some people are born with more psychopathic tendencies or that people born into poverty tend to be more violent?

Since the Universe is going to eventually disappear, we would have to accept that its whole purpose was to provide a means for judging a finite number of members of one species on one planet. It just does not make sense to me.

I do not see how the existence of God helps to explain anything. It raises more questions than it answers. Where did God come from? Why did he have to make the Universe so big? Why did he create it one way rather than another?

Finally there is Plato’s Euthyphro dilemma. Does God do things because they are right or are they right because God does them? Either answer does not turn out very well for God. If God does things because they are right, that means there is an external standard driving God, who has no choice but to follow the standard, making God an automaton. On the other hand, if things are right just because God does them then without an external standard, God can do any arbitrary thing, which we would have to accept as being right.

My thoughts on the subject of are similar to what @Banjo_Pickin_Appalachian_Wizar has written. It is hard to escape from the Christian culture into which I was born. The stories and songs about the birth of Christ, His Holy Father and the Spirit that like the other two is also God began to be questionable as I learned facts about the emergence of life and a history of humans reaching back further than a half-dozen millennia.

I find unacceptable the idea that a venerable god sits on a throne with the power like the kings of old to reward those he judged worthy and punish those who rejected his authority. While I have no doubt that a wise teacher was born some two-thousand-years ago, it seems unlike that he was anymore God than we are. However, I am unable to reject the third person of the trinity that I was taught to believe in.

The revelations of science and the likelihood that the universe emerged from a singularity, which over a vast time evolved sentient beings such as ourselves, has led me to consider the possibility that an ongoing creative spirit shaped the laws of physics governing material reality. We are born with the instinct to satisfy our physical desires. However, we may also embrace a spiritual reality by choosing to mitigate the suffering of others. The choice is to work against or with the spirit of creation.

Nope, nada, nothing. I also used to place some value on reincarnation at some point, but I now see this as yet another way to hold on to lost beloved ones or a way to explain our tiny almost insignificant existence in the face of infinity. Hard as it may be to accept, I see the master switch
tripping and after that, everlasting darkness while the world as we know goes on. That too until something upsets the balance of the heavenly bodies and destroys life as we know it.

I’m pretty open to a bunch of things. I believe in God but am not fundamentalist and do not attend church other than Christmas eve. I am not very religious, do not pray and stuff like that.

I believe in heaven but understand that I won’t know if it exists or not until the day I die.

I also believe that reincarnation is possible, God may not be the god I believe in, and maybe the Pagans were right with their beliefs. It’s also entirely possible that nothing will happen when we die, or that our energy will convert to something else.

I’m totally open to any and all possibilities and won’t argue that I’m right or someone else is wrong.

The fact that we exist at all is something special that we can’t explain. That keeps me out of athiest space and planted in the wtf realm. For me “god” is a man made concept. We don’t know and can’t simply make shit up.Trying to confirm or deny anything like this is out of the scope of our understanding.

The point of the tradition I follow is not so much to know what I describe below as it is to bring one’s seeing to what one might say is “the lap of God” (although it actually goes further than this). In this tradition, what is real is our unborn, undying, timeless, and inherently peaceful nature as God himself (or whatever name you choose, which is not the equivalent of a concept of God or a supreme creator). What is not real and the cause of suffering is our mistaken belief in an intrinsic personal identity and a world that is distinct from it. One can come to this seeing by realizing that everything that can be observed (wars, famine, pleasures, thoughts, feelings, etc.) must have an observer that is distinct from it. By investigating who this observer is, which strips away beliefs in what is unreal, one eventually realizes their synonymity with God. One also realizes there are no problems and no “things” that are not merely concepts, such as heaven or the life that presupposes an afterlife. All of it is just a play that is witnessed, and our common belief (or delusion) is that we are causal agents in its wholly spontaneous unfolding.

The tradition is called advaita vedanta and is a branch of Hinduism, but you can find the same ideas other places.

I don’t believe, but I don’t mind that others do.

You might be interested in a new 7 part series airing consecutively on OWN network called, interestingly enough, BELIEF. It starts tonight so check your local listings for time.

People from all over the world are interviewed about their belief systems, including even atheists. It’s not about faith. It’s about belief. And most everybody believes something whether it’s science or exercise or whatever.

There was a brief promo about it yesterday and it looked pretty interesting so I’ll be watching and recording all the episodes

I just wish it were airing weekly instead of a new one every day for the coming week. But at least it’s being rerun about 2–3 times at different times.

I’d be interested to discuss further with anyone else who decides to watch it.

So, who’s interested?

Who’s it being produced by? I don’t have cable, but I might be able to track it down elsewhere.

I’m naturally skeptical about anything that has Oprah’s sign-off.

Oh, yeah. It’s “Oprah Winfrey Presents: BELIEF”

That would be a firm “nope”. Her track record of insults against the atheist community is a long one.

Yes, OWN is Oprahs network. I didn’t mention her specifically as I thought it was quite obvious since the letters of OWN are her initials and there was a crapload of publicity about it several years ago when she launched it :)

I found it kind of interesting that in a recent interview, she did specifically mention interviews with atheists and pointed out the distinction between belief vs faith,

Make of that what you will. Perhaps she has grown. But I don’t specifically recall any derogatory views from her in the past regarding atheists. But I might have missed that since I wasn’t specifically looking for it.

Anyhow, I just thought I’d provide the info since it’s germane to the premise of the question. Everyone is free to use the info or ignore it altogether.

I don’t have any financial (or other) investment in the project. To each his own as usual.

@augustlan

I do believe but I don’t mind that others don’t :)

It’s amazing what realizing that the whole “unending torture of burning in hell” thing is a myth can do for one’s outlook on things. I have no obligation whatsoever to coerce somebody into believing just so they’ll have a hell-insurance policy :D

I was just kind of hoping that, even if it was on her network, it might have had an independent producer. I like the premise, but since I know it’s going to be skewed by her personal “if you have awe and wonder you’re not really an atheist” viewpoint, I’m much less interested.

That’s fine. Oprah is not everybody’s cup of tea :)

I just googled “Oprah Winfrey comments about atheists” and found a shitload of stuff.

I believe our energy will reunite with the cosmos but heaven, hell and eternal damnation. No.