What happened to OC? - CLOSED Carnage?!
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TCK

Deep stuff

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I dunno I just want to talk about my shower thoughts and things and hear responses to it. So I guess I'll jump right in.

 

People say God does not exist because they can see no evidence of it; but the evidence of God's existence isn't really something that can be shown, is it? The only way someone can find evidence that God exists is searching their own consciousness. I believe God exists for reasons I can't even begin to explain to anyone who has not shared my thoughts and feelings. I mean what I'm saying is that if there's a god then he's going to show us he exists through his preferred methods, but people who doubt his existence do so because they can't see it through our preferred methods.

 

Is it arrogance to think that, whether there's a god or not, we would be able to pin him down like a butterfly on a board just like we can do to the things he gave us to play with? I've felt like it is. Don't lose me here, but I find that when I search for God the way he wants me to search for him, I find him quickly. I can't find him through humanity's methods because he doesn't want to be found that way. He wants to be found personally, in thought.

 

There is so much debate over creation versus evolution, and I often have to take a step back and wonder why. Where did this debate originate? Did God say to anyone that evolution is completely false? No. Humanity decided it thought it knew what God wanted and began fighting it in his name. When you step outside that debate, isn't evolution the closest we can come to finding evidence for God's existence through our methods? It's right there in front of us - it was either planned or it wasn't, and the chances of it being planned seem a lot higher to me than the chances of it being... well, chance.

 

"I think, therefore I am." That is the only thing a person can ever be certain of in his life. You cannot prove that to anyone, only to yourself. If God wants to be found in thought and personal connection, is it far of a stretch to say, "I think, therefore God is?" Basically isn't it enough for me to believe he exists for the same reason I believe I exist? We are supposed to be made in his image, after all.


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Tiddy-bits:

You've got a very good thing figured out there.  I firmly believe there is a power outside our realm of existence that may or may not have influenced our creation.  That's about it.  I am not agnostic.  In the subject of your god, assuming he was real, I would have zero interest in serving him.

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I think your on one of the more right trains of thought there TCK. I always tend to respect the religious, and those who are avidly against it, in equal terms, because whatever they set their perception of reality to, that's what they will perceive. It's not far off to think of why we believe in gods, and why some gods are completely made up; as human beings, we have the extraordinary ability to will into existence singular ideas out of entire collections of them. Who is to say this is not the power of a god in itself? Few other organisms can do it, but we create on such a grand scale, and though it isn't instantaneous, we still shape the universe around us. An example, many of the tiny particles that make up matter cannot be directly observed, but through the conclusions we've made, we determine they exist. So, humanity has decided "Yes, this is how the universe must work." Someday, that might change, and we'll do it again. Some say that it is a naïve notion to make statements such as this, but in the last few hundred years we've grown so much, and we get a bigger picture of things, but only because we made it that way. Some people react to this, and look at the dated parts of religions. Many beliefs have singular notions, rights and wrongs set into place by codex and lexicon. This is the reason I think many people tend to shy from religion now, or express their outright distaste for it. They have a certain perception of life they need to satisfy, so they shut down anything that opposes it. Finding God, or faith, or even Spirit; these are all journeys we go through as an individual in the end, no matter how rapid the spread of ideas comes across us. Somehow I think it's a fundamental part of the universe, in order for us to know ourselves. There's a reason why meditation has been practiced over the past few thousand years, I suppose.

 

Sorry if some of that sounds like rambling, I've been up for a little longer than I should have been, haha.

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In the subject of your god, assuming he was real, I would have zero interest in serving him.

Read the following assuming God exists. This is not meant to be insulting - that rebellion you're demonstrating which we all have in our nature is part of our immaturity as imperfect humans. We cannot decide if we want to serve God or not; we are serving him by existing. By attempting to decide not to serve him, you are exercising your free will which is something he created you to do, and thus you are serving him. It's a paradox, and one which I suspect he intended. If my god is real as I believe, we will eventually be perfect, the way he meant us to be; which means we will no longer struggle with rebellion because there will be no ignorance any longer about his intentions for us.

 

Even further, God respects the free will he gave us enough to try to convince us to come back to him instead of simply changing our minds for us. So the question is, do we repay God's respect of our free will by using it to love him? Satan used his free will to defy God, and this too fulfilled God's plan for creation. What I take away when I read about Satan being cast out of Heaven is not that God cast him out in anger. It is that Satan simply could not exist there any longer since he no longer submitted to God. What I gather is that he literally fell from Heaven due to his own actions, he was not cast out. Satan damned himself by separating himself from God.

 

A thought I've also had before (and my mom brought this up once and I was shocked that I wasn't the only one thinking it) is this: what if Satan and the demons can eventually be forgiven the same as we can, once the bible has been completely fulfilled? When we hear the phrase "eternal damnation" we think there is no changing it because of our sense of time; but this is God we're talking about. What's to stop him from allowing you several eternities? One of damnation, perhaps, but perhaps another of fulfilled existence as his perfect creation.


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Is it arrogance to think that, whether there's a god or not, we would be able to pin him down like a butterfly on a board just like we can do to the things he gave us to play with? I've felt like it is. Don't lose me here, but I find that when I search for God the way he wants me to search for him, I find him quickly. I can't find him through humanity's methods because he doesn't want to be found that way. He wants to be found personally, in thought.

 

It is just as arrogant to impose a limitation on something you know nothing of. You can proclaim that the bottom of a pool is exactly 8 feet down, but until you actually jump into the pool and take a measurement, you are simply making a close guess (based on a sign, perhaps).

 

I'm going to quote Richard Dawkins, fully expecting nobody to read any of it:

 

 

Consciousness is the biggest puzzle facing biology, neurobiology, computational studies and evolutionary biology. It is a very, very big problem. I don’t know the answer. Nobody knows the answer. I think one day they probably will know the answer. But even if science doesn’t know the answer, I return to the question, what on earth makes you think that religion will? Just because science so far has failed to explain something, such as consciousness, to say it follows that the facile, pathetic explanations which religion has produced somehow by default must win the argument is really quite ridiculous. Nobody has an explanation for consciousness. That should be a spur to work harder and try to understand it. Not to give up and just say, “Oh well, it must be a soul.” That doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t explain anything. You’ve said absolutely nothing when you’ve said that.

 

 

As for personal experience, I wouldn't bat an eye at it. Not because it has to do with religion, but because of the origin of it.

 

As Richard Dawkins put it: http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/258-why-there-is-no-god

 

 

The argument from personal experience is the one that is most convincing to those who claim to have had one. But it is the least convincing to anyone else, especially anyone knowledgeable about psychology. Many people believe in God because they believe they have seen a vision of him — or of an angel or a virgin in blue — with their own eyes. Or he speaks to them inside their heads. You say you have experienced God directly? Well, some people have experienced a pink elephant, but that probably doesn't impress you. Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, distinctly heard the voice of Jesus telling him to kill women, and he was locked up for life. George W. Bush says that God told him to invade Iraq (a pity God didn't vouchsafe him a revelation that there were no weapons of mass destruction).

 

Individuals in asylums think they are Napoleon or Charlie Chaplin, or that the entire world is conspiring against them, or that they can broadcast their thoughts into other people's heads. We humour them but don't take their internally revealed beliefs seriously, mostly because not many people share them. Religious experiences are different only in that the people who claim them are numerous. Sam Harris was not being overly cynical when he wrote, in The End of Faith: "We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call them 'religious'; otherwise, they are likely to be called 'mad', 'psychotic' or ' delusional'... Clearly there is sanity in numbers. And yet, it is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts, while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window. And so, while religious people are not generally mad, their core beliefs absolutely are."

Why do I quote Richard Dawkins, can't I come up with my own statements? Absolutely, but anything I could come up with would simply be a facsimile of what Richard Dawkins has written, and he has made his arguments with the most clarity I've ever seen. The articles here are but small snippets from the many books he's written. I fully expect most people to glance at it and nothing more, because a lot of people in this topic don't take a quotation or article seriously enough to actually consider it.

 

 

There is so much debate over creation versus evolution, and I often have to take a step back and wonder why. Where did this debate originate? Did God say to anyone that evolution is completely false? No. Humanity decided it thought it knew what God wanted and began fighting it in his name. When you step outside that debate, isn't evolution the closest we can come to finding evidence for God's existence through our methods? It's right there in front of us - it was either planned or it wasn't, and the chances of it being planned seem a lot higher to me than the chances of it being... well, chance.

The debate over evolution is fueled by ignorance of how it works in the first place. There is no "chance" whatsoever involved in the theory of evolution, and anyone who says so very quickly demonstrates their complete ignorance in the subject. Evolution is driven by a mechanism called natural selection, which quickly and efficiently wipes out genes, and favors others, in an orderly and consistent way which is 99% dependent on the surrounding environment's compatability with them. Natural selection is the backbone of the entire theory of evolution, and without it there wouldn't be a theory in the first place (it would be just a hypothesis, as it was before natural selection was discovered by the naturalist Charles Darwin). Put simply: Traits that are beneficial to the survival of the organism will be more likely to live on through reproduction, while traits that are not beneficial (or detrimental) to the survival of the organism will be less likely to live on through reproduction.

Instead of writing up an entire essay on how it works, here's a youtube video:

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Oh cool, I'm studying some of this stuff in Medieval Philosophy. It's been really interesting to see where a lot of our cultural beliefs originated.

 

Thomas Aquinas was a theologian / philosopher combo from the 12th century, who is famous for starting with Christian theology and essentially fusing it with Aristotelian philosophy, which was all the rage at the time (not to mention banned by the pope). Canonized as a saint, Thomas is one of the "doctors" of the church -- a title bestowed upon those who perform landmark work in defending / expanding / explaining the church's theology.

 

Aquinas presented several rational arguments for God (and attacked a few weak ones), but asserted that rational arguments won't actually convince anyone -- they can only help to justify people who already believe in God. For Aquinas, philosophy (which includes natural science) is a handmaiden to theology. There are just some things we can't find out without divine revelation.

 

Of course, people who haven't experienced revelation (or perhaps choose to ignore it) seem perfectly capable of practicing science/philosophy without theology. I'm content with secularization.

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@Mars

You misunderstand my statement, I know how evolution works. I meant the fact that it started in the first place; the first cells to ever "live" would have been created by chance if not planned.

 

What limitations am I imposing? I proposed a thought, not an absolute; my post has nothing to do with "this is why God exists," it's an explanation of "this is why there is no way to argue over God's existence." What part of the universe would you have me dive in and measure to find God? That's the point of the first paragraph of mine you quoted. I have a sense that you can only find God the way he wants to be found - in thought and feeling.

 

As for Dawkins' quotes, I find his view limited. He is operating from a standpoint that I see many people in, which is "logic excludes emotion." But consider the concept of God for a second - God is love. If he exists, his existence implies that emotion is one of the most basic fabrics of reality. This would mean that a feeling is just as valid as looking at something with your eyes if it were an honest feeling. Of course there is sanity in numbers, if millions experience the same feeling it offers more credit than for one person to experience it alone.


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As for Dawkins' quotes, I find his view limited. He is operating from a standpoint that I see many people in, which is "logic excludes emotion." But consider the concept of God for a second - God is love. If he exists, his existence implies that emotion is one of the most basic fabrics of reality. This would mean that a feeling is just as valid as looking at something with your eyes if it were an honest feeling. Of course there is sanity in numbers, if millions experience the same feeling it offers more credit than for one person to experience it alone.

I think your point is "there are some things that cannot be known through pure reason."

 

3 ways of fixing belief (that I know of):

  • Authority (someone tells you what to believe)
  • Personal Revelation / Tenacity
  • Empiricism / Science

Many people seem to opt for a spiritual & scientific combo, where they believe science but fall back on revelation for the unknowable. It's a matter of personal taste (perhaps tenacity) which method of fixing belief is best. Of course, we rely on all three including authority -- none of us was able to comprehend a calendar on the day we were born, so we rely on the authority of others to tell us when our birthday is.

 

I think everyone here believes in evolution, for example.

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I think your point is "there are some things that cannot be known through pure reason."

Yes exactly. "Reason" as we know it is not a perfect way of knowing the truth - it is still a human concept. What I'm saying is, if there were a way to validate emotions as connections to God, would that not be added to our list of ways to use reason to discern things? I propose that emotion can be a valid method of reasonable observation, however there is no way to record it for evidence.

 

I think everyone here believes in evolution, for example.

Yes, for sure.

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