Do you believe in God or religion?

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I’m an atheist, but over the past year, my views have changed radically, and while I still can’t believe in God, I view a great deal of Christian morality to be deeply true. In my experience it seems like most believers have intrinsic motivation and a feeling of divine presence in their lives. I have never felt this. However, while for a long time I viewed issues regarding sexuality, for instance promiscuity and gay marriage, as being morally ambiguous, I’ve found more and more lately that I think Christians are right about a lot of things, and I think this for purely secular reasons. Do you think that religious faith has moral truth that makes life better for people in such a way that it would be useful even without the concept of a real God or does all of your conviction emerge from your belief and an unquestioning loyalty to God?
 
I suggest you read up on “stages of faith”
James Fowler goes deep into it but Scott Peck has made the concept very accessible in his layman descriptions.
 
16000 said:
Do you think that religious faith has moral truth that makes life better for people in such a way that it would be useful even without the concept of a real God or does all of your conviction emerge from your belief and an unquestioning loyalty to God?
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Speaking only for myself, as a cradle Catholic, I started out believing in the way a child trusts what their parents tell them.
However, in my adolescence, I was gifted with a religion teacher who posited, and then when on to demonstrate, that traditional Catholic morals actually could be derived from reason and logic, without relying on “God told me so.”

So, in my case, both.
 
I skimmed some about Peck on Wikipedia. Seems like some good stuff. I’d say if I fit in the stages as described on the wiki page I’m on stage 3 but I view stage four as superior logically. I just can’t find my way to that stage somehow. I’m impulsively analytical and pragmatic minded when it comes to morality. I don’t feel a great deal of empathy for others by my own nature.
 
That’s good. I have been a nihilist for most of my life and only recently found through experience the wretchedness of sin and how it destroys people and socieites.
 
I found the material helped me understand my spiritual journey better, not fret so much about where I was and to better appreciated people who might be at stage 2, not reject them because they seemed so black and white (fundamentalist) in their beliefs. It gave me hope basically.
 
That’s good. It’s not so much that I’m worried about my number. But what the numbers represent I think are indicative of issues I struggle with.
 
It helped me understand that people were just where they needed to be.
Though they are given stages, it’s not a competition.
 
That’s funny. Believe in what god??
As there are many options.

What religion dido. A life style .for living

What god or religion offers a “partnership”
To effect the world?
And eternity.?
There are plenty of options!!
 
16000 said:
Do you think that religious faith has moral truth that makes life better for people in such a way that it would be useful even without the concept of a real God or does all of your conviction emerge from your belief and an unquestioning loyalty to God?
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Strictly addressing your question, I think the answer is yes. The Catholic system of morality is ultimately derived from reason and our nature and therefore can be known apart from supernatural revelation. It is therefore beneficial to us even only in this natural life.

Going broader, religion is of vital importance in the realm of morality for a few reasons. First and foremost some points of morality deal directly with God (the virtue of religion itself being a prime example, defined as the virtue whereby we honor God as the principle of all being, as the Creator; to not do so is an injustice itself).

Second, the full consequences of morality, that is, our end in God or our loss of God, provide strong motivation to help us act morally, especially since we are fallen and our passions can easily weaken our intellectual resolve toward acting or thinking about our actions reasonably. Also, due to this weakness, God has also confirmed via revelation the moral law.
 
I’m Catholic but I believe in religion more than God. I think the Catholic Church holds moral truths and principles that will guide an ideal human life. I have strong doubts about the afterlife though. It seems like 90 percent of people will end up in hell
 
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I believe in God and need religion.
 
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I think even atheists experience “divine presence” but do not recognize it or identify it as such. For me, since I lean toward a Non-Dualism version of Christianity, morality is is based on our unity. Regardless of beliefs we all are one with the Divine Presence where we realize it or not. So it comes down to the golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. (Matthew 7:12) also known as Kant’s categorical imperative.

 
16000 said:
does all of your conviction emerge from your belief and an unquestioning loyalty to God?
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Greetings, 16000. I can say quite honestly that my relationship with the divine held very little of interest until I got rid of all the old notions I’d been taught growing up, and which were reinforced in the more conservative elements of Protestantism. The image of God as a being, for instance, had to go. St. Augustine said, “if you can comprehend it, it’s not God”. So to continue picturing this image of a wise old man in flowing robes and long white beard as God proved to be nothing more, for me, than Santa Claus with an exclamation point. A being who rewards the good and punishes the wicked, keeping track always of who’s naughty and nice.

Bishop Robert Barron, reiterating Thomas Aquinas puts it this way; God is not a being, God is all of being. God cannot be located spatially. He is nowhere, yet everywhere. I finally caught on to an idea along this line that I could grasp when I began thinking of God as all of energy; the vast and massive energy that powers everything from supernovas to flowering tulips. The energy that fills the universe is one aspect of God, the part we can see. This energy, again creating an image I could begin to understand, is itself conscious. After all, I said to some atheist friends, if nature could come up with a process that resulted in a species of thinking, reasoning, self aware creatures like us, it should not be a such a stretch to say that nature is also awake in this way. This, to me, is God.

Being attached for many years to a manipulative cult-like church, religion came between me and my well-meaning pursuits of God. I had to scrap literally everything and start from scratch. I tried the atheist line for a time, but it just never sat well with me. I had had far too many personal experiences which demonstrated a power beyond what I could see and feel. So in accepting that there was a God of some sort, some influence which felt friendly and supportive, I began rebuilding the quest I have had since childhood to know what lies beyond our senses. This journey has led me to Catholicism, but despite regular attendance at Mass, I keep it at arms’ length as the folks who know me here are well aware. I have no wish, currently, to “join” another religion, but at the same time have developed a deep appreciation of what good religion has done in the world and I wish to be a small part of that.
 
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Maybe you view Christian morality as true because it’s really basic stuff based on human empathy. Religions have moral truth because they appeal to natural human features that have become ingrained is us through evolution. There’s a neurological explanation for what people feel when they think God is with them.

Psychopaths could never experience that because their brains are wired to not feel affective empathy. So it’s not that morality evolved from religion, religion incorporated elements of morality common to all humans
 
When we break the laws of God, we end up broken, the law remains the law.

I heard it explained this way, you can try and break the laws of gravity by jumping off a ten story building. The law of gravity remains intact, but the jumper is broken.

I believe God gave us all a conscience, and when we go against God’s law, we seem to end up troubled.
 
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