Is There A God?

[Anonymous]

i dont know if this is is the right thread if not please mr admin man move it to some where suitable,

ignoring the name, religion, and everything else which can denote god's

is there a god?
by whatever name?

yes or no

cas

 

[Anonymous]

in my opinion no there are no god/gods

cas

 

[carole]

No, I think there is some sort of supreme being/intelligence.

Carole

 

[Anonymous]

wouldnt that make them a god?

 

[Pete Younger]

No, I think there is some sort of supreme being/intelligence.

Carole

Athough I am of the same opinion as you on this subject, I would be interested to know what draws you to this conclusion.

 

[Anonymous]

I do, although I used to be more than skeptical. It's funny--even though I believe, I truly think agnosticism is probably the most honest approach, being that there is little physical evidence. Having said that, the testimony of the early Church suggests some fairly wild stuff was definitely happening. For example, why would Saul of Tarsus become Paul? The big money? The chicks? These guys gave up everything they had and became persecuted for their beliefs. I suppose I believe in God because I believe in those men and women.

 

[Anonymous]

Good question, but meaningless without a clear definition of God. I definitely no longer believe in an anthropomorphic "guy in the sky" like the God I was told about as a child, but I do believe in the existence of some kind of higher power whose nature I don't pretend to understand.

So I'll answer both yes and no.

Nonny

 

[Anonymous]

Maybe Carol meant that she believes in a supreme being, but not an omnipotent one.

As for Saul, are we sure it happened at all?

Personally I see no real reason to believe in God or any other deity so I'm an atheist.

 

[Anonymous]

Originally posted by Xanatic
As for Saul, are we sure it happened at all?

Personally I see no real reason to believe in God or any other deity so I'm an atheist.

You know, Xanatic, something inside me tells me Paul was legit. I know he has a lot of detractors; still, he persecuted Christians for a living prior to his conversion and clearly perceived Christianity to be heretical, so I can't help but feel in my guts something happened to the man that was real enough he'd do a 180º on the issue. He went from hunter to hunted, so to speak, and that suggests something meaningful took place that people like ourselves can't relate to readily. I certainly wish we could; it would make things infinitely easier, wouldn't it?

There are other aspects of the Bible from human psychological standpoint that suggest truth to me, as well: "Doubting" Thomas, for example. For the book to include skepticism exhibited by one of the faithful seems to me that it's relating an actual event. Myth from that period simply wouldn't approach its subject in that manner, IMO; instead, it would tell how evident His grandeur was and all present fell at His feet instantaneously, and so on. Fiction from that era rarely portrayed people in a realistic light, and what's more realistic than Thomas saying, "Now, hold on a minute here," you know? After all, he's reflecting ourselves to a degree.

 

[JamesWhitehead]

One Supreme Being? Just a sort of ghost of a King, projected
into the sky.

More inclined to modern polytheism myself. Life is spent
negotiating with the mainly benign God in the Macintosh,
making offerings to the long-suffering transport God in the
Volvo and hoping that the hearth-God in the boiler will be
satisfied by a quick sweep of his chimney this year.

When we displease these Gods, life gets very uncomfortable.

Now the God of Mischief is suggesting that laughing at those
awful destructive sky-Gods had better be done now, before
it becomes illegal. Damn them all to Hell, before they take
us all with them. :blah:

 

[NilesCalder]

is there a god?

If there wasn't there is now!
BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

No but seriously. Once you define what you mean by "god" I can give you an answer.

As a Neo-Pagan 'Humanist' I believe in the ultimate divinity of Sapient Life. As the Hermetics put it: "Have you forgotten that you are all gods?".

During my early explorations of religion I interacted with some metaphysical entities which refered to themselves as gods and styled themselves on my interetation of the Celtic pantheon. I also know of others who interacted with them. Interestingly enough while I spoke with one of these entities another believer saw me, but their interpretation of them was different to mine and they saw that instead. So I can speak of the subjective reality of 'gods' but not of their objective reality.

I conclude from this that we somehow either strengthen these entities through our belief in them or that we bring them into existance through our faith in them. God maybe, in essence, the collected unconciousness of all sapient life.

Unfortunatly it is this belief in divine psudo-parents which brings us to this juncture in which war is fought (as someone on this list put it) over who has the better imaginary friend. Because people believe that 'god' is going to come along and put the world to rights for them they refuse to do it for themselves. Rather like a child expecting a parent to come along and sort out their problems for them. Only once we, as a species, come to terms with our own 'divinity' and accept the responsibility that this gives us will we mature and become our own gods.

As Spider J. would put it: "Read my scripture! Read my £@%$ing Scripture!"

Niles

 

[TheOriginalCujo]

I believe in a God as the ultimate prime mover, as the uncaused casue. I'm not sure that such a being has any direct influence on our daily lives. I do, however believe that we hall have within us a spark of the divine, that some part of God exists in all of us, binding us to each other.

Cujo

 

[Anonymous]

a definition of a god


some one or something which is of a higher power, conciousness,state of mind, has omnipitance, created everything, basically anything which could have either created everything,

basically a higher being be it whatever, the definition is really up to you if you feel the definition you use defines a god then use the definition ive posted above if your unsure

cas

 

[rynner2]

The idea of a god with omniscience and omnipotence, who created absolutely everything, is really the end result of an escalating 'arms race' between different religions...

"My god created foxes.."
"My god created lions!"
"Well mine also created elephants.."
"my god controls all the seas.."
"my god created the whole world.."
"Well my God created absolutely everything, so there!"

There are all sorts of logical contradictions involved in ultimate powers - ask a mathematician about Cantor's maths of infinities. Frinstance, can God make a weight so heavy that he can't lift it? If God created everything, what did he do with himself before everything existed? And, if it's logically necessary for the universe to have a creator, the same logic should demand "Who created God?"

All these arguments are really sterile. In practise, anything with powers in advance of our own would be seen as god-like, such as aliens with technology we've hardly even dreamed off, but there would be no need to believe them to have created the universe - they would be a part of it themselves, just as we are.

Such aliens might take an interest in human destiny, at both an individual level and en masse, sometimes intervening in events as they see fit (miracles), which would cover all the practical evidence (as seen through human understanding) for religion.

Would such beings demand worshippers? I don't see why. I'm totally agin all organised religion (men in frocks, bells and smells, etc), which has led to divisions amongst humanity even while they claim to be trying to bring everyone together. For evidence we have Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia (as was), the present unholy 'war' between various sets of 'civilian bombers', rapists, torturers....

[rynner is carried away by men in white coats, still ranting away.]

 

[Anonymous]

Is there a God?
Yeah, course there is. My buddy. Comes round to the house at least once a week.
I have my own reasons for believing in Him (one of which probably being the fact that I'm a lapsed Catholic), but I think one of the best things ever said in relation to this was by an old friend of mine who said that even the most hardened anti-church/religion individual would get down on his knees and pray if he were to find himself in a life or death situation with no feasible way out of it, or something along those lines.

 

[rynner2]

But would this desperate praying do any good?

There is also another sort of paradox here - since most religions preach about some kind of afterlife, why is dying considered such a bad thing? There are those who would be glad to be out of this vale of tears, afterlife or not, such as the woman in the news recently, fighting in court for the right to die with dignity and legally.

If God knows what is best for us, why not just let him get on with it? Why beg him to save your life if he in his infinite wisdom knows that this would not be the best thing for you? The same sort of reasoning applies if you pray for someone else's life.

What I'm proposing is that even if there is a god of some kind, be doesn't require worship (he already knows how good he is) and prayers are also irrelevent, since he already knows what we want (he's omniscient) but he makes his own decisions on what we need and makes sure that happens (he's omnipotent).

Organised religion is a load of human-invented ritual, much of which actually goes against what the founders of various religions actually said. Much dogma was invented by priests (of all kinds) to consolidate their own power.

Oh oh, I feel a fatwah coming my way...

 

[Anonymous]

religion

i am not sure many people nowdays believe in a father figure in a beard sort of god who grants us our wishes if we obey his rules. but surely the point of most religions is to make us be nice to each other and to make us happy. it is people who use their religion as justifications for there own evil acts or wars who cause the trouble not the religions themselves.

 

[Justin_Anstey]

Disbelief is as much a matter of faith as belief.

-J

 

[rynner2]

Re: religion

....but surely the point of most religions is to make us be nice to each other and to make us happy. it is people who use their religion as justifications for there own evil acts or wars who cause the trouble not the religions themselves.

..to make us be nice to each other...?
This seems to back up my idea that organised religions are run by control freaks. No doubt the Taliban mullahs think they are being nice to women by denying them an education, but many of the women think otherwise. Do the prods in Ulster think they are making people happy by jeering at girls going to school? Were the girls' tears the tears of laughter? Some other human's idea of what will make me happy is not necessarily mine.

Religions divide people, and if there truly is a god I pray to him to rid the world of all religions. Then at least we will be spared the hypocracy of people crying "Love thy neighbour!" whilst lobbing bombs over the fence, or telling us what god wants us to do ("Thou shalt not enjoy sex, thou shalt not eat this, do that, etc, etc).

All religions developed as acts of appeasement against gods that were originally seen as angry, vengeful and cruel - these gods were probably natural phenomena like storms, famine and disease. The idea of a 'loving' god was a relatively late development, and is pretty illogical. This is why theologians have been arguing for two millennia about the problem of evil without ever explaining it. The best that they could come up with is the idea of original sin, that all humans are inherently evil, and yet god was supposed to have created us in his own image!

(I'll never avoid that fatwah now...)

 

[Anonymous]

religion again

i dont think any religion tells you to go round commiting acts of violence against children and why would loving your neighbour be such a bad thing, or treating people as you would like to be treated, i stand by my point that religion is all about making people happier. because a religion is adapted by a control freak does not in the end make the religion a bad thing what system of belief either religious or political or any thing else has not been used to justify a bad action??

 

[hachihyaku]

one of the best things ever said in relation to this was by an old friend of mine who said that even the most hardened anti-church/religion individual would get down on his knees and pray if he were to find himself in a life or death situation with no feasible way out of it, or something along those lines.

Of course that's a lie.
There are atheists in foxholes. I am one.

Being put in a perilous situation would not make me pull a God out of thin air.

Would you ask Santa Claus to save your life if you were in danger? Same thing with me and God.

 

[Anonymous]

Heres one of my favourite poems. Seems relevant.

The Indian Upon God

I PASSED along the water's edge below the humid trees,
My spirit rocked in evening light, the rushes round my knees,
My spirit rocked in sleep and sighs; and saw the moor-fowl pace
All dripping on a grassy slope, and saw them cease to chase
Each other round in circles, and heard the eldest speak:
Who holds the world between His bill and made us strong or weak
Is an undying moorfowl, and He lives beyond the sky.
The rains are from His dripping wing, the moonbeams from His eye.
I passed a little further on and heard a lotus talk:
Who made the world and ruleth it, He hangeth on a stalk,
For I am in His image made, and all this tinkling tide
Is but a sliding drop of rain between His petals wide.
A little way within the gloom a roebuck raised his eyes
Brimful of starlight, and he said: The Stamper of the Skies,
He is a gentle roebuck; for how else, I pray, could He
Conceive a thing so sad and soft, a gentle thing like me?
I passed a little further on and heard a peacock say:
Who made the grass and made the worms and made my feathers gay,
He is a monstrous peacock, and He waveth all the night
His languid tail above us, lit with myriad spots of light.


W.B. Yeats

 

[Anonymous]

And, if it's logically necessary for the universe to have a creator, the same logic should demand "Who created God?"

This may be an old chestnut but it's something that's bothered me ever since I was aware of both the 'big bang' and the creatonist theories of how the universe came into being: According to both these models there's a point before the 'Divine Spark' at which time space and matter haven't begun to exist.
So. Who created God, or if you prefer, where did the quantam foam or whatever come from? Either way there must have been some impossible event were something came from nothing. If any physicists or mathematicians can explain this in a way I can visualise it would be a great weight off my mind.

 

[rynner2]

A curiously pleasant poem, DanJW...!

As for Slacker, you're asking a lot!
The conventional answer, amongst scientists who subscribe to the Big Bang (not all do) is that the BB created time and space, so there was no 'before' in much the same way that there is nothing north of the North Pole.

Alternatively, if you want to get into quantum foam (nicely scented, sounds luxurious!) then each universe can spawn daughter universes, which themselves can spawn even more, and so on ad infinitum (in both directions, so to speak). In this case the real universe is eternal and we can only experience an even smaller part of it than we thought.

 

[Anonymous]

But would this desperate praying do any good?

I do wonder everytime I hear about a church collapsing and killing hundreds of people.

 

[Anonymous]

A quick flick through A Brief History of Time and a search on Google ("before big bang" and "creation space time") have revealed a bit that I was unsure about.

To understand "everything" from "nothing" you need to grasp the concept that all matter is based on folds in space. The famous metaphore is the sheet of rubber. Think of energy as waves in the rubber, and particles as "nodes"... imagine a pencil nib sticking into the rubber from underneath.

This works for 3 dimensions (or 4 if you like to count time as one). But before the Big Bang there were more, and the interactions were more complex. Eventually (impossible to say how long... there was nothing there to experience the passing of time) the law of odds meant that these interactions through up a little, tiny, incredibly small wrinkle in the rubber sheet of space. A sub-quantum wave or something (lit: a thingy). This created even more complex interactions until more appeared, and more, and so on until things grew chaotic enough for one of the wrinkles to grow big enough to produce matter. Then we have a snowball effect called the Big Bang.

As for the existence of Space/Time prior to creation.. I have found fewer coherant sources. It seems that in the quantum state before the Big Bang, time and space may have existed, but had no meaning... there was nothing in them. (goes along with my personal view that time has no objective reality... but more of that some other, uh, time..).

To finish, something from http://itss.raytheon.com/cafe/cosm/planck.html


This process has been described by the physicist Frank Wilczyk at the University of California, Santa Barbara by saying, " The reason that there is something instead of nothing is that nothing is unstable".

 

[Anonymous]

The conventional answer, amongst scientists who subscribe to the Big Bang (not all do) is that the BB created time and space, so there was no 'before' in much the same way that there is nothing north of the North Pole.

That's my point exactly, and I find that concept very hard to visualise. I have trouble understanding how something can 'happen' without Time existing.
Maybe there will come a point where our grey matter will reach the limits of its ability to comprehend these things. I used to think that if our species survived it could eventually evolve into something else, but I'm not sure that we're anymore 'intelligent' than our stone-age ancestors.
Perhaps that's were God comes in.

 

[rynner2]

"...but I'm not sure that we're anymore 'intelligent' than our stone-age ancestors."

Probably not. Put the average modern human into a sub-artic climate and he'd probably not last very long. Alternatively, put him on a desert island, and ask him to build a TV or a motor car and 99% of modern people wouldn't know where to start (or even realise that it would probably be impossible in such an environment).

The only difference between us and our ancestors of a few tens of thousands of years ago is the cumulative wisdom of society. Many people, working in specialised fields, can achieve amazing things that are impossible for any one of us as an individual.

I sometimes worry that 'civilization' is really rather fragile, and that it would be easy for us to bomb (or pollute) ourselves back into the stone age.

 

[carole]

Athough I am of the same opinion as you on this subject, I would be interested to know what draws you to this conclusion.

Just my own personal conviction, py. My family are not particularly religious, so have never influenced my views in one way or another.

As to why I believe this, well that's what faith is all about, isn't it?

Carole

PS Don't worry, I believe religion or lack of it should be everyone's personal choice - I'm not a member of the god squad, I won't come knocking on anyone's door trying to convert them, I usually keep all this strictly to myself

PPS, nor am I one of those poor deluded souls who believes the Bible is word for word true.

 

[Aben_Zin]

If there is a God, beliving in him would go against all my moral principles.

Az