Your thoughts on God

[Retro Rob]

I will never rest until those who desperately cling to bronze age myths stop lying to children about their immoral, unethical religion, until they stop propagating a LIE to themselves and the rest of the world, until they stop shoving their religion down other people's throats, until they stop trying to control how everyone else lives.

You want peace? Get the hell out of government and keep thy religion to thyself (a collective you, not a personal you).

Enjoy your anti-religious crusade/inquisition on believers. I hope you succeed...

 

[ThinClient]

I hope you succeed...

Yet another lie coming out of your corner. Why am I not surprised.

 

[Moonbeam]

I will never rest until those who desperately cling to bronze age myths stop lying to children about their immoral, unethical religion, until they stop propagating a LIE to themselves and the rest of the world, until they stop shoving their religion down other people's throats, until they stop trying to control how everyone else lives.

You want peace? Get the hell out of government and keep thy religion to thyself (a collective you, not a personal you).

You will never rest!!!!! Hehe. I admire your zealotry but I bet it's only been hours since you got out of bed.

 

[PowerEngineer]

If the evidence is that the brain can mislead and you follow that evidence then you should know that your conviction that you are following the evidence isn't real but just the brain fooling itself. The fact of the matter, more likely, it seems to me, is that you don't know anything but are given to holding opinions. What do you need those for. Why not just not know anything. It might get you along on that road of humility.

If you've never tasted an orange you can read all kinds of descriptions as to how they taste, but you will never really experience what an orange tastes like until you taste one. As you taste the orange certain chemicals in your brain will fire, but these chemicals firing in your brain are not the taste of the orange. And if you like the way an orange tastes, you may find yourself having them time and time again. Does this devotion to tasting oranges or engaging in what pleases something like religion?

But if you have never tasted an orange, I must warn you. There is no proof to somebody who has never tasted one that they taste like anything at all. Sure we can see some chemicals going off in the gray matter, but it doesn't prove anything.

^This. I was hoping someone would comment besides me. Seems that you're casting pearls before swine. Oink.

Okay, I'll take the bait.

I need to tread carefully when divining Moonbeam's meanings, but this seems to boil down to "you can never be sure (or really know) until you personally try it (or it happens to you)".

Yes, that's true for tasting oranges. And for injecting heroin.

Engaging in what pleases is not necessarily a winning long-term strategy (unless you aspire to be a lotus eater).

You will never rest!!!!! Hehe. I admire your zealotry but I bet it's only been hours since you got out of bed.

That made me laugh!

 

[ThinClient]

Haha. I missed it because he's ignored, but that's pretty good.

 

[Moonbeam]

Okay, I'll take the bait.

I need to tread carefully when divining Moonbeam's meanings, but this seems to boil down to "you can never be sure (or really know) until you personally try it (or it happens to you)".

Yes, that's true for tasting oranges. And for injecting heroin.

Engaging in what pleases is not necessarily a winning long-term strategy (unless you aspire to be a lotus eater).



That made me laugh!

Was it in the Brothers Karamazov that a story was told about some doubters who found themselves on a long long road to heaven and refused to walk there. They sat a thousand years and grew so bored they finally started the long long walk of years, and entering the gate exclaimed, we'd walk a million times farther for this. What that tells me is that there are oranges and there is heroin and the difference in their wholesomeness may be integrated into the experience.

And if there is a conscious state that corresponds to the romantic notions of heaven, it isn't something you can go the supermarket to buy and taste. It is the ego that creates an imaginary heaven to prevent itself from ever getting there because the ego knows it has to die for the real you to understand you've always really been there. And the ego has no intention of dying.

There are many things to say about this but my point here is that if there is a state of conscious awareness the quality of which is obvious with the experience, then without the experience you can't know if we're talking orange or heroin. It would sort of be like buying a wine by points rather than by wine tasting.

To say that what is pleasing isn't necessarily good means to me that something may be pleasing now but destructive in the long run. I would say that to call it pleasing would be an improper use of the word. What harms can't ultimately be really pleasing because it will also cause misery.

 

[dawp]

what if 'god' isn't universal but localized? As in local to the planet, solar system or galaxy at the most.

 

[ThinClient]

what if 'god' isn't universal but localized? As in local to the planet, solar system or galaxy at the most.

Then why call him god?

 

[dawp]

Then why call him god?

same reason Zeus or any other ancient god is called a god.

 

[ThinClient]

same reason Zeus or any other ancient god is called a god.

The question was made to make others think. I'm well aware of the answer.

 

[Moonbeam]

PW: I need to tread carefully when divining Moonbeam's meanings

M: I mentioned above there was lots more to say to you but, unlike some folk, I do need rest, but when I woke up I was still thinking about your words above. Perhaps I just don't write very cogently but I think there's more to it than that. Anyway, this was what came to me as I was waking up.

Truth has a paradoxical element and when you deal with a paradox you may be on to something. Here's the example that occurred to me:

A person goes looking for the truth that can't be found by looking, so the harder he looks the less he will see. Somebody tells him that the truth is the conscious state of not looking. How can you experience the conscious state of not looking by looking?

I think maybe the Zen master might give you a Koan like the question 'what is the sound of one hand clapping, to burn up this looking tendency. The answer is in the impossibility of the question being answered by answers. The answer is the insight or the realization that comes at the moment of surrender. The truth is when not when you look or when you try to stop, but when the insight occurs that opens a third way, the resolution of paradox at a higher level.

Those who know don't speak and those that speak don't know. The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. What I say is my attempt to express as best I can my experience of this. I don't know much of anything but whatever if anything I do know, it didn't come cheap.

 

[moonbogg]

What could possibly count as good evidence for god's existence that couldn't be labeled as just another natural phenomenon? The goal post gets pushed back ever further because once a mystery is solved, it gets labeled as natural. If there is a god, we may be making a category error in our labeling of things. We assume that god must be separate and apart from the natural, but what if there is no natural or supernatural categories to speak of? I think there is existence and non existence, and only one of those is real. If god exists, then theres no reason to think we could find any evidence of him because for all we know we could be him.
I personally find my agnostic atheist position inescapable.

 

[Moonbeam]

What could possibly count as good evidence for god's existence that couldn't be labeled as just another natural phenomenon? The goal post gets pushed back ever further because once a mystery is solved, it gets labeled as natural. If there is a god, we may be making a category error in our labeling of things. We assume that god must be separate and apart from the natural, but what if there is no natural or supernatural categories to speak of? I think there is existence and non existence, and only one of those is real. If god exists, then theres no reason to think we could find any evidence of him because for all we know we could be him.
I personally find my agnostic atheist position inescapable.

What if the evidence were a total transformation in your thinking you could recognize in other people by a special halo or hand shake, the way folk in a room in a room full of other sleeping people recognized each other by the fact they are awake?

 

[PowerEngineer]

To say that what is pleasing isn't necessarily good means to me that something may be pleasing now but destructive in the long run. I would say that to call it pleasing would be an improper use of the word. What harms can't ultimately be really pleasing because it will also cause misery.

I agree. I wanted to point out the disconnect between judgments made on the basis of first impressions and those made after long experience. I'm not familiar with your story of those doubters on the road to heaven, but I'm thinking they'd be wise to eliminate any doubts about the road's actual destination before traveling too far down it.

PW: I need to tread carefully when divining Moonbeam's meanings

M: I mentioned above there was lots more to say to you but, unlike some folk, I do need rest, but when I woke up I was still thinking about your words above. Perhaps I just don't write very cogently but I think there's more to it than that. Anyway, this was what came to me as I was waking up.

Truth has a paradoxical element and when you deal with a paradox you may be on to something. Here's the example that occurred to me:

A person goes looking for the truth that can't be found by looking, so the harder he looks the less he will see. Somebody tells him that the truth is the conscious state of not looking. How can you experience the conscious state of not looking by looking?

I think maybe the Zen master might give you a Koan like the question 'what is the sound of one hand clapping, to burn up this looking tendency. The answer is in the impossibility of the question being answered by answers. The answer is the insight or the realization that comes at the moment of surrender. The truth is when not when you look or when you try to stop, but when the insight occurs that opens a third way, the resolution of paradox at a higher level.

Those who know don't speak and those that speak don't know. The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. What I say is my attempt to express as best I can my experience of this. I don't know much of anything but whatever if anything I do know, it didn't come cheap.

I can readily appreciate why you might be frustrated by what I glean about your beliefs from your posts. I think it's fair to say that the inevitable shortcomings in any communication are shared by both the sender and the receiver.

It does seem to me, however, that your beliefs are inextricably tied to your personal experience which opened up to you a view of truth that others (lacking similar personal experience) just can't shown. You have set yourself a Sisyphus-like task to somehow lead us this view through internet posts. I do also appreciate that your posts are intended to keep people's minds open to the possibility that their own personal experiences could provide them with the an opportunity similar to yours.

It's hard for me to put much credence to claims of certain knowledge based on unsharable personal experience because there are billions of people (past/present/future) that can make such claims, and I'm sure that the number of somewhat distinct claims number in at least the millions.

I'm not say that I can completely dismiss the possibility that you are correct (any more than I can dismiss the possibility that your lottery ticket is the jackpot winner).

These thoughts were among those in my mind when I earlier suggested that we should agree to disagree.

 

[moonbogg]

What if the evidence were a total transformation in your thinking you could recognize in other people by a special halo or hand shake, the way folk in a room in a room full of other sleeping people recognized each other by the fact they are awake?

I can relate to having a shared mindset amongst a group of people. I am unable see how such an experience would count as evidence. If I underwent a psychic change and found myself inline with such thinking, then such an experience would be seen as evidence (for me). But I am unable, at present, to consider the experiences of others as evidence when my own mindset is not inline with theirs.
I understand that my mind is changeable, and that's partly why I participate in conversations like these. I am curious and want to know if there is an uncaused cause of everything.

 

[Moonbeam]

I can relate to having a shared mindset amongst a group of people. I am unable see how such an experience would count as evidence. If I underwent a psychic change and found myself inline with such thinking, then such an experience would be seen as evidence (for me). But I am unable, at present, to consider the experiences of others as evidence when my own mindset is not inline with theirs.
I understand that my mind is changeable, and that's partly why I participate in conversations like these. I am curious and want to know if there is an uncaused cause of everything.

But you can't provide evidence to people that are asleep that they are asleep. If you want to share consciousness with them you would have to find a way to wake them up. You don't awaken in the morning because you dream of proof you will. You wake up because you have rested. If there is a conscious state that corresponds to some kind of religious experience or spiritual awakening, it is conditioned upon some sort of flash of intuition, some insight that affects the normal state and causes some kind of transcendental experience. There are reported to be traditions that specialize in the facilitation of such a transformation, repositories of traditional spiritual wisdom, the science of enlightenment, or whatever terms you might want to use.

 

[ThinClient]

Crowd mentality is hardly evidence. It's this flaccid wishy washy "what if" bullshit that suckers in the dumb ones. We can't let flaccid arguments and what-if's poison our reasoning either. If you claim that your god is all powerful and all knowing and all of that, you'd better have a reason to believe it to avoid being labeled delusional. You may as well run around like Rick Moranis going "I AM THE GATE KEEPER" because it holds just as much value as saying "Jesus is divine."

 

[sm625]

Humans have no idea what God is. It is so stupid to have all these religions saying what God wants us to do when we have not the slightest frickin clue what God is telling us. It is so obvious. Hell, humans do not even know what humans are. lol. There is ample evidence that humans are not the direct ancestors of previous hominids, and that there are actually direct hominid descendants walking the earth today. Rather than becoming informed on this, we just make stupid jokes (using pejoratives like "bigfoot") and simply choose to wallow in ignorance. If anything, God would have to be laughing at our stupidity.

 

[ThinClient]

Humans have no idea what God is. It is so stupid to have all these religions saying what God wants us to do when we have not the slightest frickin clue what God is telling us. It is so obvious. Hell, humans do not even know what humans are. lol. There is ample evidence that humans are not the direct ancestors of previous hominids, and that there are actually direct hominid descendants walking the earth today. Rather than becoming informed on this, we just make stupid jokes (using pejoratives like "bigfoot") and simply choose to wallow in ignorance. If anything, God would have to be laughing at our stupidity.

It's funny that you claim that humans have no idea what god is, then go on to tell us how obvious it is what god is, claiming that god exists (which you'd have to know what he is to have evidence that he exists to be able to claim that he does exist), and that he's trying to tell us something (which means you'd have to know the mind of a being you claim that we cannot know, blah blah blah).

This is the kind of bullshit word salad nonsense that suckers in weak-minded fools who can't think for themselves.

Your argument about humans and previous hominids is partly true, but doesn't insinuate the conclusion that you want it to insinuate. Neanderthals are our cousins, not our ancestors. Nobody who knows what they're talking about would ever claim that homosapiens are descendants of neanderthals, etc.

Would you care to link anything that proves that neanderthals still walk the earth?

 

[Moonbeam]

Crowd mentality is hardly evidence. It's this flaccid wishy washy "what if" bullshit that suckers in the dumb ones. We can't let flaccid arguments and what-if's poison our reasoning either. If you claim that your god is all powerful and all knowing and all of that, you'd better have a reason to believe it to avoid being labeled delusional. You may as well run around like Rick Moranis going "I AM THE GATE KEEPER" because it holds just as much value as saying "Jesus is divine."

First you deride 'what if' as the flaccid and wishy washy bullshit poison of dumb suckers and then you categorically state what someone must do to avoid being labeled delusional in a 'what if' world you have 'what if'ed into you the reality of your thinking. The god you don't believe exists is what you conceive of as god, the fantasy you set before you against which you argue and all the surety of your thinking in that regard is meaningless because the god you argue against is not the God who does.

You have used your imagination, a fiction created by the delusions of other people, to tilt against windmills. There is only the oceanic experience of unity caused by the appearance of love, the awakening of being, the God conscious state that is known to be itself by its taste that brings God and self into identity. It is the experience of such love and not the question of its origin that matters. When you awaken to such love you will know you are awake and nothing else will matter. A peak experience is a peak experience because it is a peak experience.

Real religions are constructs designed by those who know to create the right conditions for those who do not know to align their mentalities to facilitate the arrival of such an experience. They are bridges to a different reality. It is not the bridge that matters but the crossing. The religious can become attached to the bridge when the lover who created it moves on because it becomes a man made mechanical thing without the real understanding. Many worship these bridges and many deny the validity of such worship. Meanwhile some folk still keep crossing. They are called idiots by one and all.

I used to walk by a Catholic church almost every day and the only person there I was aware of who knew anything about God was the janitor. I saw Him when He would squirt the kids walking to the school there with his hose. I used to run into him in the local coffee shop and he told me his job there was to keep the priests awake.

The question you might want to ask is not whether or not a god exists, but whether it is possible to experience something that would explain why lots of folk remain so convinced he does. Is there something that can be bought with these imaginary God Dollars, something of priceless value?

 

[Moonbeam]

Would you care to link anything that proves that neanderthals still walk the earth?

I have heard that Italians have the most Neanderthal genes and I'm at least a fourth Italian. May I offer myself?

 

[Retro Rob]

It's funny that you claim that humans have no idea what god is, then go on to tell us how obvious it is what god is, claiming that god exists (which you'd have to know what he is to have evidence that he exists to be able to claim that he does exist), and that he's trying to tell us something (which means you'd have to know the mind of a being you claim that we cannot know, blah blah blah).

This is the kind of bullshit word salad nonsense that suckers in weak-minded fools who can't think for themselves.

You need a life, seriously...or a hobby.

All your posts are rife with anger, vitriol, rage, prejudice, ad hominem attacks, and so on.

Did a theist piss in your very first bowl of oatmeal?

You claim no one can know God because there's no evidence he exists, so why continue to post in these threads?

(and please, save the "bu..bu...I am worried about our children being lied to and religion interfering with our lives" nonsense because you won't affect change by sitting here bitching at random strangers on an internet forum.)

 

[Savatar]

Just wanted to add my two cents... one cannot merely suggest that God is light because, at least in Christian sources (which is what it sounds like you're drawing from), evil can masquerade as an angel of light / a wolf in sheep's clothing. You can't judge based on appearances alone. I would also argue that if something explicitly says it was created by something else, then that must imply the two are distinct. When John said 'God is light', most commentators would suggest that he was using light as a metaphor for good in general to describe God's character: http://www.biblegateway.com/resources/commentaries/IVP-NT/1John/Character-God

Similarly, the idea that evil is simply darkness and does not exist, does not conform to at least Christianity's notion of evil... it's very much about ethics and morals, right and wrong, knowing people from their fruits (the results of their actions/behavior).

 

[moonbogg]

Moonbeam, you mentioned the words "love" and "experience". The fact that these sorts of things exist makes me a little suspicious about the nature of reality, even if they are considered by many to be only evolutionary byproducts. I feel inclined to take them at face value, despite my logical side telling me they are naturally occurring accidents and are not in any way fundamental. The problem is, they seem to be very fundamental and as a result of this I am conflicted and remain solidly agnostic.
I, for some reason, am unable to view the word as it is and make a judgment. Instead, I tend to view what the world and the rest of the universe may be like in a mature stage, then make a judgment based on what I see.
What I see is something of unspeakable beauty and goodness. I see a staggeringly vast network of intelligent, mature, kind and caring civilizations that span the full stretch of the cosmos. A true masterpiece of creation far greater than anyone could suspect being possible, especially when using the current state of the world as an indicator. But I see the hallmarks of greatness hidden beneath the suffering that we endure, slowly springing forth, determined and unrelenting like a flower sprouting up through the soil, seeking out the life giving sunlight.
When I view what I think may come about, I tend to view the universe as a fixed art piece, like a painting or a sculpture and it is beautiful. But it comes about through a process, and this process involves suffering. Perhaps in order for our descendants to truly appreciate what life is like for them, they have to know and understand where they came from.
When I consider what the universe may be like at maturity, and things like experience and love, it makes it ever harder for me to disregard the possibility that we are in the early stages of something beautiful, artistic and of course, intentional.

 

[Via]

Your life is your universe.

You don't remember the beginning, and you won't remember the end. The edges are blurred and timeless.

You affect everything you touch, in ways good and bad.

You are what you seek.