what do y'all think? (the atheism thread)

[Andrea]

Originally Posted by Deckard

Assuming you mean the walking on water story, the 'or' is a bit misleading. The story is obviously for the religious - but clearly there are plenty of believers who take a more conventional logic (ie. less literalist) approach to biblical stories than others, which is probably why I didn't interpret the picture as being about biblical literalism. Personally I took it as an atheist-centric reference to the famous burden of proof argument for God's existence.

Just to be clear, posting it was no more than a little good-humoured mischief making on my part. True, I consider the logic of the religious person deeply muddled when it comes to the issue of belief in God or gods (I'm sure plenty think mine equally muddled) - but it would be a far stretch for me to conclude from it that religious people reject logic in any other area of their life.

What do we mean by "God´s existence"?
You see, I grew up in Hungary during the Communism where religion was strictly forbidden so I´m still trying to sort things out. (I got the Bible For Dummies for a couple of years ago and that was my first book ever about religion.)
I may be wrong but as I understand "God" is something bigger than everything and anybody and that "God"/divinity is what some people experience as a kind of magical revelation (e.g. the ability to walking on water, making vine of the water, hear God´s voice etc). I´m not surprised people, religious or not, need some kind of proof, unless they have experienced the "magic" themselves. I´m still not clear about it but it might be some difference between what we call "believers" and "religious" people. For me, the "believer" sounds like a person who believes without any proof or own experience. But it´s maybe just a translation/language thing so I may be wrong.

However, I think that "God"/divinity exists in everything and everybody even though some of us has experienced it in some way and some of us not.
Personally, I don´t belong to any particular religion just because I haven´t find the genre that fits my experience. The "making vine of water" variant sounds quite interesting though