Topic: God

I'm not religious at all, but I do believe in God but don't think of this often. In fact this is the first time I've ever participated in this discussion online. The only few times I've prayed were for giving thanks, and helping the health of family, and for myself maybe 1% of the time. I don't go to church though, guess working at a church made me extra jaded.

The way I view God is just the cosmos, Futurama's episode of God is the closest representation of how I view God: http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/God_Entity.

The whole thing of does God not exist/exist, is interesting. This one comedian said best how I think of it:

Some people think that they know that there isn’t. That’s a weird thing to think you can know. “Yeah, there’s no God.” Are you sure? “Yeah, no, there’s no God.” How do you know? “Cause I didn’t see Him.” There’s a vast universe! You can see for about 100 yards — when there’s not a building in the way. How could you possibly… Did you look everywhere? Did you look in the downstairs bathroom? Where did you look so far? “No, I didn’t see Him yet.”

 

I completely agree with that part, in fact that's what I absolutely LOVE about the universe. Once you understand how for instance; The stars are born and evolve, planets are created and coalesced, gravity creates galaxies and solar systems. How a rainbow appears, how thunder rolls, how the brain works, etc.
It doesn't make these things any less AMAZING! In fact, it makes them more amazing.
When a baby is born, we all know how it works, but we still look at it like WOW that's incredible!

 

"The turbulent billows of the fretful surface leaves the deep parts of the ocean undisturbed; and to him who has a hold on the vaster and more permanent realities, the hourly vicissitudes of his personal destiny seem relatively insignificant things. The really religious person is accordingly unshakeable and full of equanimity, and calmly ready for any duty the day may bring forth."

William James.

 

This is a really good point. Our physicality has nothing to do on whether or not there is a god! We have to be very careful not to come to a conclusion and then write down all of the reasons why it's true above it instead of listing all the reasons and then asking ourselves what conclusion is most likely out of that evidence. Just because something looks one way, or has been one way, or is the most popular doesn't necessarily mean that it's the correct one. But if I was looking for truth, I'd start out looking in those places because it's

I just want to quote this because it's an example of something to watch out for. While I get annoyed when too much emphasis is placed on words and labels, to ignore the fact that they're important to how our mind works is to ignore facts. Using a word to encapsulate something, to give it a label, is to imbue the event or thing with a variety of implied characteristics and what you said is contradictory; a miracle is something that defies explanation through natural laws and is attributed to divine agency. Saying that something is a miracle that is also explainable makes it not a miracle. Instead, it becomes something wonderous, which is actually how you talk about it!

Also, this quote really resonated with me because it was EXACTLY what I said for the last few years before I stopped to really look closely at my beliefs. To me that it seems that somebody who truly believes what it seems this quote is saying:

doesn't actually believe in a conscious, active deity who works in the universe. Instead they believe in laws that govern the universe and have assigned the label "God" to those laws. And that's basically where my faith broke down - at some point calling something "God" ceases to be truthful because I'm continually telling myself that the laws of the universe have a consciousness instead of simply being laws of the universe. I reached a point where I said "Why should I say 'The rules that I'm calling God' instead of just saying 'The Rules'?" Why do I keep ascribing a personhood to something that is continually being proven not to be a person?

Also, I have a question for the people here! The discussion has stayed civil (which I've really liked) so it's about that quote above from @Buzz Lightyear - how would you describe an atheist who accepts reality for what it is and moves where the evidence takes her, or a religious fundamentalist who rails against and decries the downfall of civilization because of moral decline? To me, the fundamentalist's beliefs seem more fragile and prone to disturbances because it's based on premises that may or may not be built on evidence, but both viewpoints can have their own ways of taking life's problems and incorporating them into the belief system without issue. I guess after living for 30 years as a Christian who did what Buzz said (back in the first paragraph of my post here) and decided what I believed to fill in the reasons it was true, letting go of the necessity of religion was incredibly freeing. For the first time I was able to look at the world in wonder instead of always mentally saying why my beliefs were correct and worked with whatever the scientific thing was. I was able to bend with the wind and discover amazing new landscapes instead of just resolutely root myself in place and look at the same horizon time after time as the wind reshaped it. I was able to take life as it came instead of worrying about what it might bring.

 

I use those words as synonyms. In fact, in English langue they are technically synonyms. Wondrous is a synonym for miraculous and miracle is a synonym for wonder. Check in dictionary, it's a fact. Like I said, if we brake something down to peaces it often loses it's wonder, just like a magic trick when revealed. Hence why it is not often considered a miracle anymore, because once we know how it works wonder tends to go away. This, I think, is where this relatively new meaning comes from. But it doesn't have to. To me anything that is wondrous is a miracle. Saying that something is a miracle that is also explainable makes it a miracle that we can understand.

But yea, I get what you are saying. This is all just a word play. Same words often have more than one definition. You are using the word in different way than I am, both are technically correct. If we define miracle as something than can not be explained scientifically then I guess there are no miracles that we can understand. It's not how I want to see this world tho and not how I want to define things and my reality. Hence why I choose to use the definition I do instead of the one you do. A little bit too gloomy for my taste.

You are right. I don't believe in God that way, even tho I sometimes still use the word. I don't see the word "God" as being personifying for me. I can see how and why would others see it that way but I don't feel that way. If I would, I guess I would not use it as much then.

My beliefs are pantheistic. I see consciousness as a very substance of this whole universe. Maybe that consciousness is not fully conscious of every single action performed in this universe, just like we are not conscious of making our heart beat. Maybe it is conscious of only few things it does. Maybe it is aware entity in itself with it's own mind and thoughts, I don't know. Maybe it is not. Maybe it's nothing but just automated rules. To me it doesn't even matter.

 

I totally agree with that, which is why I feel a bit bad for posting this, but I feel like I wouldn't be staying true to the spirit of my post above if I didn't. Synonyms do not mean two words mean the same thing. It means that they are similar enough that they can be interchanged in many situations, but they still have their own definitions and nuances.

With that said, if the conversation becomes about definitions of words that means the conversation is over, and I'm not about to do that!

That's interesting because to me, it's the exact opposite! If miracles are things we can't explain, and there are no miracles, then the only things left are things that we have no idea how they work, but will be amazing once we figure them out! It makes me excited because it means I can say, "Wow, the universe is amazing and we get to know why!" instead of "Wow, the universe is confusing and it's probably for a good reason but I can't say if it is or is not and I can never ever ever know."

 

I am an atheist. For a long period of my life I would have called myself a christian, I never read the Bible mind you, however I did believe in God and afterlife (heaven) so that is why I would've called myself a christian.

Later on in my life, I went through an enormous amount of depression (isolation, alienation, girls, family, all sorts of things were related) until I finally started to realize that my beliefs were partially responsible for making me depressed. Because I would always think something better was on the other side, because I always had faith that I was not in control of my life, it would end up being a vicious cycle where I just become more and more depressed.

Everyone is different, certain beliefs work for one person but not for another. I used to think my beliefs were the best, but now I realize things aren't so simple, people aren't so simple. In order to do be the best that you can be you have to believe in the most sensible thing that you can. I'm a very deep and wise person, I think about things like morality and purpose constantly, so being an atheist works for me. However, I doubt everyone is so complex with life, many seem to only care for a few basic ideals and concepts and that is all they ever need. So you really just gotta search around for the right thing to believe in, that may sound silly but aren't all beliefs simply man-made constructions? Assuming you are in an area that is open to religion, you have a right to believe in anything you choose to, no one can force you to believe in this or in that.

 

I'm not saying that I don't love knowledge of how and why things work. That's all fun and exciting stuff indeed. What I find "gloomy" would be if I would lose my ability to appreciate beauty and wonder of things as a whole. Looking at a thing that we can fully brake down into parts and understand jet dismiss that knowledge completely, if I choose so, and still find it no less amazing despite of it. Not being reliant on knowledge of why something works as it does to appreciate it. Do You find that You need that? Or at the very least desire to find out why, to generate excitement about a thing? Or am I misunderstanding you?

We crate our own reality in our mind. Words and definitions are building blocks and paint colors of that reality. It's conscious choice for somebody to live either in the world of Sci-Fi with exciting science and light sabers or in a world of magic with flying dragons. Or in a place without any of that stuff. I think whether you see a magical sword or scientifically crafted light saber is just a matter of perspective. I choose to live in a world of magic because I feel that gives it more color. But really I guess it doesn't, does it? I'm just not able to see all the colors that you can, without using any lens. Why is that? I don't know. Maybe I was just born with different eyes. Or maybe they are less bright, maybe we just like different shades batter than others.

 

@melancholy_king
Exactly the same feeling I had. I realized that for some people, like us, religion gave us too much hope if that make sense. Hope that everything would be ok no matter what happened, but this simply isn't true. One has to realize what's going on and mold the future as if it were clay, nothing is promised or predestined to be.

Also, I love this quote by Arthur C Clarke one of my favorite sci-fi authors.
'Any sufficient technology is indistinguishable from magic'
Here technology can be anything, a cell phone, a car, a lightbulb, even something as simple as rain.
Just think of traveling back in time to the year 500 A.D. carrying a cell phone and taking pictures of people and showing it to them. They would misunderstand for magic and sorcery and you might be killed as a result. When the Egyptians believed the the Sun God Ra carried the sun across the sky each day, it was simply because they did not understand how the earth and sun move in correlation to one another.
-Not really taking a side in this post, just pointing out what I think @Shugi Shugi meant earlier.

This is what gives me so much hope for the future. Just about everything that we know to be true today, would've seemed completely and utterly impossible at some point in the past. So think of things that seem completely impossible today, and the future might just prove otherwise.

 

I'm not sure what I believe but I do think I have a guardian angel watching over me that has kept me out of some pretty rough situations and has guided me to the right people and places at the time it was right for me. I veer towards a buddhist/spiritual belief that God is all around you but its hard to define exactly

 

Good point! I'm sure you're aware that from the Christian world-view, God is not "a force" or some "thing" that controls other things. God is a person. God is a being. Just like you and I are human beings, God is a spiritual being. Sometimes Christians and theists point to nature and say, "See, that's just God!" or, "Look at what God is doing!" but sometimes I forget that God has designed the universe to act in certain ways. He has designed the universe to operate in ways that we are now discovering with science and tests.

This is an illustration, so it will have it's shortcomings but let's compare God to Henry Ford and the universe to the internal combustion engine. Sure, we can understand more about Henry Ford by studying his work, but Henry Ford is not an internal combustion engine. So in one sense, yes God makes certain things happen in certain ways, but I'm not convinced that every time someone is healed from some horrible disease it's God doing it but rather the way that God designed the universe to function.

What I'm not saying is that God cannot do miracles or crazy-cool-unbelievable things, but that God has designed a universe that usually operates in a specific and (usually) orderly way.

I really hope I didn't cause any confusion. If I did, please ignore this post.

Heffe

 

Yes, because they share a common root; the desire for control, for power. They both stem from the libido dominandi.

Our whole civilization, and our whole mind-set, is built on this. We find we can not even imagine God today because our imagination is captivated with a scientific outlook on life. This outlook is as a set of spectacles which colours the world, which interprets and reads it. It's arbitrary, it's contingent, it could be otherwise, and it is, should we choose to take those spectacles off and allow an unknown and complex reality to reveal itself.

Why outsource your own intelligence to experts, who have all too often been driven metaphysically mad from having spent their entire career specializing in the narrowest topic, one totally divorced from wider concerns. And what's our ultimate concern? It's certainly not some set of 'orthodox' abstractions [yes, heresy, the dogma of individual thought, is the new orthodoxy], but the reality our own existential experience. How odd that the machinations of individual thought leads to belief in an abstraction, whether that be science, humanity, or progress, or whatever; and that the collective wisdom of a religion speaks most truly to the innermost part of ourselves.

Free your mind. Sapere aude.