i most certainly was not talking about a collective of gods ala the mythical gods of rome or greece....
everyones own soul is their higher power, its about the duality of a personality and a soul... the 'life' and the 'after/before life'.....
do you believe in God
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henno
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Flame-Sky Diver
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Do I believe in God?
Wait... better question: do I care if there is any God? I don't. Existence/non-existence of God does not affect the run of my life in any way.
Basically, we have two possibilities regarding the creation of life: 1) it's some random reaction in a random universe which just happened, 2) it's a thing planned and executed by somebody. Any way we look at it, it seems it could be both. Now we cannot "find out" the truth, neither can we find out why do things happen in our lives. Is it a happenstance or is it somebody's will? The result is the same - good and bad things happen. People try to explain why and there you have the god/no god debate. Obviously, as long as nobody tries to convert me to their theory/belief or hurt me because their belief says he should, it's OK whatever they do. What some people say are God's actions is a coincidence to others. The problem is it looks like a coincidence and we cannot tell what (if anything) is behind it. Things happen in this life no matter what you do.
Of course, we have the instructions from the holy books telling us what to do in our life to be "saved" in the next phase of existence. Most of it is just the fine stuff like "be kind and don't kill anybody" which most people including atheists live in accord with. This is the recipe for survival... otherwise we would have killed each other years ago.
Then there are all the strange instructions like what to eat/drink, to pray and so on that most people, including myself, cannot be bothered to fulfill, because life offers so many other things to spend your time and have fun with.
It may mean I will be exposed to some sort of punishment after death, but it may also mean nothing. Nobody has returned from there to tell us, right? So we don't know, we just believe or don't believe and someday we will find ourselves disappointed, rewarded, lukewarm or just dead.
Belief in some sort of God can be restorative, can help you through hard times e.g. when your best friend dies of cancer, your mother dies in a car crash or some moron decides to completely erase your race. Strong mind, friends and the will to survive can do the job as well. Either way you may be fooling yourself or you may be right... but, as I said, you won't get to know it (at least in this life).
Now I am strongly against organised religion - it is proving every single day to be a very, very bad idea. You get all the propaganda, manipulation with the crowd... eventually you end up killing people because they're from the other group... and mutual hatred. Besides, every major religion includes some sort of discrimination of a group of people which is justified by "it's god's will". Sometimes, it's just a matter of interpretation of the holy writings. But hey, discrimination is wrong, killing people in the name of whatever is wrong as well.
Another big problem (for the powerful ones it's the advantage) of organised religion is bigotry. Bigotry in modern world allows to manipulate people through religion. But bigotry is not coming from nowhere, bigotry is coming from organised religion (with the help of extreme circumstance) which is clearly contravening the frames of the holy books and their positive message.
It's these reasons why, if I believe in God, I don't want to be organized and I don't want to do everthing the holy book and the preacher says. Individual approach to God all the way.
So back to the initial question: do I believe in God? I cannot imagine all the universe is just randomness, I believe there is something behind it, something that got it moving at least. But it does not affect my life in any way, it's distant and on a completely different level. If it regulates all that happens here, ok, but I have not seen any "life v1.0 walkthrough" and recipe to get the rewards that really works... except for what everybody's trying to do... do whatever you want, whether it's killing others, living in peace with them, belief in God or atheistic view. Surely in the first scenario you may find yourself dead earlier.
Does this make sense?
Wait... better question: do I care if there is any God? I don't. Existence/non-existence of God does not affect the run of my life in any way.
Basically, we have two possibilities regarding the creation of life: 1) it's some random reaction in a random universe which just happened, 2) it's a thing planned and executed by somebody. Any way we look at it, it seems it could be both. Now we cannot "find out" the truth, neither can we find out why do things happen in our lives. Is it a happenstance or is it somebody's will? The result is the same - good and bad things happen. People try to explain why and there you have the god/no god debate. Obviously, as long as nobody tries to convert me to their theory/belief or hurt me because their belief says he should, it's OK whatever they do. What some people say are God's actions is a coincidence to others. The problem is it looks like a coincidence and we cannot tell what (if anything) is behind it. Things happen in this life no matter what you do.
Of course, we have the instructions from the holy books telling us what to do in our life to be "saved" in the next phase of existence. Most of it is just the fine stuff like "be kind and don't kill anybody" which most people including atheists live in accord with. This is the recipe for survival... otherwise we would have killed each other years ago.
Then there are all the strange instructions like what to eat/drink, to pray and so on that most people, including myself, cannot be bothered to fulfill, because life offers so many other things to spend your time and have fun with.
It may mean I will be exposed to some sort of punishment after death, but it may also mean nothing. Nobody has returned from there to tell us, right? So we don't know, we just believe or don't believe and someday we will find ourselves disappointed, rewarded, lukewarm or just dead.
Belief in some sort of God can be restorative, can help you through hard times e.g. when your best friend dies of cancer, your mother dies in a car crash or some moron decides to completely erase your race. Strong mind, friends and the will to survive can do the job as well. Either way you may be fooling yourself or you may be right... but, as I said, you won't get to know it (at least in this life).
Now I am strongly against organised religion - it is proving every single day to be a very, very bad idea. You get all the propaganda, manipulation with the crowd... eventually you end up killing people because they're from the other group... and mutual hatred. Besides, every major religion includes some sort of discrimination of a group of people which is justified by "it's god's will". Sometimes, it's just a matter of interpretation of the holy writings. But hey, discrimination is wrong, killing people in the name of whatever is wrong as well.
Another big problem (for the powerful ones it's the advantage) of organised religion is bigotry. Bigotry in modern world allows to manipulate people through religion. But bigotry is not coming from nowhere, bigotry is coming from organised religion (with the help of extreme circumstance) which is clearly contravening the frames of the holy books and their positive message.
It's these reasons why, if I believe in God, I don't want to be organized and I don't want to do everthing the holy book and the preacher says. Individual approach to God all the way.
So back to the initial question: do I believe in God? I cannot imagine all the universe is just randomness, I believe there is something behind it, something that got it moving at least. But it does not affect my life in any way, it's distant and on a completely different level. If it regulates all that happens here, ok, but I have not seen any "life v1.0 walkthrough" and recipe to get the rewards that really works... except for what everybody's trying to do... do whatever you want, whether it's killing others, living in peace with them, belief in God or atheistic view. Surely in the first scenario you may find yourself dead earlier.
Does this make sense?
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DoctorFloyd
I do not believe in a sentient 'god'. Therefore I have voted no, because that is what you are asking. I do not, however, believe there is nothing other than what we can see of the world.
I believe that everything that is alive shares in some spirit, a spirit of life if you will. There are plenty of things we don't understand, but the scientific stuff we do understand proves that there is not a god, in the form that any religion would have you believe. For example, the bible states, I believe, that the Earth is only 10,000 years old. Scientific techniques, which cannot be refuted, no matter how hard you try, have enabled us to date objects back to 100s of millions of years ago, well before God sat on his cloud and 'created the world in 7 days'.
I believe that everything that is alive shares in some spirit, a spirit of life if you will. There are plenty of things we don't understand, but the scientific stuff we do understand proves that there is not a god, in the form that any religion would have you believe. For example, the bible states, I believe, that the Earth is only 10,000 years old. Scientific techniques, which cannot be refuted, no matter how hard you try, have enabled us to date objects back to 100s of millions of years ago, well before God sat on his cloud and 'created the world in 7 days'.
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mosespa
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Ah...yes...all that irrefutable scientific stuff.
The very stuff that once claimed that the world was flat...and it COULD NOT be refuted.
The very stuff that once claimed that the sun revolved around the earth...and it COULD NOT be refuted.
The very stuff that once said that the speed of light was constant...and it COULD NOT be refuted.
Scientific knowledge is simply the accumulation of what we believe to be true according to what we ourselves have figured out.
Here's the problem...we're arrogant and think that we know EVERYTHING. And then, one day, we discover that something we once held as fact is WRONG and everything has to be rewritten...then, we go back to thinking that we know EVERYTHING...and then something else gets proven wrong and everything has to be rewritten.
If you ask me, science hasn't disproved the existence of God...it has PROVEN it...by showing that everytime we think we know it all, we really don't know jack shit.
Only God can pull that off, if you ask me.
Remember, carbon dating (for example) doesn't really date the OBJECT in question...it dates the MATERIAL which makes up the object in question. This is how a Coke can gets a reading of thousands of years old...it's the aluminium in it that's that old, not the can itself.
Okay...so, let's apply that same technique to the earth itself.
Maybe it's not the earth that's millions of years old...but the material which makes up the earth.
Maybe the earth itself HAS only been here a couple of ten thousand years...but God made it from stuff that has been around much longer.
The very stuff that once claimed that the world was flat...and it COULD NOT be refuted.
The very stuff that once claimed that the sun revolved around the earth...and it COULD NOT be refuted.
The very stuff that once said that the speed of light was constant...and it COULD NOT be refuted.
Scientific knowledge is simply the accumulation of what we believe to be true according to what we ourselves have figured out.
Here's the problem...we're arrogant and think that we know EVERYTHING. And then, one day, we discover that something we once held as fact is WRONG and everything has to be rewritten...then, we go back to thinking that we know EVERYTHING...and then something else gets proven wrong and everything has to be rewritten.
If you ask me, science hasn't disproved the existence of God...it has PROVEN it...by showing that everytime we think we know it all, we really don't know jack shit.
Only God can pull that off, if you ask me.
Remember, carbon dating (for example) doesn't really date the OBJECT in question...it dates the MATERIAL which makes up the object in question. This is how a Coke can gets a reading of thousands of years old...it's the aluminium in it that's that old, not the can itself.
Okay...so, let's apply that same technique to the earth itself.
Maybe it's not the earth that's millions of years old...but the material which makes up the earth.
Maybe the earth itself HAS only been here a couple of ten thousand years...but God made it from stuff that has been around much longer.
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Flame-Sky Diver
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Well, we're much more open to new revelations now and the science of today is so less dogmatic than it was even a century ago... most scientists realize the difference between a thing that happens 99,9+% of the time the way they expected and a theory that can be right but can also be wrong.mosespa wrote:Ah...yes...all that irrefutable scientific stuff.
I'll stick with science most of the time and in the case of dating things in particular as I believe the chronology in bible only has some symbolic meaning.
All these are examples of people thinking the wrong way about something they cannot really verify. Not the biggest problems of their day-to-day life... So it should not be forgotten that it was science that allowed people to fly, have their organs transplanted, talk about some 60s bands in a virtual space etc..., not religion.mosespa wrote:The very stuff that once claimed that the world was flat...and it COULD NOT be refuted.
The very stuff that once claimed that the sun revolved around the earth...and it COULD NOT be refuted.
The very stuff that once said that the speed of light was constant...and it COULD NOT be refuted.
So if we don't know all (which we'll never know), we still know a lot... and, for heaven's sake, most of it really works and helps us. If suddenly all the pacemakers or airplanes stop working... well, then we will have to rewrite a couple of books. But if we find out one day that the universe is much older/younger than we thought... what's the problem? I really doubt we will find out (by the means science) that the bible was right all the way... and even if we did, that's ok, I'll probably become a christian.
I'm not a scientific fanatic who believes in everything, but at this point science has undoubtedly proved to be a better approach than religion for "getting to know things" on the practical level.
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DoctorFloyd
You can believe what you want to. But I just think that attributing everything we don't understand to 'God', who supposedly cares for all of us and loves all of us (bollocks, certainly no proof of that...I happen to be watching the 10 o clock news) is short sighted, and the scientific knowledge we have now, compared to back in the days before Galileo and Columbus, supplies more than enough evidence (for anyone who is not determined to say that God anticipated all our science and created everything with the idea of fooling our men in white coats... 
) to suggest that the so called 'fact' written by ancient Jewish scholars, is wrong.
) to suggest that the so called 'fact' written by ancient Jewish scholars, is wrong.-
mosespa
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ObscuredEchoes
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Flame-Sky Diver
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Are they Jews or Christians? Are they speaking generally or about some particular place in the Bible?mosespa wrote:If that's so, then WHY do I keep hearing historical scholars saying that The Bible IS "historically correct?"
Hi, I've been studying and living a busy life. But sometimes, I return.ObscuredEchoes wrote:Hi, FlameSky-diver! Where have you been? Good to see you again....
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jambo
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Stween
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There's probably some stuff that is historically accurate, and also some that is completely inaccurate. That's a widely held view even within religious circles.jambo wrote:And why do I keep hearing many historians and archaeologists saying that a lot of it is completely wrong.mosespa wrote:If that's so, then WHY do I keep hearing historical scholars saying that The Bible IS "historically correct?"
Aside from the widely known issue of how to interpret such events as those depicted in Genesis, lots of effort has gone into trying to analyse the human timeline in the Bible, both in terms of its main characters (be they fictional or otherwise), and when it was written.
These links are the tip of the iceberg, I'm sure:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_and_history
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dating_the_Bible
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
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RAWS
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Northerntube
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No!
I think it is vain for us to believe we are so special as to deserve a place in the afterlife beyond this world. These invented concepts of heaven and hell - and religion, in general - simply serve the purposes of social control.
Two bunny rabbits get together and the scientific evolutionary process takes a little from column A and a little from column B and a new bunny rabbit is made. There is no mystery, no "miracle". And we are no different, other than our cognitive and intellectual skills, none of which makes us deserving of anything other than the horrors of being a highly deneloped monkey in the modern world.
We want to believe that there is some reward for being a good person. How obnoxious!
I think it is vain for us to believe we are so special as to deserve a place in the afterlife beyond this world. These invented concepts of heaven and hell - and religion, in general - simply serve the purposes of social control.
Two bunny rabbits get together and the scientific evolutionary process takes a little from column A and a little from column B and a new bunny rabbit is made. There is no mystery, no "miracle". And we are no different, other than our cognitive and intellectual skills, none of which makes us deserving of anything other than the horrors of being a highly deneloped monkey in the modern world.
We want to believe that there is some reward for being a good person. How obnoxious!
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my breakfast.
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