**"Believing in God/dess"**

Post Reply New Topic

I'm in the middle, or the beginning, of believing in god again. And this time it is making much more sense and having a much bigger effect on me. For instance i am falling in love with god. this is new.

The last, and only time really, that i ever believed in god it was more in the nature of a thought experiment, after realising that my complicated eating rules were about trying to return to a lost paradise , and that everything else seemed a dead end, i repeated to myself five or six times, " i believe in god" until i stopped falling about laughing and took it seriously whereupon i felt lighter, and liberatingly naughty as if i was saying i believed in fairies. The inside of my head also felt twice as big, and i felt less responsible for the universe.
However after a few months like that, reminding myself frequently that was a belief rather than a fact i began to find the company oppressive somehow, and cancelled the belief.

This new belief is more important. I am allowing it to be, because of scientific theories that i refer to on a thread about believing in aliens instead of god, which posit that developments in the human brain in the last 50,000 years, particularly in cognitive functions contributing to fluid intelligence, concerned with pattern recognition, attribution of agency and cause, and in drawing inferences, may at same time have produced a tendency to religious belief in some/many humans.

I recognise myself as someone desperately driven to assign agency, draw inferences, see patterns, and find meaning in confusion, even when there is no more data and i can go no further. I want to know and understand. I always want to know why. And the unknown is like an enemy to do battle with, to wrestle to the ground. The unknown to me is a murk. And it unsettles me. May even have kept me in fight or flight reaction for much of my life since 9/10 years old when lost my infant "faith".

Belief in god makes the unknown into rich and brilliant if still mysterious detail, and means i can let go on working it all out. And i see god as creating and creating , with a sense of humour, loving. I am being swept off my feet. It is having an effect on my dreams, and i feel as if i am falling in love, how could i not? with god?

i'm posting this on here because the PPR forum seems to be more of a punch bag area where most people take pride in knocking down anything anyone puts up. Accelerated entropy .

I would love to hear and talk about what relationship with god/dess feels like. What it changes in ones life. When and how, and why came to believe.

I'm a monist.

Wow!! I am happy for you ouinon, it is wonderful to experience something that is greater than ourselves, yes? I too would call that God/Goddess, (or the higher Self because I am into Jung).

I think a sense of mystery/the spiritual is such a great thing, enriching and making us 'larger' somehow. I have experienced this feeling on top of mountains a couple of times (and for the hyper-rationalists amongst us, no, it wasn't caused by a lack of oxygen, lol)

I don't know how to put it into words. It is a feeling ('feeling' being a strong thing, a knowledge maybe I should say, not an 'airy-fairy' feeling in the way that people sometimes use that word) that there is something deeper, more profound than the everyday world. But that doesn't really say what I mean. Oh well, it will have to do, it's difficult to pin down, and maybe it doesn't want to be. I just enjoy the feeling and try not to analyse it too much (which is difficult for me )

I had similar feelings to yours, Ouinon. It was a falling in love thing, you get quite 'high' on it, the same as when you fall in love in RL. I remember that period of my life with much fondness, one of the greatest times of my life. I also couldn't put the bible down, stayed up late reading it, then couldn't wait to wake up in the morning and continue reading, it seemed to have a magical quality.

I've had to come back down to earth from there (sigh) but it was great and I think it's a normal part of the process.

I wish I'd kept a diary at the time.

Have fun.

I have been fascinated in these days by iguanas and chameleons. I must say that lizards have fascinated me since I was a child, I looked at them scurrying over old walls when I was on my way to the beach and I was attracted by their swift movements, the capacity to drop their tail (which would grow again) their strategic immobility when they realized they were observed (playing dead) the colors and the structure of their skin.
Now about chameleons: they have a perfect sight, a tongue which moves at incredible velocity in order to catch an insect or other prey, and the habit of changing their color to communicate within the species in order to mate. The change of color is not mimickry, it is the opposite. There aresome one hundred of species known. They originate in Gondawan, which was that great continent starting to exist some 400 millions of years ago and disintegrating some 170 millions of years ago to form the actual continents. And this means that Chameleons have existed at least for some hundreds millions of years. In some particular niches they are very effective creatures, beautiful in their own way, like my lizards when I was a child.
Why after reptiles mammals prevailed? Well probably mammals had better thermostatic regulation. Together with birds they have a constant body temperature. That gave them an advantage in carving their ecological niche.
What a god should have to do with all this? Well life seems to be a field for decentralized experimentation, with one thing in common of all living creatures: the obligation to keep alive and the obligation to reproduce themselves. Why should a “supreme being” (the Jacobins’ God) or some other all-powerful, all-knowing be somewhere to preside or determine all these processes. Perhaps there is some eternal fight between organized matter and unorganized atoms. What can we know about this? And is anything of our business to take sides, if not for the reason that we as consciousness of living creatures are part of organized matter?

i have a personal godess, who is pretty much my morals and beliefs given form. shes the goddess of the natural order which ive believed in strongly all my life.