user ballots
Login
Register
Add One
FAQ/Contact
Popular Ballots
Recent Popular
Recent Votes
Best
Worst
Yes or No
Choices
What If
Prediction
Advice
Would You
Crime
Recommend
Quiz
TV & Movie
Music & Radio
Political
Science
Sports
Relationship
Techonology
Culture
Philosophy
Religion
Ethics
History
Food & Health
Fashion & Beauty
Crime
FanBase
Discussion
Bug Report
|
COMMENTS:
Ahhhh. Quell your doubts, Cathexis. The fact that you describe it as being hidden is the whole point. Nothing can touch it. It's perfect. Once you direct you mind towards it you understand that all the energy that created the universe is there, between the dead atoms. That's why nobody can tell you convincingly that God exists, only moan that you would appear to prefer to live in doubt than try and find out either way.
Maybe the point of human existence is to live in doubt. In which case I am wrong and you are right.
you make some good points cretin_slap, but i believe that God is around us at all times. he is in the air we breath, he is the blood in our veins, he is in our flowing rivers, he is everywhere. even if you cant see him, you can sense that he is there. As to whether you can meet him or not in person, that question is still unanswered. you may meet him after you die, you may not. just have to wait and see.
I suppose I was especially interested in what self-professed fundamentalist/ evangelic Christians would contribute, seeing as how Belief is a central tenet of their faith.
Oh yeah. Good point. I'm off home anyway. Have fun with the jesus brigade.
Have a lovely weekend everyone.
God making Himself clear would not take away free will. If He clarifies His existence, then people are going to believe in Him because He exists, but they can still choose whether or not to do what He says. Even if disobeyers will suffer in hell, some people may be willing to go there.
Its funny how the beliefs of the conquerers are the ones that are passed through from generation to generation. And people believe whithout question and call it "faith" Ahhhh the power of the meme!
Without this blind faith, many conquerers of the past would have had to use another excuse to rape and murder their neighbors.
Honsetly, if I were God, and I'd made this piece of work we're living in, I'd be reticent about coming out in public too. And I'm NOT joking.
why is God hidden? because love, real love, must involve a choice. if that choice is taken away by God making himself completely known, then that real love could never be experienced. and since there is a choice to love, then there is a choice to hate. a choice to seperate themselves from God. so i choose to love.
jesusfreak.
If you realise that, why bother with Jesus? Surely you could argue that Jesus (the so called Son of God) takes our choice away because He is God's son.
God is what we search for, not some mental image, and a story that makes no historical sense. There were stables in Bethlehem because there were no horses. You are wasting your life on a fiction, jesusfreak.
cretin slap, how does Jesus take that choice away? that doesn't make sense. explain
You said that if God made Himself completely known it would take away our choice.
I may have wrongly thought that Jesus being touted by religious types as The Son Of God counted as God making himself completely known.
Do you think that by incarnating as a human being, God was somehow not infringing our free will that he himself gave us?
Jesus did not infringe upon our free will. A lot of people back then still chose not to believe in Him. If Jesus had made Himself completely known, don't you think that everybody today would be christians. And Jesus came to the earth more than just to let people know that God exists. He also came to earth to die for our sins so we don't have to suffer eternal death.
Dont you think that Constantine died a young death the history of Christianity would have been much diffrent and many who today are Christians would have been something else. In history the losing side of many battles adopted the conquerers religion. The Roman Empire adopted Christianity (and no doubt picked and chose what it liked from the Bible) and used the large empire to spread the word at the edge of a sword.
duckhead, I don't know much about the history of christianity so I can't comment on that, but I can say that the bible had been misinterpreted by certain "christians" over the years, and this misinterpretation allowed them to believe that their violence was justified, in order to spread the word of God. This is not the true teaching of the bible.
I think that is where we differ, jesusfreak. If God is perfect (which it is) then there is seriously no room for Jesus. It's quite clear to me that he was no more divine than, for example Nathan Lane, who is currently on the London stage performing in Mel Brooks musical The Producers.
Jesus supposedly said that the only way to get to God (the father) was through him.
I can categorically tell you that Jesus was either lying or got it hopelessly wrong. You can get to God any time you like because it's already always there. No need for any perfect men or trinities or Gods incarnate. There is simply no need to concern yourself with this Jesus character. Everything you need for your spiritual progress is within you already.
Most people believe out of fear anyway, they are scared that if they dont beleive and they end up being wrong about God then they will go to Hell. Just about every single religion is based on fear, everyone is scared NOT to believe.
Duckhead, I don't believe in God because I am afraid of going to hell. I believe because I know God exists and I want to spend eternity with Him in heaven.
heavenly voice booms down from above...
"YOU ARE NOT SPENDING ETERNITY WITH ME IN HEAVEN JESUSFREAK, PLEASE!! TRY BUDDHISM OR SOMETHING"
Civilian, I have looked into the other religions, and I have found that I believe in christianity. Thanks for the suggestion, though.
Well, Cathexis, it seems that your question is, like most of us here in the West, oriented toward the Christian/Judaic notion of God. From this limited perspective, God is fairly confusing. Lots of contradictions, and many qualities we wouldn't want in a neighbor, much less a God (i.e., wrathful, spiteful, jealous, capricious, et al). So, however God may be, many of us are hopeful that He/She/It is not anywhere near this vision.
From my perspective, God isn't hidden at all. The eternal gamut of being (unbeginning, unending and boundless in all directions)IS God, including the manifestations we call "our selves."
I conceive of the eternity of God as a kind of eternal ocean with no shore lines. We are like currents in this ocean. So long as we move, we seem to have identity separate from the ocean, but when we "slow" and "end" all that is/was us blends back into the eternal ocean to be swept this way and that eternally.
What we seem to cling to in this existence is our individuality -- our unique identity as the wave. This, as most systems of belief speak to in various ways, is not possible, and the more attached you become to the phenomenological universe, the more difficult you make it for yourself to transition back to the eternity that supports your existence and is literally who you are. For, though we see ourselves as individuals, it is not real. This doesn't mean it isn't real in the sense that it doesn't exist, only that all things which go away, are temporary and illusory.
This isn't fodder for the sheep who never look up from their stanchions to see the endless sky above them. These cling to the apparent individuality of their temporal existences fearfully hoping and praying for a continuation of the dichotomous existence that, in reality, causes them so much agony. The do not realize that their return to oneness with eternity is both their beginning and their end, and beginning... T.S.Eliot got it right, I think, when he noted, toward the end in "Little Gidding" of Four Quartets
"We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/
Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time."
On the other hand, maybe the crazies have it right. But I certainly don't think so, and hope not.
|
|
