Does God Exist?

They shouldn't argue like that imo. They're generally more reasonable and pragmatic when they just believe/have faith and let the people who don't agree with any kind of specified theistic belief disagree. They will anyway
It is fun to discuss eachothers thoughts and beliefs on these matters, unfortunately it always turns into the ol' competition of 'if your belief can't be proven you're wrong and i'm right'. Then those gullible people take the bait and fall in the trap of answering specific questions no one can know with certainty anyway (it is called belief and faith for a reason people..!) in order to get ridiculed and stereotyped as unreasonable, living in a cocoon or being a latent danger to society etc.

 

Neither can religion, so I don't see your point in lauding one over the other. Also, I'll ask you to please look inside and ask yourself "What is it that is experiencing life directly, fully alive, totally absorbed? To what are these qualifications applying? What is free from conceptual bondage?" The answer is mind, often romantically rephrased as "heart", but still actually mind.

When you meditate, when you feel transcendent love, when you have those moments or days where everything clicks and the universe seems to make sense beyond all words . . . those are all mental phenomena. Your cardiac muscle has little direct involvement, I assure you.

One of the best and most reliable symptoms for psychosis is an increase in "religiosity". Certainly it's a troubling correlate.

You also have to be willing to be tricked by language . The proof that you exist is that things are happening.

Sam Harris gave a talk and said (paraphrasing)

"It's really amazing to me that by the time I finish saying this sentence, several children will have died slow and painful deaths, either alone on the dirt, or in their parents arms, both of them weeping. Those parents undoubtedly begged god for his help, and received nothing. Meanwhile a western believer will tell me how important god is in her life, saying that her and her family were having some financial issues, but then god came and gave grandma a really good deal on a mortgage, thank you god. It really flies straight past the ludicrous and lands deeply into the territory of the offensive and the absurd, and I wonder if these people hear themselves talking."

Saying that god "has better things to do" implies that he has to make a hierarchy of actions in order to better make use of his resources; in other words it is making the claim that god is not omnipotent or in some way is finite. The god of the bible is supposed to be omnipotent, so that god does not need to make distinctions about "how" to spend his day, because he's not a working joe like us with finite energy and time. He is god. He is outside of spacetime, he created everything, etc. If your god cannot even make it to this thread, how can i trust him with my soul? I mean maybe this explains why everything is so messed up...

I don't understand your point. Imagine you hooked up Beethoven to a heart monitor, while he was composing a symphony. I mean, the heart monitor would just register his heart beat, but all the time he's making a masterpiece? Your conclussion being, let's not use heart monitors?

There once was a man who said "Though,
it's quite clear that I know that I know.
But who I'd like to see, is the I who knows me,
when I know that I know that I know!"

 

Sorry, I meant 8.5 thousand.

-

...and sports,

Thank God for giving me the strength to PLAY a great GAME of stupid asshole pro sports so I don't need to get a real job.

That's the best use of Gods power right there!

But if you lose, that's just your own stupid ass fault.

Everything Good, God did it!
Everything Bad,
stupid ass humans.

 

Thanks.

 

So are you all agreed that "God" must be omnipotent, omniscient, etc., in order to be worthy of belief? And therefore, (S)he can be blamed for children dying or a thunderstorm spoiling somebody's birthday party? And does everyone think that this God is really concerned with the particulars of our beliefs, so that we can be surprised that (s)he hasn't been clearer as to what we believe about this or that? And that this God can be expected to intervene in human history, and if (s)he doesn't seem to be doing that, (s)he must not exist? The gist of all the points raised against God on this thread presuppose that God has these characteristics, but many theologians disagree. Adams believes that the word "Almighty" in scripture simply means capable of doing anything that can be done, and Hartshorne argues that God can limit His own actions without violating the characteristic of omnipotence. The ancient Greeks and Romans were fine with the prospect that their gods were just potent. Good enough for me.

I personally came to a belief in God as a felt presence of transcendent Higher Power that provides ultimate meaning to reality, a reasonable expression for the integrated complexity of the universe, a source of altruistic sentiment, and an expression of non-rational aspects of the human psyche that are better acknowledged than repressed. God is love. I can't "prove" that such a God exists, and I'm open to alternative explanations, but I'm willing to take a chance on it and accept it as a postulate on which to ground my worldview. Yes, I'm aware that today, as in the past, folks had a more anthropomorphic and imposing figure in mind, but I think they're wrong. I'm willing to be thankful for the beauty of the earth, while recognizing the reality of tornadoes and earthquakes, because my God isn't some Dude in the Sky that is pulling the strings like a puppet master. Natural disasters and disease happen as a result of natural laws. I'm willing to take the bitter with the better because that's life. And my concept seems to be congruent with the beliefs of lots of other people, especially mainline Progressive Protestants. So what's the beef? Most of the usual arguments against God and religion--that it leads to violence, involves inherent contradictions, etc.--simply don't apply. And for people to persist in insisting that beliefs like mine are unacceptable seems pretty intolerant and downright fanatical. if Sam Harris, A.C. Grayling and others are successful in putting secularism on a more spiritual path that could provide ordinary folks a sense of meaning and morality, I'd be open to reassessing my views, but so far I'm not impressed with the results.

 

Anytime you debate a follower of Yaweh, they will reliably define their god as being so amorphous and of having such vague qualities as to defy any sense of cohesion. "God is love". "God is the meaning of life". "God is the energetic potentiality of the universe". If that's your god, then you don't worship Yaweh, and you shouldn't be bringing in biblical scripture into the conversation.

Yaweh is none of these things. This is very clear.

And if you allow yourself to believe arguments of ancient greeks who say that gods are "merely potent", then I really don't know what on earth you're doing worshipping such an imagined being; seems to me he's a superhero that you never grow out of believing in.

You can't have your cake and eat it too; you can't be a christian and a deist. It's one or the other. Either scripture is divinely inspired and true about the properties of god, or scripture is just another religion to be added to the garbage heap of history, and god is "the god of repose", or the lazy god of the deists, who sets the universe in motion via natural laws and then lets it be; a posited prime mover, and not an iota more. No further actions in history. No listening to prayers. No care for us or our futures.

At some point, don't you just wonder why you even bother with this concept at all? Extract the part of it that is about "meaning" and reject all the personal characteristics of a ruler in the sky. reject the attention given to ancient scriptures and doctrines. reject the adherence to religious denominations. Extract the finest essence of what you need and do not conflate what you have created in your mind with that which most people believe when they say "i am a christian".

To not do so, that is ideological prison.

 

And Jesus said: "For nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom and there will be food shortages, And earthquakes in One place after another,All these things are the beginnings of the pangs of distress"

Jesus warned we would be in a time when this would happen. He warned of many things. Is anyone listening?

 

Apparently he is not able to respond to a HF thread when requested, so God doesn't satisfy Adams comdition of "Almighty."

If God was temporarily limiting his power to avoid responding to the thread, essentially disrespecting us, why does he deserve worship?

I have certainly had peak experience of transcendence, particularly on psychedelics but even the perception of being infused to hyperdimensional fractal networks oversought by transforming alien beings who can diassemble and reassmble their bodies and attempt to seemingly communicate telepathically admist gridlocked layers of interlocking geometrical patterns strecthing beyond the minds eye is not reason for me to place precedent over and forsake my own reality in the circumstances I find myself in as being a human being.

 

Religions I don't buy at all, but I believe in the possibility of a God. Guess I'm agnostic

Monotheism always seemed more plausible than some of the polytheistic religions for some reason. Maybe a culture thing?

 

I don't recall saying anything about Yahweh, the Israelite God of Battles. The Old Testament can be inspiring as a fertile source of allegories and metaphors, as the story of a remarkable people, and as an historic context for understanding Jesus. I don't commit to being a deist either, although I wouldn't reject that out of hand. "Lazy" is a pejorative epithet inappropriate for non-anthropormorphic entities. i tend to favor panendeism, which is defined as a sub-category of Deism based on the idea that the universe is a part of god, but not all of god. God is both transcendent and immanent--existing outside us , but also within us. I'm also believer in process theology, the theological position that God is changing, not immutable, and that the Bible is not God's inerrant word. This deity is a good deal more pervasive,active and involved than the classical deist god.

 

I'm not talking about responding to our thread. As a joke, that might have merit, but surely you don't take it seriously as a test of God. God might simply not want to play your game, and might be highly offended that you want to force the Architect of the Universe to do so. God has the status of being a "Haunted Universe" concept-- irrefutable by scientific means. Like ghosts who don't reliably appear when summoned, God doesn't jump through hoops like a trained animal. God limits His power in order to provide us with free will and to provide the objects of nature with the governance of natural law. God may be not particularly interested in disclosing Himself to us. To take that as a sign of disrespect for us is an indication that we have much to learn about the virtue of humility.

 

Just because you cant see things, does not mean they dont exist. Cant see sound, radio waves, gravity..etc..did you ever think that spirit creatures are way smarter and dont want to be detected?

 

I am talking about our thread, that's where we currently are to discussing the issue, we can lean on the shoulders of others in authors who have contemplated the subject but that does not prevent us from discovering amongst ourselves either. The test was among believers and non-believers alike, a fairly neutral ground. If there are no tests which can provide evidence to validate God in a fairly neutral setting, why should we as nonbelievers or even those on the fence take any Christian or theistic ramblings seriously?

If God is now being treated like a Ghost, again why does it deserve worship? And what kind of batshit insanity does it take to attribute powers or 'know' the sentience of such a thing?

 

... And how do we know radio waves and sound waves exist? Formulating criteria to test!

 

But you think all the laws of the universe are known. There is a spirit realm that exists. The bible talks about in the last days, satan and his demons would be cast down to earth to mislead all of the nations and peoples.
Woe for the earth, we are living in turbulent times.

 

Wait for the space age, the turbulence is much more higher through atmospheres

 

Those things have happened literally every single day since Jesus departed, and also literally every single day for thousands of years before he was born (if he even existed).

All conjectures that you concocted either on the spot for the purposes of this response or learned from contemplation or written authority. If god is this invisible, all-pervasive being who stays as hidden as a shy ghost, then how on earth do you know so much about it? From where do you learn that it limits its powers? It told you? Or maybe you have already decided that this god exists, and therefore you're creating characteristics for it that match the experiential data we have regarding it.

Why doesn't god want to be detected? Why doesn't he appear as a vision to every single newborn child, and say "Hey, just wanted to give you the lowdown on your situation here. There's me, and there's this guy satan, but he's a bit rubbish ya? So if you live according to my wishes and you will have life everlasting. Ok, good chat, see you at the end! Hope you choose well!"

Why not? Give me one good reason. Doing this would not take away our free will at all, and he has deemed it necessary to appear in visions to individual humans MANY times if we are to believe scripture.

Scumbag theist; not positive on existence of radio waves; positive on existence of spirit world and satan.



"I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for his reputation if he didn't." -Jules Renard

 

God is that which we invoke. No grandiose delusions required.

 

Maybe the imputed God is completely indifferent to us.For life on Earth to evolve to this point we experience today required much calamity,catastrophe and seismic upheaval,and that will always be the case.A perfect world from day one is impossible.Nothing would have created the circumstances for civilization to arise.Maybe we need the danger and uncertainty in order to really experience an examined life.I know I've been over this before ad nauseam,but the biggest questions regarding this subject for me are could the universe pop out of nowhere,expanding into a spaceless space for no particular reason other than a state of non-existence being impossible to conceptualize,in which nothingness is eternally impossible,or are there just infinities of time and space which represents an equally impossible state for explaining the grounds of beingness.

 

?How to you prove free-will to a determinist - string them along polka'ly until they demonstrate it ; but then
the song is over since they polka'd themself un-accidentally and weirded way out beyond Tuba City .