Does believing in God or even imagination that there IS a God ever give you inspirational thoughts about life/existence?

The idea has certainly inspired a lot of comical thoughts which I mostly keep to myself since coming to aM where such ideas would probably not be welcome. But from my years on Ask and Blurtit I have almost enough original material to publish Didge's Gospel. It covers everything from what really happened in the Garden of Eden, to the real story of the Tower of Babel. I even have a theory about the Big Bang which unites science and religion -- though perhaps not in such a way as to satisfy either scientists or theologians. 

So, yeah, religion inspires me. >:-D

This post was edited by Benedict Arnold at February 15, 2017 5:06 PM MST

Just the thought of a god inspires me to read and study Darwinism more closely.

"Inspirational" isn't exactly the word I'd use.

Not as asked, simply because I don't believe in God or imagine there is one, but I can still have inspiring*  thoughts about life and existence. More accurately, I am inspired to such thoughts - I don't claim my thoughts will be the inspiration.

You would have to be a very hard-hearted and probably very banal, person not to be inspired in some way by the wonders of Nature, and one of the qualities of the natural sciences is that the more they discover, the more questions they find. I find such inspiration in the small as well as the massive: in watching an orb-spider spinning her web as well as in admiring the Hubble Telescope images or trying to understand what the Large Hadron Collider is revealing. 

Yet does there come a point when philosophy engendered by science, gives way to simple emotion, and may the first sometimes be an outlet for the last? Scientists too can be inspired or moved by what they investigate. If they were not, they would not have become scientists.

A while ago I heard of a young Canadian woman visiting England one Winter. She and her hosts were admiring the night sky, bright with the Milky Way - I was told this story by one of those hosts, on a similar evening - when she suddenly started crying. Embarrassed, her friends asked what was the matter. She explained she was a radio-astronomer by profession, but used a telescope near a city beset with fog and light pollution, so her view of the stars was by traces on computer-prints, of radio signal-strength contours and vectors. Lots of beautiful physics, but expressed in elegant mathematics, not simple scenery. That evening in England she saw our home galaxy with her own eyes for the first time, and it overwhelmed her.

Similarly, the works of mankind can be inspiring too, reaching levels above their creators' material need to make a living from them. Many people become lachrymose over particular pieces of music - for me, Sibelius' Second Symphony is one. Recently, I heard an archaeologist on the radio admit that while admiring the marvellous Palaeolithic cave-paintings of animals, she finds the negative-silhouette hand-prints accompanying some, more inspiring. They hand-shadows may have been made by a simple spraying technique, measurements suggest the hands were of women, and, she added, these people were no different from us intellectually - and that the hand-pictures move her to tears.

I do not know if that astronomer or archaeologist are religious, but I don't think that matters. They found great beauty through their work, either way. My mother used to reckon knowing the science robs the romance, but I don't agree, believing that if anything, knowing how the star shines, the hand-shadow was painted or the spider spins a web, adds deeper levels with a beauty of their own beyond the purely visual.

This is why I have no time for those religious extremists, the Creationists. I regard them as professing to believe in God as Creator then dismissing Him/Her/It, the Bible's early writers, Science, human intellect and aesthetics all at once, in an effortless display of utter banality and fear of their own intelligence.  Similarly I have no time for much manufactured entertainment now, for its own effortless display of banality and intellectual fear is at best mediocrity of invention, technical ability and performing skill, and at worst, celebrates intention not to improve, to look, think and explore beyond the worst "Best of " CDs in supermarkets. I understand and respect genuinely limited ability - I could not have become a musician or a radio-astronomer - but not the wilfully ignorant, especially those who wish and foist their negativity on others.

So while a belief in God can certainly inspire, and does - both at a simple, personal level and in Christianity's wealth of glorious art and architecture - those who don't believe can still find such inspiration. The reasoning may differ, as the non-believer does not ascribe the existence of life or the human ability to create, to a deity; but the non-believer may be inspired without needing a god. I have no idea if there is some supernatural force running the Cosmos - I cannot prove there isn't; nor can the religious prove there is. Knowing how the natural world works does not mean you have to be an atheist, although it can make religious belief harder to sustain. This does not really matter here though. What does matter, to believer or agnostic, is our innate, instinctive desire to understand what we see; and to find thereby, that most elusive and personal of subjective qualities in it, its beauty.    


*(I never use that very non-beautiful "inspirational", I believe invented by some radio DJ, originally to label a particular soul-music style! :-)   )

Does believing in God or even imagination that there IS a God ever give you inspirational thoughts about life/existence?

The practice of an escape from the material world for a bit...
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Belief in God has inspired human beings to great things.

It inspired Mohammed to unite people around one God, the creator and sender of guidance to all mankind wherever and whenever they existed. A God that did not prefer one race or region above another. A God that did not wait for Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus or Mohammed to be born to send His guidance. 

It has inspired me to argue that despite the explosion in our knowledge about life/existence there is still a place for God and religion in our lives today.