Welcome to Gaia! ::

What is it to you?

My opinion may be forthcoming if I hear something interesting enough. I don't want to taint anyone's ideas now, do I?

I don't believe in a higher power.

Until there's proof outside of circumstantial & personal 'evidence'; I'm rather convinced there is absolutely nothing.

In fact, I'm so convinced that I find believers to be delusional, and irrational.
I'm what you call an anti-theist.

I don't hate religious people.
You think I'm going to hell, and I think you're crazy.
All works out.

If I were to put my faith in anything, it would be the numbers. God is pure data.

Anyways, I need to kill a major amount of time and energy right now, so I might as well throw it into a completely retarded paragraph about my own personal philosophy on the thing that people call God.

I can confidently say that no such thing exists (although I can't truly BELIEVE that, because nothing is impossible, and it's especially hypocritical to completely and totally rule something out, especially when we know so little about the universe). God has morphed into what makes us tick for me. God is curiosity, desire to learn, human emotion; the entire human experience. It really has little to do with the outside world at all, but more the idea that since we only experience subjectively, we are special and unique. Looks, personality, and all practicalities are irrelevant, because the perspective is what really counts.

I used to be one of those really stuck up Atheist types that would argue about it with people, but it's really a pointless debate (as most are). We both truly believe the same things, we just call them by different names. And it doesn't matter how empty life can seem, or how much you just want to run away from everything sometimes, because that's part of God and experience. We live and learn, and then we die. There is no afterlife. There is only life. I really wouldn't even define death as a state, because of it's total finality. I can say, however, that death tends to radiate, and it makes people stronger, even if they give up and crumble.

But really, to sum all of this up, God is uncertainty at the very core of the word. I don't know what tomorrow is going to bring, and it's probably going to suck, but it's alright because I know that in all of my neurotically rambling ways there are brief moments of hope and happiness. That variability is the important thing to me.

It was pretty nice, but unnecessary.
There's no need to disagree on a poetic, metaphoric, or symbolic god.
If anyone does they're just wasting their time.

You've said yourself that any kind of philosophising is completely pointless. Maybe I'm missing something in your concept of a deity. I'm still backing the idea that anything in the universe can or will be described mathematically. When something miraculous happens or I become aware of something beautiful in the world, I'm not looking at it as some mysterious event. My curiosity leads me to finding out why these things happen. Rules and systems can be beautiful too, just for their completeness and perfection. Sometimes, knowing how a magic trick is done is just as mindblowing as being ignorant to the mechanism.

I believe that God is made up, but that doesn't mean there is no God. As soon as people truly have faith in a concept, it becomes something real, with substance and influence. You can't argue that God hasn't affected human society.

At a psychological level, a god serves as a receptacle for thoughts, emotions and experiences that people find incomprehensible, frightening or overwhelming. To believe that there's some sort of higher power there making it all run smoothly is vastly reassuring and saves you from having to try to comprehend it all on a personal level. To believe in God, obviously, is a lot more comforting than to believe in Science; where God says "I am in charge of everything and I will look after you if you ask me to," Science says "I am in charge of everything and I do not give a s**t about you as you are infiinitely tiny and follow the same rules as everything else."

I think any religion which tells other people what God wants is bullshit, often designed to control people and make them do what you want. "Do unto others as you would have done unto you" is a fair enough rule, however "Man shall not lie with another man as with woman - God hates this," is not. Neither rule comes from any god, it's just been made up by somebody - which in a sense, makes any religion as valid as the next; if there's no Truth, then none can be any more right than wrong than the next.

I don't believe we can explain the universe through maths alone - not yet, possibly not ever. The thing you have to remember is that that's all made up too. Somebody saw something which they wanted to explain, came up with their own logic for rationalising it into numbers and formulae which they could understand. Then other people keep adding beliefs into the same system. Just because the numbers usually add up in a sensible way does not mean that the logic behind it is correct, but once people start believing in a certain scientist's explanations, they're taken to be truth, they're taught as truth, and it requires a far more forceful argument to disprove a widely-accepted scientific theory than to prove it. The process is more similar to the creation of religion, I believe, than a lot of science-oriented people would like to believe.

And, be honest - would a mathematical explanation of life, the universe and everything truly leave you satisfied? Some numbers might make sense together in a pleasing way, but does that actually bear any meaning to you?