The Purpose of the Human Life

"The only problem you have", you said. To understand God, you cannot bring you false pride, your personal opinions, your mental speculations into it. You must hear submissivle, like a child. This is how one gains true knowledge.

 

can you explain how this relates to something ive said AT ALL? did i even use the word 'speculate' in my post? or 'pride'?

you can believe in ANYTHING and understand ANYTHING if you surrender to believing it.

please make more sense. unless your jsut another 'you just need faith! give in to god!' which is pretty much telling people not to think for themselves. to surrender their ability to consider ideas, and to jsut accept them in order to be englihtened. it doesnt work like that.

id apreciate if you referred to at least one thing out of the many issues i raised before dismissing it wihtout any explination

 

What I meant by the use of my word 'speculation' in describing your post, is that it is quite clear that the conclusions you came to were came to through mental speculation.

No, I am not a person telling you to have blind faith in God. Religion should be both faith AND logic. If it is not logical, then it cannot be said to be truth. But, you cannot manufacture your own religion, and then call it truth. This leads to madness. But I invite you to listen to your own tone. If you are aware enough, you can see quite clearly that you have an intellectual pride, and are proud of your 'realizations'.

Hear submissively the word of God, whether it be Qu'ran, Bible, Gita, or whatever, and you will gain true knowledge. Speculation will lead to nothing but deeper ignorance and madness. I know that it is the latest fad nowadays to think that you are God, and because of this, no one has any humility anymore. What's the point of being humble if we are all God? It's pure nonsense, and madness.

 

Interestingly, though, is the fact that someone had to pioneer these original faiths. Today we can read the Gita or the Quran, but back then, these didn't exist. Mohammed couldn't just turn a few pages to find his spirituality (especially since he was illiterate!). Sometimes you have to find your own way, speculation could be part of that if used properly and investigated fully.

 

Speculation will lead to madness. You cannot manufacture your own religion. The Gita was spoken 5100 years ago, before there were religious desginations such as 'Christian', 'Muslim', or 'Hindu'. Although it is today known as a 'Hindu' text, back then, it was the book of knowledge. Please read the Gita, and compare it to the other scriptures, and see for yourself which has more knowledge.

 

Do you perhaps know a good online text version (english or dutch) of it? That would be awesome..

 

Acually muslims existed before Muhammed(peace and blessing of Allah be upon him), christians and jews will also accept this(read the following) sence the word islam means submitting one self totally to God. Ask any christian if Noah, Adam and Abraham(peace be upon them) submitted themselves to God and they will answer yes, then these prophets are muslims.

19. Truly, the religion with Allah is Islam...[Quran]

By saying:
"Only by surrender and submission can one be prepared to recieve this Truth."
it sounds as if you are agreeing. But do remember that you cannot agree to both at the same time sence Allah(may he be exalted) only accepts one faith(as said in the quran) and if you agree to the quran you are contradicting yourself. How can one believe in A and B at the same time when believing in A means rejecting B?

Im still quite stunned of this faith mixing of yours, remember that the Quran strongly declares that the guided and saved are the followers of Muhammed(peace and blessing of Allah be upon him) and the followers of other prophets but these saved jews and christians etc are only those who were jews and christians before Muhammed(peace and blessing of Allah be upon him) anyone who rejects him after he had arrived are not guided.

 

I read a part of the Gita and it helped me with my current development. It was the right thing at the right time for me. Thanks for bringing it up.

 

Mohammed didn't find his own way, he was guided by God.

 

oh so, since its been written in a book, that makes it more real than somethign someone creates?

have you ever heard of Michael Faraday? he practically brought electricity into the world. and you know how? 100% his own observations and speculations. he observed other scientists, and never read his information from books (though he was a book binder, he only compiled books)

everyoen called him mad

his mentor disowned him when he descovered what no one else did

because everyone else took their knowlege from books and what was accepted as the truth, instead of making their own conclusions from the base up.

so dont you give me shit about self devised realisations. (not that im trying to make out my ideas are completely self-devised)

and yes, ironically his religion was that puritan one where they believe every single word of the bible to be literal and real; but it doesnt detract from the message, since it only directed his motives for being a scientist, and wasnt part of his descoveries. I believe that there is a reality, and that is my motive.

submissively accepting god will lead you to knowlege, but you can never find real knowlege without forging the bonds of realisation with your own mind. If god is real, why the hell would you need to read a book in order to realise him? you should be able to do that completely on your own, through spiritual derscovery. if you dont have faith in your mind then how can you give it value?

and waht is 'madness'? thinkning differently to how society wants you to? or are you suggesting it will lead to schizophrenia?

 

?

 

God's hand is revealed in every one of God's creations.
There are signposts in life to guide you.
Whether or not you except something is determined by God.
At some point in your life, "the book" might be good for you, in which case you will read it. The Bible and Koran can be compared to vitamins that fortify the bread of life.

 

"Whether or not you except something is determined by God."

dont you have free will?

 

Yes, except when you accept there's an exception to every rule.

Odd as this may sound, my view, if there is a God, (which I don't know), is that we do have free will, and make our own decisions and choices in life......but......those choices and decisions are already known to God, (should God exist, that is.)
Or, this is all just a creation of my mind, and exists solely of my own making...
It is either one of those two possibilities, or else time is an illusion, and the present is the only reality. All time is simultaneous, instaneous, and is all happening right now.
That is actually my preferred option.
Told you it would sound odd........

 

there was another thread that i believe was won by the side that said (me included) that for god to know what we are going to do is a paradox if he grants free will as well.

if you 'realise' theres an exception to each rule then you will loose grip of reality, laws of physics are rules, societies rules are guidelines. just because rules of human concept have exceptions doesnt mean rules concerning reality and the universe do.

 

"In a way, in our contemporary world view, it's easy to think that science has come to take the place of God. But some philosophical problems remain as troubling as ever. Take the problem of free will. This problem has been around for a long time, since before Aristotle in 350 B.C. St. Augustin, St. Thomas Aquinas, these guys all worried about how we can be free if God already knows in advance everything we're going to do. Nowadays, we know that the world operates according to some fundamental physical laws, and these laws govern the behavior of every object in the world. These laws, because they are so trustworthy, they enable incredible technological achievements. But look at yourself. We're just physical systems too, right? We're just complex arrangements of carbon molecules. We're mostly water. And our behavior isn't going to be an exception to these basic physical laws. So it starts to look like whether its God setting things up in advance, and knowing everything you're going to do, or whether it's these basic physical laws governing everything, there's not a lot of room left for freedom.

So you might try to just ignore the question, ignore the mystery of free will, and say, oh well, it's just an historical anecdote, it's sophomoric, it's a question with no answer, just forget about it. But the question keeps staring you in the face. Think about individuality for example. Who you are is mostly a matter of the free choices that you make. Or take responsibility. You can only be held responsible, you can only be found guilty, or you can only be admired and respected for things you did of your own free will. So the question keeps coming back. And we don't really have a solution to it. It starts to look like all our decisions are really just a charade.

Think about how it happens. There's some electrical activity in your brain, your neurons fire, they send a signal down into your nervous system, it passes along down into your muscle fibers, they twitch, you might reach out your arm. It looks like it's a free action on your part, but every part of that process is actually governed by physical laws, chemical laws, electrical laws, and so on.

So now it starts to look like the big bang set up the initial conditions, and the whole rest of human history, and even before, is really just the playing out of subatomic particles according to these basic fundamental physical laws. We think we're special. We think we have some kind of special dignity, but that now comes under threat. That's really challenged by this picture.

So you might be saying, well, wait a minute. What about quantum mechanics? I know enough contemporary physical theory to know it's not really like that. It's really a probabilistic theory. There's room. It's loose. It's not deterministic. And that's going to enable us to understand free will. But if you look at the detail, it's not really going to help because what happens is you have some very small quantum particles, and their behavior is apparently a bit random, they sort of swerve, their behavior is absurd in the sense that its unpredictable, and we can't understand it based on anything that came before. It just does something out of the blue according to a probabilistic framework. But is that going to help with freedom? I mean, should our freedom be just a matter of probabilities, just some random swerving in a chaotic system? That starts to seem like it's worse. I'd rather be a gear in a big deterministic physical machine than just some random swerving.

So we can't just ignore the problem. We have to find room in our contemporary world view for persons with all that that entails. Not just bodies, but persons. That means trying to solve the problem of freedom, finding room for choice and responsibility, and trying to understand individuality."

 

Man, you're just one "Waking Life" quotin' machine! You always seem to have a quote on hand from that movie...

 

I agree that it is a paradox, or in my view, an effort in futility. It makes little sense why it would be of any point to have us just follow through on a script that we may not know ahead of time, but that someone does. There is not any reason I can see for this exercise to be of any purpose. That is why I prefer my other option.
Regarding physical laws having exceptions.....I dunno, I just know that I see things quite often that as far as I can tell defy known universal laws. The number of times I have seen it.......hundreds. So, either I am easily fooled and brainwashed, or there is some flexibility to the laws, I hope it is the second one......

 

The movie is one of the only movies that I know of that deals with the "BIG" questions, and it ties into what we are discussing.

 

I know it man, I wasn't makin fun of you, I hope you didn't think that.

As far as the free will/determinism issue goes, I look at it this way. If God is a thinking, seperate entity, the issue remains. But if you look at the universe in a pantheistic sort of way (where the universe IS god), then of course "god" knows the future and every possibility. Modern physics show the universe to be a collection of probability waves intersecting to create the real. So for a given action, every probability is out there, coexisting, but only one or two can be manifested (due to all the other probabilities for every other thing in the universe). Where there's more than one possible, then you have choice.