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[quote=Anonymous]I can't be definitively sure that God doesn't exist, but I don't believe in one.

If I went through the motions of religion simply to appease a deity, despite not believing, that would be what's known as Pascal's Wager.

I look at the universe and while I don't know a lot of things about how it was created, whether it is unique and, if not, how it fits into the multiverse and how [b]that[/t] was created, I don't see a need for a deity in that process (but I freely admit there may have been one).

When I look at the evolution of religious belief, I see primitive peoples who attempted to explain things they didn't understand based on a variant of Clarke's Law which says that the behavior of any sufficiently complex system is indistinguishable from magic. (Clarke's Law in its original form says, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.") They created "gods" to explain all the things they didn't understand - creation, weather, seasons, life, death, etc.

Modern religious believers look back on those pantheists and say, "They just didn't understand about God," but modern religions don't actually provide any explanation why the modern, monotheistic god(s) are any different from the pantheons of old. To me, the mythology of the modern god(s) exists to perform the same functions of providing (literally) a [I]deus ex machina[/I] for the things people don't understand and to serve as an enforcer of cultural norms and desired behaviors.

The more science pushes back the boundaries of the known and understood, the less need there is for a deity to explain it. Also, the more we understand about the multiverse, the "bigger" a deity has to be to have created it - making such a deity even more removed from life on our little rock orbiting our "unregarded yellow sun far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy." Such an entity would have less in common with us than we do with the smallest pieces of cells in our bodies.

So, even if there is a deity responsible for creating the multiverse, I simply don't believe that it would have any interest in us and our doings, and it certainly wouldn't be demanding worship from us or jealous of whether we worshipped something else.

It would be nice to think there was a caring, omnipotent, omniscient entity out there, and it would certainly be nice to believe that after I die I'll be reunited with loved ones forever after, but I don't believe it. I'd rather live my life to maximize the value of the time that I have on Earth with those I love, because I don't believe there's an afterlife.

When I die, my genes will live on in my children and descendants, and I hope that they are my gift to posterity (if not, no give backs!). The memories of me will live on for a while in the minds of those who care about me, and the bits of me - all of which were formed in ancient supernovae - will get recycled by the universe. And I'm ok with that, although I'd like to postpone it for as long as possible. :-) [/quote]

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