This is my take on god and how you do in life. Do I belive there is a god my honest answer to that would be I dont know and my opinion is no one knows. How you do in life is up to you you are the one who makes your own destiny. If you do good and you become a good person you did that yourself not god or anyone else around you only you same goes the other way. You are the one who makes choices and how they affect you.

i will somewhat agree with that but i also believe in karma. what you send out will come back to you.

I don't necessarily agree, because "I don't know if there is a god and no one really knows" is utter bull to those that know and to say that your choices affect the way you do is more of that because a lot of other things come into play from "unknown" facts.

A interesting post to say the least...there is an old saying and it goes something like this: If there is a God and you believe ,look what you have gained..If there is no God and you believe , look at what you've lost...
You have lost nothing , you've lived a good life...
Just a thought....
God Bless

I was just thinking about this tonight. Everyone is necessarily agnostic whether they admit it to themselves or not. Any ‘belief’ in a God is just that, a belief. Moreover a God that demands blind faith isn’t much of a God at all. What’s to be proven by blind faith? At the very best it can only prove either pure desperation or stupidity. Neither of which is a quality that any worth God would desire to see in someone.



Absolutely. In fact, it’s an oxymoron when people say “Jesus Saved me!”. That’s absurd even according to the whole doctrine. The whole idea is that a person must ‘save themselves’ by turning to Jesus. Therefore it would be impossible for Jesus to ‘save anyone’. Everyone would ultimately be their own savior by the choices THEY make. This the oxymoronic nature of a religion that is based on ‘salvation’.

Even pigheaded religious people who enjoy making fun of non-believers are quick to point fingers and laughing say, “It’s your own FREE WILL that you choose to reject God and go to hell”. They usually add some taunting childish quips along with that.

But seriously, you’re perfectly correct. Everyone is ultimately their on pilot. There can be no other way. And the irony is that those who have chosen to turn to God seem to be the most desperate of all, constantly asking for prayers from others and they always seem to be having trouble with their faith and in need of guidance. I guess it makes sense since the most insecure people are the ones who will naturally turn to a God for security in the first place. So it makes sense that the bulk of religious people will be suffering form anxiety and insecurities.

But yes, your thoughts are well taken here. Be true to yourself above all else.

In fact, if you have to be untrue to yourself to worship a God then what good is that God? Who would want to worship an entity that requires that the worshiper be untrue to their very own self? That would be a nightmare!

That’s not necessarily true at all.

What if you refrained from doing a lot of things that you believe you would really enjoy? Like having consensual sex with loving partners outside of wedlock.

You refrained from this your entire life despite the, missed LOVE, and broken hearts of the people you rejected along the way.

All for what? To avoid something that you were taught to believe was inherently wrong but it actually WASN’T WRONG after all!

What’s wrong with LOVE???

If there’s no judgmental God to denounce LOVE outside of marriage then what’s wrong with it???

NOTHING!!!

So believing in a God can indeed be harmful if that God is a LIE!

A life unlived because of unwarranted fear and superstition is the thing that should be feared most!

I have an aunt who has done this Bless her soul, I pray for her sake that there is a heaven because she has lived strictly to the bible teachings, strictly. She has had a lonely life, in that she has not met a man to accompany her to old age due to her diligence to follow the teachings. She has now reached old age and has only her church. She has always figured god would bring her that man so she stayed at home and waited. She is the sweetest woman that anyone could meet and would have made a wonderful wife but she waited for her god to bring him to her.

Trust me. I know EXACTLY what you mean.

Let’s all pray that her faith was indeed warranted!

A human life forfeited for a belief in an afterlife.

Definitely a loss if the afterlife isn't there to pick up the broken pieces.

And what about the Fathers and Mothers that will kick out their own children because they find out they are gay. This has got to be the definition of evil.

Joe, I agree with you -- in all honesty, I don't know either.

But because I haven't seen anything to indicate that there is a god, I don't believe there is one. I know that could be seen as a self-imposed limitation, since now I'm relying entirely on my own senses and thought processes, and there are certainly things that could be above and beyond what I can know and sense, and still exist.

I acknowledge this possibility, but I still have to believe -- or not believe -- based on the limitations of my own perceptions and experiences.

Otherwise, one could make the argument that I should also believe in a giant pink unicorn wearing a chef's hat, who points his horn at people and brings them good luck.

I've seen just as much evidence for the giant unicorn as I have for god --

And one has to draw the line somewhere....

Im so glad Im not the only one seeing the one true GOD


Uni-Chef

All hail Uni-Chef thru which all luck flows....

I don’t know Lex. I think a lot of it comes done to a person’s definition of ‘god’. If they can only use that word to refer to a separate self-sentient external ego-like deity that resembles some kind of all-knowing Santa Claus with a plan, then I tend to agree with you.

However, if you allow the word ‘god’ to simply mean an all-pervading spirit of the universe of which we are all a part, then that’s a whole differnet ballgame. I believe there are logically sound arguments that can be made for such an omniscient underlying essence to our existence. And it is this spiritual element of our being that gives us our ability to perceive (to experience with sentience).

I would argue further that whilst there is currently no scientific evidence to ‘prove’ the existence of this essence, there is scientific evidence that ‘suggests’ that such an essence is not only possible, but highly probable. In other words, I would argue, from a purely logical point of view, that science indicates that such an all-pervading essence is more likely than not.

In other words, I’m saying that it’s more likely that your true essence is that you are the ‘thing’ that is taking the form of your body, than it is that you are merely just your body itself. I challenge you to show a clear and unambiguous border where your body ends and the rest of the universe begins. If you believe that the skin/air interface serves as this unique border of separation, then I can only say that you are thinking in terms of a Newtonian world. For in the quantum world no such definite borders exist.

But like I say, you could revert back to the semantics of the word ‘god’ and simply say that you aren’t prepared to give that word this much abstraction. I certainly wouldn’t attempt to argue with your choice of definition for the words you use.

I guess all I’m really saying is that your true essence is more than meets the eye, and if you think that you are 'your body’ you just might be right! However, you may be under the illusion that 'your body' is merely a small individual and separate part of what it actually is. When in reality 'your body' consists of everything that exists. In other words, you’re allowing your semantics of the phrase “Your Body” to define what you believe you are.

Just food for thought, not meant to spark a debate on the issue.

I still have a hard time with this issue lol

As for myself, I do not believe in God, but nor Do Iforce that idea on others. Through my childhood, everything I accomplished, I did on my own.

That's not saying I wouldn't like to have believed, just that events in my life made me rethink that idea. Please don't tell me that god was there through all the bad times, i am not naive. To me God is like Santa Clause or the Easter Bunny. Based on truth but not necessarily real.

As my roommate once said:

"If you choose not to believe, that's your choice, as when you die, should you find out there is in fact God, you can say I'm sorry for not believing, please forgive me"

and before people say it, i used to go to church, I o have a bible and have read it several times, I still don't buy it.
I gave up on catholicism, and a few others. Now i will rely on me as I am the only person I can fully rely on.

Abra, I have read many of your posts in which you explain your view of the "pantheistic" god-construct, and, frankly, this makes a lot more sense to me than any Santa Claus god derived (and subsequently mangled to fit various "needs") from a book of stories and myths.

I think the only point where we differ here, is that I don't necessarily see the "we-are-all-one-and-all-part-of-the-universe" as interpretable in any sense over and above what I can perceive of it. I guess I just like to keep it simpler and more manageable!

And again, this is just the limited perspective of one guy who has made some serious efforts to examine the religious terrain in which I found myself ensconced in, at various times in my life. I don't have any answers -- truthfully, I don't expect to find any between now and the time when the giant pink unicorn carries me off to Neptune, to live there forever as a wandering cactus-like creature.

But it is fun to try to learn about these things....

To me, the idea of a God who would inspire a regional book that is clearly ambiguous whist allowing men in other regions of the world to create other pictures of God, would clearly be a God who likes to play hide and seek and guessing games.

Any God who would be peeved at people who ‘guessed’ wrong would seriously be a demented deity.

If you have to ‘guess’ whether or not a certain picture of God is true, then it’s clearly not true.

A God who plays guessing games and then gets peeved at the people who guess wrong would be a demon.

Just look at the book that some people expect other people to believe is the ‘word of God’. That single ‘book’, which isn’t really a ‘single book’ at all, originated as fokelore in the Mediterranean area, in the wake of many similar mythologies. These many separate stories by differnet authors were clearly influenced by the earlier stories and were told in many differnet ways. The stories eventually fell into to separate parts which became the basis for the Old Testament and the Quran. Two separate accounts of the same folklore that tell differnet plots using many of the same stories, people, places, and events.

Later, a New Testament was added to the mix which some people accepted as a continuation of the old folklore whilst others clearly did not.

What you are looking at here is a huge guessing game just within this one religious context. Which of these three religions are genuinely “God’s word”. Islam, Judaism, or Christianity? And if you pic the latter which of the many sects of Catholicism or Protestantism do you follow?

This religion is a huge guessing game all by itself.

And this doesn’t even taken into account the myriad of other religions throughout the world

The God of Abraham is a God that wants you to pay hide and seek and guessing games. And if you guess wrong too bad for you!!!

What kind of a God is that????

Can anyone SERIOUSLY answer that question?

Would this God be ‘righteous’ if he turns his back on everyone who guesses wrong including atheists?

I think not. This religion is necessarily a seriously flawed picture of a supposedly all-perfect God.

JMO of course.

I understand your view. However, let me try the following on you. It’s philosophy as simple and as manageable as I can make it.

Let’s pretend the universe is PLAY-DOH.

I take it you agree that the PLAY-DOH exists. It was here before you came onto the scene, and it will still be here after you die.

So what does this PLAY-DOH do? It manifests itself into many differnet forms.

You and I are merely a couple of the forms that the PLAY-DOH can take.

So now from a philosophical point of view, you say to me, “I am the form that is being taken temporarily. I am not the PLAY-DOH”.

And I say to you, “Oh but Sir, I beg to differ with you. The forms that are taken are but mere illusions. They have no ‘substance’ of their own. They are fleeting shadows of the true essence of what actually exists. I Sir, am the PLAY-DOH.”

Abra,

You have some very good questions. Perhaps when you do have a good question rather then jumping to the conclusion that there is no answer and therefore all religion is a joke, perhaps you can stay open to look for an answer. Or you can ask me. ;-)

There really isn't a "wrong" religion. Most religions encompass the seven noahide laws which are incumbent upon every human being.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Laws_of_Noah

They are as follows:

1 Prohibition against idolatry
2 Prohibition against blasphemy
3 Prohibition against murder
4 Prohibition against theft
5 Prohibition against sexual immorality
6 Prohibition against eating the limb of a living animal
7 Establish courts of justice

I don't think that you would have a problem with these Abra. That's all G-d asks of you regardless which religion, if any, that you follow.

The more you work on yourself to elevate yourself by doing kindness and loving others while improving your character is really all you have to do.

Doesn't seem too tough. ;-)

I have my beliefs but the truth is I don't know what happens when we die- and neither does anyone else.

So I will try to live this life as if it is the only one.

Even though I believe there is more to come- I don't believe it hurts to give this life my all.

I don’t jump to conclusions there is no answer.
Nor to I believe that all religion is a joke.

Could it possibly be that you might be jumping to conclusions about me???



The forums are always open. Feel free to jump right in.



Since you’re looking for questions, I’ll give you some,…

1 Prohibition against idolatry

Would that include idolizing a single book?

2 Prohibition against blasphemy

Would that include the authors of books who claim to speak for God?

3 Prohibition against murder
4 Prohibition against theft

The above two are common sense and shouldn’t need to be ‘prohibited’. I would hate to think that good upstanding religious people would actually be chomping at the bit to do these things and merely restraining from doing them because they are ‘prohibited’.

I don’t murder and I don’t steal. Just the way I am, God or no God.

5 Prohibition against sexual immorality

Who’s to say what’s immoral regarding sex?

I’ve always been naturally monogamous-minded, honest, sincere, and truthful. So clearly adultery would be out of the question since that would violate my own personal values.

But consensual fornication shared between people who genuinely love each other and simply have no desire to become permanent partners in life for whatever reason. That’s immoral?

I don’t believe that a God would see that as being immoral. Sorry. I just don’t buy that one.

6 Prohibition against eating the limb of a living animal

Someone needs to tell this one to Lion, Bears, Alligators and so forth.

The last time I ate living flesh was when I went on a motorcycle trip. If God didn’t want us to eat live bugs he shouldn’t have given the little suckers wings!

7 Establish courts of justice

Sounds good on paper, but in reality we often end up with courts of injustice.



I try to do that the best I can Sir.

May I go now?