Whether it be an agnostic, atheist, theists or whatever. How did you come to your conclusion that there's a higher force, there is no higher force, there's God(s0), or there isn't God(s)?

Disclaimer: This don't need to evolve into a debate, more so stories on the path you took to your conclusion.

the complicity and capability of the human being, the ability of the human to manipulate the environment, the ability of the human to DIRECTLY and INTENTIONALLY manipulate everything else

too much for me to believe its some cosmic accident,,,,,


much more likely to me that it was designed, that WE were designed by intelligence



also, very much like others disbelieve because of what they find in the bible to be inconsistent,,,

I am lead to believe the authenticity of the biblical accounts because of what I find to be extremely impressive grasp of things like astrology and geography at a time in history when there wasnt the same technology to base that knowledge upon,,,,



I have also had and witness others having prayers answered , which could be coincidence or self fulfilling, but in COMBINATION with the other things reinforces what I believe in,,,

Wow, that's a really tough question to answer in a single post. My current views are the result of well over a half a century of life.

I'll try to recap in bullet form:

My current spiritual philosophical view:

I am an "Intellectual Agnostic"

I am ultimately an intellectual agnostic. I confess that I am without absolute knowledge concerning the answer to these questions.

Agnostic = "without knowledge"

It doesn't mean that I am 'undecided'. I just realize intellectually that I cannot know the answer to this question. So it's a confession of truth. Moreover if there exist a God who values truth then this God would surely be very well pleased that I am truthful enough to confess the truth of my agnostic status.

I am an "Intuitive Spiritualist"

By this I mean that intuitively feel that there is a mystery to the universe that goes far deeper than I can intellectually know or understand. I intuitively feel that I am an eternal being. I intuitively feel that I have been around forever and there will never be a time when I will cease to exist.

Could all these intuitively feelings be nothing more than the desires of a romantic human? Sure. I'm not about to even attempt to argue for these feelings on an intellectual basis. They are intuitively feelings and that is what they are. Period.

None the less, intuition and feelings are as much a part of me as intellectual thought. So why not consider the whole picture?

How did I arrive at this view?

Well, that is a very long story that I'll try to make as short as possible.

1. Experiences as a Child

As a child I had some very deep spiritual feelings that I associated with a "God-like" spirit. At the time this "God-like" spirit was simply like an imaginary friend that seemed very real to me. It was entirely psychic (i.e. a totally mental image and connection). I did not actually see a physical personified godhead other than in my own mind. And even then it wasn't actually like a 'person'. It was far more abstract that this.

2. Religion comes into my life

I grew up in a Christian family being taught the the Bible is the word of God and that Jesus was the Son of God. I accepted this to be truth simply because my parents said it was so and I trusted them.

3. I became an adult

As I became a young adult I looked into the biblical stories, not to refute them, but to understand them and learn of the truth of God.

What I found is that these stories were not consistent nor believable. After many years of study I concluded that they are most likely the heavily exaggerated superstitions of various cultures.

4. I never LOST God

To me "God" was real. Just because a religion was wrong did not change that basic fact. I experienced "God" as a child. If the religion is wrong, it's no big deal. That doesn't change the truth that I know to be "God". (intuitively speaking of course)

5. I searched for other religions and spiritual philosophies

I was not searching for "god". I already knew "god". However by this time in my life I realized that "god" could be lowercase without lost of meaning.

I found the Eastern mystical philosophies and recognized that they describe the "god" that I already knew. So I didn't "find" god in the Eastern Mystical view. I simply found a spiritual view that already matched my own personal intuitive spiritual experiences.

I also learned a lot about the various Eastern Mystical philosophies. They are as varied as the western religions.

My favorites became:

Mahayana Buddhism
Tantra Buddhism
Taoism
Chinese (and later Celtic) Shamanism

I didn't travel 'through' these various religions, I simply recognize that all of these spiritual traditions contain concepts that I continue to embrace to his very day.

I have long since realized that no one religion needs to be clung to dogmatically.

6. I found my LOVE in Wicca and The Faery Teachings

It may seem like a total change of pace to go from the Eastern Mystical spiritual philosophies to the pagan practice of witchcraft. But I see a very strong connection between these spiritual philosophies. Wicca and The Faery Teachings were both very strongly influenced by Eastern Mystical philosophies. Albeit they took the actual traditions and rituals on a different path. But the underlying spiritual concepts are the same.

I confess that I fell in love with Wicca and The Farey Teachings for romantic reasons. But then again, I have a romance with god. So it's only fitting that my spiritual traditions should be romantic.

~~~~~

This is where I am today. I don't think of it as a 'conclusion'. On the contrary I think of it more as "coming home".

I will always be intuitively spiritual. I've actually tried very hard to imagine an atheistic reality. I cannot imagine it, neither intellectually, nor intuitively.

I might also add that my entire life was spent in the sciences. I spent most of my days, and many of my nights in research labs, or college classrooms either as a student or a teacher. So I have a very strong affinity and love for science as well.

I see absolutely no conflicts between science and spirituality. At least not in terms of the Eastern Mystical view.

~~~~

Is there a spiritual essence to reality or not?

I can't intellectually say.

I only know that for me it's intuitive.

I was agnostic as a child then became an atheist at the age of 13 cause i came to the conclusion that there is no God,period.Theres more to the story but i don't feel like typing the whole thing.

I was brought up a Christian, Pentecostal to be exact. Growing up, i read the Bible and was a tad skeptical, because things like Noah ark, 7 day creation, etc didn't make rational sense to me. Around the age of 15, i had an experience i could not explain, i woke up and could not move, my head was turned all the to the left and i felt frozen. It felt like a presence was over me. This to me was a sure sign evil existed in demonic form, etc. I got saved at around 20 and was more so an agnostic Christian, i still had my questions, but i still was VERY convinced there was a God. I went into the Military and had the same experience i had before, i was terrified, and thought the Devil was after me. To make a long story short, when i got out of the Military, i had the same experience, but this time i realized what was the problem, it was the positioning of my neck, while my head was turned a certain way, it cut off my circulation and made me hallucinate, after adjusting myself it went away like seeing a blinding light and everything coming to focus. I was mad, i was pissed, to think all those years i was being possessed and it was a scientific explanation for that, i haven't had that same experiences since sleeping correctly. I was still theistic and resumed my life. in the beginning of last year, i was unemployed for about two months and was extremely bored. I always had a love for science and started to watch vidoes, then i would see religious videos and i inquired more. I read books from Stephen Hawkings among others, then i started to question the very nature of what i believed in, after researching the process of evolution with common ancestors, the nervous system, the evolution of the eye, the Big Bang and how they all actually works i started to become purely agnostic. Not to prolong my upbringing, but more and more studying i decided there was no God. That's is my path.

just the idea of one supreme being that knew everything and controlls everything just never did it for me... i cannot comprehend a being like that... and other evidence suggests suggests that aliens guided us to these beliefs.

i didn't pick my path, it picked me

The point of this post is elaborate.

I was raised Baptist and Catholic simultaneously. Baptized to both religions, one at birth and one at about 7 or 8. One religion on my mothers side and the other on my fathers. It never really meshed with me when I was young this being in the sky who scares the bejesus out of everyone and watches you all the time. Then as I got older and started realizing what they were teaching then I really started questioning everything. It is not feasible that mankind was born of incest, scientifically or otherwise. A being of this magnitude would not curse women nor treat them as second to a man knowing she is the creator and carrier and raiser of life itself. This god doesn't understand women, nor respect women, nor consider them of much worth at all. This god has a temper over not being held above all else? Childish and manish, not goddish As I grew to understand the bible I realized it was all man, no god.

I spent most of this time being as a classified agnostic but I felt deep down that there wasn't a god or gods. Confused and feeling as though I was committing sacrilege for not having this faith of this belief. I search for the right religion figuring maybe my issue was with the Christian god but still did not find that epiphany of feeling this being or beings. It was a weight on me spiritually having to suffer the Christian religion. Shackling me to falsehood and hypocrisy.

I was diagnosed with MS in 2002 after having some severe symptoms that were misdiagnosed for a few years before. I got very sick, lost everything and ended up basically homeless. But was too sick to really change anything. My friend took me in, she had a mat on the floor in her basement which was basically a storage room. I was too sick to change anything there. I laid in the basement and was so sick that I asked god to take me. It had been months since I could enjoy anything in life, feeling so terrible every day with no hope of change in sight, I was ready to let the fight go. It was during this time of extreme stress and sickness that I felt/realized completely and spiritually that there is no being in the sky but there is the energy in each of us. I could feel mine as weak and tortured as it was. I could also feel that I wasn't going to die. It was no miracle believe me I was still as sick as could be but letting go of the false idea of the being in the sky took a weight off my spirit and it was one less stress for me to deal with. It lifted me at that level and that made the other stressors a bit easier.

As my spirit became healthier through analysis and searching after this epiphany I started to work on this life energy that I felt. I realized that when I gave out positive energy (interactions) with those around me even though I was so sick, it made me feel better. My physical did not improve for two years but spiritually I grew and grew. When I found the helpful information I needed to help myself out naturally with natural "medicine" and my body started to get better, my spirit was strong enough to help make all the connections between physical, emotional, mental and spiritual and I was better than before I got sick. Not physically what would be considered "normal" but I appreciated that I could walk still, I almost lost it, I appreciated that my mind cleared enough to pay my bills, I appreciate that although there will always be pain, I am able to get through it with the power of my mind and spirit and not narcotics, which I refused all along. Etc....

So after all of this, the energy of life that I identified and feel and that interacts and reacts to others energy is still with me. I feel spiritually free of the shackles of religion and more at peace with myself and the world around me. I feed my spirit and others positivity and I feel the return of the positive.

And here we are. There is no larger than life being in the sky that beats us down with impunity and denies us being human with guilt trips and hypocrisy.

And it is good

Amen Sister.

I feel like I just read a spiritual testimony of an atheist.

I would have to say the same happened to me. I put the experience up in "who are you".

This was an amazing read.



Hey, your profile pic and that grey stormy pic is awesome. Well, i wanted people to share their experiences, i mean, if you look at the Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama) - which i'm researching more - he found his path, but he had specific steps he had to reach it and let it absorb him. Whether you started out rocky in your early life and something sparked it, there's always a beautiful story behind it.

When you feel like it, i'd love to read it.

the agnostic that i am, i've come to no conclusions whatsoever. can't know so can't conclude.

so as an agnostic you did not know about god and thought such things were unknowable and then all of a sudden at age 13 you decided that god is knowable and you know that there is no god, period? begs a couple questions. one, what made god go from what CANNOT be known to exist or not exist to something that CAN be known one way or the other, and two, how did you conclude that there is no god? i ask because in one regard i see you, the strong atheist, as no different than a theist, one of faith such as a christian. you both have come to a conclusion about god, PERIOD, as you put it, yet neither of you can prove yourelf right and the other wrong.

same question for you. how did you go from "purely agnostic", as stephen hawking is, to strong atheist, deciding that "there was no god." most pure agnostics, such as me, hawking, einstein, not to compare my minds to theirs, eveolved from theist to atheist and finally to agnostic deciding that such things as god, the afterlife and other supernatural phenomena cannot be known by the human mind.

well, damn. you finally made sense of something yogi berra once said;,

"when you get to the fork in the road, take it."

yogi's got it. the right path will pick you. and everybody laughs at yogi-isms. sheesh.

I certainly can't speak for RKISIT, and I'm not exactly a "strong atheist",.... or am I?

I think much of it comes down to how people think of a "God", especially when it's spelled with a capital "G".

There does seem to be a difference between "God" with a capital "G", and a more abstract notion of "god" where the egotistical personification is dropped.

For example in the Mystical pantheistic picture of "god", god itself is seen as a quit mysterious cosmic conscious a facet of which we are all. That picture is quite different from the picture of an egotistical personified God who is separate from us and threatens to send us into eternal damnation if we don't appease his every desire.

I'm pretty sure that I'm a "strong atheist" too, when it comes to these egotistical personified images of "God".

Can we know whether such egotistical God's exist or not?

I say we can. We can know with basically 100% certainty that they don't exist.

How so? Well, their very character descriptions contradict what they are supposed to be.

These kinds of personified Gods are supposed to be all-benevolent, all-wise, all-intelligent, etc. Yet the fables that describe them do not allow for these character traits.

You simply can't have a supposedly "all-benevolent" God condemning people to eternal damnation for merely not believing that it exists. That's a blatant contradiction of the very meaning of benevolent.

So when it comes to "personified egotistical Godheads", I'd have to say that I'm a "strong atheist" as well. Where I remain agnostic is with respect to other possible pictures of spirituality that do not contain unrealistic jealous immature egotistical Gods.

I agree with what Dragoness concluded:



Truly.

The God described in the Bible would be an immature egotistical pig unworthy of being worshiped. And certainly far beneath the moral standards and values of many a mortal being, including many WOMEN!

Here we have a God who isn't even as mature and intelligent as Dragoness!

They flies in the very face of what a "God" is supposed to be. Thus it's clearly a man-made fable, complete with all the immature and egotistical flaws of the men who wrote these scriptures.

The proof is in the pudding. You can't have a supposedly "supreme superior being" acting far beneath the moral standards of mere human mortals.

This God would need to be a lesser being than myself in terms of moral values. But that's a blatant contradiction. Thus is necessarily must be false. Q.E.D.

That's how I feel about that.

Can we prove or disprove a spiritual essence of reality?

Perhaps not.

But if you ask me if we can disprove these ancient fables of immature egotistical "Gods" I would say that they have already disproved themselves. There's nothing there that needs to be disproved. It's already utterly absurd.

I'm pretty sure that Stephen Hawking is a "Strong Atheist" when it comes to the idea of a personified Godhead. He may be open to more abstract concept of spirituality though.

Same is true for Albert Einstein. He has a very clear quote on this:

"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly." - Albert Einstein

So here we have Einstein proclaiming to be a "strong atheist" in terms of a personified godhead such as depicted in the Bible.

However, here we have Einstein proclaiming that is is not an atheist in general:

"In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for the support of such views. I'm not an atheist and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangements of the books, but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God." - Albert Einstein

So in the above quote Einstein is recognizing that something 'mysterious" is going on and he acknowledges this as God. He even suggests that he can't truly support pantheism exactly. But perhaps that could change depending on precisely how pantheism is defined. There also exists panentheism which is subtly different, perhaps he may have endorsed that to some degree, it's hard to know.

I would love to know what Einstein would think of modern quantum mechanics, especially concerning Bell's Theorem, etc.

Einstein also stated the following:

"The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism." - Albert Einstein

So he supported the idea of having spiritual values even though he was ultimately agnostic concerning the precise essence of this mysterious spiritual concept.

But he clearly renounced the idea of God as a Big Ego in the Sky (or some heaven) who's sole purpose is to raise humans as obedient servants.

man, i've got einstein and hawking quotes saying they're obvious agnostics that i can match your quotes one to one without breaking a sweat. but i'll not get into yet another debate about what two people think who aren't here to confirm or deny. i will say that nobody seems to agree on the topic of einstein and hawking and how they think about god. two lists here, of famous agnostics. hawking is left off the first, einstein missed the second, bot both apear on a list of famous agnostics.

Sir David Attenborough (1926-) - English natural history presenter and anthropologist.[75]
Francis Crick (1916–2004), Nobel-laureate co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, who described himself as a skeptic and an agnostic with "a strong inclination towards atheism".[76]
Marie Curie (1867–1934): Polish-French physicist and chemist. She was a pioneer in the field of radioactivity and she became the first Nobel laureate to win two Nobel Prize in two different sciences. She won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911.[77]
Charles Darwin, (1809–1882), founder of the theory of evolution by natural selection, once described himself as being generally agnostic, though he was a member of the Anglican Church and attended Unitarian services.[78]
Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), French sociologist, who had a Jewish Bar Mitzvah at thirteen, was briefly interested in Catholicism after a mystical experience, but later became an agnostic.[79]
Albert Einstein (1879–1955), Jewish born theoretical physicist, best known for his theory of relativity and the mass-energy equivalence, E = mc2.[80]
Milton Friedman, (1912–2006), American economist, writer and public intellectual, winner of Nobel Prize in Economics.[81]
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002), an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, science historian and popularizer. Gould called himself a "Jewish agnostic".[82]
Thomas Henry Huxley, (1825–1895), English biologist and coiner of the term agnosticism.[83]
Ludwig von Mises, (1881–1973) Austrian Economist and Philosopher.[84]
Sherwin B. Nuland (b. 1930), American surgeon and author of How We Die.[85]
Paul Nurse (b. 1949), 2001 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, called himself an atheist, but specified that "sceptical agnostic" was a more "philosophically correct" term.[86]
George Olah (b. 1927), 1994 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, discoverer of superacids,[87]
Carl Sagan, (1934–1996), astronomer and skeptic.[88]
Peter Schuster (1941—), Professor of Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Vienna.[89]
Steve Wozniak (1950—): Co-founder of Apple Computer and inventor of the Apple I and Apple II.[90]




following is a list of famous agnostics that you may know:
Mark Twain: known for his book Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Bill Gates: founder of Microsoft.
Larry King: famous analyst at CNN. Known for the Larry King Live show.
Ted Turner: Founder of CNN and TBS.
Charles Robert Darwin: famous scientist and author of the Origin of Species.
Stephen Hawking: famous scientist and author of The Cosmos Explained.
Sean Penn: A famous movie actor and activist. Known for the many movies like "Colors" and "Before the night falls"
Harrison Ford: A famous movie actor. Known for his roles in "Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back "
Dave Matthews: A famous musician known for the Dave Matthews band.
David Horowitz: A writer and activist. Known for his famous book "Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey"
Warren Buffer: founder of Berkshire Hathaway.
Rose McGowan: famous actress known for movies like "Scream."
Bertrand Arthur William Russell: author of the book "Why I'm not Christian."
Carrie Fisher: famous for Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope - Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back -Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi
Susie Bright: author of the book "The Sexual State of the Union"
James Taylor: famous musician known for songs like "Fire and Rain" and "You've Got A Friend"
Monica Bellucci: Famous actress known for her roles in "The Matrix Reloaded" and "The Matrix Revolution."
Harry Dean Stanton: actor known for his roles in "The Green Mile" and "Alien"
Cillian Murphy: actor known for his role in "The Black Knight."
Stephen Jay Gould: well known for his famous essay-writing and advocating science education