That's because it's pretty much the only tool they have in their toolbox. I mean it's not like reason and evidence are in there so what else do they have except for "you're going to burn in eternal hellfire"...

I mean frankly, if I'm going to hell, then everyone else is, them included. Pretty sure one big concept of Christianity is that if you believe in Jesus, he will forgive you for your sins once you reach Heaven and to love the sinner and not the sin.

My thing has always been that if there is a God then it is aware of my reasons for not believing in it. It knows exactly what it needs to do in order to establish "belief" with me. If I die and the pearly gates exist and they won't let me in because I didn't "believe" then it's on them at that point as they knew the criteria that needed to be satisfied on my end to instill said belief.

I like to think less of me as a Christian, and more as me having views that align with Christianity. People who believe that everyone who doesn't believe on one exact god and follow all rules, all the time are going to burn in some kind of hell for eternity are kinda nutty. Be nice to others and I'm sure that you'll go to heaven - if it even exists.

Very personally I'm agnostic. I want to research religions more but I can't consider myself an atheist nor would I ever particularly want to associate with that community. The big problem with atheism is the same problem most religions suffer, but the inverse of it; essentially, it's any argument for religion with a "not" prefacing it.

Same, I don't want to discredit religions, and there might very well be a Jesus guy who lived once back in the day. Who TF knows. All I know is that It's full retard to just throw the "sky fairy don't exist" card and discredit every religious person ever.

Is cherry picking in the bible a bad thing though? It's some ancient documents, and their way of life back then doesn't align with ours today. Excluding crazy stuff like this or this can't be a bad thing, right?

Not to mention any religion cherry-picks content to use, atheism included.

Also, most of our qualms with Islam stems from the Qur'an being taken 100% literally.

Yeah but then the kids of these religious people thats basically all they do if your naughty your going to burn in a fire for eternity and there told this there entire childhood basically its child abuse 

Well I do believe in God or whoever create this universe and multiverse. 

I mean a creation this complex doesn't just happen because of a random explosion. Something must have been causing it. 

That's my reason, I am not a very religious person but I believe in it and still do my prayers.

But Here is my motto, well sort of.. If there's turns out to be nothing after I die, then that's it. I freakin died but if there's something.. Anything that are related to religion then I will be more grateful than the people who doesn't. 

Just saying.. I dont meant to offend anybody. Everybody has their own right. 

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I mean a creation this complex doesn't just happen because of a random explosion.

Uhhh that's because it wasn't complex at all when it initially happened. What you initially had were the quarks and what not that made up protons and neutrons which then over time combined to form Hydrogen. Then after a lot more time when hydrogen became more concentrated you had that condense due to gravity until there was so much of it in one place it ignited via nuclear fusion into a star which then went on to create heavier and heavier elements until you get to iron. Once a star starts producing iron it can't get hot enough to fuse it further so the internal pressures that keep a star in its constant decrease and gravity takes over causing a supernova. The explosion of the supernova is what forges the heavier elements past iron. If you do this for billions of years you eventually get enough heavier elements to form planets and other nice things which can then support life eventually.

The cycle of life mirrors that of the formation of the universe, starting of extremely basic from some molecules combining in a very specific way that causes them to self replicate which then leads to individual organelles and eventually individual cells. Once again, after billions of years, these cells eat each other and change due to the normal changes/fluctuations that happen when DNA replicates and you get different cells and eventually multi-cellular life which just repeats the cycle until you eventually get mega-fauna like the animals we have today.

Soooo no, creations this complex don't just happen because of a random explosion. Nobody ever said it did if you were paying attention. What happened was minute changes that compounded over spans of time that the human mind literally cannot comprehend until we got here to ask these questions and figure things out.

Are you saying that all of the creation is not complex? Is that what you are saying? If it is then human would have been able to create life in the lab that is similar to themselves or any life at all and could live as long..or travel in a speed of light. 

There are tons of God knows what that we haven't discovered or knows about, our knowledge on this universe is still very limited and just because we knew 1% of it based on a theory that we concluded or just our limited discovery. saying that universe is not complex based on that is so naive, we haven't even able to fully understand our own brain. 

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Are you saying that all of the creation is not complex?

No, where in the hell did you get that idea? I said that in the beginning things weren't complex but when things run their course for 13.7 billion years you end up with things that are quite complex.

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If it is then human would have been able to create life in the lab...

Once again, not what I was saying but keep beating that strawman I guess. By the way that happened almost a decade ago...

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/may/20/craig-venter-synthetic-life-form

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No, where in the hell did you get that idea? I said that in the beginning things weren't complex but when things run their course for 13.7 billion years you end up with things that are quite complex.

Didn't u get what I am saying? When I said complex that means as it is now. Not when it first created in which no one knows how. 

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Once again, not what I was saying but keep beating that strawman I guess. By the way that happened almost a decade ago...

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/may/20/craig-venter-synthetic-life-form

Just setting an example.. Also it didn't work out very well did it? Because where are they know? And I don't think an invention such as that will get published in the internet, it would be a government secret. If it's real that is. 

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it would be a government secret.

Ahh, you're a conspiracy nutter...with that I bid you adieu.

ok without diving into the actual religion of it, just pure logic, I think believing in no god or afterlife is playing a risky game. 

So we have two actions possible each with possible consequences. (Taking out the intentional sin, as it holds no point in this argument. If hell exists and you are bad enough to go to it, that won't be changed by believing or not believing

1. Believer

They will either go to heaven, or nothing will happen.

2. Non-Believer

Either nothing will happen or they will (according to every religion I'm aware of) go to hell or purgatory or whatever exists in that religion.

So if we take out the nothing, as it is an option for both, then we're left with the believer possibly going to heaven and the non believer possibly going to "hell"

So the chances of a positive outcome are simply higher for believers. Also, while there's nothing to say atheists can't enjoy social groups and relationships, by nature of religion, a believer will tend to have more relationships and social groups as that's literally part of the religion. There's data showing married couples who have the same religion divorce less. And the belief that there is nothing to believe is quite a depressing knowledge to live with and prepare to die with. So all in all, the chance of being happier and less stressed is higher for believers. 

So from a purely statistical standpoint, I believe being a believer is a less risky route for living longer (chance of eternity), having healthier relationships, and being happier in general. 

This is NOT to say that an atheist can't be happy or enjoy life or have great relationships. I'm just acknowledging not only statistical chances, but addressing the psychological effect of a deeply rooted belief system.

Now some people will argue that religion must be fake, because a lot of religious stories share similar themes and elements. I see that differently. I believe that the similarities only go to prove it. I follow close to a CS Lewis theology where religion is all the same, but people see it how they want to see it, which explains everyone having a slightly different story but similar parts.

Also, @imreloadin while your theory of complexity makes sense for explaining the large variety of mass and matter configurations, it does not explain the actual rules of the universe. The complexity I refuse to believe an accident is not all the species of animals or the variety of matter in the universe, but that all of it follows the same well defined laws of nature. Nothing escapes the laws of physics. The conservation of energy is absolute. Everything can be explained. Those laws existed before the big bang event, or at least during the time of. IMHO, laws as well defined and absolute are only created. The binary system that runs all of our technology so perfectly is wonderful. It is easily explainable, repeatable, and absolute. But if we found a computer lying on the ground years before computers began to exist, we would naturally assume it to be a creation of somebody or something. I apply the same to religion. There are too many natural laws that just work. If I'm wrong, well then I die and nothing happens. But if I look around at all the different laws that work for this world without a hitch and believe something created them, I at least have a 50/50 chance of eternal paradise. If I ignore all the natural world around me and pretend it just magically came into being at some point, matter, rules, and all, I'll not only have no explanation for the world around me but i'll have a 50/50 chance of eternal torture of one form or another. The math simply tells me that one is better and I reinforce that choice with logic. some say religions have no logic to back up their beliefs, but I pose a challenge. You say the big bang event took a bunch of matter and spread it all over our universe. Where did all that matter come from? Why was it spread out into galaxies and solar systems and planets and ecosystems. Where did this big bang come from exactly? If your answer is it was "just there" and "just happened", which is the best science can guess at, then I see no difference between that and the universe being magically poofed in by an omnipotent being.

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I at least have a 50/50 chance of eternal paradise.

@Jtalk4456

Uhhh no, you have to make sure you pick the "correct" religion to follow. Each of which has its own rules and customs you must follow in order to gain entrance to "paradise". Your odds of picking the correct one are rather abysmal actually...

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Where did this big bang come from exactly? If your answer is it was "just there" and "just happened", which is the best science can guess at, then I see no difference between that and the universe being magically poofed in by an omnipotent being.

Let me just stop you right there, religion is the one that always claims something "created" the universe or "set it into motion". The laws of physics, as we know them, only hold up until an infinitesimally small fraction of a second after the big bang occurred. In short we don't know what caused the big bang or how space-time even behaves at that point what you may have read are hypotheses regarding possibilities but nothing has actually stated as "proven" by science in that regard as you're implying.

Chances are I shouldn't be here, but whatever.

The way I see it is both "The Big Bang" and "God" require you to believe in something that can not be "proven".

We can't replicate "The Big Bang" in a lab, we can't go "here, put nothing in a container and see if something happens".

and you can't prove or disprove "God".

You either believe what people are saying, even though it can't be proven, or believe what the Bible (or whatever religion you're using in the example is based off of). either way, you are believing in something.

@Tog Driver we can "wind back the clock" so to speak using physics/quantum physics to a very small fraction of a second after the big bang. Before that point we don't actually know what happened and apart from thinking there is a singularity as logic would imply if the universe kept progressively getting smaller, like it does as we go back in time, we don't know for certain as our physics/quantum physics as we know them currently fall apart past that point. So there really isn't anything to "believe" as you put it because we actually don't know. Sure there are several hypotheses about that try to explain what goes on during that time but there hasn't been the "Eureka" moment at that point yet that connects all the dots.

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we can't go "here, put nothing in a container and see if something happens".

Also I just want to point out that this is not the correct way to think about it. What you want to visualize is the current universe as we know it now broken down into its base components (quarks, electrons, etc) in an extremely deflated universe. What I mean by that is since we know the universe is expanding you want to reverse that and shrink the universe while breaking down the complex molecules, atoms, etc into their base components while "shrinking" the sphere that we are a part of in the observable universe.

@imreloadin I'm not going to claim I understand all the quarks, electrons, etc, but the point still stands that, we don't know what happened, all the quarks, electrons, etc, wouldn't have just shown up conveniently for the big bang to happen, stuff just wouldn't appear.

This is basically the same as "where did God come from?".

You just have to believe that "it worked somehow" and go from there.

@imreloadin So you might not be familiar with CS Lewis' theology. This is a quote from the Chronicles of Narnia:

For context, at this point in the story we are reflecting the second coming of christ, and if you're not familiar with the lion witch and the wardrobe, the Aslan character is made to be jesus

So in this theology, my chances would be 50%. As long as I am good in the name of any god I am doing it in his name without realizing it because he is goodness, so good acts are accepted by him. 

Also lets forget that theology because it's not a mainstream theology. IF as you say I have to pick religion, and I might get it wrong and still go to hell, then by modern estimates, I have a 1/4200 chance of eternal happiness, which is still better than a 50/50 on nothing or hell. But the reason I fail to believe a god would do this is simply that most people don't "pick" a religion. Most are born into it, through their family and cultural surroundings. If the one true god is buddha, how am I supposed to know that being born into a presbyterian church and family. My grandfather was a preacher for many many years, and a fine one at that. At what point is buddha planning to get my attention enough that I suddenly realize my whole life is a lie and of course it's been buddha all along? Simply put, an omnipotent god that can't realise potential worshippers are being born to families that don't live in India isn't very omnipotent as far as I can tell. So I choose to believe that a being powerful and omnipotent enough to create all the complexities of this and potentially other universes is also capable enough of reason to allow in someone who did good their whole life, but worshipped the wrong name due to geographical location.

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Let me just stop you right there, religion is the one that always claims something "created" the universe or "set it into motion". The laws of physics, as we know them, only hold up until an infinitesimally small fraction of a second after the big bang occurred.

Not so. Sure, religion started a theory of creation, but science has picked it up all the same. With time as a scientific principle that is studied as a fourth dimension, it by principle has some creation aspect to it. Scientists all over the world are trying to define what happened during the big bang, and figure out where it all came from. A body at rest will stay at rest. This means that the planets orbiting stars and everything else in motion had some force act upon them to begin the motion. Science aims to define all matter and principles of the universe. All that has to have a start. If science doesn't aim to find the "start", then it by extension aims to either ignore where all matter came from, or it aims to define infinity of time, which, because we cannot truly define or visualize as creatures that are not infinite in thought, falls back to an eternal and infinite force of creation that is entirely unexplainable without making theories that would come right out of a religion.