
How to start believing in God? - juniorbnusc
I&#x27;m atheist. But I did not want to be an atheist.
I think life would be easier, happier, if you believe in something divine.<p>It can be a theistic religion, reincarnation, etc.<p>Is there a way for an atheist to be a believer?<p>I know the process can be long.
But I think it has to be this way.
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Broken_Hippo
I somewhat understand your situation: I often thought that it would simply be
easier to believe in God. I tried really hard growing up (parents both being
religious). I thought there was something wrong with me for a while. My sister
goes to church, my brother actually believes and goes. And it was in the
culture after all.

But nevertheless, I'm still an athiest. And weirdly, an occultist. The
viewpoint I have is that it is all a mental construct - something that goes
between you and your mind. So when I do "religion", in my world known greater
as Chaos magick, I really only have to believe in the moment, and then get
back to the real world where I don't. In a way, it is like having a backup for
all the things you can't quite explain, and gives a way to focus your thoughts
towards goals or having meaning behind it all and so on. Perhaps it is applied
psychology. It doesn't require me to believe in dieties, but it is an option
if I would choose it (I personally don't).

But I only really got here by reading about a lot of different religions and
things like that, along with a long period of self-realization. And that is
where I think you should start. If you are under 25, I'd suggest waiting until
later to make a choice, mostly because the brain is different at that time.

It might not matter if you actually believe in the god, so long as the basic
construct of the religion has a positive impact on your life. Maybe the
community does it: maybe it yields to scientific explanation first, and so on.

Much luck to you.

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araxhiel
My two cents...

Why not start by investigating some religions first, in order to find those
whose values, dogmas, rules, etc., align with your own set of values? I guess
that it can be easier to make the "switch" if there are something to adopt as
own, or to feel identified.

As example, I could use myself: I'm also an atheist, but, some years ago I was
very interested in the mythology of the Scandinavian region (as, you know,
there are some "revival movement" around the Heathen/Odinist religion — I can
be wrong in the "labels", sorry in advance for that) and somehow I got into a
group of people who were trying to follow those "religious beliefs", more
important, I felt identified with most of the ideas of those beliefs... So, in
resume, thanks for that feeling, I almost start to believe on such divinities
(albeit not in the same sense of the Abrahamic religions)... But I guess that
my lack of conviction on believe in such things is so hardwired that
eventually I left that path and continued my life as an atheist.

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davelnewton
"I want to believe something I don't believe."

...

A puzzling request. I'd suggest doing some comparative religion research and
finding something that resonates and start from there.

That said: you don't believe in something divine for a _reason_. You're
basically asking for a way to brainwash yourself.

So. What makes you think life would be "easier and happier" if you believed in
something "divine"? What is your definition of "divine", something super-
natural?

For me (militant agnostic, atheist for all practical purposes) the sheer
magnitude and mystery of the universe-as-we-know-it is more than enough to
believe in. I haven't found it necessary to resort to a "God of the gaps".
Instead I'm just fine not knowing everything and not needing a reason for
things to be the way they are.

I'm also a Buddhist of the variety that doesn't believe in super-natural
"beings", divine intervention, etc. I'm not unhappy because I believe we're
"just" here for no readily-apparent reason other than that's just the way
things worked out. Might I be wrong? Yup. Do I have any _reason_ to believe
I'm wrong? So far, no. It doesn't make me sad, it doesn't make me happy, it
just _is_.

What makes me happy or sad is the human condition, how we treat each other,
how we treat ourselves and our environs, etc. Believing in something "divine"
would not change that. If anything it'd piss me off to believe there were
interventionist god/ddess/s that don't bother to, or care enough to, prod us
in the right direction. All evidence leads me to believe we're on our own
regardless of the root cause of our existence, and I don't need any more than
that.

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noonespecial
How about the simulationist argument?

Atheist:

1) There is no god.

2) That means no supernatural woo, ghosts spirits, souls etc.

3) So everything you are comes from natural process happing in your brain.

4) This means that there is probably no fundamental reason the same processes
couldn't be run in a computer. It might even be easy since it takes only a few
watts in a few cubic inches and is duplicated billions of times by nature.

5) If it can be done it probably will be given time.

6) There can only be one "real" reality but an unlimited number of potential
simulated realities.

7) So the overwhelming likelihood is that this reality is one of those
simulations. A created thing. By something/someone greater.

Theist:

~~~
davelnewton
Big freakin' leap between 1-6 and 7. Nothing at all suggests it's an
"overwhelming likelihood", and it begs the question of our creator's creation.

Occam's razor: it's not simpler to believe we're a simulation created by
something else who's asking the same question.

~~~
noonespecial
Oh I definitely agree it's not very satisfying from the "why is there
something and not nothing" perspective.

But the creator's creator is irrelevant at the first layer. There would be no
way at all to reach or experience the "god" at the next layer up. Op wanted
someone in the office of "god". Simulationism gives you one without too much
existential overhead.

~~~
davelnewton
I don't see the "simulation" argument as anything else than a "god of the
gaps" substitution at this point.

The "creator's creator" may be "irrelevant" at the first layer, but again, it
just begs the question. Let's say we discover that we _are_ in a simulation.
Now we have to ask who made the simulation (our creator(s)), and we're right
back where we started from again.

It's just another layer over the exact same question.

~~~
noonespecial
I fully concede this point until I creat a sim of my own and look in to find
my creatures having the same argument.

Then I'll try to stop thinking so much!

~~~
davelnewton
HOW DO WE KNOW YOU DIDN'T CREATE THIS ONE

~~~
noonespecial
:)

It was homework in cosmology class. Given one Davelnewton, create a minimum
viable universe around him. You figured it out already!? Looks like I'm gettin
another D-.

Sheesh. At this rate I'm never gonna graduate and get my G.O.D.

~~~
davelnewton
If this is viable I'd hate to see a crappy one. Clearly you were running on
fumes when you created my friend NPCs.

------
fuzzfactor
Seems to me like it would require a complete leap of pure faith great enough
for you to be able to believe in almost anything you choose, regardless of
whether it was actually divine or not.

Beliefs worthy of being faithful to can often be traditional, other times
realistic, sometimes both.

Given a choice, choose carefully what to believe and have faith in.

Most religious people are not given a true choice, on the one hand many of
them might have been born with something you were not, on the other hand you
might have been born with something out-of-reach for them.

Happy Holidays in all their forms.

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juniorbnusc
All excellent answers.

Thank you very much.

On second thought, I think my problem is different.

What bothers me, is something else.

I asked another question:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13046232](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13046232).

------
alex_hitchins
I think what you are asking for is impossible. Sounds like you are saying that
you want the easy way out but not to feel bad you took the easy way out.

Don't mean to sound harsh, but that is what I read.

------
splodge
Just stop thinking critically, and you'll be there in a week or two

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OldSamaritan
Get a King James Bible and start reading.

------
instareligion
Think about what you are. Your world is basically the state of your brain at
this moment in time. A moment later, it will have changed. It's not the same
brain anymore, ever so slightly. Yet, you perceive yourself as continuing.

When you lose consciousness or sleep, you seemingly skip over some parts of
time. To you it seems continuous, you're okay with the lost time. Things are
continuous from your point of view, even when not in sync with real time.

Suppose a very talented doctor could disassemble your brain into 5 pieces,
keeps them alive in a vat for an hour and reattaches them such that no harm
was done. Supposedly even then you would perceive things as continuous. Next
he does it again, except this time into 50 pieces. You are still "yourself".
Then little by little increasing this into 1000 pieces, a million pieces, all
the way to individual atoms and back. Here it might be a bit of a personal
choice, but I would say that even then I'm still me and things seem continuous
from my perspective (although probably pretty weird experience).

Now let's say that after he cuts your brain to individual atoms, just as a
joke he then stores them for a week before putting them back together again
just to see your reaction when you realize a whole month has gone by
unnoticeably to you.

He tries to do this joke again, except this time for a month, but
unfortunately he gets hit by a bus before he has the chance to put you back
together. Now quadrillions of years pass, human civilization no longer exists,
and your atoms are flying around in space, occasionally recombining as parts
of planets or stars, which then are destroyed and scatter and again become
something else.

All kinds of crazy civilizations come and go, but one day a particularly
bizarre religion emerges on an alien world. They have determined that for the
rest of eternity, their task is to collect atoms from all around the universe
and then recombine them in every possible way. Sometimes while doing this
their own world is destroyed, but another civilization later on has a similar
religion that tries a similar thing, and after endless cycles of this one day
one of them happens to put together the combination that happens to be exactly
you at the instant the doctor disassembled you.

So you wake up, seemingly no time has passed for you, but here you are again
feeling great. You never do find out what happens to the doctor and you live
many happy years among the hospitable aliens. You become famous on the planet
after you reveal your backstory, and the local scientists decide to replicate
his experiment on you. They disassemble you to pieces, but unluckily right
then a terrorist attack destroys the facility and they don't have the
opportunity to put you back together.

Now insane amounts of time pass again. The universe undergoes the big crunch,
but it turns out that every gnab gib is followed by another big bang, except
each iteration has a slight random element. Unimaginably many such cycles come
and go, and eventually one emerges that is exactly like the one where you got
taken apart, except this time there is no terrorist attack. You don't notice
at all, but huge amounts of time actually have passed and you are in a new
universe.

Every time something destroys you, there will be another point in time where
it didn't. So now you have immortality. That's a good start for a religion,
but let's go further.

Suppose one time you get destroyed, but it happens that your exact
configuration happened to be one that the crazy alien permutation religion
tried in the recent past. You wake up, but now you're in the past. But from
your point it's continuous, you pick up exactly where you were. Hey it's not
just the pattern that is the same, but they even happen to be the same atoms.

Now you continue living your life, but to fit in better in the alien world,
you decide to undergo some plastic surgery to look more like the locals. The
local doctors helpfully even take out a brain tumor they happen to find. Now
your body and mind are a bit different from before, but it still feels
continuous to you. You take a vacation to another planet, which just happens
to be the one where you were living the last time you got destroyed. There you
happen to walk past your past self on the street, but don't even notice
yourself. The other you does notice you however, since you're a tourist from
another planet.

This way during your endless existence, the pattern of your atoms sometimes
changes, but it still feels continuous to you. One day you go wild and decide
to recreate the movie Benjamin Button just for fun. The local doctors go
through successive iterations to make you younger and younger. It's a fun
experiment. However just as they've gotten to the baby stage, unfortunately a
gamma-ray burst wipes out their world and your baby version gets destroyed.

But luckily after several cycles into the future, a world emerges where a
woman happens to give birth to a baby which is just as you were, and even the
atoms again happen to be the same (that took a few googol cycles to occur, but
it was worth the wait). You are born to the world as this baby, and shrug off
your hazy memories of a life before that as just childish fantasies.

In this way as the cycles go on and on, your pattern takes on many forms.
Sometimes jumping forwards, sometimes backwards. Sometimes you are a baby,
sometimes an alien, sometimes a man dying of old age. Everyone you encounter
is actually you. So neat, now our religion has not only eternal life, but
rebirth as well. Have those TODOs crossed out.

But it's not really a proper religion without a god, is it? OK, actually
unbeknownst to you, in one cycle the universe had turned out such that there
is an alien superpower remotely monitoring all life on your planet. They call
themselves the Universe Knowers, or U.K. for short. The U.K. monitors
everything you do. If they like what you did, if you lived a good life, if you
get destroyed they recreate your pattern in hell or heaven, custom-made just
for your beliefs (or your money back).

Most of the cycles you happen to be born into a universe with no U.K. in it,
but sometimes there is one. The criteria they use to determine your fate
depends on the cycle you happen to be in. So there you have it: eternal life,
reincarnation and not just one god but every god ever.

~~~
johnson
There is an overwhelming amount of physical and documented evidence of the old
testament and new testament folks. Here is the last (2) paradoxes that remain.
Babel is where political correctness, the bane to truth, began. We as
believers have not atoned for nor corrected the hubris in our rational(logic)
beliefs that man is superior to god. Service to those in need will clear this
up for you, on a person basis.

The second paradox that must be "atoned for" is the fact that nowhere in the
new or old testament does the scriptures authorize "Christians" to stop
celebrating all of those old testament (Jewish?) feast days. It's an insult of
the law and god is not pleased with Christians that abandoned those days of
celebration. Religious celebration is how we show God we love and honor what
he has does for us.

IT was and continues to be a 'business' decision by the Catholic Church and
most modern day (Christian) religions. Besides, If Christians returned to
honoring the law (the OT) then Jews would be much more amicable to embracing
their brothers of the law.

Like it or not, the past is a problem; but both Jews and Christian anxiously
away Messiah and an emphasis on the OT does not marginalize the gift of Jesus
Christ; never has and never will. How and when Jews embrace Jesus, is between
then and god. Besides there are probable more messianic Jews than Torah Jews
that truly believe. Most are secretive about it.

A simple 1 week trip to Israel and Jerusalem will fix your doubts, brah.

