Belief in God

just me said:
Yes, I have heard of Switzerland and horses. Narwhales have always fascinated me a bit.

By original, I mean my mind has not been hammered and watered down with a bunch of books on religion. I may read a commentary on Hebrews by Guthrie, but read such books with anticipation seasoned with much discretion. I do not allow thoughts to influence my mind that I do not feel comfortable with, in other words. I have a comfort zone with my years of studying the Bible, and the writings had best add up to what I see as truth. Some writers seem to get off on a sort of "self-tangent", so to speak, that I read through and fail to let soak in. Make any sense? Don't get me started on the word "original" today, please. Maybe I should have taken care not to use it, but someone years ago on this forum in a word exercise called me the "original iconoclast", so I felt it appropo. I can accept you think I may sound a wee bit like someone else; no problem and no foul.


BTW, I am glad you are an optimist, as the world needs more of them. Some folk seem to find only negative things to dwell on, and it becomes a bit uncomfortable after awhile. ; )
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Okie dokie! Makes sense. Some people are smart enough they don't have to read other smart people's thoughts. -looks at feet- those some would in general not include me! Hah!
Haha and thanks. I enjoy being an optimist. To quote one of my favorite bands "It's funny how you find you enjoy your life when you're happy to be alive" (the rest of that song fits me as well though... I can be very pessimistic, and when I am... Watch out)
Back to the topic at hand however!
Transcendence: We talk of things "transcending" reality or logic. I had a uh... Let's call it a "discussion" over this with someone not long ago. My reasoning was: God is real. Reality is logical. Therefore God ought to be logical, BUT there are so many tjings around us we just can't call "logical." I believe in God and I want to believe in Him. What am I missing?
Response: God is the creator of logic and as such it can teach us things about God but not everything. You can tell things about an artist from a painting of theirs, but not all. In addition, logic by definition does not account for infinity. If there is such a thing as an Infinite being it therefore follows that logic would never be able to fully account for it.
Thoughts?
 
Optimist said:
Okie dokie! Makes sense. Some people are smart enough they don't have to read other smart people's thoughts. -looks at feet- those some would in general not include me! Hah!
Haha and thanks. I enjoy being an optimist. To quote one of my favorite bands "It's funny how you find you enjoy your life when you're happy to be alive" (the rest of that song fits me as well though... I can be very pessimistic, and when I am... Watch out)
Back to the topic at hand however!
Transcendence: We talk of things "transcending" reality or logic. I had a uh... Let's call it a "discussion" over this with someone not long ago. My reasoning was: God is real. Reality is logical. Therefore God ought to be logical, BUT there are so many tjings around us we just can't call "logical." I believe in God and I want to believe in Him. What am I missing?
Response: God is the creator of logic and as such it can teach us things about God but not everything. You can tell things about an artist from a painting of theirs, but not all. In addition, logic by definition does not account for infinity. If there is such a thing as an Infinite being it therefore follows that logic would never be able to fully account for it.
Thoughts?
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My first thoughts happen to be this, after reading your profile @Optimist :
[video=youtube;Dm03rocz_tk]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dm03rocz_tk[/video]

We sometimes try so hard to understand words and reason we often miss the point of them. The Bible teaches us to love one another. The Bible is considered God's Word.

We are able to look and see the glory of God if we can truly open our heart and mind to it. We see these things through that which has been given to us, though we still do not see the Glory of God in its entirety and fullness. Thus, we are standing in between two means of knowledge or understanding. The more we seek, the more we find. The more we knock, the more doors are opened. The more we ask, the more we receive. We walk by faith. God reveals Himself more and more to those that truly seek Him through faith.

I am reminded of the temporal and the eternal, because we see things the way we look at them sometimes. If we focus on the temporal, we will naturally see things temporal. However, if we focus on eternal things(infinite, as you will per your words), more eternal things are revealed to those that truly have the desire to know and understand those things if they follow the path and stand on the foundation that has been laid in front of us. The desires of the flesh have thus become moreso the desires of the spirit. Yes, there are those that walk that narrow path and have more revealed to them. The power of God becomes part of their life, and I must stop there.
 
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[MENTION=680]just me[/MENTION] ... Yes, well said!

Knowledge is not gained through our own work, but it is granted by the Grace of God.

7Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock, and it will be opened to you.
8For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it is opened.
9And who is the man among you whose son will ask him for bread and will hand him a stone?
10And if he will ask him for a fish, will he hand him a snake?
11If therefore you who are evil know to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in Heaven give good things to those who ask him?
 
Optimist said:
Have you read Escape from Reason by Francis A. Schaeffer? A few of your ideas seem to ring of his thoughts.
For those of you who haven't read it, I recommend it. It's a short read and has been critiqued for its lack of length before actually, but is a nice summation of the way man has viewed what rules him over the centuries.
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No, I have not heard of it before now.
 
Optimist said:
Ah but true "originality" doesn't exist. It's all just a mixing of what we already see. A unicorn is a cross between a horse and a narwhal for instance. So maybe you and Schaeffer just looked at the same world, combined it similarly and this this is why you sound a wee bit like him.
Anyway, it's a good book that relates to this topic a bit...
And he wrote and did the video series: How Should We Then Live? He lived in Switzerland... Any of that ring a bell? If not oh well
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Do not expect me to believe it impossible for something to be original. Can't swallow that one.
 
There shouldnt even be the word "atheist". Theres no word for someone who doesn't believe in fairies.

Having said that, I once heard an atheist say, "prove it".
 
By being faithful to one's experience of transcendence one also develops the capacity of living action.

Faith receives, love gives. No one will be able to receive without Faith; No one will be able to give without Love.

Therefore, in order to truly receive, we have faith, but this is so we may love and give, since if one does not give in love, he has no profit from what he has given.
.........
In this manner, we reap that which has been sown. ~Jesus, a very wise soul in the teaching of surviving the human containment. :-)
 
Sandie33 said:
By being faithful to one's experience of transcendence one also develops the capacity of living action.

Faith receives, love gives. No one will be able to receive without Faith; No one will be able to give without Love.

Therefore, in order to truly receive, we have faith, but this is so we may love and give, since if one does not give in love, he has no profit from what he has given.
.........
In this manner, we reap that which has been sown. ~Jesus, a very wise soul in the teaching of surviving the human containment. :)
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<3!!!!!!!!
 
Dragon said:
Here is a thought.

Do you agree that God is by definition transcendent (as in, above material reality)? If yes, then God is categorically different from typical, material things.

As a result, it makes no sense to ask the question about whether or not God exists because non-transcendent things are categorically different from God. Agnosticism and atheism are literally nonsensical positions because they are assuming that asking whether or not God exists is a genuine question. Likewise, believers who argue about the existence of God are also making the mistake of assuming that they are arguing about a genuine question. I think if we accept that God is transcendent, then we cannot have a discussion about whether or not God exists.

Discuss.
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I'm confused why agnosticism is a nonsensical position?
 
Well, it's been a while, but I'm going to reply anyway because it's somewhat interesting. I don't believe in Western dualism, so to me, the OP's questions are a bit like trying to slam a box around a patch of noonday sky to catch the light. Instead of coming up with human boxes and trying to fit the Universe beyond us, never mind "God/dess," into them -- and thus limiting both, by circumscribing both our perceptions, concepts (what we're willing to take in and consider, which is what most organized religions do), and our possible understanding of the Divine and Creation -- why not simply build on our actual experience? And accept that others may have different experiences for a variety of reasons?

That way, we'd always be reaching out, building on the foundations of earnest souls who went before us. It seems to me that the history of organized religion has been a consistent process of closing in, making ever narrower, smaller, and more intricate boxes, mutilating ourselves and bludgeoning others to fit into them, when humanity was never actually meant to do so. Puns intended there.

Genuine understanding of things so vast and deep will always be incomplete, and experiential knowledge has to be the only stairway to heaven because intellectualizing and revelations "enforced" by other humans will only serve to cut us off further rather than connect us to that great, ever-present Ultimate Reality. Which doesn't have to be "transcendent" in the sense usually meant. I believe the Divinity is in Creation, and Creation in Her and Him. The Divine, like us, is both immaterial and material, but perhaps these two categories are misleading in themselves. Modern physics is discovering that "everything is energy" and ancient Chinese medicine taught the same. Matter is neither an illusion nor dirty, but an expression or emanation of a deeper truth. It's not necessarily about one thing "controlling" another; it's misleading to plonk those kinds of (arguably deviant) human group dynamics of submission and domination onto the Divinity or Their Holy Creation. Instead, they're mutually affecting one another, interacting in relationship, and reinforcing each other for good or for ill. And by healing one, we can heal the other.
 
@Dragon I think my answer to your OP is that I don't think it ever has seemed particularly reasonable to me to take strong positions on issues like mind-body dualism and/or naturalism. I find both positions are kind of vague, and really not very enlightening, and in such cases it seems best to me to take seriously that we do have intuitions about these things but we don't have anything like a theoretical explanation of why those intuitions are as they are.
In some sense, I think my attitude is similar to that of what I think science sans overly strong philosophical positions should be, which is a taking-seriously of evidence and acknowledging what it does and doesn't tell you, and that's that. Science says nothing even close to being able to derive consciousness from the kinds of principles it works with, even if one can make valid, brute-force correlations between brain states and what we intuitively know to be subjective experiences.
Does this prove some kind of eternal soul? No. Does this show "everything is just physical?" Absolutely not, not in any meaningful sense.

As a result, I think one can talk of transcendent things in the definition of your OP -- we do it all the time when we philosophically characterize love, despite not having a scientific account of how love is possible. However, what seems to be unilaterally true is that we can't characterize things that aren't essentially empirical facts or logical facts with any kind of consensus. Things we can measure/quantify are fine, and things that are more or less manipulating logical axioms are fine, but other things seem to cause extreme difficulty to really characterize in a way that compels reasonable people to agree.

The drive for God seems to arise from a sense in human nature that there's some kind of "mind" or "consciousness" at work at a fundamental level in the universe. As yet, this seems to be warrant for a kind of spirituality, wonder, etc, but not for the more specific conclusions a very particular religious sect might have us make.
I think this is the fundamentally most correct source of disbelief in highly sectarian accounts of God -- I think one doesn't have to plead inability to discuss concepts that aren't somehow "entirely" within traditional reductionist discourse, and that when one does discuss such concepts, it becomes plain that, sans some evidence, there's not going to ever really be a consensus as to what they mean, even if there's still something to the ideas.
 
Is it really necessary to "prove" the existence of God? Empirical evidence shows that belief in a higher power can bring peace into troubled lives, and those who truly follow the teachings of many major religions have done much good in the world (Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, various saints, etc.) With that in mind, even given that God does not exist, is it not in Humanity's best interest to act as though He (or She?) does?

Secondarily, even assuming that the universe is entirely mechanistic, there is no reason to rule out the existence of non-physical entities. My personal theory is that souls exist outside the universe and affect their respective bodies by altering universal constants retroactively such that they result in a universe where said bodies act out their wishes.

(arms self with Bible and copy of the complete works of Saint C.S. Lewis)
Any questions? Refutations? Testimonies? Memes?
 
tentacledGnosticalgic said:
Is it really necessary to "prove" the existence of God? Empirical evidence shows that belief in a higher power can bring peace into troubled lives, and those who truly follow the teachings of many major religions have done much good in the world (Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, various saints, etc.) With that in mind, even given that God does not exist, is it not in Humanity's best interest to act as though He (or She?) does?
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My take is that what we need to reduce the tendency to do is for people to try to mix idealism with certainty. As yet, they just don't seem to go together -- the ideas of God, Ultimate Love, etc seem to be things you can reach towards, but where there's different ways of defining them, and that's part of the point -- if you could pin it down in the same, drab, dull, concrete way you can pin down scientific facts, it really wouldn't be an ideal anymore. The loftiness is kind of part of the point.

In my experience, the evils of organized religion almost unilaterally arise because people are over-eager to pin down and have final answers to the biggest questions of life in a kind of crude, pragmatic, enforceable, certain way, so they have to invoke "because God said so" to create a certain set of laws that defines the absolute and ultimate good....instead of viewing it as a never-ending quest we get better at.

So I think if we want to act like there's such a thing as God, the Ultimate, the ABsolute, etc, that's fine, but we can't act like we know what it is. The things we know for certain seem universally to be made explicit and concrete at some point (whether that be physics or math or whatever).
 
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In my experience, the problems of organized religion arise not because a set of laws is created, but because the members of that religion try to forcefully impose it on others rather than simply obeying the laws themselves. The Sikhs have an extremely strict set of laws that all Sikhs must follow, but are one of the most peaceful and, from my impressions from my research, benevolent religions.
 
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tentacledGnostalgic said:
In my experience, the problems of organized religion arise not because a set of laws is created, but because the members of that religion try to forcefully impose it on others rather than simply obeying the laws themselves. The Sikhs have an extremely strict set of laws that all Sikhs must follow, but are one of the most peaceful and, from my impressions from my research, benevolent religions.
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Ah just saw this now -- I think personally that the main threat isn't always violence, but simply the fact that religions tend to want to answer somewhat absolute questions, like find an absolute responsible for both all that is and what ought to be. What this means is that their worldview, when it creates these rules, isn't just saying here is a culture we like to follow out of preference, but rather asserting some objective truth underlying that. Culture can be a group-think force, where even if people don't harm those outside their group, they may expect members of the group to conform and be quick to reject people who don't fit their rules.

I tend to be queasy about the "entitled to your opinions" viewpoint -- people certainly will have different preferences, as distinguished from opinions which I view as more normative, but it seems to me dogmas are formed when they feel justified in having those preferences, and justification almost always involves some claim of objectivity (otherwise, all there is would be a subjective feeling!). Once you take all the objective force out of someone's preferential orientation, you still leave them the freedom to live as they want, but perhaps introduce a certain tolerance and intellectual humility into them, which is aware their preference is JUST a preference, nothing more than that. Not something one can easily argue to turn into a law.
 
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But if all there are is preferences when it comes to morals, then on what grounds do you base your argument that people should not force their morals on others? Is it not a moral assertion?
 
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tentacledGnostalgic said:
But if all there are is preferences when it comes to morals, then on what grounds do you base your argument that people should not force their morals on others? Is it not a moral assertion?
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Well, you seem to have been under the impression that I was saying moral judgments are wholly about subjective feelings, which is very far from what I was doing.

In fact, I was simply suggesting that the problem with pinning down stuff like God or Ultimate Love into laws is that these are ideals, and ideals are things we chase -- I've never seen a way we conclusively pin those down in concrete form, and I'm not sure it makes sense to do so. So the thing is, I'm against arbitrariness of creating laws where there are none, even if the system isn't inherently violent, because you don't have to have a violent system for distress to start forming (e.g. the more arbitrary your rules are, the less people will find it makes sense to follow them, and this can lead to issues within a community).

The stuff about subjective preferences is simply saying that opinions tend to involve both beliefs and subjective preferences, and I'd like to state which is which clearly -- not that subjective preferences exclusively determine moral codes.

Also note that when I was speaking of "laws" I wasn't talking of moral laws exclusively, but laws of any kind, including laws of nature.
 
Basically, once you state what is subjective and what isn't clearly, then it takes a lot of the "force" out of various belief systems and leaves only the stuff reasonable people generally can't disagree on, and I think this is desirable, because it enforces that cultural peculiarities (that is, things that aren't ultimately "universally true") remain acknowledged as peculiarities, rather than confused with laws of nature.
 
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