As to The_Ghostess_Lola: It is possible that I will change my mind at some later time, but for the moment, I am no longer going to reply to her. It is one thing for her genuinely not to understand how it is possible to be a nonbeliever in God or an afterlife and to be a rational thinker (as I hope I am) who claims that we ought not believe in them without good reason but nevertheless to fervently hope that there is an afterlife, as I do; it is another for her to insist that I am lying about it. For someone who claims emotional intelligence, such a level of disrespect is shocking. And there's no point in saying anything to someone who simply refuses to believe that you mean what you say and would rather conclude that you were an inveterate liar.
Even though I dislike Lola calling you a liar, I think I understand where she is coming from.
I think in your personal life you have everything you need, more or less. Need? Yes. Want? No. However, I am not particularly driven by my wants: if I were, I'd more actively seek work and an apartment and a lady friend. As it is, I am fairly content to live with family and to work on my book and to play a little chess. One thing I think Buddhism gets right is the virtue of not letting your desires dominate you. (But my being satisfied with what I have is also partly attributable to my living my life very much in my mind. I realize that I am atypical in that.) So that you don't need god. I mean either way it wouldn't make any difference. I don't understand how that would matter. If I were homeless, freezing in the street in midwinter, it might help if there actually *were* a God, for then perhaps he would create a warm home for me; but how would *belief* in God help? I think some people take the view Karl Marx had: while people are suffering a lot, religious belief helps make the suffering more tolerable. Well, maybe there are people who really are psychologically built that way: religious belief helps make their suffering more tolerable. I don't seem to be like that. Suffering is suffering, whether there is a God or not--and anyway, belief-formation is not tied to how I feel. More importantly I doubt if you want to SEEK god, or go through the discipline neccesary to come close to knowing what it is all about. (Zen meditation, prayers, ascetism etc) Why would I seek a God whom I strongly doubt exists? It would be like "going through the discipline" of mounting an expedition to Mars to seek the Martian purple unicorns. Why would I do that? Moreover, this "seeking of God" seems to consist largely of placing yourself in a psychologically receptive state for believing in God, which seems an awful lot like self-hypnosis. In fact, human beings have to be very careful *not* to be overly receptive to believing this or that, or they will find themselves believing all sorts of things that there is little reason to think are true. Think of conspiracy theories. Imagine someone who deliberately put himself into a very receptive state of mind for believing that the Moon landing was faked. He'd very soon find himself believing that it was faked--even though he shouldn't.
And I think this is what Lola was sensing, that in the end, you don't really care. Perhaps Lola mistook your intellectual curiosity as something more?
If I am wrong, my apologies. But I'd like to know how you feel about god, rather than think.... It isn't altogether clear to me that there isn't a fundamental error lurking here. Perhaps you're simply curious about how I would feel about this or that version of God, were I to think he actually existed. It would displease me to think that the Old Testament God existed, since he's such a monster. It would displease me to think that the New Testament God existed, too, since (a) he's supposed to be the same God as in the Old Testament and (b) even in the New Testament, he's irrational and not maximally loving. But what kind of God do you have in mind? I don't really have a feeling about there being a God who was nothing more than a First Cause.
The fundamental error I referred to is that of thinking that belief in God is appropriately determined by how you feel rather than by what you think. We should all be skeptics. We should all say, "Oh, really? Give me good reason to believe that that's really true." You wouldn't believe in the Loch Ness monster without good reason. Why would you adopt the far more important belief in God without good reason? And when good reason is not forthcoming, we should withhold belief. Maybe we'll find good reason later. But until we have it, we should withhold belief. This is a basic principle of propositional belief (I have to say "propositional belief" because we hold lots of beliefs, like beliefs about morality, that really are appropriately determined by how we feel or what we value--they're just not beliefs about the way the world is, about what is objectively true or objectively false, like "Jupiter is the largest planet in the Solar system").
People like you, PP, just don't get it. You, Lola, hapless, e99, etc. have a total misconception. His personal life is good, therefore he doesn't need god? You are so far off the mark that it is unbelievable.