Reply #46: Some of them are intolerant...

[Meshuga]

...sort of like the religious right. They try to impose their belief (of not believing in God) and don't respect other people's belief.

Instead of a debate where one respect the other belief or lack of belief we get threads like this mocking people who believe in God as if they were so childish to believe in a fairy tale.

But we know fairy tales are fairy tales and God is not a fairy tale. You believe in fairy tales if you are a child or you are an adult with a child's mentality but people who believe in God have their reasons. Sometimes using rationality and sometimes not.

Some people think that if there is not a metaphysical source of life , then life is ultimately purposeless. To them life would be nothing more than the chance of innumerable coincidences and human beings would be nothing more than self-aware molecules. They choose to believe there is a force behind existence.

Does God exist? Well, there are good arguments on both sides of this question so we cannot dismiss either side.

A believer in God has to account for one thing, the existence of evil. The atheist has to account for the existence of everything else.

Everything, according to an atheist, developed by chance. People who believe in God, do admit that beauty, love, art, intelligence, consciousness, conscience, natural law, complex cellular activity, the pervasive sense of purpose, the notions of universal justice and morality, and all creation could emanate from inanimate coincidences. But while this is a possibility (not to mention our religious natures) compels us to reject it as a probability. Design suggests to us a Designer, law a Lawgiver, creation a Creator, intelligence a Source of intelligence, conscience a God.

There are two possible explanations for creation: that everything comes from chance and coincidence, or from design and purpose. The choice is between nonsense and sense. To a believer, if there is no God, one cannot speak of sense in life, or of good and evil, or of ultimate purpose. This things would be mere delusions created by our minds to deny that all is anarchic and meaningless.

But the moment you affirm that these non-physical aspects of life posses an objective reality, you are implicitly affirming the existence of God. From where else these non-physical realities derive? Gases and amino acids don't possess truth, purpose, good, or evil.

I am not posting all this to try to prove the existence of a God. I am posting this to show that people who believe in God have an intellectual reason for believing in God. Comparing the belief in God to a belief in fairy tales is ridiculous at the very least.

I can see people say that the Bible uses fairy tales to express what God is but the Bible being a book of fairy tales does not make God into a fairy tale.

It is okay to not believe there is a God because who the hell can prove that God exists or not? But you cannot dismiss other people for believing in God unless you did not put to much thought into the subject or you are trying to proselytize your atheism.

***Edited this message to spellcheck