[Newfie]

Whatever 6. It has not been done & never will. Probably the greatest mysteries.

And that is the chink in an Atheist armor isn't it? Agnostisism seems much more prudent and humble.

When I was 14 I thought I had had a terrible unfair childhood and declared myself an Atheist. When I was 16 I realized my Atheism was just as much an act of faith as my poorly formed theism had been in earlier years and I called myself Agnostic because I wasn't sure who was right. Over the next ten years of rough sledding I came to believe in Christ, slowly and with much time spent thinking about it. At 27 I became a commited believer.

If I am wrong and the Atheists are right then I get great comfort from my faith while I am alive and when I die I cease to exist. If I am right and the Atheists are wrong then when I die I go before the judgement throne and explain my actions and thoughts to my Lord and receive justice. The Atheists will be right there with me explaining themselves as well. If I am following an incorrect faith and get judged for my actions rather than my beliefs I hope that whomever is doing the judging finds my efforts more good than ill and metes out justice accordingly.

I believe my faith is correct and I am Subject to my King, Jesus the Christ. If I am deluding myself then I am comfortable in my delusion.

What is really funny is that, as an atheist, I believe very nearly the same thing.

So, as an atheis, I belong to this silly little religion that preaches the ?God you believe in is immaterial, the deeds you do are everything. In short.....

DEED BEFORE CREED.

[SeaGypsy]

Until Jew killer Paul became the key New Testament figure, works were what God judged man by. Paul proposed & developed the idea of 'salvation by faith', based on snippets of the Old Testament, God choosing according to 'his' own standards, everyone being a sinner, redemption through repentance & rebirth. There is still a schism in Christianity about this. Reading the ancient Egyptian religious texts, it is obvious where the God of fire & brimstone, expecting & accepting nothing less than perfection came into the Judeo Christian tradition. It is also obvious that probably nobody would ever meet this standard. The Paulian narrative brought a whole new possibility to the religion. Jesus, like his priest John the Baptist, made the experience of God available to sinners. Both Jesus & John baptised prostitutes, tax collectors, cripples & thieves. The suggestion here is that salvation cannot be by our own hand, or in return for a deed, but is a gift of the unseen hand to the humble & repentant sinner. Personally I think the schism is probably healthy. We are called to acknowledge our imperfection, yet to do good, not for a reward, but as a duty to Christ in reflecting his nature.

[wildbourgman]

Seagypsy, I kind of have the same philosophy. I think that if there is a God, that God is the same regardless of religion even though it appears differently within a certain religion. It doesn't matter what religion you are because that religion was just an avenue for your basic morals to develope. Good is good and bad is bad, it's not that difficult to tell the difference no matter what the doctrine dictates.

Many young earth folks that I know also believe that if you’re not born again Christians you automatically burn in hell no exceptions. So I'd ask about a little Outer Mongolian child that dies prior to being "born again" and never had the opportunity to even meet a Christian and they are like, yes they burn in hell too.

I told them that if that is true, then it's plain wrong, even if it is Gods standard. It's statements like that make more atheist than it does to help evangelize. I can't believe that and I can't believe in the young earth deal either. I also can't believe that all this is a massive coincidence.

[Ibon]

but all three are intertwined & inter-dependant. Without creation, there is nothing to sustain, without sustenance, there is no time, without destruction, there is no rooms for new creation. Focus on the Overshoot Predator is much like what most Hindus do, putting Siva, the destroyer, topmost.

These three intertwined move in cycles ascending and descending and thus maintaining balance. So which is on top really depends on which one is needed at the moment to restore balance. Sustenance and creation has had a pretty long ride hasn't it?

[SeaGypsy]

With you there all the way WBM. One of the main things to put me off evangelicals is the oft carried idea that if the disabled had true faith they would be healed, physically & permanently. To be honest I don't believe at all in this aspect of Christianity, the most dubious of all aspects of the bible- raising the dead, restoring sight to the blind etc. Snake oil in my book.

[ralfy]

Ralphy, get with the program dude. Your posts are totally off topic.

My subsequent messages follow my first post here:

creationism-t70568-20.html#p1222679

[SeaGypsy]

but all three are intertwined & inter-dependant. Without creation, there is nothing to sustain, without sustenance, there is no time, without destruction, there is no rooms for new creation. Focus on the Overshoot Predator is much like what most Hindus do, putting Siva, the destroyer, topmost.

These three intertwined move in cycles ascending and descending and thus maintaining balance. So which is on top really depends on which one is needed at the moment to restore balance. Sustenance and creation has had a pretty long ride hasn't it?

Sure, but Siva always has the last word, just as the Overshoot Predator. We all die, as do all living things. Hinduism always has this realisation, that all here is temporal & temporary. Whether or not one can take the Vedas at face value at all, they are full of powerful metaphors & cycles of birth, life, death & rebirth. There is a massive scale of time in the Vedas compared to all other mainstream religions, there are cycles of hundreds of thousands of years, the in breath & out breath of Brahma, bring forth & end entire universes.

The essence of Hinduism is in self realisation. Each sect believes that once we realise our true eternal nature we become free of the cycles of birth & death. Vaishnavas worship & serve the creator, see all other gods & living beings through the same lense, struggling for self awareness as part & parcel of the supreme being; the goal to be a perfectly self aware servant of the greater self, to which all life belongs. Brahmins don't want a bar of eternal life & pray for utter annihilation through self realisation (the self being an illusion to Brahma). Sivites find self realisation through facing death, continuously, yet they hold the Yoni & Lingham (vagina & penis) sacred, as in the Karma Sutra; sex & death being the most powerful forces in this world.

According to the Vedas we are in the early stages of a cycle called Kali Yuga, where everything is ruled over by selfishness & decadence. There are over 100,000 years to go in the Yuga, which are going to get progressively worse. After which there will come another Golden Age, the last of which is said to have ended about the time the Bhagavad Gita was first spoken to Arjuna, traditionally said to be 5000 years ago.

[Subjectivist]

With you there all the way WBM. One of the main things to put me off evangelicals is the oft carried idea that if the disabled had true faith they would be healed, physically & permanently. To be honest I don't believe at all in this aspect of Christianity, the most dubious of all aspects of the bible- raising the dead, restoring sight to the blind etc. Snake oil in my book.

Sea gypsy, I am sorry the Evangellicals you have encountered believe in such a twisted doctrine. The challenges my Jesus has put in my life humble me and show me how small a creature I am compared to the glory that is creation. Without my troubles I grow arrogant and full of myself. When I encounter the less fortunate I try to encourage and uplift them, not sneer and degrade. It is not my place to judge anyone, my role is to reach out in love and share my faith. Demanding another follow my faith is not what the Bible teaches, telling my faith and encouraging others to learn it is done in peace, not under threat or by intimidation. The Bible says if you share your faith and others reject it just depart peacefully and move along.

[SeaGypsy]

Yes Sub, I concur. I'm not saying all evangelicals hold the crazy dogma I described responding to WBM, just that it is too common & thoroughly offensive to me personally & to the experience I have personally of the spirit of Jesus. If the guy is a friend to you, not a bearded blond blue eyed idol, but the greatest, truest friend, it doesn't matter much what anyone thinks about it, or if the friendship experience mirrors the Jesus of the Bible in every aspect.

[Sixstrings]

I haven't believed in God for a long, long time.

And I kinda think that, should there be a God, he wouldn't listen if I prayed, and he wouldn't really care about my beliefs. Actions? Maybe!

Can't prayer be looked at another way? Maybe like meditation?

I like the gnostic Christian ideas (banned in the council of nicea a very long time ago lol). Would be nice if there were some different takes on Christianity, and expressions of it. I guess there are with the gazillion denominations -- yet so many have your view Newfie, "if there was a God he wouldn't listen if I prayed."

Maybe it's not about "a man upstairs" like santa claus who is listening to prayers. Maybe there's another way of looking at it, that doesn't rock one's logical rational mind.

I'm really in your boat on this though Newfie, I'm a bit of an atheist / agnostic but also a traditionalist and there's some far inner core that tells me I'm a Christian and I can't ever shake that. I can have all these atheist layers on top of it, but the core is still there. Yet I don't read the Bible, or pray. I like my zen and buddhism books, and the dalai lama.

My main point here would just be that if one has these logic barriers (i.e. it's silly there's a man upstairs listening to me), then maybe one is just eating the wrong flavor of ice cream. There are so many denominations out there. There's more than one kind of ice cream and pathway to Englightenment -- "God."

(p.s. a nice quote about faith, goes something like if you were 100% SURE there's a God and he listens to you, then that would be fact and not faith. Faith requires doubt and the choice to believe. At the end of the day, we all KNOW there is some kind of grand cosmic thing behind all of this -- quantum mechanics, the big bang, string theory, the vastness of the universe. Maybe there are many universes. And they big bang explode and spread out and then contract like a cycle to explode again, or what's the latest theory on this, that it's just the big bang and then heat death?

Anyhow, there's something behind it all, Aristotles "unmoved mover," the thing that began it all. And then what began that thing, what created the creator. There's something behind it all! We just don't know all the details yet, other than as a species we evolved spirituality. We're tapping into some kind of unseen / not understood world.

And if the scientific minded think that's far out, then think about quantum mechanics and how you could take two quarks or neutrons or whatever the heck they are, on opposite ends of the unvierse, and if you poke one then the other vibrates in resonance on the other side of the universe. So how cool is that, eh? It's like magic.)

[Sixstrings]

Without my troubles I grow arrogant and full of myself. When I encounter the less fortunate I try to encourage and uplift them, not sneer and degrade. It is not my place to judge anyone, my role is to reach out in love and share my faith.

Those are certainly good values to have.

It's just my opinion by the way that the Bible shouldn't have anything to do with science, it's actually missing the point, and it's unfortunate how so many don't have a spiritual life just because they can't logically believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis, or that there was a literal Noah's Ark that had two of every animal on earth. (though the flood story is common across many cultures)

What's your take on this? Would you agree with me that literalism and arguing about evolution actually misses the point to begin with?

I just think that one has science for science, and faith for something that is not science (or not fully scientifically understood, as yet).

[SeaGypsy]

You supplant religion with pseudo science anyway 6 so there's not a lot of difference really, except you think you know & are being rational about things which to others appear unknowable & utterly irrational, like your thing with that jerk Hawking & your space nerd mate here KJ.

[Ibon]

Well, I appreciate the thoughtful posts here and maybe someone better informed can comment. I remember reading somewhere that christianity and other religions arose at a time of conflict and upheaval, in the case of christianity this would be the middle east some 2000 years ago.

I have been mentioning in past posts that our "overshoot" dilemma has a strong component as a spiritual deficit. If we take a look at the upcoming upheaval that will follow the consequences of human overshoot it would appear that we are entering into another one of these "biblical moments" where religions can be born or revolutionized.

Pork is forbidden in some religions because in biblical times pigs carried disease

In a similar way can excessive consumption that causes a die-off be forbidden as a tabu as religions pass through overshoot?

The analogy with pork is interesting because long after pork has been a health threat the tabu remains. Can we not have long lasting tabus away from unregulated consumption so that self regulation becomes embedded in our religious institutions following the draconion consequences of human overshoot?

That remains an open question but one I ponder often.

[Sixstrings]

You supplant religion with pseudo science anyway 6 so there's not a lot of difference really, except you think you know & are being rational about things which to others appear unknowable & utterly irrational, like your thing with that jerk Hawking & your space nerd mate here KJ.

What pseudo science? Quantum mechanics appears to be reality, crazy as it is. Like how those quarks or whatever they are will do different things based on whether they are being observed or not. It's the whole does a falling tree make a sound if nobody is listening thing, but here it's proven in testing.

You don't find that far out, and wild? String theory, quantum mechanics, yes I have just a very basic lay understanding of it but holy cow this stuff is the most far out stuff I've ever seen in my life.

Quark resonance suggests what buddhism talks about, some kind of connectedness of all things and there's a universal framework where distance doesn't matter.

Then there's things like dark matter, which is something like 90% of the universe or whatever (I don't have these numbers off top of my head).

It's like.. we're little bugs on the tip of a nut and bolt on the inside of a very complex machine, and we look out trying to figure things out. There's something BIG behind all of it, we know that much. You don't find it fascinating? Like how there are as many suns in our galaxy as there are grains of sand on all the earth, and there are as many *galaxies* in the universe as grains of sand on all the earth.

What part of this "pseudo science?"

It's not any proof of any particular religion, of course. I don't mean to be "religious" about space nerd stuff but SeaGypsy -- if you learn about space and the universe how can you not be in wonder? And so much is still unknown, and at the bottom of it all there is the same darn question that Aristotle asked thousands of years ago, WHO or WHAT is that "unmoved mover," what is the the first domino in the chain of dominos, what is the explanation for that mystery, or if it's a constant cycle then how is a cycle without a beginning possible, it boggles the rational mind. How can something just be a cycle with nothing to start it, but even if you find the creator then who created the creator -- do you see? It defies all logic, but yet there the question is, staring us in the face.

[Quinny]

I am scientist and atheist, but believe that god is good.

[SeaGypsy]

I have no problem with mixing religion & science so long as the difference is acknowledged. Many scientists leave room in their hard rationality for a spiritual factor, even cause, to life. I do have a problem with utterly stupid ideas like espoused by the likes of KJ, Hawking, that us shaved monkeys should, could or would be in any way bettered by living eternally in a tin can artificial gravity in space. Besides stupid, it is horrid that anyone claiming any kind of care for the planet which has nurtured us to our existence is so worthless as to be seen as no more than a launching pad for this eternal fantasy man. This idea very strongly correlates to apocalyptic religion.

[wildbourgman]

Well, I appreciate the thoughtful posts here and maybe someone better informed can comment. I remember reading somewhere that christianity and other religions arose at a time of conflict and upheaval, in the case of christianity this would be the middle east some 2000 years ago.

I have been mentioning in past posts that our "overshoot" dilemma has a strong component as a spiritual deficit. If we take a look at the upcoming upheaval that will follow the consequences of human overshoot it would appear that we are entering into another one of these "biblical moments" where religions can be born or revolutionized.

Pork is forbidden in some religions because in biblical times pigs carried disease

In a similar way can excessive consumption that causes a die-off be forbidden as a tabu as religions pass through overshoot?

The analogy with pork is interesting because long after pork has been a health threat the tabu remains. Can we not have long lasting tabus away from unregulated consumption so that self regulation becomes embedded in our religious institutions following the draconion consequences of human overshoot?

That remains an open question but one I ponder often.

You can find many other reasons for the rules and regulations within religion. Sexual morals can easily be for stopping desease, it could be to stop from having unwed births where the family has another mouth to feed. The pork and other food taboos are certainly about desease. Someone got sick and died after a ham sandwich and it was determined that God was against eating pork.

Although the question could be asked, did the taboo come from trying to avoid a bad outcome or did the bad outcome happen because God wanted to you to keep the taboo?

[dinopello]

This theory from physics about the origins of life is quite à propos for this site

From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat.

Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.

[SeaGypsy]

Whoopy doo! This proves nothing at all about the origins of life. If life can be made in a test tube from raw elements, post some evidence.

[dinopello]

If life can be made in a test tube from raw elements, post some evidence.

I will certainly do so if and when there is an experimental confirmation. For now, I just posted that dudes theory. Although I suppose even if he were able to show life spring from nothing, people would just say God did it. And maybe they would be right.