Do kiwis believe in god? - Really autistic poll inside

[Czechem Republic]

After reading some of the A&H threads, I'm curious what the broader beliefs are here.

Don't get too hung up on the labels; the definitions there are worthy of their own thread. The explanatory text is the important bit.

Also, religion does not necessarily mean Christianity.

 

[From The Uncanny Valley]

Basically this.

 

[Not Really Here]

Why would anyone give a shit about what New Zealanders think?

 

[Daddy's Little Kitten]

We believe in Terry.

 

[xX_rAcE_wAr_420_Xx]

The sky wizard strawman version of God is probably fake and gay, a superliteral boogeyman used by fedora-tipping faggots to justify an insufferable crusade against everything tangentially related to religion. If the literal version of God that sits in the sky and judges us is real, uh, sorry I guess, please don't smite me.

But religion is right about a ton of shit. The Bible is the greatest collection of fables and wisdom and what have you, western society is built on the Ten Commandments (mostly anyway), people are consistently fucking ruined by the seven deadly sins. You don't have to hold any deep spiritual beliefs to agree that you disregard the lessons of religious texts at your own peril, especially if you end up a 30+ jaded alcoholic living in a bugman hive, depressed, wondering what the meaning of life is. It's poetry - Redditors who are prideful enough to believe they're above 'stone age ghost stories', doomed to tragedy befitting something straight out of the Bible.

So, maybe God is a shared, overarching sense of... karma, almost. If you're righteous you reap the rewards, and if you're sinful then you inexorably end up ruined. I don't think God smites adulterers, but all you have to do is read r/polyamory to see that they end up getting their share. Metaphorically, it lines up pretty well. People like to shit on the line about 'if you look at a hot chick and want to bang her, that's basically cheating', but how does your wife like it if you spend time ogling insta-thots? The things we spend time doing, that we pour our energy into, shape us in turn; making a habit of browsing weirdly personal soft-core porn cannot have a good effect on you.

 

[Standardized Profile]

I guess my religion's official position is the Christian form of classical theism, though unlike the more ardent classical theists I don't look down on theistic personalists. As long as they don't devolve into the "God is my boyfriend"/"God is a genie who grants me wishes" type of theist, I think it's a perfectly valid way to think about God as God relates to the created world.

And classical theists have their own issues. Some of them philosophize about God's ineffable nature a little too much. The ultimate expression of this tendency is probably the apophatic aphorism "God does not exist," because existence is a category and we can't apply categories to God. That kind of thing just confuses the normies.

Closing the poll on Christmas Eve ... is there a message there?

 

[Czechem Republic]

The sky wizard strawman version of God is probably fake and gay, a superliteral boogeyman used by fedora-tipping faggots to justify an insufferable crusade against everything tangentially related to religion. If the literal version of God that sits in the sky and judges us is real, uh, sorry I guess, please don't smite me.

But religion is right about a ton of shit. The Bible is the greatest collection of fables and wisdom and what have you, western society is built on the Ten Commandments (mostly anyway), people are consistently fucking ruined by the seven deadly sins. You don't have to hold any deep spiritual beliefs to agree that you disregard the lessons of religious texts at your own peril, especially if you end up a 30+ jaded alcoholic living in a bugman hive, depressed, wondering what the meaning of life is. It's poetry - Redditors who are prideful enough to believe they're above 'stone age ghost stories', doomed to tragedy befitting something straight out of the Bible.

So, maybe God is a shared, overarching sense of... karma, almost. If you're righteous you reap the rewards, and if you're sinful then you inexorably end up ruined. I don't think God smites adulterers, but all you have to do is read r/polyamory to see that they end up getting their share. Metaphorically, it lines up pretty well. People like to shit on the line about 'if you look at a hot chick and want to bang her, that's basically cheating', but how does your wife like it if you spend time ogling insta-thots? The things we spend time doing, that we pour our energy into, shape us in turn; making a habit of browsing weirdly personal soft-core porn cannot have a good effect on you.

So, I'm no fedora-tipper, but after a stint with Catholicism that led to me writing them off as spiritually and morally bankrupt, my belief in higher power is at its lowest point since my teenage years.

As Geisler and Turek said, I don't have enough faith to be an atheist... but no religion out there has satisfactory answers (Cath/ortho bros win on the historical pedigree and coherence of their thoughts here, but still fall short) to the problems of evil, and accepting the bible in whole as mainstream Christianity insists I do requires me to abandon the critical thinking I was supposedly created with.

As you said, it's a book filled with wisdom and it has value, I can't argue there. But it's also filled with fantastic stories passed off as fact, plus a number of factual contradictions that undermine its claims of "divine inspiration". More importantly, very little of what the bible teaches was taught by the bible first.

You mention "If you're righteous you reap the rewards, and if you're sinful then you inexorably end up ruined", but the number of happy and successful utter bastards out there means I can't accept this either. The same with regard to degeneracy - were this some law of the universe, like gravity or the speed of light, that being a coom-brain ruins you, it would apply universally in all cases. Plenty of areligious people lead happy, sex-filled lives outside of monogamy.

Closing the poll on Christmas Eve ... is there a message there?

Heh, not intentionally. It's where the date landed when I hit "1 month" for the close time.

 

[MadStan]

The sky wizard strawman version of God is probably fake and gay, a superliteral boogeyman used by fedora-tipping faggots to justify an insufferable crusade against everything tangentially related to religion. If the literal version of God that sits in the sky and judges us is real, uh, sorry I guess, please don't smite me.

But religion is right about a ton of shit. The Bible is the greatest collection of fables and wisdom and what have you, western society is built on the Ten Commandments (mostly anyway), people are consistently fucking ruined by the seven deadly sins. You don't have to hold any deep spiritual beliefs to agree that you disregard the lessons of religious texts at your own peril, especially if you end up a 30+ jaded alcoholic living in a bugman hive, depressed, wondering what the meaning of life is. It's poetry - Redditors who are prideful enough to believe they're above 'stone age ghost stories', doomed to tragedy befitting something straight out of the Bible.

So, maybe God is a shared, overarching sense of... karma, almost. If you're righteous you reap the rewards, and if you're sinful then you inexorably end up ruined. I don't think God smites adulterers, but all you have to do is read r/polyamory to see that they end up getting their share. Metaphorically, it lines up pretty well. People like to shit on the line about 'if you look at a hot chick and want to bang her, that's basically cheating', but how does your wife like it if you spend time ogling insta-thots? The things we spend time doing, that we pour our energy into, shape us in turn; making a habit of browsing weirdly personal soft-core porn cannot have a good effect on you.

You are over-thinking this.

I've yet to find a single atrocity, invasion, genocide or sick and twisted culture that wasn't lead by a religious twat.

Prisons are full of religious zealots.

Believe it or not, some people actually just think it's wrong to knowingly hurt others or act like a cunt; and don't need fables to figure it out.

The only thing more selfish than religious, is a cat. I know, I have a few.

 

[Nick Gars]

I believe a decent chunk of the "God's" were/are real, but they aren't "God's" in the traditional sense. They're more than likely extra dimensional beings or something of the sort that wanted to dick around in our dimension for clout or entertainment. Since they're beyond our understanding it's easier to just call them "God's". In their realms they're probably a bunch of dickheads everyone laughs at.


I'm against worship because I feel it's antithetical to man's nature of adapting, surviving, overcoming, and controlling even the very forces of nature. I also feel worship should be an act reserved for a perfect being, and as no such being seems to exist worship seems contrived.


There probably is an afterlife, but it's probably really anticlimactic and is more or less a lobby between matches in CoD where you wait and/or suffer until the next round. Reincarnation probably isn't karmic, just the greater universes recycling bin with a lotto attached.

 

[Iron Jaguar]

Of course there's a Creator. Just because we act like shitbags doesn't mean we weren't created.

 

[Prophetic Spirit]

Well, my beliefs are solid, i don't believe in gods, but i don't care about the others about their own beliefs.
Now, thinking creatively; i made a world with angels & demons, they have their own worlds inside Earth but they're not different, one are guided by the Light & the other in Darkness but both factions are both violent, conquerors and even "slaved" humanity at the dawn of time.
I'm gonna really like somebody here if someone found the main inspiration of this.

 

[LightDragonman1]

I'll just say it; I am a Christian, and am proud to be one.

Honestly, every time I see folk on Twitter mocking and ridiculing religion (not just Christianity, but religion in general), I shake my head, because they are so determined to "progress" that all they can think about with it is how outdated and bigoted those dang God-followers are. Think is though, for me at least, many of the teachings by Jesus and the like I find to not only be valuable, but also even more relevant now than they were back then. It's just one reason why I still choose to believe.

 

[Rapechu]

The sky wizard strawman version of God is probably fake and gay, a superliteral boogeyman used by fedora-tipping faggots to justify an insufferable crusade against everything tangentially related to religion. If the literal version of God that sits in the sky and judges

This concept of God you call a strawman is based on Platonic logic and has thousands of years of scholarly thought behind it. In fact there are even mathematical proofs of its existence. Why else do you think the Greeks and Romans of the classical era adopted Christianity so readily?

 

[Pirata]

After some time browsing KF one might be inclined to stop believing in any God at all.
I was raised Christian, questioned my beliefs on my late teens, and soon enough realized religion is a lot more than just "be a good person" and "go to church whenever you can, if not every week" it usually gives a clear core of values which sooner or later come in handy in life, and genuinely can make a difference between messing up your life forever and being a decent person (decent neighbor, decent son/daughter, decent sibling, etc.) Take for example the general idea of not holding any grudges, and learning to forgive those that have wronged you. How many people do you know that have messed up their lives for being vindictive and holding grudges when they would've been better off accepting things as they were, instead of taking matters into their own hands?

The same principle can be extended to any of the teachings you find in the bible, there is some sort of primal truth to them any smart person will be able to identify after thinking about it for a bit. In that sense I believe that reading the bible can be useful, even for non-believers, I'm sure everyone can get something out of it.

 

[The Big O]

I feel like an anomaly in my beliefs these days. I was raised Catholic but only ever received communion, and drifted away from anything church-related by my mid-teens. My family only gave me mild grief about it, but otherwise left me alone about it due to the turmoil between my parents. Because of it, I passively adopted an atheist outlook and remained that way for most of my young adulthood. Up until my late twenties, I was a miserable drudge of a human.

These days my life is better, but certainly not the best it could be. It's ironic, but I have elevated my belief to a more agnostic outlook. And after 2020, with COVID, I began to lament how disturbing modernity has become in its large absence of a "God" or any sort of faith. Most of the cultural powers are resoundingly atheistic to an antagonizing degree. And after once more analyzing certain passages of the bible, a lot of it had begun to click in my head. So much of what was listed in it is now eerily being mirrored across the USA, especially where I live in the heart of New England. The more the world goes off the rails, the more I want to believe there's something better ahead. "The best is yet to come" as a certain orange New York real estate mogul loves to say.

 

[Dyn]

We believe in Terry.

Peace be unto Him.

 

[Haim Arlosoroff]

We believe in Terry.

Even liberals believe in Terry Davis.

 

[KooksandFreaks]

Atheists always want to talk about "god" all the time.

 

[ditto]

If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself.
I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief.

 

[Professor G. Raff]

Kind of interesting how many believers there are based on the votes so far. I wonder if that has to do with KF hosting a large group of people who have been de-platformed by the mainstream liberal online world, or just some kind of coincidence.

Anyway, chose agnostic atheist. Just based on our own evidence of tampering with lesser life-forms that can't hope to comprehend our technology or understand anything is manipulating them at all I can totally buy the possibility of some kind of being(s) of a greater magnitude having done/doing the same to us. I don't think it's likely, but it is possible especially since I am in the camp of Extra Terrestrials existing being a 100% guarantee. As for the institution of religion it's basically garbage designed to gain wealth and power in modern times, and was an outright authoritarian in times long past... but in some ways it has it's place. I think there is some merit to the idea of America's religious vacuum being filled by a secular version of religion that is much worse - aka Leftism. In my younger days I'd have tipped me fedora aggressively towards Christianity without a thought, but that 90's/2000's reformed Christianity was a fucking paradise compared to what goes on now.

Sometimes I think it'd be better to be ignorant and enjoy the bliss of religion - feel involved in a community, know the wicked would be punished and have absolute faith things have to get better because sky daddy wills it - but you really can't go back when you think about the burden of proof and how it benefits the top of the institutions to make believers. Even if I somehow believed in the Christian God for instance, it's impossible to not see him as the most evil being that could possibly exist and then it'd just be fear of inevitable hell for these thoughts based on immutable facts within the religion. Even the afterlife "reward" is pretty much hell, I'd have to specifically request my consciousness be consigned to oblivion (which might just be a sin with a ticket to hell for the very idea to such a vain god, who knows) compared to the relief of knowing I won't have to exist past my brain meat degrading with atheism.