“God” is a supernatural being. “Love” is a feeling. To say “God is love” makes as much sense as saying “My left shoe is confusion” or “Frogs are hurt.”
Czarcasm, you are simply divine. 
The Creator is no more supernatural than His creation.
Love is far greater than just emotion or feelings, it is a power. Love can heal, change hearts and minds, and dispell all fear.
God is unconditional Love, compassionate, and caring.
If you wish to know God, seek Him within you. God is both the architect and the essence of all things.
Love
Does anyone else here suspect that lekatt is some kind of automated religious senslessness generator? Maybe I’ll work on one of those next weekend. Could be fun.
No, it isn’t.
Hey, this making-baseless-assertions game is fun!
The phrase “God is love” is a meaningless string of words. You might as well say that God is “jump”, “the the smell of frying bacon”, or “quickly”. Love isn’t a thing. It doesn’t exist of its own accord. It is merely one of many emotions experienced by the animal we call Man (and possibly others).
If you want to keep saying that God is love, you first need to show that love can exist outside the framework of the human mind.
Before somebody starts talking about near death experiences and the validity of TV psychics, any chance we can get back to the OP and discuss the most convincing arguments for the non-existence of God?
Barry
Well the little sidetracks are part of what convinces me of my own tenets. People who spout narrow-minded, unconditional statements like
‘You don’t know God until you look for him. Know love and you will know God’
simply reinforce my view that the whole concept of faith in the supernatural is adrift in its own set of circular arguments. In the end one must draw illogical conclusions in order to get off the carousel.
For what purpose should I look for a God? Why not look for answers rather than presuppose them? I know love. I know unconditional love. The love for my children fills me with joy and happiness and knows no bounds. I am open-minded, tolerant, and the genuine love of my fellow man is a value that I aspire to. Why is it then that I know love but that it is revealed to me as a (powerful) human emotion evolved to give a social animal competitive advantage and not as a God? What am I missing?
If there is a plan to the Universe that is not indifferent to the fate of mankind then it has seriously gone off the rails. My friends who last week lost their 7 year old daughter knew unconditional love. Now they know grief, sorrow and despair and a future that seems bleak and tortuous. Are they supposed to learn something about God(s) from this? Is this some kind of sick test of their ability to have faith in a supposedly benevolent supernatural being (or ‘Love Force’ if you want)? C’mon, what’s the plan?
For those that believe there is a plan and a purpose to the universe devised by some greater entity, what conceivably is the value of these events to the individuals concerned or mankind as a whole (and none of this ‘we cannot suppose to understand God’s purpose’ twaddle)?
If there is no conceivable purpose that makes any sense, why invent the idea that there may be a purpose which we don’t understand? Why not accept (or at least consider) that this suggests there may actually be no purpose?
But back to the topic, Barry…
If Gods cannot be found through reason and rationale then I prefer that they remain undisclosed. I believe the tool of reasoned thought gives me the best chance for first, survival and second, achieving something worthwhile in this short and unique life that I am lucky to have. I have no wish to abandon it so that I may experience blind faith again. It served me fine as a child but is hazardous as an adult.
Yes, the most convincing arguments for the non-existence of God are the intellectual ones. Using logic and reason one can easily prove the non-existence of any God. Or for that matter anything.
I will leave you with the discussion by saying God is individual and personal, each must find Him through their own efforts.
Love
Promise?
If God can make people with enough analytical ability to quesiton whether he exists, he needs to give evidence that will prove to those people that he does exist.
If God wants me to believe in him, he needs to give me proof. It’s not enough to point out a tree and say God made that. Or say that the love I feel for my children is God. There’s no proof that any of that is God anymore than it is Santa Claus.
And it wouldn’t take much to get me to believe. One simple miracle will do. Let’s see. God, if you exist, make a mouse run across my desk right now. …Hmmm… No mouse. God, you had your opportunity and you blew it. And that wasn’t even a supernatural miracle. Let’s try an even easier one. God, make my phone ring. You don’t have to talk to me. You can hang up right away… Hmmm… Phone’s still quiet.
So it doesn’t make any sense that God would make it so hard to believe in him. If he existed and he wanted people to believe in him, he’d give more evidence.
The “point” of imposing such limits is multi-fold. First off, and perhaps most importantly, I think that it is only the traditional scripture-based concepts of God that actually need to be disproved. The so-called “deist” God is merely a logical construct and doesn’t, as far as I know, have any real impact on people’s lives. The non-scriptural God has never “told” anybody anything – it hasn’t told people to hate homosexuals, that divorce is bad, that infidels should be killed, etc. In short, I see little harm in somebody using “God” merely as a way to explain the (perhaps) unexplainable as long as they don’t use their belief to justify judging and/or mistreating other people.
The second reason for the limits is that whenever anybody discusses atheism on this message board, somebody invariably pops up with the old “it’s impossible to prove or disprove the existence of God” comment. When pressed, they usually admit that they are not talking about any concept of God that has ever actually been worshipped in the history of mankind, but are instead referring to an intellectual concept of God that is defined in such a way as to be unknowable in the first place. This “god” is, I maintain, nothing more than a straw man, since those who typically call themselves atheists aren’t talking about this “god” in the first place, nor are those who call themselves “believers.”
In short, I don’t want to waste my time arguing against the existence of a being who, like the Invisible Pink Unicorn, is not actually worshipped by anybody and who, by definition, can neither be argued for or against in the first place.
Since there are plenty of people in the world who do worship the God described in the various traditional scriptures, however, I feel it is relevant to limit the discussion to these beliefs.
Barry
Fair enough, godzillatemple, and thanks for taking the time to reply. I appreciate it.
By the way, I’ve been meaning to tell you that the first time I saw your name, I misread it as godzillatemplate and I now have to do a doubletake every time to make sure it hasn’t turned in to that.
No problem. Sorry I didn’t notice your question right away.
“Godzillatemplate,” eh? Hmmmm… Well, I suppose it might be relevant had I used a template to create my Temple of Godzilla. But I didn’t.
Barry
Damn coding. Make that Temple of Godzilla.
Big Brother is no more supernatural than His creation.
Big Brother is far greater than just emotion or feelings, He is a power. Big Brother can heal, change hearts and minds, and dispell all fear.
Big Brother is unconditional Love, compassionate, and caring.
If you wish to know Big Brother, seek Him within you. Big Brother is both the architect and the essence of all things.
Big Brother
So if we invert that idea... the non-intelectual arguments are the best to prove the existence of God ? Curious isn't it ? If its something that should be plain and obvious... why do we need emotions and turned off brains to "feel" God ? Shouldn't our creator and mighty diety be ever present and pervasive ?
At last you post something reasonable beyond the love is love thingy. Now I agree with you. When people stop hearing church babble and old dusty 2000+ year old books then maybe they will find God and not some religious formula full of dogma and hates.
He doesn’t have purpose, he is a basic principle. He is. He is the way things work.
I think people can be moral without believing.
I find them in my life all the time, every day. When I people who piss me off I know that I needed to meet them in order to know something about me. Why do I care about this or that behaviour? Why does it piss me off?
For starters “Autobiography of a Yogi”
by Paramahansa Yogananda, or any other book on eastern philosophy.
That’s because we don’t always see the connections, but somebody takes care of us and arranges things which are good for our learning processes.
I already told you that the existence of God cannot be proven in a previous posting.
I think that the religions are all equivalent except that they are all imperfect and changed a lot during their discovery.
Sometimes some religions puts an emphasis on some aspect which is not so important for another.
You people compare Axioms and Mathematics to Religion. You shouldn’t.
In the best case you can compare experimental science, like physics, to Religion. Mathemics is about deriving things from axioms, i.e. real deduction. Experimental physics is about induction (not deduction) of hypotheses from observed data. That’s closer to religion, but still a pretty wild comparison.
Apart from that: Imagine, 500 years ago somebody told you that there is something like electricity, but you can’t see it, you can’t smell it, you can’t hear it, and since there are no devices you don’t have any evidence of it and you can’t measure it. With your arguments you would say that you can’t believe it, right?
I find the argument rather stupid, that something we can’t measure with the current state of the art of science cannot exist. We always discovered things we never experienced centuries before.
There are things which we can’t measure and which don’t exist. But there are others which we can’t measure and which exist.
I can’t say it better.
I’ve read Autobiography of a Yogi. I read it for an Eastern Religion class, in fact. I think I still have it somewhere. I found it hilarious. Of course it proves absolutely nothing except that a nutter can write a book in which he makes one absurd supernatural claim after another. I would hardly consider that a legitimate cite.
BTW, I’ve read quite a few other books on Eastern religion as well. They’re not all as ridiculous as Yogananda’s book. I’m quite fond of Alan Watts, for instance, as well as some of the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh, Krishnamurti and Ramakrishna. I’ve been a practitioner of Zen meditation for years. I still see nothing in Eastern philosophy that would indicate any supernatural intelligence in the universe or any sort of order or purpose or intent to human life.
Flonks: Who is to say that God’s existence or presence cannot be measured? Certainly not the people who wrote the scriptures upon which all regious beliefs are ultimately based. The God of the Old Testament parted the waters of the Red Sea and smote his enemies. Jesus turned water into wine and fed a multitude with a few loaves of bread and fishes (not to mention that hole rising from the dead bit). The Bible, in fact, states that the faithful will be able to perform miracles in Christ’s name. These are all things which can be measured and/or falsified.
The God of all traditional religions could most certainly be measured if he, in fact, existed. This is not an immaterial spirit who set the universe in motion and has hid himself from us ever since, but an active being who routinely intervenes in the affairs of men. This is a God who has suposedly revealed himself on numerous occasions and has told people to perform specified acts and treat people in specified ways.
As I said before, the God who, by his very nature, cannot be measured is nothing but a straw man conjured up by people who acknowledge that the traditional concept of God can’t possibly be right, but who nevertheless refuse to abandon some “warm and fuzzy” notion of God that helps them sleep better at night. And it’s also NOT the God I was referring to in my OP.
Barry