lost_my_calgon wrote:and by the way......have you asked God why you are feeling this way?
and how do you expect God to consider answering when you don't give him any consideration from your end? It's a two way street.
You want absolute proof that God exists?
For starters....look into your heart and not in your mind.
examine the fact that the human body is an intricate system that no man can create from a bucket of water and a pile of earth.
look at all the "what if's" in your life.
explore just how unhappy and empty you feel or have felt at some point in your life. And take a really close look at all of your imperfections vs. the special things you posess ( not material ).
Everyone is different. If everyone believed/understood in God the world would not need to exist. Our time here is precious...trying to explain God to someone who is skeptical is like trying to explain to them exactly how and when they are going to die. You just can't explain it...you just know God and Death exist. You just know. And if your not sure and don't know that these two things exist well then continue ignoring your maker and I will make a firm promise that when you do die it will be then that everything comes into focus BUT it will be too late.
You obviously are terrified of the unknown, Lost -- and this is your way of dealing with your terror.
Stop trying to sell it as logical and reasonable.
It is neither.
And if you ever really want to begin a discussion about all that, we can do so. But first you have to stop lecturing us on your superstitions.
God was invented by man in order to expain the inexplicable. A crutch for frightened little minds unable to come to terms with the billion to one accident that it their existence.
calgon, you may not read this, if you've gone as you claim, but I just have to observe that your most recent tantrum is wonderfully illustrative of the impoverishment of your argument and the inconistency of your philosophy. Rather than defend, explain, and expand your position intellectually and substantively (something which can, after a fashion, be done), you lash out at the folks who challenge your position. A resort to Ad Hominem attack is the surest admission of an argument's failure that can be made; unable to counter the arguments and objections presented, you castigate and villify those who do not merely accept your position; rather than strive to engage challenge, you turn your back to it and to those who pose it, thereby confirming to those who reject the validity of your argument that your argument is defenselessly invalid. Your approach to the issue, or more properly, your avoidance of the issue, precisely is the fatal inconsistency of your argument; you serve only to prove the case against your argument. Whether you are unable to present an argument or unwilling to do so, your failure to do so is nothing less than surrender. The point of discussion and debate is the exchange, critique and comparison of diverse ideas, not the unquestioning acceptance and affirmation of any one particular set of ideas. Though I doubt you will, I urge you to think about it.
truth
Why I am not an agnostic: I cannot say that I cannot choose between the atheist's and the theist's positions for lack of conclusive evidence either way. That's not my responsiblity. I am, as I've said many times before, a PASSIVE atheist. I do not ACTIVELY believe in a no-god; I have no argument justifying atheism; I con't need one. All I know is that the theist's argument makes no sense at all. I will go to my death bed as my father did, unresponsive to my catholic relatives' pleas that I convert and receive extreme unction. If I were an agnostic, however, one who feels that there MIGHT be a god just as there might not be one, I would, on my death bed, be more likely to call for a priest. Why not? Since I do not have a clear reason not to disbelieve (or, more passively, not-to-believe), and since I have very little life left to sacrifice, why not accept Pascal's Wager?
This assumes, of course, that God will accept my purely instrumental motivation.
By the way, Calgon. I want to thank you for giving me another reason to love chicken.
Ruach wrote:Outside of religion how about relationship. Can someone crawl out of their 4x4 box and explain why they have no relationship with the Living God. Why can't you find him.
I've never been in a 4x4 box, but will answer your question anyway.
I find it difficult to have a relationship with a mythological being who has never given me any evidence whatsoever of his existence, and whose followers must renounce logic and common sense.
Quote:Things christians claim as why they believe in gd you cannot disprove. There is nothing that disproves that there is no gd.
Exactly. There is nothing that disproves the statement that "there is no god." And I CAN disprove claims about the God of the Bible, usually by quoting the parts of the Bible that Christians choose to ignore.
Quote:Is God necessary anymore........
Why does God want us to love Him and our neighbors? God wants to spend eternity with free-will spiritual beings who love Him.
A good question. Now why do you suppose that God needs billions of human beings to love him? Isn't he complete within himself? And if he does need love, why not create beings with a higher mental capacity who could be his equals instead of his slaves?
And why would you suppose that our currently-incomplete understanding of the solar system somehow proves that a god must be running things? Writers can use the word "design" to mean natural processes without intending to imply that God was the designer.
Ruach wrote:Outside of religion how about relationship. Can someone crawl out of their 4x4 box and explain why they have no relationship with the Living God.
Yes, someone should crawl out of their box. Why not do so, Ruach?
Quote: Why can't you find him.
Perhaps because "he" does not exist or perhaps because "he" exists but doesn't want me to "find him."
A better question would be: Why do you find it necessary to pretend you have found "him?"
Quote:(Your choice) He is right here.
God is my keyboard??? C'mon! You can do better than that.
Quote: Like the magnetic field around the earth, penetrating every aspect of life, unseen, and yet a direct force in the world. A spiritual God who dwells within.
Wow, you really are frightened, aren't you?
You know, each person needs to find his/her own way in life. For some, the concept of a God fulfills an important internal need. I think that it is unfair and cruel to cast aspersions on a person's most intimately held beliefs, when it is obvious that the person is not asking to debate those beliefs, but simply to discuss them.
An old quotation comes to mind, "The gentleman, he doth protest too much"!
Re: Is god necessary anymore?
Individual wrote:Genesis
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth…
And god said, Let there be light: and there was light.
He created heaven, earth, waters, land, light, and darkness. He made fish, fowl, animal, and man. Then he rested. He intervened a few times throughout history according to more than three different religious texts. But has anyone seen him lately?
Is the person who created everything and controls everything needed anymore?
Since creation is an ongoing endeavor, the CREATOR will ALWAYS be needed.
Now, Frank ... c'mon, dude ... go ahead and slam preposterous arguments, expose ridiculous inconsistencies, demolish idiotic assumptions, and shred uncorroborated assertions, but don't attack their proponents. Play nice, OK? :wink:
Why is it that everyone says "no one KNOWS the answer" even though there are millions of people on earth that say "I DO!"
That's the thing. I've never understood how people assume that it can't be known, when I know many people who know.
Millions on Earth all believe in different Gods. Millions do not believe in God, millions do not know. And that is also what makes beliefs a very controversial subject. People want to think their beliefs are superior and right so they may then reinforce their beliefs and make them stronger.
Millions of Greeks and Romans believed in a pantheon of Gods. Millions of Buddhists believe in no God. Numbers do not make a belief real, only an individual can know what their own beliefs are and try to live by them.
See that's the apologetic-ness I don't get. I mean, I'm from the San Francisco Bay Area, and I can fit in anywhere solely because I've been trained to be so unreasonably apologetic about everything. But it seems odd to me that most people who don't know want to call themselves academically skeptical, as though evidence would change their beliefs. And that's the funny part.
If a man comes up to you and says he saw God, it's more important to most people to assume he's crazy than to hope he's right. Now if a billion people say they saw an angel, we've been trained to call them all crazy long before we consider that they may have a point. That's what's weird and non-academic to me. You can say there's no proof of God, but there's more than enough proof to stand up in our current court system. There are far less provable things that we consider proven.
And Buddhists are agnostic, not atheistic. Buddhists do not believe in no god, they believe in admitting to yourself what you know and what you don't. Still, there are Buddhists who believe they have seen metaphysical things, and that doesn't make them any less Buddhist.
Hmmm...as a Buddhist, I am pretty sure what my beliefs are. Do some research on Amida Buddha...
So perhaps you should have said Amida Buddhists believe such and such, instead of Buddhists believe such and such. I do not think your path of Buddhism made my comments less accurate...
I've always thought the great hindrance to Buddhism in the western world is that they've always allowed themselves to be called a religion, trying to redefine the word "religion" rather than just becoming a philosophical path or school. I mean, anything nontheistic is inherently not a religion by most western definitions.
And again I ask, because I want to know before this topic diverts, "would you consider it non-academic that we disregard that which we have millions of witnesses for?" If a million people said they could fly, would we not allow our doctors to do research on the subject?
With all due respect, mrcolj, I must reject your hypothesis. I will admit that skepticism of the supernatural is a learned response, something to which humankind has become trained. However, that training is the result of experience observed, amassed. assessed, evaluated, tabulated, and otherwise processed and retained over the course of countless generations. And again, I'll agree that there is not, and apears cannot be, proof that the Supernatural is wholly a construct of humankind's imagination, but to my satisfaction there simply is no proof to the contrary either, while the preponderance of available, legally admissable, independently corroborated, externally validated, academically consistent evidence supports no argument for the existance of The Supernatural however defined or attributed. The odds just don't favor it. I'm far more comfortable with admitting there are things I do not know than to claim belief in an answer predicated on miracles. Physics and chemistry, though not providing "All the Answers", neither require nor even permit miracles. Surprises are not uncommon, but outright miracles are conspicuous by their absence. There may or may not be a diety. I have seen no reason to conclude there MUST be such. To my mind, that in and of itself, exclusive of all other consideration, rather calls to question the base concept.
But still there is not an absence of those who consider themselves to know, and that's what is still curious to me. However they know, there are enough of them that say they've seen angels, spoken to God, woken up with premonitions that turn out to be 100% true, whatever.... It's the number of these people that makes me ask why everyone else is so passionate about
them not existing.
Anyway, can't talk more, gotta do some work...
mrcolj wrote:But still there is not an absence of those who consider themselves to know, and that's what is still curious to me. However they know, there are enough of them that say they've seen angels, spoken to God, woken up with premonitions that turn out to be 100% true, whatever.... It's the number of these people that makes me ask why everyone else is so passionate about them not existing.
Well mrcolj, I was never too passionate about the subject as I could always just switch channels. What has increased my passion of late is that I now find my country being led by one of "those who know".
I find it very disconcerting to think that major decisions such as going to war are being made on the basis of voices in the head. I suspect that I am not alone in this regard.
