BTW, right before you posted I added to the end of that sentence “or seem to be losing any sleep over it.”
Also, I started with “If my family members found out for certain that I was going to be kidnapped.”
They knew it was going to happen since the organization is skilled and powerful, but they would try their hardest. If they did give up hope, again, my sister, a very anxious and emotional person, would be crying non-stop and not sleep at night. She would be talking about my fate with others incessantly, as would many family members. I already told you what action and reaction my eventual torture in the afterlife elicits.
What would work on me and what they “know” would or wouldn’t work on me are different things. But even if they “knew” this organization couldn’t be stopped from completing a mission, they would try. They would be very upset that the inevitable was going to happen and attempt to convince me that others are out to get me. There wouldn’t be an occasional chuckle or eye-roll at my nonacceptance like there is regarding my atheism.
I believe I have asked my sister in a phone conversation years ago, but I don’t recall her response. Her responses to religious inconsistencies weren’t very memorable. I do recall asking her husband about it. He told me that God is just saying that is the punishment for non-belief to scare people into believing, but He wouldn’t actually go through with it. How he knows this, I don’t know. But my guess is that he’s not a true believer and said that as an out as to why he’s not trying to save me. He can’t admit, probably even to himself, that he doesn’t need to save me not because God is lying for our own good, but because deep down he knows the religion he’s grown up with doesn’t reflect how things work.
You raise a good point. If Adam and Eve were metaphorical, not actual people, then so was the talking snake, not to mention the apple, the gal from grace, and Original Sin itself. All metaphorical. Therefore, there is no Original Sin to be redeemed from, and no actual need for a Saviour. If Jesus actually existed, there was certainly no need for Him to be sacrificed and resurrected.
Could the converse also be true? That deep down inside everyone knows there isn’t a God, and so latches on to this agreed-upon fairy tale because it preferable to realizing there is no one really watching out for us and no great hereafter? Belief in a deity can be comforting, providing others also believe in it, but it can also be delusional.
Not to be crude, but what if that “fun” actually is God? I mean, it does have something to do with how life is created, the most god-like thing we humans are capable of…
Food for thought. And I believe it’s one thing we all have in common.
That’s ONE of the flavors. The other is what I mentioned in post #5. I have had people tell me in dead seriousness that a person can commit any sort of immorality and still be a Christian.
It has just occurred to me why one could claim to know what a person really believes ‘deep down’. I mean, it sounds like a reasonable explanation: psychology.
Psychologists study how the mind functions and use behavior and language (interpreted as behavior as well) as evidence or indication of how the mind works. Actions, feelings, thoughts and our reports on all this stem from the way our mind works on different levels, including ‘deep down’. To a certain extent, depending on their experience and flair, psychologists (even amateurs) may be able determine what a person really believes ‘deep down’.
The problem is that psychological research is often unreliable. In August 2015, the Open Science Framework team published an article in “Science” showing the results of their tests that analyzed modern psychological research in the US and Europe. They put to test 100 psychology experiments from leading journals in this field by replicating them and observing their effects. The effects were far weaker than they had been during the original experiments (that is, not even half in size/magnitude). In addition, although remarkable effects had been observed during almost all of the original experiments, only 36% of the replications reported anything significant.
While critics might wonder what all the authors of those psychology experiments really believed ‘deep down’, I would say that we can always speculate but we’ll probably never know.
Too many people say they believe something but their actions don’t back it up. Belief is just that. Belief is not fact. Only if proven. many people who claim to be Christian do not follow the teachings of Jesus; Like: Love your enemies, return good for evil, don’t judge etc., I don’t remember Jesus saying ;“to go to Church or pray”, He did tell them how to pray, but he said " Go to your room, close the door, pray to your father in secret, he who hears in secret will answer in secret. Some Christian’s I know spend more time trying to get others to follow their beliefs than to live them themselves.
No, because in our inner being we are Jesus, and have always have been and have the power to overcome death. We are all God’s children, with the capacity of Jesus powers. And Jesus has come forth many times over history and still does today, working through different cultures and religious structures, the account of Jesus in the New Testament is for a divine purpose, but that path to eternal life is always there and set in the human heart for those who will seek it. This is the reason that Christians pray in the name of Jesus, because they are Jesus (meaning God’s child). Jesus did what He did because of who He was, his heart is the heart of God, and that is what compelled him to do the work of the Father in the manner he did it and was done to him.
To compare and contrast, Buddha also claimed his god self, with a demon opposing and accusing him, and claimed eternal life, overcoming the cycle of reincarnation (which means suffering and death over and over again). In this Buddha is Jesus and Jesus is Buddha, and there have been many more, from the beginning, and still are today. There is a term in Buddhism which describes why Jesus had to suffer and die and be raised. It is something like Buddhasutra, which is a enlightened being who choses to come to earth and help others, instead of just taking the ‘prize’ of enlightenment and running with it (which is sometimes said the 3rd level), and this described the highest ‘level’ achievable, and one of the reasons Jesus is lifted so high, and suffered so much.
Here’s the problem with that, yes you are correct, except it’s a dead end. A reality that exists at the same time as the other reality. Once that dead end is hit, which it will, that reality ceases to exist. See ‘Strodingers Cat’ analogy to see how two separate realities can exist for a time.
And in my experience, both realities work somewhat different, and things on one doesn’t necessarily pass to the other, so yes it can appear delusional, but for the person it not only works, but it is amazing.
Somewhat yes, because it is a different reality that one must learn to accept, but again it works. Many people have found that the reality we exist in is the illusion, Buddha makes this clear, as does Plato with the cave analogy. Jesus teaches us to think in heavenly terms, not world terms. It is the worldly view is the false belief, one that does offer some comfort, but ultimately a illusion which binds up to a cave wall with chains unable to understand anything outside.
You only believe this because you happened to have been born after this particular group of stories were created. If you were born 10,000 years ago, you’d think that volcanoes, earthquakes, storms, eclipses, diseases and various other natural phenomena were punishments because various (other) gods were angry with you and required some kind of tribute or sacrifice to appease their anger. And you would not hesitate to sacrifice a goat, or a virgin, because you were absolutely certain - as certain as you are now - that that was what your god(s) demanded of you.
You rationalize your entire belief system based on where and when you were born. Nothing more, nothing less. I’ve no doubt that deep down you want/need to believe these stories you tell yourself and others. I do wonder, if in times of true introspection, you consider the actual known facts of your reality in space and time. And if and when you do, does it give you pause when you must realize that a human/earth centered belief system based only on the (unreliably) recorded history of the last 2000 years is entirely myopic and wrong?
So you believe that there are two (or more) literally real literally concurrent realities that people simultaneously exist in, often unknowingly, despite the fact the realities are slightly different. So, like, in one reality a person starts climbing a ladder, but in the other reality the person just is doing a stupid climbing in place motion because there’s no ladder there but they don’t know it.
What happens if somebody gets hit by a bus (or a divine smiting, or a poison vial triggered by radioactive decay) and dies in one reality, but is still alive in the other? Do people in both realities still see him? If he grabs somebody else and drags them away (into the path of a bus), do they get dragged in the other reality too?
This is a very radical and very entertaining worldview, but I’m not sure it works from a practical functional standpoint.