Does God exist to you.

[Fides]

Originally posted by: Tripleshot
Hmmmmmmmmm. Is ignorance bliss? With this subject matter, is it a safer positition the non believer chooses, to lessen the impact of having to justify to oneself the posibility that there could be more to life than flesh and bone? That a mothers instinct and protection of her children is a chemical reaction, and not possibly the notion(?) that man was created in Gods image, and that the instinct of protection may in fact be a devine conotation, a plan for mankind, even a blueprint of life?

Is it safer for people to deny their spiritual self, because they do not understand it?


Or could it be that those who try to increase their spiritual growth, and open their hearts and minds to accept the lessons of love and compassion, may indeed validate the existance of God, on the same scale as to believe the sun will rise tommorow and when it sets, you can see stars in the heavens---and when we expand our chests, we breath in gases that sustain us. Do not these very things become your reality? for the believer, God is just as real. His Word is written, it is documented, it is an historical record that transcends science. To believe in God is not by its acceptance a denial of science. It may never be that science will prove the existance of God. God is proved by faith, and is revealed to those who believe by the power of the Holy Ghost. It is documented and accepted by most all the religions of the world, that Jesus Christ, Son of God in the Flesh, lived and died and was reserected as a testimony of love and redemption, and the basis for man to return to God after death in the flesh.

When you die, will your body turn to dust. It surely will. But what of your soul? Will it die as well? I believe not. I believe the soul that is in all man,which in and of itself is the man that God created (not and ape or transmutted tadpole) is in the pervue of His Grace, and when at his choosing He decides to reunite the soul with the body, He can make it happen, for it is an eternal process and is spiritual in nature. That is beyond the scope of mans understanding. But it cannot be denied just because you haven't seen it happen yet. You cannot tempt God to act in the way you want. He allows you to make free choices. In essence, He allows you enough rope to hang yourself. But He has provided a ransom for you, and you have the opurtunity to accept Him. Again the choice is yours.

For me, God is as real as the air I breath, I will not deny Him. I am happy beyond measure knowing his Love for me, and for you. It is the very foundation of life itself, the very purpose I was placed on this earth, to learn, grow, multiply, teach, love. This is no accident of some space time continuim. This life is a designed and planned part of exaltation for all the hosts of Heaven that suported and loved God in the pre existance. The very fact you can read this is suffecient proof to me that God loved you enough (and you Him) to send you to this earth to obtain a body and go through lessons of life on your journey to exaltatation. Yes, life is a journey, a Devine journey. Study the God of your choosing. Learn the Truth. It is there to be revealed to those who will but seek after it. Don't sit back and claim atheism, or agnostic, step up to the plate and justify your belief on Truth. There is no truth in athesim, just ignorance.

Is ignorance bliss?


I think not.

Of course a lot of people will disagree with you, but I admire the strength of your faith.

 

[Chubbz]

Originally posted by: optoman
No,

Except when I need a miracle.

 

[HombrePequeno]

Originally posted by: kleinesarschloch

To answer my own question, they affect you plenty. If you are born Christian in the west, and you live your whole life there, I doubt very much that you will become Buddhist (unless of course you are an extremely open minded individual, which is rare)

or because buddhism is the trendy religion at the time... :disgust:

Buddhism is the trendy religion now? That's kind of weird cuz I see no one really following this trend.

 

[kleinesarschloch]

it's trendy in hollywood i guess...

 

[HombrePequeno]

Originally posted by: kleinesarschloch
it's trendy in hollywood i guess...

Actually that's scientology.

 

[Fides]

Originally posted by: Rio Rebel
Fides,

1- My humanity, my "self" so to speak, believes in a single, loving, personal God who is the God of Abraham, Jesus, Mohammed, and maybe even Buddha (I know, that doesn't exactly fit, but I think Buddha received Divine wisdom in many of his writings.) I "know" God through the teachings of my parents, and my religious colleagues and friends, so I tend to see God more from the Judeo-Christian perspective.

2- But my intellect will not accept the Judeo-Christian God, because I believe there are subtle contradictions in that notion. I believe God as the sum of all perfections (a very Greek notion) leads to inconsistencies with the God who revealed Himself to the Israelites. I won't go into all of them, but suffice it to say that I can't see how an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient God can interact with people in the way the Jews saw Him. How could a perfect and all-powerful God change his mind? The Hebrew picture of God is one who gets angry, interacts with us, and makes decisions - even changes them - based on that interaction. How can that be reconciled with the notion that God already knows all and is all powerful? If God changes His mind, then either He was wrong in the beginning (and thus not God), or is wrong now (and thus not God).

3- My "faith" is a constant struggle of my intellect and my soul. It is not that my intellect contradicts my soul, as some atheists wish to propose. It is that my soul finds God, and my mind categorizes Him in familiar ways - ways taught me by my family, friends, teachers, etc. - and my intellect then rejects the inconsistencies of those categories. My soul will not let me reject God's "existence", but my intellect also won't let me put Him into boxes that I know in my heart won't reconcile. So it is a constant struggle.

4- On the flip side, I would submit that these people who come in so forcefully claiming of their personal knowledge of God's existence, and how they "feel sorry" for those of us without that assurance, are doing so to hide a very strong and very deep insecurity because they know in the depths of their heart that such an assurance simply isn't there.

Thank you for your well thought out response.
Reffering to the discrepancies between the old and new testament, I have a couple of theories of my own, but I am really not well versed enough in eaither book to say anything competent. I suggest going to http://www.christian-thinktank.com/

In your struggle between intellect and faith, i suggest using your intellect to compliment your faith.
"Critically examine everything. Hold on to the good." Thessalonians I 5.21
There is absolutely no reason to put God in a box. If you can't find one that fits, makeup your own. Dont get held down by worldy restrictions.

4- Very very strong and deep love? or ignorance...
I doubt it's insecurity, that would serve as a detriment to their faith. And then again i don't know who you are generalizing about.

 

[Fides]

Originally posted by: kleinesarschloch

To answer my own question, they affect you plenty. If you are born Christian in the west, and you live your whole life there, I doubt very much that you will become Buddhist (unless of course you are an extremely open minded individual, which is rare)

or because buddhism is the trendy religion at the time... :disgust:

It is my understanding that there are only 40, 000 true Bhuddists in the world that keep the balance of things. And if you claim to be a bhuddist, you automatically arn't one.

 

[honz]

Originally posted by: LandRover
Right... we all just evolved from frogs or something. And the world and everything living on it just created itself.

haven't read the whole post, but this caught my eye. But i will go back thru it

alright, lets say there is a god. you're saying in your ultimate wisdom, or is it from god himself? That god could not have created the universe THROUGH evolution?

frankly my answer is no there is no god. and i'm fed up with all those who only believe in what they are told!! Hitler started that way!!!

 

[HombrePequeno]

Originally posted by: Fides

Originally posted by: kleinesarschloch

To answer my own question, they affect you plenty. If you are born Christian in the west, and you live your whole life there, I doubt very much that you will become Buddhist (unless of course you are an extremely open minded individual, which is rare)

or because buddhism is the trendy religion at the time... :disgust:

It is my understanding that there are only 40, 000 true Bhuddists in the world that keep the balance of things. And if you claim to be a bhuddist, you automatically arn't one.

I can't say I've ever heard that (the not being a Buddhist cuz you claim to be part). There's probably more than 40,000 true Buddhists but the majority are probably Buddhist by default. The same goes for any religion really. I can guarantee you that all of the 2 billion Christians in the world are true Christians and the majority of them probably haven't even read the bible.

 

[Jugernot]

No, God is the biggest hoax man has ever known...

 

[Fides]

Originally posted by: Jugernot
No, God is the biggest hoax man has ever known...

"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was making the world believe he didn't exist."

 

[BennyD]

Originally posted by: TheBDB
No.

 

[Spyro]

Originally posted by: HombrePequeno

Originally posted by: wizardLRU

Originally posted by: HombrePequeno

Originally posted by: wizardLRU

Originally posted by: Rio Rebel

God does truly exist

That pretty much answered the question. You BELIEVE that God exists.

That also pretty much answered the question..... eh???

Care to elucidate. I challenge you, prove that God doesn't exist. I would like facts and arguements, until then God exists. Eventually you will see this also, and if not then I pity you.

Umm...you're supposed to try to prove the positive, not the negative. It's your responisbility to prove that a god exists because you're making the claim. If I said Santa Claus exists I wouldn't tell you to prove me wrong, I'd be the one having to give the evidence.

All of the evidence that God exists is abstract. Believing in God is a personal belief, not a scientific conclusion. I believe in God, and that is my choice. God gives people the ability to choose whether or not we believe.

Believing in God is an act of faith, one that is rewarded with God's presence in your life. Nobody can or should be forced to believe in God, but they should know that there is a God in heaven.

Abstract evidence is fine for some but don't go telling people to prove god doesn't exist when you don't have any verifiable evidence of your own.

Which was my point exactly........

 

[Vic]

YES

 

[LAUST]

No, but I'f he hops on CNN and starts doing some of that old age rock n' roll he did forever ago, I'll be open to some idea's.

 

[Fides]

I think the problem with science is that it is based completely on what can be measured and quantified. As of yet, there's no way to measure feelings like love, hate, happiness... etc. They have to be described as chemical imbalances, or something similar. I even heard of life after death being a delusion created by the dying brain. By claiming things like this, we diminish our worth as humans. Tell me, how pointless does life seem if we say it is simply a really complex reaction. By seeing there is such a spiritual aspect to life, the question of understanding God would be made a lot simpler.

 

[w9design]

Do I believe in the Church? No.
edit: Referring primarily to the Catholic Church (hence the capital) but have issues with most organized religions.

Do I believe in God? I don't know.
But if you're looking for a relatively interesting thought on it, St. Thomas Aquinas put forth the Quinque Viae (Five Ways) -- basically the five ways we can see there has to be a higher power. Some of them questionable, but the Prime Mover argument is pretty solid in my opinion. In any event, they all make you think deeply about it. Thomas Aquinas isn't exactly the most impartial source, but his arguments do inspire thought.

Five ways that reason reaches the conclusion that God exists:

*One: From the fact that everything is in movement and transition to that which sets everything in motion but is itself unmoved.

Essentially this states that everything in the Universe is in constant motion. It stands to reason that there must have been something that started it all in motion... things just don't start moving by themselves.

*Two: From the observation that everything is caused to the conclusion that if you move back through the chain of cause and effect, you reach the origin of all cause which is itself uncaused.

Basically everything has a cause and effect, and you can keep going back farther and farther until you finally must reach an uncaused cause.

*Three: From the fact that we live in a world of contigent possibilites (whatever is might not have been) to the conclusion that for anything to be at all, there must be a necessary guarantee of contigent being, which means that God is the reason why there is something rather than nothing.

Everything is dependent on another thing, so therefore things must be dependent on one central independent thing. This is one of the weaker arguments in my opinion.

*Four: From the fact that we make comparisons (taller, wiser, smaller, etc.) to the conclusion that there must be some absolute standard against which comparisons are made and that the "standard" must exist since to be perfect is to exist in the fullest possible way.

Another weak one in my opinion. This one is pretty self-explanatory -- there must be perfection for us to compare against it.

*Five: From the observation that all things exist in such a way that they are directed towards their own end, in the way that seeds turn into plants, and arrows, properly aimed, hit their target (since they are designed to reach their goal, in Greek, telos, hence this is called the teleological argument), to the conclusion that where there is organized design it is rational to infer a designer.

Basically, everything has an intrinsic design, so there must have been an initial designer.

 

[Fides]

Originally posted by: w9design
Do I believe in the Church? No.

Fair enough, but first define church. It comes in many shapes and forms.

 

[HombrePequeno]

Originally posted by: Fides
I think the problem with science is that it is based completely on what can be measured and quantified. As of yet, there's no way to measure feelings like love, hate, happiness... etc. They have to be described as chemical imbalances, or something similar. I even heard of life after death being a delusion created by the dying brain. By claiming things like this, we diminish our worth as humans. Tell me, how pointless does life seem if we say it is simply a really complex reaction. By seeing there is such a spiritual aspect to life, the question of understanding God would be made a lot simpler.

Does life really need a point? What use is a point to life? I don't know about you but I like being alive and that's good enough reason for me to stay alive.

No, God is the biggest hoax man has ever known...

"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was making the world believe he didn't exist."

I'm sorry but to me these two quotes are stupid. The first one is just ignorant. As for the second one...there are quite a few Christians in the world so quite a bit of the world believes he exists. I also don't feel I'm being "tricked" because I don't believe in a devil.

 

[DaviDaVinci]

Originally posted by: SagaLore

Originally posted by: LandRover
Right... we all just evolved from frogs or something. And the world and everything living on it just created itself.

You got that wrong. The Universe "banged" by polarizing spacetime into a sub-particle which initiated a cascading time frame effect, and the incredible amount of energy which equalizes to zero further polarized itself by expanding into 2 different directions along a planar axis and then forming the other particles through a complex chain reaction of expansions and contractions. Why did this happen? Theory has it that spacetime is a cycle that repeats itself when the universe dies of heat death and contracts back to a single state.

But God existing out of nothing? Impossible!

And life forms started as a pre-cell membrane that formed in a pool of amino acid type molecues which had the proper amounts of compounds, pressure, and electrical charges (lightening) to create an RNA sequence capable of replicating itself. This self-replication instigated a multiplication of pre-organisms that were very unstable and kept altering their RNA per replication, creating a accelerated evolution into stable organisms. As organisms divided, consumed, and died, mutations occured in the genetic makeup which caused changes in metabolism and structure which could benefit the organism. Over milliions of years, complex chemical reactions and nervous systems became the basis of intelligence. Millions of more years human evolution split off from a pre-ape like creature that had the right circumstances to make variations in speech, and thus language was born. Language then solidified intelligence into a self-progressing medium. Art, Spirituality, Science... computers capable of making decisions... life keeps evolving... we become more efficient at controlling the environment around us, as in genetics and chemistry... learning how to transport particles to other locations instantaneously... how to manipulate the atom for energy... and we will eventually reach a point of human evolution where our knowledge and ability will be omniscient and omnipotent...

But God knowing all and creating the whole universe in 1 day by mere thought? Impossible!

You'd make a good debater. Confuse the heck out of the opposition with big scientific words and watch them succumb and shed to tears.

 

[Fides]

Originally posted by: HombrePequeno

Originally posted by: Fides
I think the problem with science is that it is based completely on what can be measured and quantified. As of yet, there's no way to measure feelings like love, hate, happiness... etc. They have to be described as chemical imbalances, or something similar. I even heard of life after death being a delusion created by the dying brain. By claiming things like this, we diminish our worth as humans. Tell me, how pointless does life seem if we say it is simply a really complex reaction. By seeing there is such a spiritual aspect to life, the question of understanding God would be made a lot simpler.

1-Does life really need a point? What use is a point to life? I don't know about you but I like being alive and that's good enough reason for me to stay alive.

No, God is the biggest hoax man has ever known...

"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was making the world believe he didn't exist."

2-I'm sorry but to me these two quotes are stupid. The first one is just ignorant. As for the second one...there are quite a few Christians in the world so quite a bit of the world believes he exists. I also don't feel I'm being "tricked" because I don't believe in a devil.

1- Of course you need to see a point to life or else living would be pointLESS. You say you like being alive, but did you ever question yourself as to why you like being alive?

2- It is my view that the devil isn't an external force, spirit or what have you, but rather an internal part of man that serves to try to subvert man's purest intentions. A small excerpt from T.S Elliot's Hollow men to demonstrate my point:

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

So that is the devil to me, shadow. With that in mind, for us to think that the devil is some outward force which we can forget about if we are "good" is to say he doesn?t exist. If you realize that he is a part of you, that despite that fact that you are the most upstanding citizen in the world, you are still capable of the most atrocious things, that is seeing the devil.

 

[HannibalX]

Denying the existence of God suggests two-dimensional thinking. The Universe clearly was designed, that is not the hard part to figure out, the puzzle is it?s purpose and what God intentions for humanity are.

 

[HombrePequeno]

Originally posted by: Trinitron
Denying the existence of God suggests two-dimensional thinking. The Universe clearly was designed, that is not the hard part to figure out, the puzzle is it?s purpose and what God intentions for humanity are.

Clearly? Do you see the blueprints lying around somewhere and I missed it?

Originally posted by: Trinitron
1- Of course you need to see a point to life or else living would be pointLESS. You say you like being alive, but did you ever question yourself as to why you like being alive?

The same reason I like soccer or anything else. It stimulates a part of my brain and releases things like endorphins and adreneline. It doesn't mean that a god made me like it.

2- It is my view that the devil isn't an external force, spirit or what have you, but rather an internal part of man that serves to try to subvert man's purest intentions. A small excerpt from T.S Elliot's Hollow men to demonstrate my point:

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

So that is the devil to me, shadow. With that in mind, for us to think that the devil is some outward force which we can forget about if we are "good" is to say he doesn?t exist. If you realize that he is a part of you, that despite that fact that you are the most upstanding citizen in the world, you are still capable of the most atrocious things, that is seeing the devil.

Fair enough. But really what's evil to one person is honorable to another.

 

[HannibalX]

Clearly? Do you see the blueprints lying around somewhere and I missed it?

The laws of physics would not support life if they were adjusted slightly in either direction. Since these laws are constant it is unlikely they would just "form" by random chance. I suggest you do some research on creation-science. Even if you do not agree with it at least you will have seen the other side of the coin.

 

[Cuda1447]

This...


Just more that points toward creationism and against evolution.