@Nocturnus
I find your morality argument quite interesting. Please do correct me if I am wrong here, but it sounds to me a lot like you are saying, that you cannot imagine living in a world with no ultimate moral standards.
I see one problem in particular with this, and that is, what then, if God doesn’t exist? I mean, whether or not you want to or can imagine living in a world with no God has no impact whether or not there is one, right?
Another interesting thing with God and morality is the Euthyphro Dilemma, which simply put goes like this:
Either something is good because God pronounces that it is good, which means that God can change what is good and bad anytime he wants, in which case my question to you would be “Would torture, murder and rape be moral if God said so tomorrow? And would you do it, why / why not?”
Or, God pronounces that a thing is good because it is good, in which case why do we need God? And here you have the exact same problem as atheist do, namely figuring out where morals come from.
I just find It much more realistic and simpler to understand if we say that morals are an ingrained attribute of humans, which we have evolved as a social species, and together we should strive towards a setting hour own moral goal, which we can evaluate our actions upon. I would suggest as many others the maximizing of health and wellbeing and the minimizing of the opposite. It is not perfect at all, but I think it works quite well, and I hope very few people would disagree with the statement. Now, why we should follow it? I think It is quite simple, while the universe or anything beyond our little tiny place in it might not care at all, we do, and that is what matters, it is, after all, our morality we are discussing.
I just don't really get the "why does anything matter" questions, I mean, I don't really think things matter in the great picture, but it definitely feels like things in my life and the lives of those around me matter to me, why isn't that enough. Does there really need to be some underlying reason to it all. If you really don't see any reason to live, to love and so on other than God, I really am sorry for you, and I think you should get some psychological help. Please believe me, when I say that I am not trying to insult anyone or anything like that, I just think you can unlock so much more in life if you find value in yourself, just because you are here in this world, it doesn't matter whether somebody put you here or not, whether somebody has a plan for you or not. We are here, and that is the thing that matters.

Ironically, we are getting more and more diseases, so that may becoming closer and closer to the truth. Only 1 problem with that theory... god doesn't exist!

I've come to the ultimate conclusion that it's a bunch of shit primarily designed to comfort people into believing there's something after death. Magic isn't real, and it still isn't no matter how hard I wish it was to make this boring world much less so. As for God being the ultimate benevolent being? No way! A truly benevolent God wouldn't allow evil people to get away with stealing presidential elections in the greatest country on the planet, allow babies to die due to birth defects or other issues, stand by while the Jews were massacred, etc.

Religion brainwashes people, and while it's not as harmful as other forms of brainwashing, it's still a form of brainwashing in my view. Accept God or you will burn in the lake of fire for all time! Yeah, that's a really compelling reason to worship God. Not! Oh, what's up with all this lord and servant bullshit? I'm not a servant to anyone and would rather die before I become one. If God is truly benevolent, he/she/it will accept anyone regardless of whether they believe or not. Until you can prove to me that magic exists, I'm not taking this stuff seriously.

As for dying, we'll see what happens. The more I think about it, the more I think there's nothing. There was obviously a time before when I didn't exist, and I have no memory of that, so presumably there will come a time when I cease to exist as well and I won't know or care. Perhaps we're all doomed to wander the Earth as ghosts, or maybe this crap is real (highly unlikely). If it is, I've got a lot of questions for the almighty bastard.

@43, by your logic, if there is absolute truth then I have to accept that truth may not exist, making the all truth is relative concept a thing all over again.  No, if absolute truth exists, it is because there is an absolute truth giver, else truth is merely a belief you can wipe away with another.
@Jayde, 44, it is up to you if you're the one claiming he doesn't exist and that you're personally convinced of it, in as much as you believe it's up to me because of my personal conviction.  Making the claim is what puts you in that position because you're making a statement you claim is true.  To say that God does not exist is to say that you know without the shadow of a doubt that what you are saying is true.  ON the other hand, you also state that you don't know so we should keep trying to find out, which tells me you're still conflicted to some degree, as you cannot hold to both as true.
As far as Christianity goes?  Yes, you are absolutely right, and apparently it began as the result of the audacious claims of some guy who was born out in the middle of nowhere to a young woman who had apparently never had sex with anyone but was apparently visited by at least one angel and told that she had found favor in God's sight.  Why her?  I don't know.  He also apparently performed 7 signs that affirmed his divinity.
1.  He reportedly turned water into whine, bypassing the way chemistry usually works.
2.  He supposedly healed a man who is not in his physical presence, bypassing both the ways medicine and space/distance usually work.
3.  He apparently healed a man who has been crippled for 38 years, bypassing the way time usually works.
4.  He is said to have fed at least 5000 people with 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish, bypassing the way matter usually works.
5.  He was mysteriously seen walking on water, bypassing the way the human body and the forces of nature usually work.
6.  He was um, sighted?  By blind people?  Healing blind people, bypassing the way chronic disabilities usually work.
7.  And finally, he somehow, by some means, at some point, at some home, with a bunch of someone's watching him, raised a dead man after he'd been buried and all that jazz for quite some time, bypassing the way life itself usually works.
Now, this is a bunch of apparently and reportedly and supposedly and hypothetical yada yada that came to us from a bunch of other guys who were around some 2000 or so years ago who all believed this stuff to be real, and that's a lot of big stuff to believe in.  But he apparently, yeah, apparently, went further!
1.  He claimed to be the bread of life.  Interesting that he should then feed 5000 or so people with just a few loaves of it...
2.  He claimed to be the light of the world... I guess giving blind people sight wasn't such a miracle after all?
3.  He claimed to be the door/gate by which all good sheep enter.  I'm not sure how that ties into the 7 signs so I won't even bother to try there...
4.  He further reaffirmed that sheep business by stating he was the Good Shepherd... I guess he really wanted people to follow him.
5.  He said he was the resurrection, and the life.  Lazarus apparently felt the same way, after his sisters had left him for dead.
6.  He stated he was the way, the truth, and the life.  Nobody who wants to go anywhere of any great importance and know anything of great importance and see anything of great importance can do it by any other means, if that statement is to be believed.
7.  And finally, he said he was the true vine.  Apparently that's how water became whine, or some such.
In reality, what makes any of these statements of any worth is the utterance "I am,"  coupled with the symbolism he used to illustrate without any hesitation that he was the foretold messiah of scripture, written about hundreds of years before his time.  IN and of them selves, those I am statements are useless.  Coupled with the old testament and if he is to be believed as having had any ounce of truth in him, Jesus was in essence saying that all of this had been planned from the beginning of time and that he was equall to all of it.
Is it true?  Most biblical scholars are at the very least in support of some Jesus who apparently lived in Nazareth, born in Bethlehem.  The archeological evidence of his existence, however, is practically none.  What does that mean?  That Jesus, like 99 percent of the world in his time, made little impact on it from an archeological standpoint.  It means he was a peasant.  It means that if he lived he lived a hard life.  Eyewitness accounts of him are biased in every respect, as they should be given what those people reported.  Outside of the new Testament, historians such as Flavius Josephus coroberate his existence in his writing the Jewish Antiquities  Coupled with Annals of Imperial Rome, we get the idea that there was a Jesus who was excecuted by Roman law and that his followers were blamed for many things by the great emperor Nero.  There master, "Christus," was apparently put to death during the reign of Tiberius by Pontius Pilate.  Both of these historians, as Roman citizens, could hardly have had any bias toward Christ or Christianity.  Roman governor Pliny could hardly have had any reason to write about people singing hymns to Jesus as if he were God if in fact it didn't happen.  The historical evidence we do have suggests that Jesus at the very least existed, even if we don't want to agree on the why.
But that begs the question, if his followers believed that he was the real deal, as it were, and that is confirmed by what others who weren't followers of his wrote on the subject, why on earth and why in heaven should Jesus be so influencial at all?  Why start this organization of losers?  Of misfits?  Of people who would be seen as nothing but walking talking breathing wastes of space?  What does it proffit a loser to lead a bunch of other losers to their deaths because they would not refuse this so-called way?  This reciter of parables?  This man of paradoxes?  This wordy wish washy teacher who claimed that the last shall be first and the first be last?  This nobody from nowhere who had nothing to live for and who was hated by his own people, shunned and scorned and crowned in thorns for a world that would not believe in him?  For that matter, so bad was his loserness that one of the other losers inside of his sphere of influence said he didn't know him right before Jesus died!  Three times!
The truth is that there is no way any popular figure today in this world we live in would go to the cross for you and I.  The truth is that no top business leader is going to give his all for you.  The truth is that winners have nothing to gain if they've already won it all, while losers gain the knowledge of knowing that if there is a God who loves them that he loves them just as they are and that he'd willingly give up his one and only begotten son for them to have a chance at redemption in this sick and twisted world we've wrought with our own hands, thought up with our minds, desired by our hearts and full of our selves with no thought other than the here and now because it is all we see and everything clouding our perception.  For humanity to love, it must be loved.  For humanity to do good, there must be a reason for its good.  For humanity to exist, there must be a cause outside of it that has made it so, or else I'm just a predestined ape with just a bit more rationality than my three million years or so ago cousin writing a load of nonsensical sweet nothings for a world that is doomed to the vast bleakness of anticlimactic and brutal nothing that means we've all wasted our lives for nothing and our very lives were nothing in a forever nothing nothingness.  Love cannot work like that.  Love has to work on the basis that one is free to choose to act inside or outside of its influence, to better the one it is they love.  If we are simpy molecular and atomic collections in a shell cooked up by primordial soup for no reason other than that we are, then none of this should matter at all.
To conclude, you can be spiritually apathetic... I won't fault you.  I was there at one point.  You can claim that there isn't any solid proof of his existence.  You can even claim that there isn't enough evidence to compell you personally to believe!  What you cannot do, is tell me definitively that there is no god.  The day you do that, truly do that and leave me with no doubt, I'll Christen you God myself and I'll show the world why.  Until then, I'll claim that either Jesus was mad, or he was a liar, or he is precisely who and what he says he is, because those are the only three choices I see before me that make any sense, and each and every single one of them have implications surrounding them.  It's up to me and me alone to make the choice, just as it is true of us all.  "You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

I've never said that Jesus didn't exist in some form. But just as Trump supporters claim he won the 2020 election and claim his two impeachments don't matter, so I would argue that followers of Christianity have, over time and with great personal motivation, adopted beliefs that suit them.
Put another way: you can't accept that the answer is "we don't know", and some sort of god fits. That's great for you. You are not one of the pushy ones. But the Christian god is as much a fiction as the Muslim Allah, and as much a fiction as any of the Hindu pantheon. These are constructs based on imperfect human understanding. They were written about by humans, for the purpose of getting other humans to follow teachings and behave like good little sheep. It's very easy to control people when you scare and shame them first, and unfortunately, if you read any holy book thoroughly enough, you will see plenty of fear and shame and gaslighting and guilt in amongst the love. You admitted yourself that a lot of things that Jesus supposedly did were "apparently". You made a really excellent case for how those things were essentially small acts turned into legends by people who were not well educated and not well acquainted with close examination of their own system of beliefs. I'm sorry, but you can't then prop up a religion based on all of this.

The only reason I am conflicted is because I'm not willing to say that there is no power greater than us. I am firmly convinced that none of our understanding of religion even comes close to the surface of what might actually exist out there. Practically speaking, I might as well be an atheist, but technically I am an agnostic because I can acknowledge that there might be things beyond our understanding out there to find. In fact, I'm sure of it; but as to what those things are, and how they operate, or how they'll interact with us (if they ever do), I, like everyone else, has no idea.

Now, to your other point, about love mattering because it comes from outside. My answer to this is far more prosaic. We are intelligent, and we are observant. We are also social, and being social, this means that at base, we don't want to be alone. Not being alone means we want at least some people to like us. When those who like us stay around, we eventually begin to observe how life treats them, or mistreats them. Because we have emotions, and because we have enough intelligence to recognize those emotions, we can feel pain, outrage and other things on their behalf. We can want to do things for them to make them feel appreciated. We can want to get closer to them due to shared experiences, good and bad. We can, because we do have a rather large biological component, even find those people attractive in some way. Thus, in one guise or another, love is born.
You say there has to be some sort of greater source of love. I disagree. This isn't emulation of a purer source. It's learned behaviour on account of our intelligence, our social nature and our empathy. Some of us are better at giving and receiving love than others, for a whole plethora of reasons. This speaks not to our relationship with something divine, but to our ability to process our emotions, our willingness to be social and to share our world with others, and to our observation of the world in which we live, as well as the processing of the data we receive. Machines can process all that data, but the chemicals which constitute a machine are not the exact same as those which constitute a human being. The same goes for a sea sponge; it may have a survival instinct, but it's unlikely to be thinking complex, emotional thoughts beyond its own survival. This is how evolution works. It's not about god, or greater love. It's evolution, baby.

My question would go may be a bit ferther, why would a good god even create anything?  What makes someone create a universe or anything else for that matter?

I, am a christian, and i'm not the type to start some argument about how you should trust god, and at 61, well, it's science, but. what made all that stuff happen to create this earth we now live in today. I Really don't want to start anything so just please don't say  anything to me if it's about how it's not true, you people have your beliefs and we christians have hours.
Now, second of all, and there might be some answer for this, but why would anyone even rite a 700 page book in the first place if they were human? about all that.
And there have bin videos of ture mearicles happening, now sense i guess most of us are blind weal probibly never see that.
Now that's the end of my post again, please i really dont' want to start something smilyface.

There is no truth giver, there is only truth. It's what you get when you take the substance of life and melt it down a crucible, so that all the impurities are gone and what remains is exactly the truth.

All powerful god huh? Well I had to put my grandma to bed, or at least help at any rate. Like I said, she's got sun downer's, which means after about 5PM, you don't get much sense out of her until the morning. My mom was over there talking and talking and talking. "Mom, we want to get you in bed. Mom, mom, mom mom mom mom." Your mom is not able to comprehend things right now, and the longer you have her up, the more pain she's going to be in. In order to put her in bed, I have to hurt her. There's no way not to. So while you're over there blithely trying to get her up on her own, I just want to get this done. I don't even need her ass, I can pick up my grandma and carry her if I have to. Now you'd think, with as close a relationship she claims to have with god, that maybe he'd be like, "Your son is right you know. The longer she sits there, the more pain she's in."

Then she's in bed and my mom stops and doesn't tell me she's not all the way up to the head. SO then more him-hawing and I'm like get her the medicine. I had to say that three times. By this time I'm agitated. Get her the fucking medicine for christ sakes. We can do whatever else when that's done. It's like this shit isn't fucking hard, it's not rocket science.

But you know, he can't even be bothered. Oh yeah, that's because there is no god. The nerve of these people astounds me. Most of the time, I just kind of shrug it off. But when you come at me with that crap at a time like this, just no.

Hi.

@GrannyCheeseWheel, I know we haven't gotten on in the past man but I actually am sorry you're going through what you are.

My nans (grandmas) mum had Alzheimer's and hearing her crying out at night, the family having to put an alarm mat thing on the floor for when she got out of bed, her not wanting to eat, all of that, was horrible.

As horrible as this may sound to some, her suffering will end soon so at least there's that.

My nan now has cancer and has a colostemy bag, and is going to the hospital later on today, it's 2:24 in London now and in the next week or so she's going for an opperasion to do something. From what I understand; she'll have about 10 years to live, hopefully it's more but we'll see.

As for god or a creator, I do believe in one as I've left my body, I've had my energy drained, I've helled energy in my hands and can do that every time I wish, I've done it around my brother and he felt it, so to me; there's evidence of an afterlife an a soul and to me, the logical next step is a creator, if there wasn't one, why would these things exist to me?

As for AI and the soul, they're not the same. A soul, in my oppinion is a bunch of energy with personality, it's your youness if you like, all clumped together in one energy packet. AI ON the other hand; as amazing as it's going to be in the future is code and an amazing computer brain, then again; who's to say the energy of that AI machine doesn't go on in some way. If you form an atachement to it; will you see it in the afterlife or a form of it at least? I don't know. I think all things are energy so in that way yes but would a machine designed to help you cross the road need or want to se you in an afterlife, I don't think so.

When I was younger, I used to be a lot more spiritual than I am now. I don't think I ever truly called myself a Christian, but I was always taught that God exists and is always there. I don't recall ever being taught to fear God, however. I once went to a blind Christian camp and they basically enforced the idea that God loves us and wants us to be with him. Basically a very simple version of Christianity. They probably hoped that we would study more on our own after we went home.

As time went on, I got interested in things like energy work, magic, crystals, and the concept of the Force from Star wars. I didn't think too much about whether or not there was a god. I just believed what made sense to me at the time.

Everything's made of energy? Okay, why not? Science pretty much says everything is made of the same stuff anyway.

Crystals affecting your energy body with their vibrations? No real scientific evidence for it, but why not? Apparently everything vibrates, and maybe crystals do vibrate in specific ways that can affect people somehow. Who can say for sure?

Magic? Hmm. Maybe not like the magic in fiction, but why not? To this day I do wonder what the real limits are if magic truly exists. It's always fun to speculate anyway.

Psychic abilities such as telepathy, psychokinesis, etc. Again, no real evidence, but why not? We don't know everything about everything, so maybe it's possible.

The Force is what makes the most sense to me. The Force in the real world shares some aspects with the Force depicted in Star Wars, and it's actually not a new concept. Lucas didn't just invent it out of thing air. I suppose one could say that anything involving energy work is all the same thing, and we can just call it the Force. Life gives off energy. Heck, even non-living things give off some sort of energy. All that energy is all around us, and maybe it somehow connects everything. It also sort of answers the question of what happens to us when we die. We become one with the Force. Whether there's consciousness after death is something else entirely. Now whether or not that energy can be used to affect the physical world similar to the Jedi in star Wars, I don't know for sure.

So, what changed? That's simple. Someone tried converting me to Christianity. We had many debates/arguments, and I will admit that I was afraid at one point. Afraid because God, for one reason or another, absolutely forbids anyone to use magic or anything else that doesn't come from him. If you don't follow him, if you don't repent, if you do things like practice magic, you go to hell where you will burn for all of time and then some simply because you dare to defy him. There are also no marshmallows to roast. It was quite psychologically distressing.

At some point, I concluded that this is extremely unreasonable, and that God couldn't be how he's depicted by Christianity. God must be extremely misrepresented. Who in their right mind would be such a jerk all while claiming that they love everyone? Sounds like a bit of an abusive relationship to me. Do as I say, or burn forever when you die! Oh but wait. We're all saved as long as we accept that Christ died on the cross for our sins, because that really makes sense. Especially when you consider that he was brought back in a few days, and that he's really part of a trinity/God himself. So God sent himself down an died so we could be saved from his judgement, when all he really had to do was just forgive everyone. Right then. Sorry. Makes absolutely zero sense in the real world. It's an interesting story though, and if people want to believe it, that's cool. No judgement here.

Add to that that there are so many demoninations of Christianity, all telling us that they have the monopoly on truth. We can't even all agree how to worship this god of ours. Some churches even use different versions of the Bible. But wait, there's more! There are classes one can take that teach how the Bible's supposed to be interpreted based on the original Hebrew, because apparently the English translation isn't understandable enough and we need help. How the heck does this even make any sense at all? Why wouldn't the Bible just been innately understandable by believers in the first place? God supposedly wants people to come to him. Why make it extra difficult? Oh. Right. Satan. Of course. Has to be.

There's more, but this is getting long as it is. Suffice it to say that if this kind of thing is what keeps people going and gives them hope, great. Sometimes it does inspire people to be better people. Sometimes lives really are turned around. I've seen it happen. Whether it was the holy Spirit or just their own desire to change, I can't say for sure. But so much of it makes no sense to me.

So after realizing all this, it came to me. If I'm sitting here saying that God can't possibly be real as far as Christianity goes, then how can I possibly also sit here and say that anything else supernatural or metaphysical is real? How can magic be real? How can psychic abilities exist? Is everything I ever believed just fantasy? Was I really using the Force in some way in the past, or was it just me being more aware of my natural senses and kidding myself that it was something special?

To this day I've never really fully recovered from it. Oh sure, I'm still interested in things and still have a ton of information I've collected over the years, but I don't work with crystals anymore. I don't work with energy anymore. If I ever did have any sort of psychic abilities, I've subconsciously shut them off and I don't know how to turn them back on. I don't know how to remove this obvious mental block I seemed to have put on myself. All I know for sure is that the universe and I exist.

So, does God exist? I don't know. Part of me wishes he did. I wish he could just talk to me like he used to talk to people in the Old Testament. I wish I could just talk to him like I would any person and ask that things be explained directly from him and not by other flawed humans like myself. Okay, I admit that then it wouldn't be a belief based on faith, but why in the name of cheese does it have to be faith based and not reality based? What the heck is the point? *sigh*

Anyhow, that's my story and I'm sticking to it, as they say.

The scientific enquiry has no way of explaining the data gathered by Ian Stevenson, though. Obviously something does happen after death, otherwise we wouldn't have such a shit ton of cases people remembering stuff they shouldn't. What happens though? I'd just wait for science to actually work it out. I am confident that it can. Though nonphysical phenomenon is always, always rejected by the scientists, which seems a bit dogmatic to me, but hey, at least they are willing to change their mind after empirically verified evidence and research backs it up, which is a plus point in their favor. Do you come back? Obviously not as the same person, there's nothing which remains the same for 2 consecutive moments, let alone after death. Then what happens? I await the scientific research on this, although there's just no way to do it without first working out the actuality of some sort of nonlocality in consciousness I think.

@72, the huge problem with proving that anything exists after death is the fact that there's no way of actually testing such a hypothesis. Well, there is: the scientific method, sort of. The problem is that there are ethical implications. It is unethical to study what comes after death because people would need to kill a lot of people, something no one is going to stand for in the scientific community. All the various sub-communities of the overall scientific community (psychology, biology, &c.) have these ethical boundaries that you just don't cross, and murdering someone in the name of science crosses pretty much all of them. You might -- the key word being might -- be able to gather a lot of data, but no one would be willing to publish or accept your data because of how unethical your experiments would be. Of course, this is assuming that I'm understanding what your getting at.
As for scientists refusing to accept nonphysical phenomena, this very much depends on the entity your referring to. If it in some way violates a mathematical or scientific law, its much harder to prove satisfactorily because your contradicting a lot of well-established knowledge, and things like that tend to take a while.