If God exists...

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hate? i'm describing the mechanical fact of how religion works. YOU'RE the one who says homosexuals are a problem and that it's freedom TO religion and not freedom FROM religion. i think you need to quit projecting on others when you're the hateful, intolerant one.

you're talking about an omnipotent, omniscient being. there is no accruing. it's there already. that's YOUR beliefs and faith. to claim otherwise is make your deity not a deity but simply a more advanced/capable version of us and ignores all the claims and writings throughout the history of religion and faith...unless you're more into polytheism and your deities are more reflective of those like the greeks and romans where the gods were simply a higher elevation of humans complete with interractions.

You hate me just as you hate yourself.

I'm not talking about him accruing, I'm talking about us.

you implied earlier that our existence is a test by god. tests imply that there are flaws and imperfects that must be found, analyzed and eventually fixed. i then postulated that this is not the case unless your deity is not the omniscient, omnipotent being that is claimed. if i misunderstood in that, then i need better clarification.

Nope. Not testing us for his understanding, testing us for our understanding of ourselves.

Schweet I am proud of this thread I made

Yes, it's certainly engaging.

circular logic. not going any farther.

That's why its a hard topic for people to debate - there are some rather set limits because of the fact that our trace on reality can only go so deep with the means we currently have. Plenty of answers that the best and brightest theologians can't come up with, plenty of questions as well that atheists have their own sticking points on.

On the other hand, I think there can be many cases of the sheer shape of human nature doing better at implying that there is something more to religion than a sheer societal control construct.

This is true. I would class the nature of mystical experience as one of those things about the 'shape of human nature'. Look at descriptions of them over time, in many different cultures and in people of different belief systems and you find they're overwhelmingly similar. (R. M. Bucke's Cosmic Conciousness is the classic guide, but his attitude is in many ways dated and I'd love to know if there's a similar, more recent compendium of such experiences.)

This would imply that
a) there is, beyond the names and outward trappings of religion, Something Else that is capable of being revealed to the human mind
b) the brain is wired in such a way that healthy people undergo emotionally powerful, but otherwise meaningless experiences that, if their background suggests, they will call 'spiritual'.

I personally hold with a). Atheists would pick b). That's their choice. (What really interests me is whether atheists actually have such experiences and, if they don't interpret them as spiritual, what they do think of them...)

Oh man adam and eve? Don't even get me started.. No one gets the moral of this story right, people say "the devil is evil for trying to get them to defy god", when in fact it was this god who was evil for keeping knowledge from them. Every time Satan has humanity in his best interests and that jewgod gets in the way and screws things up
The true lesson is the importance of bettering yourself, and dealing with problems people give you about it. I'm still struggling with that one.
The difference between animals and most humans is that they have more freedom than us, and for the most part they choose "good" over "evil", which says a lot about us as a species. Animals/trees may not be intelligent like us but they will always be more wise.. Which really doesn't give us the right to take advantage of them or think of them as something less. Using them as food/etc does not count for taking advantage, as they would do the same to us if they had to.

I agree that what your mentioning is uncanny, though I do think that can be rather directly linked to being part of our evolving what we call 'symbollic thought', something that catalyzed our development like rocket fuel.

Here are a few of the things I've been thinking about recently though:

1. The other weird thing, if people take a godless reality to its full conclusion; it ends up with the human race committing hiri-kiri. There is no purpose for us, in our capacities, to be here. Our lives have no meaning, life pretty much is pain and dealing with pain, and it seems like we're only still here because we haven't reached that sort of global suicide pact, our values don't coincide with that and in other cases people are still in the mode of "I'm here whether I like it or not, all I can do is try to make my life better and the same for everyone else in this sh--boat". Most atheists today would have disdain for the idea of global self-termination but, the ironic twist, most of their social values and desires for justice come from the secular imprint of the judeao-christian values that they either directly or indirectly grew up with; if all the world religions just ended today, these values would live on for possibly centuries in abstract but, as they dissipated, our societies would unravel.

2. Another thing is our insatiable nature. Our being propelled self-actualizers doesn't make sense in the evolutionary term, particularly with things such as depth or wisdom. To this day I can't say I've seen or even heard of anyone's dog or cat trying to read Tolstoy or gorillas in the wild drawing in caves or conducting funerals for the dead of their tribes. While its understandable that this could just be a branch off of what I said earlier as a coping mechanism and advanced utilization of our symbollic thought, as well as religion when we realized as a culture what we were facing down without it; it doesn't specifically argue for a god, doesn't argue against, but does argue persuasively for our need to believe in a religion or many - that's uncanny in its own right as well.



I'd imagine they're probably as intrigued as anyone else by them, just that they probably get a lump in their throat as they try to swallow down the fact that - yes its beautiful, its transcendental, its refreshing beyond words; but its pure fantasy. I did that to myself for at least 3 or 4 years of my early 20's.

If there was no God, I'd have no reason for living. Life would have no meaning and I'd probably just kill myself. And I'm not just being dramatic, here. I really believe what I say.

How scary is that?

But since I know there's a God who loves me, I keep on keepin' on.

At that point I'd just figure the people around me still need me. However, I'd be really reticent about having kids.

To me, a godless world would seem comopletely hopeless, completely unredeemable and without joy or comfort. Such a world I would not want for any children I might have.