Christians distracted from worship - Page 2

Disbelief in god is not a sin, but occording to the original sin doctrine there are no people without sin.

So in order to make it into heaven, you need the "get out of sin free" pass that you get by accepting Jesus as your personal savior. In order to do that you have to believe in God, so it is impossble to get into heaven without believing in god.

So, really, it is kind of like the transitive property in mathematics - disbelief in god is a transitive sin.

Not quite true.

If, for example, a member of an obscure tribe dies never having been presented with the choice to accept Christ he will then be saved regardless of his own personal beliefs.

Similarly with a child or young person who is below the 'age of accountability'.

In effect it is the rejecting of Christ which will condemn one to the nether regions and logically those never presented with the choice to either accept or reject are generally held to be safe when faced with a Just and Benevolent Deity.

The multiverse hypothesis is a theologic result from some physicist. It isn't science, it is faith. Regardless, if God knows what is going to happen, then knowledge of all things exists and there isn't really any choice -- an individual cannot change the future by making a different choice (because there is no different choice). If you place your faith in an all knowing God, you have no free choices -- all of your decisions are known and directed by God. If you don't put your faith in God, God knows what you will do and the result of everything -- if the decisions are set in stone in god's perception, then they aren't decisions. It is like a deterministic system -- I set up a reaction containing certain reagents and I know what is going to happen, those molecules don't have free will.

You are assuming that an all knowing God necessitates predestination. The two are not necessarily linked.

In any case I don;t think this example holds water. For example, God could want result X and create a universe with infinite choices, A, B, C, D (and A1, A2, A3 etc) onwards, all of which led to result X.

He could then populate the universe with beings who had free-will to choose any of the infinite options and He would still know the end result whilst the beings would still exercise personal free-will.

It is the getting there and the journey of life that matters, not the end destination. We are our choices. Choice is all.

You are assuming that god wants something out of the universe and that free will is somehow obviated in obtaining this goal.

The journey doesn't matter in most Christian sects -- the goal is Heaven (which you can always obtain by accepting Jesus at some point right before you die). The theology of an after life has ruined an otherwise sound theology. Choice is nothing.

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

"[T]he Church has always taught that the overwhelming misery which oppresses men and their inclination toward evil and death cannot be understood apart from their connection with Adam's sin and the fact that he has transmitted to us a sin with which we are all born afflicted, a sin which is the 'death of the soul.' Because of this certainty of faith, the Church baptizes for the remission of sins even tiny infants who have not committed personal sin"

i.e. Infants and obscure tribal members go to hell.

doesn't this imply that at some point all non-christians actively refused to follow what the christian god willed for them?

So these damn evangelists who told me about it fucked me over.

That's the old question of all religions: Is faith and trust in God enough, or should rules be preached and followed?

There is the theory that if you really have a strong faith in your heart regarding God, then you will automatically do God's will, because you would receive divine guidance, which would naturally keep you from sinning and motivate you to do good.

There is definitely some truth therein, but I think that rules can help to nurture, or even create that faith in the first place. It's a bit like a paradoxon, you need rules to walk on God's path until you generate real faith, and once you have that ultimate faith, you don't need the rules anymore, you would be guided and you would naturally keep from sinning and be motivated to do good..

So, I see rules and faith as being equally important for religions, because they need each other, but enforcing peope to abide by religious rules and rituals is in my humble opinion the wrong path and the Quran clearly says, that there mustn't be compulsion in religion.

Compulsion merely creates hypocrites.

Nightcrawler

doesn't that contradict what you said earlier about 'every person' having the choice to yield to god's will or resist it?

Lets face it, everyone here is talking about a different God.

And so today, I decided to resolve this problem.

Being that there is no evidence whatsoever of God, from the simple fundie God, to a highly sophisticated belief in God as held by someone like Segovius...

...then God must be a delusion.

The reality is, that there is a "mystery". Which no-one has yet solved, so God must be the state of mind one reaches when one gives up trying. Wether one gives up as soon as they hear the message (fundie) or wether one gives up after a lifetime of trying to resolve the mystery (sego?) is what differentiates God from person to person.

Therefore, it really depends on ones 'conviction' to solve the mystery, and what the breaking point is before they give up, and resort to 'God' as the explanation to things they have not yet discovered, or are capable of.

Therefore everyone finds 'God' at the end, because the 'mystery' has so far been beyond human comprehension, or so they say. It just depends on ones tolerance to keep going when the barriers of the journey close in on them.

I think alot of things are said to be undiscoverable, because they are meant to test your resolve to really find the answer. Islam might have the 100th aspect of God that is "unknowable", but is that really true, or just a mechanism to weed out the people who dont really want to put the effort in to find out?

I also think that this journey into the "mystery" is like the film "Matrix". Most people are quite happy in their self created "delusion" (fundie GOD) that they do not want to see past it, or are not capable. Then there are a few who reject the programming, and go on to observe a bit more of reality, those that 'wake up' BUT, the problem then, is they dont realise is, this new bit of "reality" is just another aspect of the "Matrix" designed to control those who rejected the first. While our "Morpheus's" are busy congratulating themselves on their awakening, seeing just how "ignorant" everyone else is trapped in their little 'delusion', thinking they are in a "war" for their survival, or embark on a mission to wake up the people still 'asleep' they too have been constrained by their delusions, and are not capable of, or have not yet realised they too,are still in a Matrix, albeit, just constrained by a different aspect of it.

So, as soon as your delusion has got the better of you, then God is the answer. But there is no God, only Mystery.

BTW, Sego..I used you as an example here, because most people here know you well enough to get my point. I wasn't trying to pick a fight with you.

Good news - I'm a puny nerdish weakling

Re your previous post, I actually agree. In part.

Certainly what you say is accurate and spot on for the vast majority of 'believers' (in fact it is perhaps one of the best analyses I've heard) but I think there is something you are missing.

The thing is you can come at this issue from two ends (ooh err missus). The first one is exactly how you describe: someone hears about this 'God', perhaps they read some Scriptures describing Him or maybe listen to a fundie, whatever. The result is they start to either reject, search or believe.

Of course, no such God exists so searching will never find and the seeker must always fall back on belief or rejection. Rejection is your position (and fair enough - it is the only sane one from this approach) but 'belief' is merely the position of the seeker who has inevitably failed to find. That's what 'faith' is - it is in Neitzche's excellent phrase 'not wanting to know what is true.'

But I come at this from another angle: basically I would not construct a God, listen to someone else's description and then look for Him. surely things nonsense?

If a transcendent God exists then why would HE be 'hidden'?

Instead I look at the things in my personal life which are transcendent. Things like sex, peak experiences, various mystical glimpses.

In addition to this I see a 'proof' in injustice. When I see brutality, what Fundies like to call 'evil', negative stuff - then I know for sure there is an opposite of all that.

These things are certainly not God in the sense you are describing and in the sense the religious understand it because they understand God only as a being. But why? Why should God be a being? Why can He not be an energy or a force or even a part of us?

This is what I think anyway - my name for all those transcendent experiences (which are very, very common) and for the opposite of 'bad things' (which is what those transcendent experiences are) is God.

It's just confusing by the name but I think it is the fanatics who should stop using it not me. Most of their activities do not correspond to the nature of God even as they believe Him to be.

sego.

It appears from my Matrix!, that what you are describing as God, is what I am describing as Mystery.

The reason i reject labelling this as God, is because I think that to call it 'God' is ultimately deluding oneself about the nature of 'where' one arrived. ie, this is the best state of understanding I could attain when I knew that I couldn't walk this path anymore, therefore to avoid the devastating feeling that I had failed, I labelled what I did find as God, when infact it is a "part" of the Mystery, that if it was solvable, might reveal a mysterious force/power/entity, or might not.

Make sense?

I have come to the realization that the god of all religions is simply the human mind...

Take the beginning of genesis for example.

I would like all of you to take an opportunity this spring to lay on a plot of grass right before sunrise on a clear day. Close your eyes, open them while looking at the sky and what will unfold in the next few moments is what is written in genesis -- awareness of space/earth, creatures, self...

Not sure I follow you but I do know it doesn't matter whether you call it 'God' or Swiss Cheese. What matters is whether it is real to you.

Perhaps for you it is necessary to dispense with the 'God' term and all religious trappings - many systems do this, Zen Buddhism for example. There is no doubt though that although Buddhism dispenses with God, enlightenment is the same 'transcendence' we are talking about.

Also I think hardeeharhar in the post above is right on the money - that sort of experience is exactly what I am talking about. It's what we don't normally have - we are 'asleep' to use the Sufic phraseology and at some points we have glimpses of being awake.

Beautiful. A while ago I made an attempt to extract the meanings of some of the Bible stories in another thread, I actually came to the conclusion that Genesis was the birth of me/us and that the Bible was a story of my/our life. I've later found the days of creation were parables to stages of my life where I became aware of my surroundings and consciousness.

But you put it much better.

Talk about being distracted. According to this, more White American Christians support the use of torture than secular Americans.

About 55% of Catholics, and 50% of evangelicals and Protestants support torture "sometimes" or "often" whereas 35% of seculars support torture.

WWJT?

I don't think so. At least among the abrahamitic religions, the God talked about is the one who created the whole universe, the angels, Adam and Eve, and who sent out messengers like for example Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad.


Do you really think you can simply decide to resolve the problem and actually do so? Hello, all the thousands of humans throughout the ages that have dedicated their whole lifes to approach the problem were merely the shadow of your wisedom, a wisedom that is not only able to grasp the problem but also to solve it in just one day...


You yourself are an indirect evidence of God's existence, as well as your ability to doubt God's existence.


So you are of the opinion that science actually is capable to solve the mystery, not at once, but at least slowly but surely, step by step, more parts of the mystery get solved, right?

Well, I hate to burst that bubble, but science has never and will never solve any mysteries, it merely describes and categorizes the mystery and splitting up the mystery into a myriad subsets of mysteries.

For example science has described the mystery that most things tend to fall to the floor when pushed off the table, and further observations revealed that things tend to fall faster when starting from higher up, in the most ideal circumstances, ie. in a near vacuum-setting,independent of the weight of the masses involved with the same speed.

That led to the description of the gravitation-force as F=(m1* m2/r²)*(a constant), but nevertheless it didn't help in any way to solve the mystery of gravitation, what it is and how and why it works, it merely describes its effects.

This same scheme you can find in all aspects of science, be it optics, electromagnetism or whatever.. the results of these scientific branches are nothing other than mathematical descriptions, but not solutions of the mysteries.





Hardly. I think it boils down to the old question, does the existence of something need a creator, does a picture need a painter, does a house need an architect...

Usually those that think that universe and life came about coincidentally and can keep up their existence on their own are and always be at odd with those that think the universe and life was espescially created for a purpose.

Usually the latter group is being challenged by the former group with the question: "If there is God, who created everything, who created Him?".

While the latter group counters with the question: "If there is no God, what then came first, the hen or the egg?".

Both sides eventually run into unasnwerable dead-ends, where only faith remains, faith in God's non-existence or faith in God's existence.

Nightcrawler

I don't believe in a god or gods. I don't disbelieve in god or gods. Whoops, the issue is more complex than you think. By the way, faith in disbelief is kind of a loaded term. I don't believe there's an invisible purple unicorn that lives on my roof. I guess you'd then say that I have faith that one doesn't exist. Well, fine, you'd be wrong there too.

faith (n) - belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence.

This is a definition that most reilgious folks will admit to. Those who try to say that their beliefs are based on logical proof don't have faith. So, given this definition of faith, can you really have faith in disbelief? In the absence of logical proof or material evidence for the positive, do you then NEED it for the negative? I say no. Your entire premise is a loaded question that just tries to throw faith into an atheist's face. Sorry, sell crazy somewhere else. I'm not buying it.

I don't mean to pick at this matter to much, but I think you dodged my question. Here you say that every person has a choice to submit to god's will, etc. Doesn't that infer that by not 'submitting' to god's will, every person who has not done so is, in fact, actively resisting the will of god?

My point is that many people have never been in a situation where they are either accepting or resisting god's will, but rather the issue never played any role whatsoever in their life.

I was trying to say something around this kind of issue in my reply to MarcUk.

What you are describing is true - there is no proof that a purple unicorn is not on your roof one way or another and so it is with common conceptions of God.

However, there is another approach that is quite different: the experiential.

That is to say, if I experience X then it is proof that X exists.

Granted, no-one has experienced God as described in the various scriptures where He is basically a human writ large - and this is because no such God exists - but we do as humans, very often experience the numinous and the transcendent. The problem is that we have been conditioned to believe that 'God' is what the organized religions claim He is and so it does not occur to us to label these experiences 'divine'.

If we can throw out outmoded concepts of God (and we should) then that does not mean that God does not exist. It just means that we may have been experiencing 'God' all along and not called it that and that it is nothing like we have traditionally been taught.

Atheists and believers are both right: 'God' does not exist - 'God' exists (this is the Islamic profession of belief btw) and no faith is needed. it is purely experiential but it is nothing like most religionists and literalists understand it to be.

The material evidence is clearly the existence of this world as well as all there is in.

That's the basis for both believers and atheists.

Believers have faith therein that there is an omnipotent entity that has created all this.

Atheists have faith therein that everything came about coincidentally.

Determination vs coincidence.

But you are right that it isn't that simple, because there is a third group that is probably at least in the west the majority, namely agnostics.

Agnostics are the ones that really don't have faith, neither the faith in determination nor in coincidence.

I have good news for you: You don't have to buy this crazy, I give it to you for free.

Nightcrawler

Following on from the discussion about 'proof', I think also that we actually can at least disprove candidates for 'God' through logical processes.

For example - if we can identify an illogical and ridiculous human belief then any 'God' sharing this belief cannot by definition be God. Some stupidities are uniquely human and not a possible property of a putative creator of the Universe.

Similarly with contradictions: if someone claims there is a unicorn on the roof then fair enough. There may or may not be. However, if someone ays there is a completely blue unicorn that is also completely yellow and is a vegetarian that only eats meat and is also an elephant - then we can say this is a fiction.

Of course someone holding this belief may well resort to tautology and special pleading (ie 'theology') to 'prove' how the unicorn can be a unicorn and an elephant simultaneously but if we stay sane and don't allow ourselves to be diverted from the fact that the original claim was 'there is a unicorn' then we won't get sucked into the madness.

So it is with some literalist conceptions of God.

I can't follow you on that one. Haven't all abarahamitic religions stressed the notion that God is really unknown and humans not capable to grasp his nature?

Nightcrawler

Yes, but that hasn't stopped some people describing His nature or issuing instructions on His behalf.

The US fundamentalist evangelical community would be a good example (not all of them - mainly the 'televangelists') of people who follow self-appointed 'prophets' who claim to speak for, or to, God but there are many other cults and sects in all religions that do the same.

So you expect me to accept that everyone who is a Christian has the same idea or feelings of God? Everyone who is a Muslim has the same idea/feeling. Everyone who is a Jew/Zoroastrian. And then you expect me to accept that everyone across all these groups has exactly the same idea or feeling. I dont need to call BS on that, because you already know it.

And what 'God' are you talking about, Jehovah, Baal, Al-Ilah, El, Elohim, Asherah, Lucifer, Dogon, Nimrod, Tammuz, Hades, the wise Volcano?

There are what 7 billion of us, that means 7 billion concepts of "God" or "Not God"

Why dont you sit down with "Fellowship" and see if you can come up with exactly the same conceptualization of what God is seeing as you both follow an "Abrahamic" religion. Id bet money, you would be scrapping within 3 minutes.

As soon as one of you disagrees then

a) One of you is deluded
b) Both of you are deluded
c) Both of you are right, but too ignorant to realise why.

Incidently, id go for {c}

Lets then sit down with the whole world. If you threw every possibility about the nature of God, would even a single pair out of 7 billion agree on every possibility. Probably Not.

Therefore everyone succumbs to delusion at some point, when their knowledge fails them.

Therefore God as an explanation is ultimately a delusion for everybody "at some point".


Well maybe all the other humans came across the universally held belief that God is ultimately unsolvable, and thats why they failed. I call BS on that. Everything has a solution, including the solution that there is no solution yet.

So, There is possibly one true series of events from the instance of Big Bang uptill the second I am sat here typing this. This is the Mystery, "What really happened and why", it would be very very easy at some point of trying to solve this, just to say a God did it, but then I am deluding myself, GIVING UP! - for every single description of God we can find ends at some point in a self-delusion - as shown above.

Now, Segovius, You, Fellowship, Me, hardeharhar, everyone on the planet, even the Satanists and Athiests, have all experienced the feeling that Segovius calls "God", and I call "Mystery"- i dont dispute that. It a very real feeling, and something as yet unexplainable.

But this is a "Mystery", because the possiblity still exists that it is "God", or, just a series of Chemical reactions that as yet we dont understand. Or that God IS the series of Chemical Reactions.

To chose to call it "God", suggests to me atleast, that at some point you have "given up" wanting to know.

Now, Segovius claims that the reason for this is that we have been misled about the nature of God, because we are all expecting to find a grey bearded granddaddy in the sky, yet God exists as a feeling within ourselves.

Now, perhaps its stupid and dangerous to ask, and perhaps most, if not everyone, doesn't want to know, if an unknown series of chemical reactions can manifest itself as God. BUT I DO!!!

What happens when this feeling of God, within ourselves, is reduced to a flow-chart of events, described in terms of atoms, and electron interactions. What is God then?

I expect very many people are going to have a very bad day. But not me!

Most people, would think that all the magic had gone from the world, Yet they are only in contempt of themselves.

If you cant look at life, the Earth, or the universe, or Evolution, or Chaos theory, and be completely blown away by its' very existance, regardless of God, Jesus, Mohammed - if you need a resurrection, or ascention of an imaginary friend, a heaven, or threat of eternal punishment, to have value in life - then perhaps it is better that you do believe in God, and dont ask these questions, or seek the truth.

It would be better that you do believe in a Jesus resurrecting on a 'wooden' cross, if thats the only thing that can break you out of your self imposed contempt for life and mystery. Because the truth would surely kill you.


No, I am direct evidence of a mystery that I wish to solve. You are direct evidence of someone who has given up and accepted a delusion to make your life possible.



Science and religion WERE the same thing. Religion was the mechanism where scientific discovery was communicated and written down, in parable so that people could understand it on different levels depending on their natural ability. And it evolved over millenia, building on its foundations to incorperate new science, philosophy, and theology. Thats why every religion has the same core teaching, the same core parables, wisdom and characters - thats why every religion is the same, yet different. Thats why Jesus=Joshua=Mithra=Orpheus=Hercules=Osiris=Horus and many many others. He was just a natural progression of mankinds increasing knowledge. Not a God damn real person. If events in Rome had turned out differently, there would be no Jesus. We would have re-written his story a hundred times over by now, incorperating all the new science, philosophy and wisdom that mankind had discovered over the last 2000 years. Evolution would now be part of our Bible.


For the mystery to be solved, both Science and Religion must be reunited. Its entirely obvious. They need each other.



Yet there is Science going on right now that will/may answer, or at least provide further leads in how to solve those mysteries, If you've built your "God" around believing that these things will always remain a mystery, then I wouldn't want to be in your shoes over the next decade. You'll be in for a very rough ride.




we have the mathematics and the theories, yet all of a sudden there has not a mass unemployment of Scientists, What do you think they're working on now. There working on "How" and "Why".

Whats dmz going to do when Science can show how a flagellum came into existance all on its own. He's framed the question as "either its the flagellum or God". When Science solves the flagellum, dmz will have lost God.

Why build your tower to God in a foundation of Sand?


Marc

Baal = wise volcano
Dogon = tribe in Mali
Hades = place we are in all likelihood going

That can only happen if humans are the highest form of life in the universe - ie, we can only explain things we have mastered.

For example, if, as is very, very likely at some point, we encounter an extra-terrestrial civilization millions of years older than us and utilizing a technology utterly alien (as it would be) then we will not be able to 'reduce' this to anything.

And that is just with other forms of life. 'God' would stand to them as they do to us.

You put too much faith in science and seem to have caught some of its afflictions We are nothing ion the universe - certainly nothing to be 'reducing' God or many other things.

It's an interesting theoretical construct but nothing more.

A pedant writes:

Aha! Common misconception.

Hades was the god of the Underworld.

edit: a Wikipedia search reveals that, er, 'Hades' was the god but also became the place: 'the house of Hades'. But wasn't always thus. Anyway, oops.

IIRC i think you'll also find that Dogon WAS an ancient Jewish god, and that this tribe in Mali stuff that claims to know about sirius B is actually a big joke. But I might be wrong, its been a long time.

A wanker writes:

No, the Dogon are an agro-pastoralist people of the mountains of Southern-central Mali, noted for their rock paintings, and curious since their language is of non-siNtu ('Bantu') derivation.

(But as far as I can tell, this Sirius B stuff is indeed crap.)

Edit: a Wikipedia search reveals that yes, they are into Sirius. I was just getting into anti-Graham Hancock mode, because everything he writes is bullshit.

mea culpa!

I actually meant to write Dagon!

See I can fuck up too.