The concept of a God bothers me

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Hey, what were you doing lately? Anyway I was raised Catholic, but lately I stopped going to mass. I felt the end of my line for belief in God. Personally, I nearly hate him (even though I want to love him). His teachings inspired things going on today like censorship of television broadcasts, for example. I used to be very conservative in my social beliefs but I drifted past that. The unworldly afterlife makes me uncomfortable too and feels like religious coercion. Does anybody feel the same way?

Faith is a matter of the heart. Coercion is the negation of faith.

welcome to our cool club MusicalCat i try hard to be a musical cat also, but maybe your luck and talent are more powerful than mine. anyways, maybe what you should do, is take a break from the organized religion and try to free-lance, so to speak. a good place to start would be to (clicky) read the book, Your Life: Why It Is the Way It Is and What You Can Do About It - Understanding the Universal Laws (by Bruce McArthur). i read it a decade ago, and i am still learning from it. amazon is selling copies of it for one red cent [plus about 4 bucks shipping ] - you might be better off trying to find a copy at your local public library.
here, i've done some of the work for you- below are a list of the 32 universal laws as presented in this book-

UNIVERSAL LAWS-
Like Begets like.
As you sow so shall you reap.
The spirit of your actions multiplies the results.
Like attracts like.
Opposites repel.
As you seek you attract and are attracted to that which will fulfill your search.
As you seek you repel and are repelled by that which will not fulfill your search.
For every effect there is a cause.
There is nothing by chance.
Nothing happens by chance: there is a purpose to everything that happens.
As thought and purpose and aim and desire are set in motion by minds, their effect is as a condition that is.
Know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
God is.
As you honor, respect and love your own unique individuality, so you honor, respect and love the individuality of others.
Your true needs, wants, desires, hopes, dreams, wishes and their fulfillment are as important as those of any other soul in existence.
You must first 'save' yourself if you would 'save' another.
As you put the God within [yourself] first in your life, so too you will manifest the God whose part that you are.
As you become master of your lower self, so all things, conditions, and elements become subject to you.
Spirit is the life, mind is the builder, physical is the result.
Life is the experiences of your choices.
If you will be my people, I will be your God.
Seek the Spirit within and all things shall be added you have need of.
Seek first the Spirit within and you will find.
Ask the Spirit, with faith, and you will receive.
Knock, with faith in Spirit, and the door will be opened.
All exchanges balance.
As you believe, so it becomes for you.
Whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith.
Love transforms.
True giving manifests love.
As you give, so it is measured to you again.
As you give, you gain in understanding.

MusicalCat, dude, welcome to the club

I know it's hard to lost faith - I went trough that process many years ago.
If you loosing something - you feel bad. It's just natural

But after some time, and after some thinking - you realize that loosing faith in "god" is the same as loosing faith in "tooth-fairy", "goblins" or "Santa Claus"

You can do two things:

1) Force yourself to faith, reject rationalism and continue delusion (there are a lot of people who helps in this, just to mention all preachers)

2) or you can speed up the process, and make it less painful: if so, I recommend you to read "Disbelief 101: A Young Person's Guide to Atheism" by S. C. Hitchcock (it's very simple book, but really god for start), and then moving to R. Dawkins "Good Delusion" and Christopher Hitchens "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything"


"Faith is just believing something you know ain’t true." Mark Twain

Or you could just be kind and generous to those that are not as clever as yourself.
We really don't understand the evolutionary function of religion. This is the great irony of Dicky Dawkins he is a strict and dogmatic functionalist in his professional life -Read his critiques of Stevie Jay Gould's Ideas of path dependency and Spandrels- but when in comes to religion suddenly he is all about "faith sufferers".

If faith has a evolutionary adaptive origin which it has to in a functionalist view then is has to be selected for
judging by its frequency. But the King of the Functionalists suddenly becomes S J Gould Jr.

The way I see it until he reconciles the starkly contradictory nature of his thought -functionalist in every thing but religion- he is going look like a hack on a hobby horse riding way out side of his field.

Read Bertram Russel's "Why I am not a Christian" it is much better and less intellectually silly.

Why do you waste your precious time even thinking or worrying about such matters? Guard your time. If you are lucky you will live about 30,000 days.

ruveyn

I'm curious about who you mean when you said "His teachings?" Do you mean those of Jesus? If so, Jesus can hardly be considered to have spoken in favor of TV censorship.

I would also surmise that there are a great number of socially liberal Catholics in the world (my favorite at the moment is Stephen Colbert) and not all hold the same views on the afterlife. I would suggest www.religioustolerance.org as a handy site to compare various views within Christianity. Good luck in your search!

MusicalCat, I was raised not as a catholic, but in a very conservative denomination called church of christ. I've pretty much come to the same conclusion. I pretty much see, that if you get a group of people big enough, that people stop thinking for themselves to become sheeple wherever they go. One thing I remember in particular, is how much that denomination stressed not questioning anything related to god. Yet how do humans understand and learn about something? By questioning it. So basically it becomes a ploy for control. All that blind faith becomes dangerous. I also laugh at how literally they took the bible's words. Like, how "praising god with your voice" meant that you couldn't use any musical instruments in worship service, and things like that.

As a child I went to a variety of catholic and christian churches, so much hate, and blindness even among fellow churches of the same religion.
I remember I was going to a catholic church and we passed another catholic church and every adult in the vehicle stated "Oh you don't ever want to go there" I asked why and no one answered because they didn't have any real reason.

I have read into a few religions and have found no reason to believe any of them are anything other then an organization to control the masses and further the agenda of those in power.
Not that most religious people realize that or want to even.

Haven't found anything to credit the theory that a god exists either, plenty to the fact that he doesn't though.

As for the bible, anyone remember in school where they had someone say something to one of the kids.
Then the next kid told the one next to them and the next and the next and then by the time the last kid said it out loud it wasn't remotely the same.
The bible is the same thing except its also been translated across languages 3 or 4 times on top of that.
Add even further that the bible is such a powerful object and I can't imagine that at least one or two kings didn't switch around a few words to benefit his agenda.


Yes I am aware that I'm going to burn in the fires of hell for all eternity. So you don't have to remind me good religious folk.
Burn in hell with the likes of Hitler and the most evil of men solely for not worshiping his almighty godfullness.
I can't say that with a strait face.

I don't mean to insult anyone with this, except those that truly believe their all forgiving all loving god would sentence me to the worst torments imaginable, next to the most evil of men for not bowing and praising him.

Yes. Of course, TV never existed in Jesus' day, but censorship groups cite their examples from religion.

They have also cited examples from religion to support wars and various other political endeavors, but usually not from the words of Jesus, such as "love your neighbor" and "love your enemies."