So If You Really Don't Care About God, Why Debate It All The Time???

[Alan_Owes_Bess]

A so so point IMO.

Relying on my memory, I believe december referred to “the President”, for the Bill Clinton quotes. It would be natural for anyone reading the post to assume that the current President was meant.

Ditto for the current example.

I am not making a big deal out of it. I did think the response by a number of posters to december’s misleading stunt a few days ago was way overdone anyway. However, his throwing a quote from Hillary RC into the mix probably didn’t help matters and perhaps made his post go a bit beyond the pale.

[fessie]

I assumed it referred to Dubya as well, although the fact that it apparently doesn’t really isn’t all that important, IMHO.

I thought about you guys last night when I ran across this quote from Dostoievsky (it was mentioned in another book I was reading, so I don’t know what the source actually was). Now, back when I was 13 I was interviewing a journalist for our class newspaper and I asked him for advice for writers. All he would say is “Know your Russians”. I’m sorry to say I failed to get through much Tolstoy, and Notes from Underground is about all the Dostoievsky I managed (and I don’t think he was referring to Ayn Rand, although We the Living might have counted). But I think I’d like to add this bit to my knowledge base, and I thought it was germane to our discussion here:

“Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.”

[John_Zahn]

*Originally posted by fessie *

Sometimes I get the impression that people want to believe in some kind of higher power and they’re hoping that someone in a debate will surprise them and provide a God-model they can use.

I think for a small minority that once claimed to be atheists, but are now believers, there is some truth to that. I have known of a few like this. I think it also describes you. Your latter posts bring this out:

After examining various religions and being an atheist, I feel good about the God-model I’ve adopted for myself, and it’s probably just human nature to want to share. Personally I think it’s possible to reject all religions as flawed but still believe in “God” as something we can only hope to glimpse but never truly understand, something we can experience only very personally. Anyway I find that helpful.

But is that it? Any intellectual reasons why, or only emotional ones? You have found that it makes you feel good and it gives one hope. I would think you’d have to had some preponderance of evidence that caused you to change your mind or did you switch because it just made you feel better? I understand someone being an atheist throughout their life quite well, or the conversion of believer to unbeliever, but not vice-versa. Especially if they went from fully understanding the very natural world we live in, to now all of a sudden believing in the supernatural, if the latter now applies to you. If the supernatural doesn’t apply to you, then what does your God-model consist of that you now find convincing?

JZ

[fessie]

Mr. Zahn, I think it’s a matter of neither the Christian nor the empirical approach proving adequate on their own. That’s all.
I’ll discuss it further since you asked (I assume you weren’t being rhetorical), but only with the grand caveat that I believe we all have to find our own way of knowing our own God. What works for me certainly won’t work for you - there’s just too many factors involved, too many needs to be addressed. It’s not like I now believe in God because I found the “right one”. I think we all have to devise a way to align our spiritual needs, spiritual experiences, conscience, and empirical reality as human beings. That’s all I’ve done.

I’ve noticed that posters often refer to “evidence” in discussions of the religious. I don’t think of it in that context; I’ve never personally witnessed shrubbery spontaneously bursting into flame or anything of that sort. That’s not the issue for me.

My experiences have a lot more to do with my own internal dialogue and the way I process my sense of the world. Dreams and prayer and really private moments. I find that with a sense of God in my life it’s much easier to align my internal and external experiences, to bring my sense of my life in sync with my reality, to accept and work with my sense of place in the world. I’m better able to appreciate what I’m able to accomplish, and thus I accomplish more. Faith enables me to trust more and worry less, which is also more efficient for me.

That’s hopelessly vague, isn’t it.

How about this - if one watches a lot of (American) television, shops in the malls, reads the newspapers, well then it seems that our definition of ourselves, of what makes us worthwhile, is one thing. And I’m sure that works well for a lot of people. But not for me. So when I focus on my sense of God and (some) religious writers’ opinions of what’s important, then my sense of purpose and my capacity to meet it are in alignment. A useful touchstone.

Another key quality of my God-model is the response to prayer. And it’s not a response that consists of answers, but of openings to new opportunities that enable me to find the answers myself. My God-model isn’t a tangible, answer-giving entity; it’s really just the forward movement of life itself, and my ability to be a part of that energy.

For example, just about four weeks ago I’d prayed for some guidance on certain issues. I knew whose help I really wanted but that person isn’t available to me - however, he’d given me a wonderful old book that I’ve read many times by an author whose other books are now out of print. I think I’ve gotten everything out of that book that I can at the moment. But I knew I needed more advice along those lines. And don’t you know, about 48 hours after my prayers I wound up, quite unexpectedly, at a huge used book sale with my Hubby and a friend (we got lost walking back from the beach & found ourselves in front of the Newberry Library). We all split up to do our searching (I dove into the kids’ books), and when I went to catch up with my Hubby he wasn’t quite finished. So I stood there waiting for him, glanced down at a table, and there was a mint copy of an out-of-print book by that favorite author. It gave me just what I needed at that time.

Now, I’m not saying that God (or his agents) wandered into the book sale and put that book on that table just in case I happened to stop by. I am saying, though, that the act of praying and being open to help enables me to approach each opportunity with an open mind. I spot those things because I know they’re out there, and they are. In those times when I’ve been an atheist I’ve relied on myself alone, with no expectation of help, and I didn’t find any. I’d rather move with the flow than try to engineer everything. But that’s just me.