Which is better, believing in a god or not?

Not read the past 30 pages, but I have a simple principle -

Don't believe in God.

Believe in the Devil.
Stay Away.

From my own personal perspective I believe in god. There was a point in my life where I was close to death and I saw this warm bright light and all I could do was smile and I was peaceful. Sure that might have been a halucination but to tell you the truth, I feel like that was a glimse of the after life. God is love. Just sayin.

Easy to presume under the steady state theory, perhaps. Not that it doesn't have its strong points, but Hoyle and his colleagues really went out on a limb with that (although the same can be said of Lemaître when he first proposed his theory, I suppose).

As far as I can tell, the Big Bang seems to be the prevailing theory of the two. More evidence in favor, I guess.

I can see why people are saying atheists are living a happier life than religious people.

This is just my assumption by the way, please do correct me if I'm wrong.

Atheists tend to think that they only live once, so they are living life without any burden. They want to enjoy life to the fullest. They work on the weekdays and play as hard on the weekends and so on.

People who have religion thinks that there is an afterlife after this life, and they would rather enjoy their life later in the Heaven instead living in Hell. That's why they are doing certain things to please their God so they are allowed to go to Heaven. This life is mere test for them.

Either way, it is your choice to choose which one you believe.


PS: I deal with muslim people a lot of times so what I am saying about religious people is what I learnt from them about their meaning of life.

According to some statistical studies, the opposite is true: Religious people are happier than atheists.

Here are two older news articles on that topic:
Believers are happier than atheists
Religious believers happier than atheists and agnostics: study

Its always good to have faith in a higher power in my opinion.

Fair enough, I was just assuming anyway, thanks for the link you gave me :D

For believers, we are encouraged to do good deeds and be blessed and be rewarded with Heaven.
This is why believers believe that they have a good reason why they need to be good person in this world.

Not every believe systems includes heaven and/or hell. Judaism has neither for example.

how do you measure happiness?

How do you measure satisfaction? Or despair? Just because you have different things that make you happy, you can't answer the question if you feel happy or not? Or how happy you feel?

Of course it's highly subjective from person to person.

Statistical research is based on the scientific method, therefore on rational and objective criteria. I am not an expert on how statistics work, but it sure works better than the all-good-faith-which-way-the-wind-blows-by-licking-finger method.

Since i didn't believe those webpages at all I decided to do some more reading, so I read up on the topic a bit. Believing in God does apparently not make you happier at all. The social contact, friends and feeling of belonging to a group makes them happier. Which makes sense as humans are not solitary animals. What's more interestingly is that people that has it bad turn to religion while people who have it good turns away from it. Which can be seen by how rapidly the number of religious people is decreasing in western countries. So I have a hard time believing that religion actually has a positive effect if you're not partly miserable.

So you think that the sole incentive of reward is good enough reason to do good things.

I'm going to construct a hypothetical to demonstrate the error in this.

Let's say God came down, and gave the exact same laws you believe come from him in the first place. BUT, disobeying these laws cause you to burn and choke and cry and be tortured forever in a Hell of some sort. But, directly disobeying these laws cause you to spend the rest of eternity alongside your creator in complete bliss.

Do you still obey the laws?

There's definitely some truth in what you say. A part of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy has to do with the whole slave mentality of religious values and beliefs; the idea of putting meaning into suffering. For people with little to go on, who live a miserable existence, the belief in a God that rewards for doing good can be a great ally. It gives them something to work towards, something to hope for.

However, I think it's a bit of a stretch to say that this is the only positive of religion. Religious morals and values have played an important role in the development of our modern concepts of law and the social contract (Christian values especially). So to say that religion hasn't influenced us positively is a bit of an exaggeration.

The belief in a higher power may not make sense to a person using cold hard rational thought, but it makes some people happy.

We probably have different opinions on what religious morals are, or your country is just very different from mine.

Probably a little of both. Also doesn't help that the issue of religion is a very polarizing topic. Most people swing all one way or the other, hardly ever in the middle. So it's hard to come to a point where both sides can acknowledge the other's merits.

But you definitely brought up a ton of good points, alongside the other people in this thread. Even if it doesn't necessarily change my own position on the issue, it definitely gave me plenty to think about and take into account.

[In case it's not obvious, I'm probably done posting in this thread. Good topic, but it's a very tiring subject to talk about. And my religious zeal has pretty much burned out.]

As far as I noticed, most of the people on this topic are at least trying to reason.

Since we can account most of the religious influence on modern western society to Abrahamic religions, we can state that this influence is over 5000 years old. With such long lasting cultural inheritance NO atheist can claim for sure that his moral values are not influenced by religious moral values.

Monogamy is the best example, and I'll use a very recent example in American history:
Modern estimates place the Hawaiian population at about 1 million at the time of Captain Cooks landing in 1778. Although most of pre contact Hawaiian history was lost (the Hawaiians had no writing), we know that they had group marriage as a cultural norm and knew nothing about jealousy.

Now, over 300 years later, most of the original culture was replaced by Christian missionaries, who installed the according moral and cultural values.

We are the direct and indirect result of thousands of years of history and denying their influence is denying their existence.

Judaism (one of the Abrahamic religions) is a religious tradition with origins dating back nearly four thousand years. Newest researches reveal that may be even older. And we are still talking about moral values here, not about democracy - which was obviously influenced by ancient Greece.

Then again monogamy is estimated to be at least ~20000 year old. So monogamy isn't really a christian thing in my opinion. But come to think of it this isn't the monogamy thread, so I probably shouldn't say anything...