Something like this would normally be in "regular" WotM, but I'm trying to see this forum thriving, and, besides, this is a relatively short post; the discussion will (eventually) be the main part, not my initial post. So, a forum is perhaps more appropriate.

So, this is a challenge to any believers reading this. No matter whether you're Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or any other kind of theist (if your religion has no gods, then this doesn't apply).

And it's this: I'm going to give 3 reasons for believing in God. Tell me -- if you can -- that you don't fit in one of them (or more than one).

1. You don't know how something - say, the universe, the world, life, or Man - could ever come to be, so God is the best explanation you've got.
2. You feel that a universe with a God is much better than one without him; that it's much better to believe that when you die, it's not really the end, you just go to a better place.
3. You've been raised that way.
   

This post was last modified: 11-23-2006 07:13 AM by Pedro Timóteo.

NICE.

1. I don't know a LOT of things. God is NOT the answer to all of them. But even if a God is the answer to one... maybe the rest don't matter.

2. Believing in God could make things MUCH worse when you die, because most (not all) theist believe in a hell. The universe would be WORSE with him, because responsibility to be a good person takes more presidence, and if I live a selfish, horrible life, it's worse for me afterwards. I can't just be a lazy asshole and have no consequence other than not doing anything.

3. Raised, but that's not the reason.



So one... I gues is a yes. Two, definately a no, three, a no.

1 - Does anyone really know? God isn't an excuse for the unknown, and specially for the lack of mankind's perception and intelligence. I don't fit in this one.

2 - The keyword here is "feel". As limited beings we thrive on our ability to feel, our feelings, our instincts. I believe that everything is subjective, and so is the way I feel God. I feel that "my" God is in everything, everywhere, meaning that He will be present in my death as He is present in my life... whatever that means.

3 - Unfortunately, no man is born free, I was no exception either. I was baptized by the Catholic Church when I was a child, my parents gave me no choice. Fortunately they didn't forced me into a church in my latter years. I explored the catholic church and faith when I was 20 / 21, left at 22 when I realized that I couldn't find God in any religion. So, I guess I don't fit in this one either.

This post was last modified: 11-24-2006 06:08 AM by odrakir.

 Hello all, I have been reading WoTM for several months now and although I don't agree with everything posted here, I have found it informative and somewhat inspiring.
Thank you, Pedro
I don't think that I fall under one of your three categories listed above.
I was an atheist for most of my life but, I have had experiences that have led me to believe that there is something more to life. I will not go into detail about these experiences, but I am convinced that they were real & not just strong feelings.
I am currently looking for a religion that I am willing to accept. It is a very difficult thing to do considering where I live & the number of southern Baptist that surround me.
I choose to believe in god but I have no understanding if it. I like to think that god could be a combined consciousness of all living things...dead & alive. I try to live that when I die I will get a review of my life & hopefully the whole universe. I expect to feel all of the good and all of the pain that I have cause on the world.
You have heard the phrase "Get high on life". Well, I believe that "life is a high"... I think before we come to earth, we are all hanging out in "heaven" with "god". And he leans over to us and says, " Hey, try this stuff out." and we come to earth to experience life & pleasure & pain & all the other living stuff.
But, I don't know if there is a religion that follows this concept or not. I just feel alone in my quest for answers.

To most of this I can just say... welcome to the club dude.
And get ready for a ride, because your experiences are going to be contradicted here, and proven false again and again until you almost don't even remember them (your experiences) anymore, and the only thing that you can think of is cold hard fact... and nothing else.
Your feelings don't matter... they don't prove shit.
PROOF is all that matters, feelings are insane. Your experiences, no matter how real they were, were actually wrong, and no god can ever exist, not even as a possibility because of humanity's logic, which is capitol.

1) What is he then? If not an explanation then a question, if not a question then an explanation.
We do not know, but we do not pretend TO know, or pretend anyone knows.
2) More vague comments and conversational circles.
3) I left the Anglican church at 11. I feel for you. Quite often, though not always catholicism is very good at drilling beliefs so deep that they can't be removed. Good work on leaving.
However I must be blunt here, without religion there would be NO GOD.

This sounds a lot like the Buddhist concept of Karma, have you considered being a Buddhist? I think jim, he might be able to help you out.

Why do I feel bad now?
Although Kren has a good point, to understand the universe we must first understand just how limited our views are, just because we create objects for a purpose doesn't mean that all objects in the world HAVE purpose. Thats a good one to remember

This post was last modified: 11-25-2006 10:30 PM by XTimmy.

While I cannot disagree with the latter part of that statement, I wholeheartedly disagree with the former. We are not solely logical and rational beings. Feelings are a part of who we are, and they do matter - but only to us individually. I would amend the first part of your statement to say that "Your feelings don't matter to anyone but you..."

And it is precisely because of that that they cannot be used to prove anything to anyone else.

Has anyone experienced deja vu? or have an explanation for it?

TIMMAH!!

Nice to hear from ya.

Good point too. A lot of humans have created God for the purpose of being (Or even HAVING a...) RIGHT. Correct. NOT WRONG.
OR, as has been pointed out before... an explanation for that which we can't explain at thus time.

I really like your rebutle.

I ask then, are feelings to be thrown aside?

A lot of people have "Felt the presence of.. "the truth of.." blah blah blah.

Obviousley not. You feel you have the right to live, so you live.
I feel I love my wife therefore I do what I can for her.
We feel that our son might make the wrong decision based on our example and do better for that very image. We feel that we are not strong enough, so we work out, or not smart enough so we read books. It's all really some sort of illusion right? Strong enough or smart enough doesn't REALLY matter does it... does it make you a bad PERSON if you can't bench 145?
I've known people that can do physical feats I couldn't do after a few months practice, who couldn't get a "simple" equation before I could. Am I better? Does this make me "Right"?
Feelings transcend these views. I FEEL that nobody is better than the next person, just better at certain things. And even if someone is COMPLETELY inferrior to you and I, thier offspring possibly be stronger than mine or yours.
All in all, how limited ARE our views? We have limited ourselves to all that is physical have we not?

Thank you .

No, Hell, no, your passion for your wife and son, indeed my passion for acting and philosophy are what makes us individuals, however, despite their apparent complexity, they all stemmed from evolution and natural selection, humans have simply transcended, well partially, natural selection and because of that we appear more diverse than any other species. In a way it is damaging, but I'm not going to go into that in this thread.

HOWEVER, we must understand that we are not unique as "feelers", almost every animal that is not part of a "hive mind" can actually get depressed, chimps have been known to stand around waterfalls, slowly singing and gazing up in, as far as we can tell, awe.

BUT. and this is a big BUT. Feelings are massively subjective, they are, in a way, survival skills that alter our perception of reality so we react in a different way (being hit invokes anger etc). And because of "their" ability to warp our perceptions, we MUST ignore them when studying the universe around us. Imagine if a scientist felt strongly about his results, strong enough to modify them so he liked them! We must be objective when studying our universe, indeed when studying ourselves.

This is going to sound personal, but I assure you I mean no harm, your wife Kren, her name is a subjective human construct, her personality just as much, her looks are, most likely, influenced by society.
Assuming you don't have some weird liquid fetish, you did not fall in love with a bunch of cells, you fell in love with one or more of the above. In general terms. However to truly study "your wife" (not psychologically of course) you would have to strip ALL emotion, ALL human constructs away, and look at exactly WHAT she is.

This applies to anyone in love, try stripping away their personality, their looks, their name. Forget WHO they are and look at WHAT they are, THAT is how we must study the Universe, THAT is how we must study "God".

NICE Timmy.

MORE now, do I admire you. The fact that you mentioned my wife takes NO offense to me.

As an example, my wife...
To strip away the cells, the skin, bones blah blah blah,
I see decisions made. Actions taken.

DID I fall in love with a batch of cells? Yep. But would I fall in love with any batch of cells? No. Would you?



We had the same conversation tonite in fact. What is love? What the fuck is it?
Well, if you love a friend, the nearest definition of love would be your willingness to do (commit actions) for them. Die, being the most profound of actions.
Do we study the universe in the actions that people have taken due to their convictions? Or do we study the universe in total denial of it?
What I mean to say is, are our feelings nothing? For many times, we've been accelorated as a race, by the feelings of geniouses.

Do our feelings, being stemmed from evolution, mean nothing? If they mean something, what?

You're processing it in the reverse to how I would, which is an interesting way of looking at it, rather than seeing actions, feelings and emotions like a field around a person, it's more like they are the core.

In response to your second statement, is being stemmed from evolution equal to being nothing? I certainly hope that several billion years of energy is nothing or I'm using aeons of energy simply to breathe.

For humans it is a matter of finding balance between the objective and the subjective, we cannot constantly go round with a purely objective state of mind, even if we where hermits we would need emotions to keep us safe, fear so we wouldn't take on big risks, sadness and emotional pain so we wouldn't perform certain actions again. We need that ability to alter our perception of the universe, like giving objects good or bad connotations when in reality they have no moral status at all.
In contrast we cannot live purely subjectively, at times we need to be objective to achieve goals, I cannot spend my time forming an opinion of my spear, when there is a beast about to attack me.

However, in terms of scientific discoveries we MUST be purely objective, our emotions play no part in reality, only in our perceptions of reality, in terms of science, we must use evidence in the place of emotion. Whether an object is right or wrong in a scientific sense is not "whether it is harmful or beneficial to me" as a subjective point of view would give, rather it is "is this evidence factual or not".

There are times when being completley subjective is fine, in love for instance, it is better to use your feelings as your guide, as they have been built over billions of years to produce a better generation of people.
A more general example is an exercise used when an actor is getting into a psychologically motivated character; Looking at everything and forming an opinion of it, based purely on that character motivations and emotions.

However as I stated in my "objective" paragraph, for God to be proved we need him to be defined and studied, otherwise he simply has no evidence towards his existence, as all the evidence (at least, all that I have seen) is subjective; visions, feelings etc. And this is not evidence, but "psychological survival mechanisms" known as emotions.

I couldn't agree more here. There's a difference between "feelings don't matter" and "feelings don't prove stuff".

our views are as limited as we make them. an atheist can be just as closed-minded as a theist, although it's usually the theist that is closed-minded. And just because someone says that you are closed-minded doesn't mean you are, if you have thought about it. An open-minded person is open to new ideas, beliefs--he or she can change...

Once a friend said this to me:
I don't care what what your belief may become, but I want you to put a hell of a lot of thought into it.

That was at Jew camp. That may have been the best advice ever given to me. I am now Jewish-atheist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Atheist) (not an oxymoron).

My ex-girlfriend of nearly a year said to me that her church and family forced her, ever since she was a small child, not to question her beliefs. This ignorance may well be what drives some ideas of Christianity.

Thanks to XTimmy for nudging me into responding to Pedro's challenge here.
1. I don't think an explanation for how the universe came into being is necessary. Scientists now believe - as I understand it - that time is a quality of our universe and doesn't exist outside it. Therefore cause and effect don't exist outside it either, and the question of how it came into being doesn't even arise.
2. Had to search my soul on this one (no pun intended!). When I think of the gods that some people believe in, I don't want anything to do with them, thank you, so I think we'd be better off without them. When I think of how I myself envisage "god", however: an infinite intelligence from which we came and to which we will someday return then, yes, I like the idea of that, though others might find it scary. Does the fact that I am comfortable with what I "believe" invalidate it? I don't think so, but I fully accept that you might disagree. That's OK. I don't expect anyone else to believe in god just because I do. All I try to do in my blog and through the various comments I leave is to open people up to the possibility that something which may (or may not) be called god may exist and may be rather different from what you've read about in the bible.
3. Speaking of which, I was raised in the Church of England, which doesn’t bear much relation to my current beliefs, so I don’t think I fit in here.
So category 2 only, I reckon: one out of three!

Reading back through my previous post, I realize that in trying to be brief, I did a really lousy job of explaining what I "believe". So slightly less briefly: I "believe" in unity, the concept being that the universe and everything in it, including ourselves, are all one - all part of a composite entity or intelligence which we may choose to call "god". I talked about eventually "returning" to this, but that's not accurate because we haven't really gone anywhere. We're still a part of god and always will be. What we're "returning" to - sometimes, I think, after a great many incarnations - is awareness of what we are, of our true nature.

Your thinking holistically, which is great, to my mind you're correct in saying that we're all connected every action has an equal and opposite reaction, every decision and every action you make has an effect (albeit small) on everything and everyone around you. Therefore people should be mindful of their actions as their affects are bigger than the original source.

However, to say that we're all part of a single intelligence I find slightly less probable, the odds (Citing: 'The Blind Watchmaker') of us existing (as intelligent beings) and their being life on more than say two or three planets (there are several billion) are very low, it is quite likely we are the only thing is several billion kilometers. So by your argument we're connected to a whole lotta nothing. Going off on a slight tangent here, from your post I derive that you think we're almost synonymous with cells in a body (would that be correct?). This is completley incorrect, Cells have no individual motives beyond survival, they replicate purely to keep their host alive, they are similar to ants, with no individual mind or motivation, they work for the survival of the greater 'good'.

Humans do not, we presumably live to further the species, but, and this is a big but, in our life times we have individual motivations and intents. IF we where part of a greater intelligence, a greater 'being' it would be quite probably that each of our actions would be DIRECTLY linked to furthering this intelligence's survival. In which case you can call me a cancer.

This post was last modified: 12-09-2006 08:59 PM by XTimmy.

Your feelings can be real, but as has been noted, feelings don't prove anything.

What does it matter what you choose to believe? It doesn't make it happen.

I have experienced deja vu many many times. Explanation.

It reminds me of this one dream I had many years ago - it felt like I had travelled through time and some narrator (sounded like myself) said "this is you when you were half a year old" or something to that effect, and I was watching myself as a baby in my house. Now, if I didn't think about it, I would be utterly convinced that I was really having some weird out-of-body transcendental experience since it felt so real.

But a couple of days later, I realized that what I saw was impossible. The house I saw myself in was the same as my current home. However, my family was living in another house when I was that young.

In short, I've recognized that I'm still subject to brain "glitches" and the like.

Yes, people tend to think of the idea of karma as something imposed upon us by some all-powerful being. In fact, I think it's just a natural law of cause and effect. If you do something we might think of as "bad", there are consequences. It's the same with the law of gravity. If you throw something up in the air it will come down again. It's the way things are. On the other hand, we're here in life to experience, so most of us are going to do "bad" things from time to time, just as we're going to jump too high and tumble from time to time as well. It's part of life.

The trouble is that when we think about this sort of thing, we make the mistake of judging things from a human perspective. Even Richard Dawkins is not immune to this problem. Several billion kilometres seems like a lot to us humans, but I would submit that it may not be much when considered against the universe as a whole. And bear in mind that many scientists believe there is more then *one* universe. If you lump the whole of "what is" together, then several billion kilometres pales into insignificance.

No. I think our bodies are like the leaves on a tree which we shed from time to time. What we are is consciousness, an integral part of the unified field we might choose to call "god" or prefer to call something else. What I am proposing here is that we came from this field and will return to it. In actual fact, we are still a part of it, but most of us are not aware of that at the moment. As it happens, our bodies and the leaves on the trees are a part of that field too, though for the sake of this illusion we call the world, they have taken on the temporary semblance of matter.

Yes, in most cases for most of the time, we are motivated by our own egos to serve ourselves and those who are close to us. You only need to look at the state of the world to see that this is not, by and large, for the good of humanity as a whole. If we become aware that we are part of a unified whole, we are more likely to want to act for the good of the whole. Many people believe that such a change will be needed in the near future if humanity is to survive. My favourite quote from Albert Einstein seems to be relevant here, so I'll throw it in:

I'd also like to respond to your description of yourself as a "cancer" in this context, but I wonder what makes you say that?
Please bear in mind that the various ideas I'm putting forward here are my best guess about how things are. But i can't prove them and I'm not expecting anyone else to "believe" them just because I do. I'm just putting them forward as an intriguing and - I hope - compelling concept.

I would say I am a cancer, because, in my model of "your" beliefs (The now debunked "Cells", I'll get round to discussing leaves on a tree in a moment.) each of us is a cell, a cell must act towards the betterment of it's 'host', a human is made up of cells etc, however if this model which I suggested was correct (to both of us it's not but never mind) then any 'cell' that did not act to the betterment of this intelligence (i.e. Me) would be considered a cancer cell, as it is a cell that has mis-formed and now 'attacks' the host.

Now, onto your most recent post.
Our bodies are leaves on a tree, an interesting comparison but one that is similar to the cell ideology none-the-less, I'll move to our consciousness in a moment, leaves are very similar to cells in purpose, they exist to sustain the host, nothing more, leaves are more specialized than cells but they have a similar 'purpose' anyway.
Secondly, what makes the conscious separate from the body? There is no evidence to suggest, no matter how much it may insult our dignity as humans, that our consciousnesses are no more than chemical reactions in the brain, as much as it is a comfort (and it is) to believe that our consciousness is something special it is not.


Now I'm going to attempt to explain why. Up until now I've been referring to humans as 'hosts' for the cell, and the cells being a slave party in the organization, this is wrong. Bodies are, in fact, little more than defensive mechanisms designed to protect the DNA or RNA that we house. DNA and RNA are not as mystical as people think, they are simply chemical compounds that are capable or copying (or even spontaneously creating) themselves if given the resources to do so (you can't get something from nothing, but you can from a few chemicals). They are NOT cells. Now natural selection works even on this level and DNA that formed itself into defensive shells etc (this is watered down, but the idea is the same) survived long enough to copy itself more, soon Cells existed, then cells that did not quite split, then multi celled animals, all of this through natural and sexual selection and random mutations. Eventually the end product you see is us. Consciousness is a survival mechanism along with all other things we call 'human'.

I'll extend this when I get back from work.

You back from work yet, XTimmy?

Just ended a nine hour shift, our clientèle is not the sort to intellecutally stimulate so you'll have to do with the above post.

On another note, did you know Western Australia is the biggest Banana Republic in the world, due to our "fuck you jack" attitude?
Yeh.

Commiserations on your work load, XT - and it's certainly hard to focus on God with all the distractions of Christmas.

As I've said before, I don't claim to be able to *prove* that God exists, and I'm quite happy to accept that there isn't any proof that consciousness is separate from the body. I suspect, however, that there's no proof that it isn't either. So here's just something to think about. Have you ever found it difficult to sleep at night because your mind keeps racing? Have you ever felt that your mind is out of control in that way? So which part of you is feeling that? Which part of you is observing your unruly mind? Could it be that what you think of as you is the brain, with all its chemical reactions - and also something else?

Reactions keeping reactions in check, nothing new there, we have machines doing it all the time, I can bring up taskmngr.exe right now and see what my computer is doing, taskmngr.exe is still part of my computer, but it allows it to check it's status.

Furthermore, if we where to use the "I can't prove God exists, he just DOES" argument then, considering how complex God must be (assuming he created the entire universe etc), we could easily put forward a claim that life and the universe simply exists without a God, that's actually alot more reasonable than saying God existed from nothing.

Further more, the reason that you can't sleep when your mind is racing is because the brain is malfunctioning in a way, it is not releasing the chemicals it needs to sleep. Now you can't state that "Oh, I can't sleep, my brain needsn less adrenaline" because there is nothing inside your body to tell you that. What you ARE feeling is "My mind is busy, therefore I cannot sleep" (The appropriate analogy would be a computer stopping tasks before shutting down.) The only reason you assume "oh chemicals" is because you've been told that. In a nutshell, you cannot feel, sense or understand the reactions in real-time, but you can see the effects.

The brain is amazingly complex, yes, but not impossibly complex.

I don't think it's more reasonable to say such a thing - maybe just as reasonable, but you've got to remember that time exists in our universe, which tends to suggest that it must have had a beginning. If God is the creator, then 'he' must presumably originate from outside the universe, where - as I understand the latest scientific thinking - there is no time. God therefore is not subject to time and doesn't need to have a beginning!

Please understand that I present the above as what I hope is a worthwhile point to raise, not as proof of God's existence. The same goes for what I said before about the mind observing itself - and you, XT, made a perfectly good point in return. But none of these are proofs either way.

As it happens, I don't think there is any proof, one way or the other, about God's existence. And I certainly wouldn't say "I can't prove God exists, he just DOES". My position is more like "Though I can't prove God exists, I have a strong feeling that 'he' does and what seems to me to be a pretty good working theory about what life and the universe is all about, but I don't expect anyone else to believe me just because I say so." Which is kind of long-winded, but a rather more reasonable thing to say, in my opinion.

And it's this: I'm going to give 3 reasons for believing in God. Tell me -- if you can -- that you don't fit in one of them (or more than one).

1. You don't know how something - say, the universe, the world, life, or Man - could ever come to be, so God is the best explanation you've got.
2. You feel that a universe with a God is much better than one without him; that it's much better to believe that when you die, it's not really the end, you just go to a better place.
3. You've been raised that way.
   

So, any takers?

4) Everything I've seen and felt in this life speaks of a creators hand on my life, up to and including, this discussion.

Yes to all three of the above also, but it's not as vague as your words.

How praytell does a discussion which proves conclusively that the xn god cannot exist, and that it is not merely irrationaly but in fact grossly irresponsible to believe in the xn god, "prove" the existence of this impossible entity??