What religion are you?

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Its a perfectly rational position to take if one wants to construct a cohesive worldview; some morality systems entail belief in God.

My question was (and remains) how one concludes the existence of god from personal morality,
not personal morality from god.

And some do not.

ruveyn

One cannot. Having reread the post by Shantih I cannot see this claim being made. All one can reasonably conclude from personal morality is a belief in God. If one has reasons to believe that morality is objective then believing that God is the grounding for such could be inferred.

I chose other. This sounds megalomaniacal but I feel like I have my own religion. Really just an accumulation of ideas on the meaning of life and the nature of the universe etc.

Three primary tenets:

1. Everything moves toward what is good and thus the world is a place born of love. Pain is caused by conflicting loves.
2. All is one but consciousness is split among many beings.
3. There is meaning in everything and where there is meaning there is truth and where there is truth there is something good to be moved toward and where there is good there is love so no matter what everything is perpetually moving toward a state of ultimate love.

Nonsense. Things which subject to zero force move in the direction they are moving and other objects move where the forces push them. There is nothing in physical laws that define or indicate what is "good". "Good" is a human delusion.

ruveyn

Good in my definition is what is moved toward by any thing, sentient or not, by the forces you describe. It is what is required in other words. Required by what, who could say, I mean what set this in motion in the beginning, or was there a beginning or is it just a circle. Good is what is needed and what fulfills requirements. For sentient beings when things fulfill the requirements of the being as a whole this gives them what they love so that is why I equate the fulfillment of requirements with good feeling.

I am a christian I go to a methodist church athiests only make the religious more religious an make their belief in god that much stronger in a way the religious needs atheists and agnostics it takes greater faith to belive in nothing then it does to belive in something

I chose Other; the closest thing I can find to my belief system is neo-pagan. I believe that ALL living creatures are equal (not just animals!) and I believe that nature is sacred and should be revererd. I don't believe in a sentient higher being, but I do believe in a benevolent force, so that things tend to work out the way they need to in the end. This does not, however, mean that I can do whatever I want and not care about others; I feel like I need to be a part of making things better for others and preventing suffering. I'm not sure if there is reincarnation or an afterlife or not, but I don't see how something that was alive can disappear from existence just because its body dies.

I admire some forms of Christianity--the ones that believe in spreading love and kindness--but I think Christianity doesn't value nature or give nature enough credit. From the way many people have explained it to me, Christianity sees nature as proof of the great power and love of their god, and they see it as having been created by their god. I feel like this is an affront to nature; I think that something so powerful and beautiful doesn't need to be created, and that it shouldn't be seen as proof for some higher being, because it is already so amazing.

I find it very sad that animals, some bacteria, and some protists have to murder in order to survive. I wish that we didn't have to eat others, but I believe that every creature has the right to preserve its life and the lives of others it cares about. I believe it is just as bad for a human to eat a dog as it is for a dog to eat a human. In fact, to me, there are only two reasons that humans shouldn't eat other humans. One is that in order for us to have a healthy society we have to be able to trust each other, and the other is that humans are more likely to have others who care about and depend upon than, say, a carrot plant. Still, to me, it is a tragedy that carrots have to be eaten for us to survive.

I don't understand the argument that moral codes prove the existence of gods. Could you please explain it to me with logic?

I guess us Apatheists/Apatho-Atheists/etc are far too apathetic to bother getting our good name out there and included on at least one poll, somewhere...

I would say that I am more like an agnostic.
To quote something you are likely to be very familiar with "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and by that it means empirical evidence, not philosophical babble.

By this notion of yours evil is good. Because sometimes evil things are the outcome of forces in operation already.

Your are quite mistaken. The moral quality of actions derives from their being chosen by sentient beings. Both good and evil are the result of choice. Everything else is just happenstance.

ruveyn

That is something we can both agree on

ruveyn

I'm not disagreeing with you on the last. Morality is defined by sentience.

I'm just saying, as someone who experiences life (someone who is sentient), life therefore has moral quality to it.

Well by my definition everything is good because there's only morality to intention. Evil to me connotes bad intention and there's never any bad intention, only movement toward the one thing that would most fulfill a thing's requirements at a given time (and away from the infinite number of things that are not this most fulfilling option).

Oh and [edit] - I see what you were saying, yeah the wind that blew my cup off the table is not sentient and so there was no choice involved and it's neither good or bad. But. The wind didn't actually blow my cup off the table. My arm did cause I'm really clumsy. I definitely didn't mean to do that. Then what if I were having a bad dream and knocked the cup off the nightstand. I would be intending to hit someone in my dream but instead I hit the cup. Then what if I were awake but got really mad and threw the first thing I saw. What if I calmly looked at the cup and thought, I'm bored, it would make things interesting if I just knocked this off the table and got water all over the floor. What's making me do that though. Who really chose these things. As far as I know there's only my sentience in the universe and where is the boundary between what I control and what I don't. I don't know what my point is with this last paragraph really.

I don't worship the fundamentalist Christian God now. Old King James version bible and cassett tapes took care of that. I still believe in dead spirits.

Only 6 pages and we've already devolved into solipsism.
I just lost a bet.