How to start believing in God?

[juniorbnusc]

I'm atheist. But I did not want to be an atheist. I think life would be easier, happier, if you believe in something divine.

It can be a theistic religion, reincarnation, etc.

Is there a way for an atheist to be a believer?

I know the process can be long. But I think it has to be this way.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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

[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.