Atheists, God and the afterlife.

I believe that if you want to know a God, He will reveal Himself to you. And if you are happy with your self sufficiency, He won’t disturb you. Having lived on both sides of not knowing Him and knowing Him, I am very glad that I took a gamble that He might exist and decided to open my heart to Him. If you pray, asking Him to give you answers and reveal Himself to you, and you do this with humility and not from a place of arrogance and indignation, you will not be disappointed.

 

No. That's Occams razor.
Just ask me anything.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor

 

theT

The freedom...yes. Well people don't get religion. It is the same freedom we use to choose our beliefs or religion.... bit we overlooked the liberty. Well we are sinners.

 

Right!

 

Let us not forget, when it comes to the argument of individuality vs the religious, one should not make it sound as if the two are incompatible.
Look at the history of philosophy; a lot of great philosophers were Christians! Aquinas, Descartes, Berkley, Locke, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Tillich, and who can forget C.S. Lewis?!
For some, they perceive that religiousness closes the intellect, but the history of philosophy (as well as art and the sciences) prove the contrary....unless one is some sort of religious fundamentalist, then that's fair game to say that that kind of religion totally destroys intellect and individual freedom.

 

I love Stephen Fry! Clearly hesgoing to hell but I love him so

 

Ah, alas, we need to feel all the more sorry for Mr. Fry, because, if he is going to hell, by John Calvin's theology, he was predestined from the beginning to be so. Makes me wonder at times if then Mr. Fry would not be so much a simple sinner, as he would be a victim as well. Same goes for all others who were "predestined". Calvin, you scrupulous authoritarian, you make my blood boil.

 

And I'm not saying this to offend you Calvinists out there, I'm just responding as a man of "free will".

 

That's understandable. The notion that God is in control of all things and that all things bring him glory is not something I always believed. I used to think I was saved because I chose God. This is, of course, a work and we can not be saved by works. Only by grace.

 

That may very well be so. But nevertheless, it does involve man's acknowledgement. It involves man's free will, otherwise there would not be any grace. Grace is a two-part story, where on one side God is involved and the other part man is involved. Man does not save himself, that is correct, but on the other hand, grace is definitely not something that is forced upon him.

 

I would say that choosing God is not a work but a decision, albeit a big one. Even if we willing choose to steer away from God, we always have the ability to redirect ourselves towards him. That is one of the many, many great significance truths about free will.

 

Haven't read all 22 pages of this thread going way back with members who are probably not even here anymore, but I thought I'd introduce a Buddhist perspective - more specifically a Mahayana one I suppose.

If anyone reading does not know, Buddhism is basically non-theistic so it doesn't talk about God either way. And whereas the theistic faiths generally talk about an afterlife in terms of heaven or hell, Buddhism talks more about rebirth. (reset?) The notion of the bodhisattva is someone who has generated bodhicitta, the aspiration towards enlightenment to free all sentient beings and will take countless rebirths in order to do so. I must say, and actually without even being identified with Buddhism exclusively (I love Sufism, to name one devotional and theistic path) that this is hard core if you look at it for what it is. Furthermore, the pattern is actually relevant to addiction recovery. Basically you have someone who is not there yet, but they have that aspiration not just for their own benefit but for everyone - sounds like the kind of people we want in our recovery network doesn't it?

And on a Sufi note relevant to the notion of afterlife, one quote from the famous Sufi saint Ra'bia says:

 

I'm actually reading a very interesting book right now for a paper I'm doing in philosophy that has Buddhism as one of its core tenants. It is called "The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience" by Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. It is about enactive cognition but tries also to make Buddhist practice and cognitive science compatible, especially through the art of "mindfulness". One of the most interesting parts it covers in aspects of Buddhism is the delusion of self, that is the "ego-self". To me, that part is really interesting, especially when it comes to explain that one of Buddhism's claims is that human suffering extends from this desperate grasping for the ego-self, only for all of the struggle and suffering to reach it is in vain.