If you do, why do you believe in God?

Sure I do, but in the sense that they’re also trapped in this cyclical world, will change and die. Also don’t believe their existence is that important.

Man - how I hate that on almost every post that shows some vulnerability and shares their belief we have lemmys trying to convince people about it not making sense.
Be respectful guys. Thank you to all the upvoters of the actual content - I see you.
- Everytime I’ve shared on Lemmy that I’m a Christian I’ve been met with nothing but huge negativity.
  Everything from accusing me of being a Trump supporter, to telling me I should abandon my belief system because bad people believe the same thing as me.
  I’ll have a read through this thread, but it’s very unlikely I’ll reveal anything more about how Faith has changed my life.
  I used to be a hardcore atheist who mocked all believers so I understand where it’s coming from. I’m not here to fight.
- Given all of my unresolved prior trauma caused almost exclusively by my upbringing around those believing? No thanks. Fuck everyone that believes this shit. It too clearly self-selects the narcissist asshole who wants excuses to not have to answer for how shitty they are. They ram it into EVERYTHING and use it as a blanket for pure judgment amd shame of others. Fuck em all.
  And don't give me this religion vs spirituality bullshit. Very clearly the vast majority are affected by religion. It ain't my job to sort through that when 99% are clearly bad apples.
  I'm speaking from actual personal traumatic experiences from childhood home, multiple churches, multiple schools, and lots of extended family and family friends. Fuck. Them. All.

Upvoting the actual answers here, as some who were not the target audience and haven't read the question have answered.
- Agree.
  OP wants to hear opinions from people agreeing with statement X, not those who disagree.
  I disagree with the notion of the universe being a probability game, but that's not asked.
  
  Thumbs up from me too. I'm always eager to hear/read from people who aren't shy but rather open and reasonable about their beliefs, whatever those may be.

In some sort of greater being yes, in any kind of church or following no.
I find I have my own belief in some unknown cosmic entitys, something along the lines of energy is always in a state of flow, life and death, rocks to dust, consciousness to the sprawling reaches of the universe a bit of new age spirituality stuff,
- That’s kind of where I am with it. Anything human led is suspect and I think any resemblance to “Jesus church” is long gone. I want to believe but I struggle with God being “just” but also allowing so much injustice.
  If I had to put myself somewhere I believe in God but my faith for the rest of it is dwindling.
  
  I wish I had a not so cynical view but the moment I see any human infont of any amount of others reading from a "holy text" or any interpretation of one I'm just like, your in a cult, your after power, there's something you want, you want to judge others or some other underlying reasons.
  Yer it's hard to believe in anything when everywhere you look it's just shit.

Makes me feel more assured and will reduce my suffering until I die. After my death, regardless of if I am right or wrong, the net positive of having had the soothing idea of a larger meaning can’t and won’t be retroactively undone. So why the hell not?
- I think most people think like this at their core regardless of class, status, label.
- Because religion can be and has been used to convince people to do terrible things. The fewer false beliefs people hold the fewer things can be used to manipulate them in this way.
  
  water can and has drowned people. i fail to see your point.
- What is truth and how do you know that?
  
  From my perspective they are not lies.
  In the hope of civil discussion, it is not helpful for you to frame it that way IMO.
  
  Why do you think truth matters so much? Don't disagree, but why is it humans will forego a more beneficial situation if it's proven to be "untrue" or "not real" etc?
  
  my choosing to engage with something that might not be true isn’t hurting anyone. i’m a solo practitioner of a non christian faith. :p of course the truth matters, but when staring at it makes you actively suicidal and feel like everything lacks meaning, why not make use of the circuitry our brains evolved with, and let a little bit of What If light the path forward?

- I went to a Romanian Holy Unction service and it was beautiful.

In short, yes because you lose nothing by trying to emulate Jesus.
That said, the church be crazy af
- If emulating jesus was what the christian church was about I would have less scrupules
  
  Define "Christian Church". This almost invariably comes from former evangelicals in my experience.
- I may not believe in God, but I can definitely respect the man. ✊

I saw something fitting a common description for God (in meditation). Yes, a total mystic vision.
(The creator of reality. A star (that also looks like a jewel) that emits poetry energy. And then I react to that energy by dreaming this dream that I call reality. Like contriving lyrics for an instrumental song.)
No intelligence or personhood as far as I can tell. Just a vast brainless mystico-cosmological gusher of energy.
- Same. Just a big ol gusher. But it has consciousness when you interact with it because it's how we can speak to things. It has time and space for us. It has whatever we need so we can interpret it. It doesn't care to assume some specific form or signal. But I'm my experience, it can answer if you ask stuff. You answer yourself through it though so it might be the people that reflect in it's glory

Consciousness exists. This implies that either consciousness is some emergent property of sufficiently complex interconnected systems, or it's some universal force that complex interconnected systems "channel".
If it's emergent, it seems less presumptuous to assume that the most complex interconnected system of all, the universe itself, would develop consciousness. That universal consciousness might as well be called "God". If it's a universal force, it might as well be called "God". Anyway you slice it, a universal consciousness seems inevitable from a sober metaphysical analysis.
Lots of people have ascribed lots of culturally specific attributes to the universal consciousness which are obviously quite silly. The core statement that "I am that 'I am'" is really the only meaningful attribute we can identify.
- If it's emergent, it seems less presumptuous to assume that the most complex interconnected system of all, the universe itself, wouldn't develop consciousness.
  I was, no shit, just thinking about this on my break about an hour ago. God or whatever you wanna call them. If there was a way to develop more consciousness by adding more information to the universe. If consciousness emerges to solve complex problems then maybe if we populate/terraform planets then we will have a deeper understanding.
  
  It makes sense. But why would adding more complexity and information necessarily lead to consciousness? I think there is an assumption that if this much complexity is a consciousness, then more complexity must also be consciousness. I don't think it has to be the same thing or the same universal consciousness has to exist due to emergence? It can emerge from certain properties, like mushrooms appear in conditions. And then if there is too much of heat or water, it stops emerging. In fact, our planet and existence is on the very edge of a pointy specific and unlikely set of properties tuned just so. It should be said I kind of believe in a universal consciousness anyway but I wanted to discuss this awesome topic
- If it's emergent, it seems less presumptuous to assume that the most complex interconnected system of all, the universe itself, would develop consciousness.
  Is the universe the most complex interconnected system? Complexity implies not random. It seems to be nearly perfectly random. Not understanding something is not the same thing as it being complex.
  
  It seems to be nearly perfectly random
  How so?

Sort of, but it's more a comforting theory rather then a true belief. I came up with it when I was younger, doing a lot of psychedelics, and meditating often on the nature of existence and reality.
My theory is that God is everything. The earth, the stars, our fellow beings. All of reality makes up a complex web that I loosely refer to as a "consciousness" for lack of a better word. The nature of this "consciousness" is incomprehensible to us. It does not activly intervene in our daily lives, and operates on a scale beyond our comprehension. Mostly, it simply is. It is the oblivion from which our consciousness was once plucked, and it is where we will one day return.
In essence, each of us is a tiny fragment of reality experiencing itself. The meaning of life is to experience it. All of it. Joy, pleasure, and suffering. It is all a part of the whole of existence. When we die and return to the infinite our individuality is lost, but maybe God learns something about itself.

Cos I've done drugs, and experienced heightened states of love, being, appreciation for nature and humanity, states that feel magical yet real, even if only temporarily.
The very fact those states of mind are achievable at all gives me a certain emotional grounding and inner certainty that reality has purpose, or at least meaning. As opposed to just being a happy accident of atoms and energy arranging themselves in this miraculous way to create life. That's just a logical explanation of how, not why.
We're almost all driven to look for meaning in life. Even if it's just to "find your own purpose", that journey presupposes you have one to begin with.
I guess I feel a belief in god without having much idea of what god is, or even what they want. But I don't believe at all that logic, science, reason etc. are things you have to choose instead of religious belief. They're things you have as well. You can't square the two - the Rubik's cube of logic doesn't twist that way.
- OK, our reality might have a purpose or meaning given by a god - but then what about that god's purpose/meaning? Was it given by yet another one higher up? You can keep going up layers like this and finding meaning on each one, but eventually there has to be a final one, a reality that was not designed by anyone. But why does it exist?
  Some people may say that there's no proof that we actually exist. And maybe we don't, but the fact that we can think and experience things means that even if our reality is somehow fake, there has to be one that isn't. Because if nothing existed, there would be nothing at all. Not a void, just nothing, not even the possibility of existence. So something, at some level, must exist. But why?
  "Because God created us" is not good enough for me, because it doesn't answer anything. If we exist because a god created us, that still means that a god existed before us. Why does this god exists then?
  We'll never find out. Any answer we find will only open things up for new questions. And just like a child that is just starting to experience things, we'll never run out of questions.
  
  I think it's the book of Job, God says something like "you could not possibly fathom the purpose or meaning to the world, even if someone tells you". I think in much the same way a Turing Machine simply cannot process certain tasks or achieve particular ends, our brains are limited to a certain subset of understanding. Still mightily impressive what we can imagine/devise/understand IMO. In Islam, this is more readily accepted dogma: you can't even imagine or picture God, so even attempting it is doomed to failure (or delusion)

Personally I'm a huge fan of the Alcoholics Anonymous understanding of "god" and I think it applies more widely.
In AA it is supposed to be A-religious so as to accommodate as many people as possible. To them, god is whatever higher power you need to put your faith into to do better. An entity who you are striving to make proud or you are asking for guidance or help, etc.
This genericized god idea kinda gives up the game to me as an atheist, but it doesn't mean it's bad. In fact it's made me believe in god as an idea.
There are plenty of studies on "manifesting" goals and how saying out loud to yourself or to someone at all substantially increases your chance of succeeding in your goal. This is just prayer or a magic spell or whatever else you wanna call it. I call it a ritual.
The fact that god is a made up idea has been uncontested in my mind for eons, however the psychological power of a belief in god is new to me and makes me appreciate the systems of religion more (doesn't excuse a lot of their bullshit).
- AA is a great program and is basically secularized Christianity. Two great religious books that talk about the program from a more explicitly religious perspective are "Breathing Underwater" (Catholic) and "Steps of a Transformation" (Orthodox). Even with your agnostic perspective I think you would find them enlightening.

Truth is proof - I can neither prove the number of gods is >0, nor prove it is =0.
Thus cautious agnosticism (since the evidence suggests, if there is at least one god, then they really hate us).
- They may not hate us. They could be totally agnostic too. Like a rain drop that dropped in our pond, they may be passing by having no idea the ripple it left behind. That's the wildness of all the options for GODS capacity. But hate requires human input from stimulus.

I don't believe in the Christian god because there are too many contradictions and I don't think the divine truth is corruptable. Anything so corrupt it doesn't even agree with itself cannot be divine truth.
- contradictions
  Like what
  
  I see a fair amount of Christian-related posts in your post history so I'm gonna go ahead and suggest that this is probably a conversation you don't want to have. I'm trying not to be an asshole here, but I am very well read on the subject of Christianity, so suffice to say that contradictions exist, they are widely known, and I find Christian apologia on the subject wholly unconvincing.
  That said, if I'm really the person you would like to go on this journey of discovery about your religion with then I will take you, but I can't say that you are very likely to enjoy the results.
  
  If you're serious, there are so many. Here's one of the first results I found in a search, but you can find so much writing on it if you want to, which if you actually believe you're following the "truth" you should look into.
  One of the most common fundamental contradiction arguments is the Judeo-Christian god is defined as omniscient and omnipotent, all knowing and all powerful, as well as benevolent. If this is true, why is there evil in the world? He's omnipotent so must have the power to make a world in which it doesn't exist, and he must be aware of whatever will happen in the world he creates, since he's omniscient, and must not want evil to exist since he's benevolent.
  These cannot all be true. If they were then he'd create a world that satisfies his goals that does not have evil, which he must be capable of doing if he's omnipotent. If evil must exist to accomplish his goals then he isn't omnipotent. If he can't detect evil will exist then he isn't omniscient. If he wants evil to exist then he isn't benevolent.

If there is a god or something like a god, it has to be the sun. The sun makes all life possible and has near infinite energy, I can not think of anything more deserving to be god. Will it save us or help us as individuals, i don't think so, its a god we are insignificant in comparison and will burn when staying in its presence for two long. Also its real.
Another idea I had was from Einsteins quote: "to believe in god you have everything to gain and nothing to lose." So by that logic you better believe in all gods for maximum gain. There are a bunch more suns aswell ;)

You cannot have a painting without an artist. A sculpture without a sculpture. A tool will never use itself, it takes a user.
Imagine a blank and static universe. Someone had to add or move something to start the initial reaction even if they never play a part in the events after.
In some sense there is a creator. I just don't know in what capacity.
- Why someone? Why not something? Physics say a monopole magnet is mathematically possible, something like that would absolutely cause a disturbance because it doesn’t conform to the laws of physics we have defined like every action has an equal and opposite reaction… I think you’re right, something happened but I don’t know why it would be someone and not simply probability and the natural world conforming to that probability
  
  I can't answer every question especially pertaining to evolving science. I wouldn't even try.. I'm not religious either. To have something, someone or something had to create it that's all I can muster on the subject. Can you create anything without touching, moving, manipulating by some outside force?
  I don't know how it happened, why, person or thing. All I can figure is if the universe was a blank sheet of paper, something had to add, kickstart, etc a reaction for things to unfold regardless of size, time or scale. I don't really believe the universe at its utmost basic, blank canvas form voided form, simply has energy. It doesnt make sense. Energy requires input from some outside source.
  
  Nothing in physics say that time has a beginning or end. It says in fact that it doesn't have that.
- Hmm. I think you can't have those things without an observer. Art, beauty and utility are in the eye (or hand) of the beholder, and apt to appear anywhere.
  
  I agree with this. Whether life is a series of evolving or constant simulation, whatever form it takes for which we cannot form answers for yet. Something cannot come from nothing. I again just don't know, nor does anyone the answer to OPs question.
  
  In fact, nature has some of the best art. And our art is almost as good. Does it mean we are almost god? Does beauty signify gods presence? It is very harsh to the less graceful people that have hearts of gold
- If you zoom out on the universe it's almost pure noise. Does that resemble what you'd expect from a designer? I guess it could be designed, but there's also no reason to indicate that if pure randomness is also expect to create the same things.
  
  Can anyone make sense of this post? It looks like unintelligible symbols crammed together to me.
  
  I am unsure of the capacity of a designer, constructor, what label you want to call an input. To have noise there must be an initial force to create it regardless of its structure, randomness, pattern, form. A big bang, literally anything we may never know. But if the universe was static and blank with no energy or anything just a black sand box. There would be no noise until a reaction happened.
  I have never seen something come from nothing. I don't think anyone has ever or this question wouldn't have been asked or even be in our consciousness.

I believe in all gods, much in the same way I believe money, justice, and math exist.
Doesn't mean I follow any or all of them, yahweh is a dick and so are a few others, but some are chill.

For me, God is a character stronger than me.. Someone whom I call upon in times of despair. That's it. No deeper meaning than this.

I used to believe because of how convinced other people were. I thought they had a good reason. Turned out they had not

I believe in a god but it is strange lol. I will truly never understand the concept of being all knowing and powerful so my idea is he's either so bored with his existence he created us for entertainment or simply boredom. I imagine him similar to a comic book writer or tv show creator

Simple answer: I find I carry on believing in God in much the same way I believe in Science. A mixture of experience, logical coherence, testimony, teaching from people I trust, and connection with other things I know/believe, that makes - to my mind - God's reality overwhelmingly more likely than not.

I believe in God because I think its the best explanation for the existence of our universe with it's laws. A being outside of our current space/time setting our universe into motion just makes sense to me.
- That's essentially the TAG argument.
  
  Interesting, I've never heard of that term but I am partial towards the Maliki madhab which is highly influenced by the Asha'ri and I see them listed there.
  I'll be sure to look into this later.
- If our universe requires a being outside it as an origin, why shouldn't that being itself require another being of even further outside as an origin, and so on?
  
  By nature of being outside of our universe they are not subject to the same constants/restraints or our same concepts of space and time.
  But I'm not necessarily saying it's a requirement. That's just the line of thought I lean towards personally at this point.

I'm LDS some people might call us Mormon.
The short of it is I asked God and I felt his presence. Not like any earthly feeling, more like the burning the bible / new testament describes.
But even without any of that I'd still have believed / known. I just, always have if that makes sense? I might've gone a different direction in my beliefs but I'd still have known he's there.
- I have always wanted to ask someone who has this opinion how they confront the knowledge that people from every religion have felt the same thing? Some people have felt this way multiple times about mutually exclusive faiths.
  That's one of the largest things that led me to be an agnostic atheist (meaning I don't claim to have knowledge, and I hold no belief in a god; I don't disbelieve, it's the ascence of belief). I was raised non-denomination Christian, but I had a good Buddhist friend in high school. It made me curious about other faiths, and they're almost all mutually exclusive, yet every one has people certain they're correct. What are the odds I was born to a family that believed the correct one?
  I'm not self-centered enough to believe I'm special and all the other people are just unlucky, so the result is that it's most likely I wasn't born lucky, and neither was anyone else. So many religions have faded out of existence, so the odds are if any are correct they don't exist anymore. Why would I think I happen to find the right one?
  I know this is unlikely, but I'd be interested to hear an actual opinion about how that feels, not hearing about what you're supposed to believe (which I've heard before). I think it's interesting to know if it makes others feel the same way I once did or not.
  
  This is why a "feeling" should not be the reason you convert to a religion. You should be skeptical of Christians that argue their conversion on feelings alone. I certainly had feelings that I attribute to the Holy Spirit when I was an inquiring Christian but I frankly tried to ignore or diminish them to stay sober minded. Relying entirely on emotionalism or charism is historically discouraged as you could just as easily be swayed by demonic forces (e.g. prelest). It's one of many critiques of charismatic Protestantism and the LDS church.
  
  So, for the sake of this post isn't "I'm trying to convert you to my religion" I'm going to try and summarize our points of belief while more or less answering your question, and I'm not doing it out of a debate, but merely to answer you :)
  It's not really "we think we're lucky or better than anyone else" hell we actually believe that God is a God of fairness that doesn't value one person over another. Ie. "We are all his children and he loves us equally" is a core belief we hold. And as apart of that belief, we firmly hold it true that God will ensure that all his children who lived or died without hearing his gospel will have the opportunity too. That's point 1
  Point 2. Yes you can most certainly have spiritual experiences outside of the LDS faith or any faith for that matter. We tend to refer to that as "The light of Christ" but for a summarized explanation. We basically summarize that as, a testimony of truth wherever it may be found God will bare witness of it.
  And I also tend to lean towards a lot of Buddhist tenants myself btw. The concept of a state of being called Nirvana, that life is suffering (Though I know that's not exactly what he said) and a few other ideas they hold I agree with.
- Does it feel correct that there are levels of heaven, better and worse heavens on other planets? I always felt this is disturbing to me, but it makes sense what you are saying
  
  Not so much "levels of heaven" in that anyone's values lesser than others. It's that God understands his children, he understands we're all different. I like a plain pepperoni pizza. Some people like supreme pizza, some people God forbid like pineapple on their pizza.
  He's not going to force one person or another into this route definition of "heaven" because supreme pizza may not be heaven, nor plain pepperoni or pineapple.
  Sorry if that analogy doesn't make sense.

I think I believe in something more like… biology and physics working together in some way to create our existence. I had a near death experience once when I was in ICU for several months. I met, a… thing, it was like a large glowing spark but its light didn’t travel away from its self, its glowing was contained to its “body”. I asked “is that me?” and the “room” we were in was filled with a sense of “no” it’s taken me ten years to process that experience and be able to talk about it, idk what that spark was but I’ve come to accept I believe that is the All Thing, it’s the eternal spark all sentient life stems from, I do believe access to long term memory is critical for being a part of the All Thing not simply being animated biology, like a mosquito for example.
I think the All Thing animates biology as a way to experience the physical world because it must “live” somewhere and we are all avatars, our thoughts are only important in the sense that they lead us to experiences and forming memories. I believe in nonduality and that physics is actually the closest humans will ever get to describing a god, an All Thing
- That's very cool, I also feel like many who meet this kind of entity will more likely than not return a message or keep a wisdom relating to ego. It is not you, and yet encompasses you. Death is the ultimate drop of any ego and return to the light. And the experiences I have heard of and felt is the radiant compassion. That the compassion is overwhelming. The intensity of which of course makes makes lasting tracks and grooves in the mind of anyone.
  The most calming and intense feeling is the knowledge that what is behind the veil of everything, is a warm bright love. That our home is a place we can know comes with a soft sigh of contentment where we can bathe in complete belonging and let go of our self.

DMT

For me "God" isn't some person with wits and thoughts.
It is just the circumstances in where we live. The time the physics the vibration and energy filling the matter and thoughts.
There is no need in praying to it (except for you self). We're in a happy stream full of energy filled with feeling "souls" going into the same direction in time and filling this strange place where we feel energy as matter, waves and colors.

In times of peace, I'm agnostic. In times of christofascism, I'm militantly atheist. People go to church or talk to God because it is an existential crisis. They are just scared of dying. Momento Mori.

It's not about belief. I don’t believe in Jah the same way I don’t believe in gravity. Gravity just is, and so is Jah. Look around. Breathe. Existence itself is the evidence. I’m not here to convince anyone or convert anybody. Jah doesn’t need followers, He just is. Whatever you call it, it’s all the same current. I walk with Jah because I recognize Him in everything.

Because it sometimes makes me feel better about there potentially being some purpose to us if we were created intentionally, provides a placeholder explanation for what's out there besides the universe, makes life more fun, and does not harm anyone (I'm not religious).

I believe in God because I don't believe knowledge is possible without a transcendent being. (e.g. the impossibility of the contrary) Otherwise you are dealing with infinite regress or axiomatic circularity. Materialism breaks down with origin theories. Metaphysics aren't substantial yet exist. Math and logic aren't descriptors of the world but integral to how the world is structured. The Orthodox view is that these principles are a reflection of the divine mind.
(I am an Orthodox Christian)
- If so, your definition of 'God' is so far removed from what most people take God to mean as to just invite linguistic debates over debates over the thing itself.
  
  Explain what you think I mean by God.

If you look at it very very loosely, many major religions are reaching toward the same general concepts and have enough similarities to suggest a consensus that there's a "something" up there.
We probably all have an imperfect idea of what that "something" is, but there are enough similarities (or echos of the same ideas) across many religions to suggest they're looking at the same indivisible thing and interpreting it differently.
- That something you're referring to is just fear. Fear of nothingness fear of death fear of the unknown etc... Fear of this being it. Fear of the end. That's all it boils down to. Thus they have to create something to answer that fear. But it's not like there's a universal truth they're all circling around. They're all just creating something to address that fear.
  
  This was a thread for believers. Let them have this one.
  
  Okay cool.
  OP asked for reasons, and I gave one of mine. I didn't intend or expect it to be convincing to anyone. If I wanted to give a formal argument for the existence of a higher power I would, but that's not the point of this thread.
  
  "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding." Proverbs 9:10

There are definitions of "God" that I feel are hard to prove, but others that are easy. For example, of your definition is "God is the ultimate cause of the universe" then it's pretty trivial that if everything has a cause there must be an end of the chain. Of course, this the could be a computer program running the universe simulation or even just the laws of physics themselves if those are truly causeless. But nonetheless, it's still a somewhat satisfying definition of "God" so I'm comfortable saying I believe in God. Harder definitions include "God is an omnipotent being" (which most of God's traditional attributes can be derived from) and "God is the being described in the Bible/Qu'ran/other religious text" which I feel like are unprovable.
A lot of religious apologists will make arguments in favor of the easier definition and then try to claim that this means their specific view of God is real. Personally I think that's insane. Like "there must be some end of the chain of causality therefore God became a Jewish carpenter in the ancient Roman Empire." Even if you're Christian that should be a bad logical jump.

Gods, plural. But believe is a weird word.
I commune with the ancient gods of my ancestors, whether I believe in them is complicated though. I spent most of my life atheist after the christian church failed to grab me. I learned of my ancestral religion from my great grandmother and my great aunt. Grandma was Catholic on paper but still recognized the old gods. My aunt called herself a druid.
I choose to commune with the old gods because I have to believe in something. I've felt the call of spirit, the gaping void in my heart where spirituality was meant to be, but I do not trust organized religion. I don't trust the churches. I don't trust those who would hold power, enforced by faith, over those who do not know better.

For most, it's indoctrination.

I do not, no proof. If there was a god such as in the Bible why give us reasoning abilities when they give no proof? And if so, then I put forward the idea that if there is such a god, they don't care if we believe so why bother?. Not to go all gamer but like the Sims, they made us and took out the pool ladder and saw what happened.
If there is a god that has such powers and cares, well fuck them cause they ain't helping us it seems. If they are well we're too far off course for it to matter, this playthrough is spiraling and it doesn't matter if we believe or not cause we may be circling the drain.
So seems easier not to believe because if you do it's more depressing.

I do not and i believe that religions are the number 1 problem in the world. The things people do for their "Gods" are stupid and cruel af
- Actually I would say that religions are just a symptom of a human flaw.
  The same gets exploited by politics and other things too.
  Religion is just so bad because it is based on an intangible mind construct as as lies go, this is one of the biggest ever to keep spreading and going fueled by nothing more than the sunk cost fallacy in time and energy invested of current and past believers. They need to validate themselves by pushing ot onto the next generations because otherwise it would mean their their time invested into it was pointless.

I feel like religion is so corrupted by governments, cults, and sleazeballs. Not all of them mind you, that it’s just so difficult for a lot of people to put their faith in any religion. That’s why theirs so many atheists.

We seek tangible proofs, of intangible things, in a tangible world, using intangible consciousness, thoughts, mind and reason, called the "Self" or "I Am", in order to determine if an intangible being could possibly exist. You are your own proof of such things, amongst 8 billion other proofs. We are the intangible being we may or may not believe in. All of us are.

Earthseed

TLDR; I'm vehemently agnostic.
I believe that if there is a "God" entity, that it is incomprehensible and not worth attempting to understand.
I also don't believe in an anthropocentric "God", in that "God" doesn't inherently value nor not value humans as somehow special nor damned. I also don't believe "God" cares nor doesn't care about humans or existence.
I also don't believe in inherent meaning, nor that there is some form of divine justice. Those are human lenses through which we interpret the world, and are unlikely to apply (at least in the same way as a human) to the supposed viewpoint of an eternal omniscient omnipotent entity that created the universe and will supposedly one day close the door on time and its own existence.
In short, I'm one bleak motherfucker and it doesn't matter if "God" exists or not. Either way, I don't get to survive death. What is eternal about me is inherently not a part of me. It is mortality, true mortality, mortality of the consciousness and the ego and the individual that defines the individual. When that dies, "God” or not, either way there is no individual to somehow surpass death.
- Leave me be, I'm agnostic. Bother me with religious nonsense and see the atheist come out and ruin your day.

Because of Nick Cave.

No reason. I just do.

I dont know. I am conflicted about it. If god exists why would he create all the suffering and pain? If he doesnt, all the world is just a probability game.
- If God exist then why bad thing happen?
  The Christian paradigm answers this.

The pattern looks like a boxershorts or Lederhose

By using our logic and from the experience of things around us we can say that it's impossible for something to come from nothingness. There is a consensus that the universe has a beginning which scientists call the Big Bang. But that cannot come out of itself, logic dictates that there is something which brought it about (energy/matter does not just compress itself into a singularity). Whatever that thing is or things if there is a chain of initiators/causes, must end with an initiator which is self-sufficient and which has not been caused by something else. Otherwise we go in an infinite regression of asking what caused that cause, and an infinite chain going backwards would mean the present never gets to happen, but we exist, and that is proof that the chain ends somewhere.
That's what is called the necessary being or the uncaused cause.
Now, by observing the universe we can surmise some characteristics that that cause must possess to bring it about, since it must possess them in at least an equal ammount. The enormous ammount of energy held in the universe shows that the initiator has immense power. The laws of the universe and its intricacies suggest that it must possess knowledge and wisdom etc.
- The laws of the universe and its intricacies suggest that it must possess knowledge and wisdom etc.
  You should study physics

No. I believe in Stephen Fry.
- He’s pretty close!

I don't believe gods exist.
I know the Abrahamic god doesn't exist.
- How do you know that?
  
  Because it has conflicting attributes.

How is it possible to answer the question until you define what "God" you're referring to? Christian God?
- The spirit of the question is to provide an answer if you believe in any god. Could be Allah, Yahweh, Zeus, Loki, etc.
  
  Thanks, it wasn't clear, I thought it was more meta than that.
- What does it matter ?
  
  I think it matters because God can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Are we talking about Plotinus' "το Ἕν" or are we talking about Allah? This is the problem with these kinds of questions. It's difficult to discuss the nature of what God even could be, before we get on to whether or not you "believe" in it. As other posters have pointed out, even the language of "belief" is generally inadequate as a starting place.
- In my case yes 😁
  
  I have mad respect for Orthodox Christians. My sense is that they typically grok Christianity on a completely different level to other, more modern denominations. When I try to talk about God with my average local Christian, there is this "white man in the clouds with a big beard" image and that's the level you're starting with which I find very difficult.

- "adults either know or don't know" then you immediately acknowledge there is room for ambiguity. Revealing that you worked backwards from the premise of "belief in God is childish".
  Why else would your example of a reasonable "adult" usage of believe be valid but not
  "Hey man is there a god" "I believe so but I haven't seen him personally"
  In both examples there is a being/place beyond our current reach which we believe to be there, for whatever reasons, but are unable to confirm at the moment.
  Ironically in your rush to call others childish you posted the most childish response here by assuming your understanding is the only valid one.
- Do you believe that to be true?