I really didn’t find God, He found me. Yes it was getting rid of the impersonal ‘BS’ that we all have been taught, actually this too was a act of God, as all that stuff was ‘shattered’ one day, and I had to learn all over again.
The God I believe in is the always loving Father of all of us, waiting for us, as described in the parable of the prodigal son. Along with Jesus, the Son of God, which is God living and acting in humans today, along with the Holy Spirit, which is spiritual form of God which gives us, God’s children, insight as to the truth. All 3 are the one and only God and fully so, and we all are to be part of that.
You’re welcome. BTW, I am a she. I find it fascinating how many Reform and less traditional Jews responded to my post. In the U.S., religion and God are so often defined purely in terms of Christian beliefs that the sometimes very different approach of Judaism gets ignored.
Frankly, I’m not at all sure that Moses and Abraham existed. I’m well aware that there is very little evidence that the Exodus ever took place in a strictly historical sense, and Abraham far preceeds that. Of course that doesn’t stop me from trying to understand God’s role in the world through my interpretation of the stories of Moses and Abraham. The story of the burning bush resonates with me, as does the “still, small voice” of God. I have definitely heard the voice of God, the way that AHunter3 describes it, as something in my own head. Just the firing of neurons, or whatever? Possibly. It makes sense to me as God, and it makes sense to me that the ancient Israelite peoples understood it that way and wrote about it that way, using their own experiences and myths to describe it.
I used to believe that. Now I believe they were all stories, some compiled legends and some made up. The thing that really got me was the “history” I learned in Hebrew school was treated as every much a set of facts as the history I read in Landmark books. It wasn’t until much later did I learn that the first part was purely bull, and the Biblical archeology books even later showed that even the latter part - David and Solomon - were bull also.
My Hebrew School history, by the way, started with Abram, and didn’t even pretend that Adam and Eve and Noah were factual. That might have been one reason they were so insidious.
Exactly as I would have put it myself. If Diogenes wants to maintain that non-material means non-existent, then he needs to argue that with the editors of dictionaries, because they don’t agree with him.
It’s been a widely-known fact for thousands of years that the essence of a human being is invisible. (Also inaudible, unsmellable, &c…) That is to say, a human being could live next to me for years or even decades, and I could see them, talk with them, spend almost every waking minute with them, yet not truly know them. They could still hide all or part of their nature, mislead about some of their true feelings and thoughts, or simply keep their innermost being a mystery. Hence human beings are not purely physical beings, because the reductionist view that takes humans down to animals–and eventually down to chemicals–is not a full description.
So if human begins are invisible in their essence, then there’s nothing illogical about the possibility of a being that’s entirely invisible (from the material standpoint). Indeed, reasoning from what we know about humans points us towards just such a possibility. A human being at a high level of development–one who is self-controlled, careful, thoughtful, and philosophical–has an essential nature much less visible than a human being at a low level–hedonistic, selfish and impulsive. Hence if beings at a level higher than humanity did exist, we’d logically expect that even less of their essence would be describable in the materialist and reductionist sense.
Lastly, since human beings can choose if and when to reveal certain aspects of themselves, we’d expect higher beings to have the same ability. Since I do believe that God has revealed Himself in human history, both supremely in the person of Jesus Christ and at other times by the workings of the Holy Spirit, I obviously do not believe that God in non-existent. Let me offer a story that my priest told me:
When he was younger, he was working in a parish in Miami when a woman came up to him with a panicked look on her face. The woman claimed that her four-year-old daughter was going insane and hearing voices in her head. The priest asked to see the daughter. When they were together, he asked the girl, “What are the the voices saying?”
The girl answered: “Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might, heaven and earth are full of your glory, hosanna in the highest.”
The priest then asked, “Are they saying anything else?”
The girl then turned to her mother and said, “They say that both you and the baby inside you will almost die, but that everything will be all right in the end.”
At this point, only the women, her husband, and her doctor knew that she was pregnant. Near the end of the pregnancy, she suffered placental abruption and had extremely heavy blood loss. The baby was born very prematurely and had to have surgery to repair a heart defect just hours after birth. But both mother and baby survived and fully recovered.
So while events like that aren’t a necessary part of my faith, they do occur.
One of the reasons the request for us to disprove god is invalid is because there are many, many, definitions of god. You have correctly objected to people defining those they don’t like out of Christianity, so how can you define proposed gods out of godhood? In any case, the One True God version is fairly recent - Zeus hardly was the One True God.
I have no idea what is going to satisfy believers. I do think you are right that this spirit stuff is a stop just before atheism, since it attracts none of the scorn we get from being atheist. But it is more than that. My wife has retreated to a very vague deism, because she is very uncomfortable with there being nothing at all. My kids have no problem, so I suppose they got my non-religion gene.
I wasn’t saying all or even most believers believe in a spirit only, but it seems popular among the set of intellectuals responding to Dawkins. I think the Holy Spirt (Casper the Holy Ghost?) is part of that infinity associated with the God who visits and chats with us. The God who is actually the universe doesn’t visit and show us his bum, as I understand it.
Careful, you’ll bring out the “does love exist” crowd. Non-material things such as processes certainly exist - but they are all tied to material things. Something strictly non-material (and photons are material) doesn’t exist, true.
Beware the trap of saying something or things is a system and thinking you have said something interesting about it. I doubt that many biologists actually believe in the fallacy you’ve stated. Evolution tells us we are not special, as does DNA. Those who believe in a God who created us are much more likely to think animals are here for us, and to doubt that animals did just fine for hundreds of millions of years before we bothered to show up.
The very fact that we believe it proves it to be true. As for being the only or most sentient being, I don’t know of any scientist who thinks this.
Singer’s morality cleverly defines those species he wants to protect as sentient. But, how many of the preferences an animal - or a human - makes is from being sentient, and how many are a product of genes and environment. If you define preference broadly enough you can bring it down to the single celled animal level, after all.
Kit Carson and Grizzly Adams might have a bone to pick with this statement. They did a lot better than a single zebra would.
Oh, nonsense. The cultural collective (two bit phrase for tribe?) was there long before religion. Since we are a social species, we have lots of social groupings, and religion is only one, though a successful one.
<lots of vague stuff snipped. I live in California, and even I don’t buy it as being interesting.>
No, I think we are a fluke of the universe. We have no right to be here. If you can hear it or not, the universe is laughing behind our backs.
If I understand this correctly, God is equivalent to the Universe and the Universe is sentient to the extent that there are sentient beings in it (almost certainly more than just us.) Now, how does the ability of these beings affect anything. At the moment we are stuck on one world pretty much. If all sentient species are like us, the universe god is kind of in a coma, with some mental processes running but not any which can affect its essence. Do we have to get to the throwing stars around point to be interesting?
I see where you are pointing but there’s nothing there but a bunch of subatomic particles interacting with each other. Attributing the behavior of those subatomic particles to this illusory Diogenes the Cynic does not add anything to our understanding of those events as far as I can see. While it is true that some of the more complex epiphenomena cannot as of yet be explained with full rigor as the outcome of equations that we have now governing the location mass and momentum and charge of those particles, no one here doubts that if we did have sufficiently comprehensive information, more complete understanding of some of the finer points of particle behavior, and more raw computing power to address the enormous volume of variables, we would be able to do so. No one is seriously proposing that some of those behaviors is actually due to this “Diogenes the Cynic” exerting its will and overriding the laws of physics as they apply to those particles.
There is no such thing as Diogenes the Cynic and it’s rather embarrassing to have conversations this day and age with folk who apparently believe that there is.
He also wasn’t called “God”; he was called Zeus. “God” is simply a means of referring to the Judeo-Christian monotheist God, with all the baggage of intolerance and control that involves.
False comparison; there’s plenty of evidence that Diogenes exists, and his existence violates no physical laws. He can be talked to be anyone on the board, and respond in a way anyone can see without appealing to mystic revelation. The opposite of claims that God exists.
There is NO evidence that Diogenes the Cynic exists that can’t be explained away as actually evidence of the subatomic particles whose behavior is ENTIRELY responsible for everything you attribute to “Diogenes the Cynic”. If you believe otherwise by all means provide some evidence.
Of course “his” existence violates no physical laws. Did I say that there cannot be a “Diogenes the Cynic” because you are asserting that “he” has impossible characteristics? I most certainly did not! (There may BE silly people who make such claims but not in THIS thread, oh no). What I said was that positing the existence of a “Diogenes the Cynic” adds nothing to our understanding of what we already comprehend as subatomic particles and their predictable, quantifiable, physics-obeying behavior. So why use the construct “Diogenes the Cynic”? What does this formulation bring to the table?
It’s what the collection of subatomic particles in question calls itself on this message board. It’s easier to deal with him as a unit and not on the level of particles.
All you are doing is engaging in an old, bad parody of scientific reductionism.
If you’re addressing me, I’d like to point out that I have asserted nothing except to point out that Diogenes’s claim is a mere assertion. In this thread, I have not argued for or against the existence of a spirit or anything immaterial. Rather, I have pointed out that Diogenes needs to substantiate his assertion. I trust that everyone can see this distinction.
No, it’s not. We can perceive the material world, and there’s no evidence for anything else. It is the*** logical default***, not an assertion to assume that there is nothing else unless and until evidence comes in otherwise. It is the obligation of those who claim that something else exists to provide evidence; not **Diogenes’**s to prove a negative.
No, it isn’t. Even if we do grant the claim that we do not yet have any evidence for the non-material, the logical default is to withhold judgment – NOT to adamantly insist that nothing immaterial can possibly exist.
For pity’s sake, we can’t even begin to perceive everything with our own galaxy, much less the entire universe. To declare that something cannot possibly exist simply because we haven’t perceived it (again, if we grant that claim) is hubris in the extreme. You need to have a firmer argument than that – especially since you’re trying to rule out ANY immaterial thing of ANY kind or nature whatsoever.
Again, it’s interesting how certain people here will demand some sort of scientific test for the existence of a spirit, and yet resort to unscientific assertions that absolutely nothing immaterial can possibly exist anywhere or at any time. This demand for scientific proof is apparently discarded when it gets in the way of materialist assumptions.
Thanks for the response, which was just the kind of thing I was looking for. If I can test my understanding, your revelation convinced you that the universe had purpose in some sense, right? And it sounds like you went from a more or less standard belief, which was unsatisfactory, to less of a belief, because of those problems, to your present belief. I wonder how many others rebound like that.
Deism is a subset of the kind of thing I’m describing, which is more pantheism. In deism the god does not interact with his creation, in this the god more or less is his creation.
Animism assumes intelligence in something. The construction of an android involves placing intelligence into something, totally different. Imputing malice to your computer is a type of animism, which is clearly something wired into us.
Imagination is indeed an essential part of cognition, yet DerTrihs is correct since the imaginary is not real by definition. The creative process is the thing that transforms the imaginary into the real. It might be done by being captured in fiction, or the imaginary might be an idea for a program which becomes a real program. You are confusing the idea with the reality. As anyone who has done anything creative knows full well, the limitations of our skill and natural law makes the real and the imaginary mismatch. Which is often very frustrating.
