King -

You're into the philosophy of a man who claimed to be God, even though you think he might have been/probably was wrong? I think if someone claims to be God and isn't, their philosophy is immediately pretty fucking suspect. Just me.

As far as saying there's no way I can know that there's a God because there's no proof and it "just isn't possible", I'd have to say there's also no way you can there's no proof or that it isn't possible. Not possible God's given you the proof and you haven't wanted to find it enough? Not saying that's the case, but I would imagine you could admit it's possible.

The existance of God IS possible. But God's existance can never be proved. That's all I'm saying.

And so what if I follow some of the philosophical teachings of Christ? I follow the philosphical teachings of many people who were not all they said they were. I follow some of the teachings of the Buddha, Siddarthe Gotama, but I don't think he really sat under a Bodhi tree for twenty years andsurvived on a single grain of rice a day. Just because I don't beleive Jesus' divinity doesn'y make the bulk of philosphical teaching suspect or invalid. Like I said previously, he said some truthful thigs that are unrelated to religion and God. I'm just talking about loving yr naighbor, treating people with respect and dignity, charity, etc. Jesus, as I understand him, was a good man and a misrepresented character in history. We may never know if he truly was the son of God and existed innthe way the New Testament claims he did.

And although I may not believe in his divinity, I still believe he had a great role in human history. I see Jesus as a teacher and a philosopher and a humanitarian rather than a God whether he claimed to be Christ or not. That doesn't matter to me. It's his humanitarian messages that mean the most.

Well, there ya go. It doesn't matter to you.

That's right. It doesn't matter because there is no way we can know for sure that Jesus was Christ. There is only belief and the ILLUSION of knowledge.

And that's the way the New Testament, understood properly, would have you view Christianity. With the New Covenant that God established with the Earth, the temple was declared to be the body (synonymous with the body of Christ as a symbol for the Self) & not a church building of an organized religion.

So, Bush issued this statement last week:
"we recognize a divine plan that stands above all human plans and continue to seek His will."
The words were penned to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Eisenhower's establishment of "In God We Trust" as the national motto of the United States, but one can't help but, (knowing Dubya) feel a bit queasy reading those words.

The whole cultural idea of how the Book of Revelations is interpreted has been handed down from the biblical scholarship of one man, a British evangelical minister who lived in the nineteeth century.
This man's name was John Nelson Darby.



He is the individual responsible for the doctrine of Dispensationalism & for interpreting Revelations in such a way as to craft the common understanding of the Rapture & the Tribulation & Millenium that most Christians adhere to worldwide.

also see: http://users.frii.com/gosplow/disp2.html

I actually wrote a paper on the "Left Behind" series. It was 20 pages, I read all 12 books. Man, it was honestly really really interesting. But so much of it was just like "GUYS, SERIOUSLY, USE YOUR BRAINS".

Another reason I believe in Christianity: it's too beautiful not to be true:)

Once again Lips, yr not looking at things in a rational way. Just because something is very beautiful, or seems true, doens't mean it really is. ALl that glitters is not gold. I don't find Christianity to be all that beautiful a religion. Most religions have their good aspects and their bad aspects. Chrisitianity is just as fucked as many other religions. I has many good aspects and many of Christ's devoted followers are good people, but come on. You can't just beleive in something just because it sounds pretty. Search yr soul. Use yer brain. Think long and hard about the universe and the soul and the mind and nature. You might just come to different conclusions. If you don't and you still come right back to the way you are right now, then that is perfectly fine. I just want people to stop swallowing what is just handed to them and search themselves for answers.

And those left behind series of books are awful. Even if they are well written and interesting, I have to say that the basic premise of the book is garbage. There is no Anti-Christ and therew ill be no Reckoning or Apocalypse or anything else like that. Those books were ploy to prey on the weak-minded ignorami that beleive in all that End of Days bullshit. I don't deny the plausible extinction of the human race or the possible and inevitable destruction of the world. I know for a fact that humanity will end one day as will the planet Earth. But I see our destruction as a result of our own hubris. We wqill probably die from nuclear holocaust or from an incurable disease or maybe a large meteor or asteroid, comet what have you. We will NOT be descended up by The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the Righteous will NOT be beamed up into Heaven like on Star Trek. The damned will NOT have to suffer here on Earth while the Anti-Christ rules us for 7 years or 1000 years or however long the "prophesy" said he would. It is alol pure BUNK!!!

Fuck the movies, too. And fuck Kirk Cameron for even appearing in that shit. That stupid, ignorant, self-righteous little twit can kiss the fattest part of my ass and I don't mind saying so!

If you had just stopped with saying that something being beautiful doesn't make it true, that would've been fine. I agree. I said it's TOO beautiful not to be true. As in I don't think the human mind could come up with something so foreign to the universe if it weren't true. By foreign, I mean that, say Christianity were a total hoax, well, in that case we would never have thought it up. I think it's illogical that either a.) a different God would allow us the brain power or freedom to come up with something infinitely better than him or b.) a godless universe could create brains that would think of something so infinitely better than the godless universe. And like I said, that's one of MANY reasons I believe it.

I've searched soul, brain, books, science, etc. I actually do those things everyday. I'm still a Christian. You should know people better before you assume ignorance, fear, or tradition are why they believe what they believe.

Yeah, the Left Behind series is beyond retarded.

Oh, and King, what I was saying by "there ya go, you're not interested" was that you're not interested ENOUGH to KNOW whether or not Christ could've been God. It's not something you can disinterestedly discard. You have to throw yourself completely into it.

First of all I HAVE researched Christianity sextensiv;ey. I was brought up Christian and for years I questioned many things about the religion. I just happened to come to the conclusion that I do not know whether God exists or whether anything that happened in the Bible is true.

Also, if God didn't exist we would still be able to have the brain capacity to imagine such a being. Even if there were another God that we as humans are not familiar with through our current or past religions, we would still have the ability to create religions out of thin air.

By this logic it is a given that aliens exist. So do ghosts, haunted houses, witches, etc... What about all of the religions that contradict each other? Human minds have come up with something "so foreign", yet they cannot all be true. So, according to your logic, since the human mind has come up with both heaven and reincarnation, are they both "true"?

Personally, I don't think aliens, for example, are that far out. It's just athe idea of a living physical object being present in another physical location than Earth. Like imagining "what if there were a remote control in the sewer?" There's nothing foreign to the nature of the universe there (assuming there's no God and there never was one, that it's a completely brute and physical world).

What I'm saying is, the idea among primitive people that there must be a creator isn't really primitive. If the world were really and truly godless, primitive people wouldn't have been able to imagine a god at all. It would be like a a brainless amoeba fantasizing about the idea of infinite bodily cells.

Primitive people believed a lot of stupid shit. People used to think the world was flat and that the sun revolved around the earth. The Aztecs sacrificed thousands of humans to appease multiple gods. What about witches? If this is your best argument that god exists (because primitive people were able to imagine it) than even you shouldn't believe god exits. Your analogy to a brainless amoeba doesn't make any sense either.

I NEVER said it was my best argument. I didn't even say it would make sense to other people. I just said it was a reason I believe. I'm also not saying that primitive people imagined it. I'm saying they knew god or gods existed. I'm saying in a godless world they would HAVE to imagine it, which I think is impossible. It wasn't an argument. It was just a statement. And what about witches?

i am almost entirely sure that i don't give a shit.

I am entirely sure that, although intelligent life may appear elsewhere in the universe, aliens & alien spacecraft, as we imagine them, do not exist. I assure you that any crafts being seen are quite terrestrial in origin. Most people that claim to see UFOs are either delusional, a liar seeking attention mostly, or just plain have a fucking $ching-ching$ agenda.

The same goes for ghosts, but that opens up a big can of shit debating that one because if a delusional person sees a ghost, then it is more-or-less real to them. Most "ghosts" are seen when going to sleep or when awakened from sleep & thus, people see & hear things that an independent observer right next to them would not notice.
http://www.sonicyouth.com/gossip/sho...ht=unconscious

Jesus Christ, primative people believed in gods and spirits and demons because they were too fucking stupid to understand the universe. They thought people got sick because the gods were angry or that demons had entered their bodies. They beleived witches were able to cast spells on them. They beleived that a bad harvest or a bad season meant that the gods were punishing them. Lips, yer logic is awfully flawed. If there was no god that doesn't mean that primative humans wouldn't be unable to imagine a higher power. Yer logic is awful in this regard. We are able to imagine things that don't exist because we have evolved the brain capaicty to do so. It's nature; evolution. We have very powerful brains not because God gave us them, but because we evolved them through the process of natural selection because we needed the abilty to think on a higher level than other animals to survive.

You beleive in God and religion for all the wrong reasons. You hold faith in a higher power power not because you have searched all possibilities and came to what you believe is a rational explanation for the universe. You just think that it has to be so because it's too beautiful for God to be nonexistant and that primative man brains couldn't think up an unseeable, all powerful being on their own? Awful, awful rdiculously irrational line of thinking. If that's yr reason for believing in God, I pity you.

Think about it: If humans had primative brains in a reality WITH God, how would they then interpret God's existance anyhow? Their primative brains, as you claim, wouldn't be able to process that kind of thing. Yr logic is contradictory to yr own logic.

boring. tie me off.

Shoot up.

god, what the fuck took you so long?

What is it with people not being able to pay attention? Again, I never said that's my reason for belief in God. I said it's one of them. And it's at pretty much the bottom of the list.

Again, since you're all about being able to prove something on your terms, what possible proof could you have that evolution (which I believe occurred, dude) would allow us to imagine a loving God? What would be the point of that?

I could get further into it but I can see this isn't going anywhere.

What are you talking about? What does evolution have to do with fantasizing about God? That makes no sense. Our highly evolved brains make it possible for us to IMAGINE a "loving God". That's all. Higher brain functions. That's it.

What would be the evolutionary function of being able to fantasize about something that could never exist? And it's not something like a unicorn (a horse with a horn on it...combination of two things) but rather something completely foreign to the universe. For what reason would that kind of imagination be desirable enough, from a survival standpoint, to be part of the dominant human genetic makeup? Why human beings would imagine a God, or why their brains would be able to do so cannot be explained by evolution alone. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I think it's illogical. I think if the overwhelming majority of human beings, early human beings, all from different cultures which had, for the most part, never interacted, all believe in a creator or creators, there's some root of truth to it. That's all I'm saying. Am I saying it couldn't be perverted or confused until it turns into "no crops this year...rain god's mad at us" or "no crops this year...must sacrifice humans"? No. But I'm saying at the heart of it, there was truth. I don't think that human beings evolved to a certain point and where finally able to imagine a God starting about 6000 years ago. Or even 20,000 years ago. Did one person imagine it and somehow word of this fictional character spread across the earth to all these different cultures (even though these different cultures never interacted (such as Native Americans and Jews, or Native Americans and Romans))? Or did, somehow, all of these different cultures simultaneously start imagining God? Either one seems completely impossible to me. Maybe I have a lack of imagination, but I don't think so. I think it's illogical to think either of those two things happened.

You said "our highly evolved brains make it possible for us to imagine a 'loving god'"...why would they do so? What would be the point? And, to restate my second point again, how did all the cultures of the world basically start imagining God or gods at about the same time?

or maybe they just were representing & interpreting their universe for their time?
that actually shows some wisdom does it not?
We just have a better understanding today that allows us to describe things, as we perceive them, more rationally. Thank goodness we do have a lot more efficacious medicines nowadays. The rise of nation-states has produced some nice amenities in our "civilized" lives, but aren't we experiencing many of the pitfalls of civilization as well? Your statement presupposes that people in general are gloriously intelligent nowadays & that's simply not the case, especially when it comes to philosophy, art, love, or religion. Look to art history. That should tell you all you need to know really. At least look to 19th century european literature back when far more people were fabulously intelligent. The generations that came after the middle class first arose in nation-states & public education first became more widespread were really with it. It's from those people that free enterprise & decent standards of living arose, slavery first started to end & that women got the right to vote in Europe & the French also inspired our wonderful governmental model of checks & balances (that has now unfortunately fell by the wayside.)
Intelligence, like everything else, is relative.

Well, natural law (God) is punishing to those that do not understand its intrinsic rhythms. We should always be seeking to know nature & thus ourselves. So, if what we perceive as "punishment" is actually just a reminder that we need correction & to perfect our wills further is "punishment" not, in that way, love?

As one may have inferred, I feel that kingcoffee's post comes off as a rant. It's as if he's just lumping all these (ridiculously elitist) generalizations together.

Actually, without religion, most of modern civilization would not have occured. We would still be fucking each other's wives and killing each other's children for food. Oh, wait. We still do. :)

Not everything our brains can do necessarily has an evolutionary function. What is the evolutionary function of imagining time travel? Our brains are highly evolved so we can out-think stronger species. Imagining God could simply be a by-product of our complex thinking ability.

Or perhaps imagining a god is a way for people to give meaning to what could otherwise be perceived as a meaningless existence. If our brains thought that life was meaningless, we might not have a drive to survive. That could definitely be the evolutionary function that you are seeking. However, it doesn't mean that an actual god exits.

So if, like Freud said, we believe in God because we perceive the world as cold and meaningless (and also of course other issues involving our fathers), and we need to believe in God to have a drive to survive, that means, basically, that the world is INHERENTLY better if there is a God (if God existing would allow more people to survive via hope). Which would mean that a Godless universe facilitated fantasies of a universe better than itself. That seems illogical to me.

Basically you're saying that religion is mass hallucination and fantasy on a global scale. So does that make God real then? I mean, tens of millions of people belive in George Bush, that must mean war is good, right? And conspicuous consumption has always been the answer, right? :)

You sound confused. I don't understand what you're trying to say.

Perhaps I am. A lot of contradictions abound in arguments where logic is utilized to illustrate abstract notions. When you reach the point where religion is pulled into the fray, I tend to see a blurry distinction between fact and hopeful thinking. Whether this distinction is a purely opinionated viewpoint, or fact; has always been a point of contention for me, especially considering most people will tend to drive their points home without any consideration as to the facts, or value of the facts.

Regarding the post made by sonikjuice, it just sounds to me, as though a situation where people have to imagine a God into existence so as to make their existence bearable, is an intolerable and generally inconceivable situation, especially when you regard the fact that most of the population of developed countries, like America, Britain, Tokyo, et al, are within the middle to upper class wealth percentile. Add to this the fact that organized religion has, as its proponents, the majority of the human race, and I would say that someone or something has got everyone hallucinating the exact same thing at the exact same time. Wonderful achievement, I would say. I wonder who's doing it? :)

"Regarding the post made by sonikjuice, it just sounds to me, as though a situation where people have to imagine a God into existence so as to make their existence bearable, is an intolerable and generally inconceivable situation"

Yep.

Again, why would the myth of God appear all over the world? At the same time (basically)? With no contact between most cultures?

I'm an Athiest

You're in the minority then. How does it feel like to be Godless? :)

If you didn't believe in god, would feel your life is meaningful? Why do people look to religion in the first place? I would argue that it is to find meaning in their lives.

I don't understand your argument concerning wealth. Are you saying that people with wealth already have meaningful lives and therefore don't need to believe in a god at all? By the way, not everyone believes in the "exact same thing at the exact same time." A lot of people don't believe in god or believe in multiple gods. In addition, why is it that people with some of the most developed/evolved brains (like Nietzsche, Freud, etc..) did not believe in god? Why would god allow our minds to question his existence? (On another note, Tokyo is not a country).

I personally don't know if a god exists or not. I tend to think there is a higher power out there. However, I do not buy the argument that god must exist because a lot of people have believed in a god for a long time. That is ridiculous to me.

Actually I wasn't saying that, and you contradicted your own argument with that statement.