How can an assumption not be a choice? What we see as reasonable at one point in time can change. We can disagree on which assumption is the most reasonable or we can believe both assumptions are equally reasonable and simply chose one.
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A metaphysical question
- Thread starter eugler
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The Bible also teaches God is an intelligence. It is necessary to assume a loving intelligent being if one is to assume ultimate meaning to our existence and have a hope of destiny other than oblivion. It is only false security and confusion of thought if there is no God and no meaning and no destiny. I agree God is loving, but I do not agree God is the same as me and you and the universe. If God is not the same as the universe, then we have not artificially tried to divide the universe have we?
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Because God and spiritual things cannot be proven to exist. They must be accepted on faith, which is to assume their existence.
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What kind of proof are you seeking.. ?
God and nature are inseparable.
Why add a further unnecessary complication by suggesting the existence of something supernatural..?
God is inside..
Underneath the superficial self, which pays attention to this and that, there is another self more really us than I. And the more you become aware of the unknown self -- if you become aware of it -- the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that is. You are a function of this total galaxy, bounded by the Milky Way, and this galaxy is a function of all other galaxies. You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes. You look and look, and one day you are going to wake up and say, 'Why, that's me!' And in knowing that, you know that you never die.
You are the eternal thing that comes and goes, that appears -- now as John Jones, now as Mary Smith, now as Betty Brown -- and so it goes, forever and ever and ever.
Alan Watts
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Yes, but it is you who seem to be desperately clutching at straws here. The truth of Christ's saying that where your treasure is, there your heart is, is readily observable by those 'with eyes to see'.
"Also does the aggressive mission with people who have nothing to eat and happily change their faith for earthly help like a handful of rice. I've witnessed this happening and I find it disgusting on many levels."
I couldn't agree more, provided only that the missionaries concerned would not have chosen to share their own werewithal, anyway. I know some American Protestand missionaries were/are motivated on a deeply cynical level, perhaps even sponsored by the CIA and/or State Department. Our own dear Prosperity Gospelers might be, or be associated with the people concerned. Those missionaries used their mission as a front for, if not the spread of capitalism (that was assured by the Monro Doctrine long ago), as a rear-guard action against the spread of the true Gospel of Christ and Socialism.
"... and we know just wanting something to exist doesn't make it true."
If only! Alas, what you believe about ultimate truth is what you want, what you choose to believe. Just like the rest of us. Christianity, too is wishful thinking. The difference, however, is that it just happens that God made the world to accord with the wishes of those of us who don't believe that the truth must necessarily be undesirable, not to be wished for, not to be hoped for, ugly as sin - even in the face of the wickedness and sorrow all over the world. It is directly and personally infused knowledge, supplementing what we learn from scripture and the teachings of the Christian church.
The Holy Spirit coordinates the strands of our intelligence. Faith and knowledge form a continuum, even the secular versions, and they in turn form a continuum with our Christian faith/knowledge, corresponding to our space-time universe.
"About the voluntarism I will have to point to mission and social pressure, they can't just be ignored." If good people don't spread a good message, you may be sure that bad people will spread their version. Leaving people in a vacuum is not an option. We are at war with the forces of evil.
I'm not arguing about the ins and outs of it, merely the fundamental truth. Charlemagne won most of Europe to Christianity by the edge of the sword, but would it have been better to have left the peoples of Europe to their penchant for human sacrifice - women and children, I believe being the favoured vicitms. One of the first questions put to the Pope by a bishop in one of the conquered countries was, "How should the sale of a slave for human sacrifice be treated; to which the reply was, "as murder". Corrupt as the Church was in the Middle Ages, it was the Church that set up the first hospitals, and at least passed on the teachings of Christ, the supreme goodness of which has never been surpassed. Sure Chesterton rightly observed that Christianity has never been tried and found wanting. It has been found hard and left untried. But enough of the goodness of Christ's has managed to emerge to treasure it. Bear in mind that the history of mankind has been largely a chronicle of the ministrations of psychopaths, so it has always been an uphill battle. Just consider most of the leaders of today's world.
It has done so much for humanity, not least of course, simply by spreading the Gospel of Christ. It's clear from Matthew's gospel that a conscious belief in Christ is not essential for salvation, but anyone who can remember the forties and fifities will be all too aware of how, with the rise of secularism, our Western societes (notably, the US and UK) have sunk into a morass of unbelievable wickedness, which was not only unheard of in that earlier day, but was unimaginable. Yet we read about new kinds of atrocities every day now.
Prima facie, infant baptism doesn't make sense, but I can tell you from my own experience that I felt the benefit of it very strongly as a young child.
The leaders of all the mainstream religions, share the view that the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes are arguably the most sublime ever written. Ghandi was certainly deeply impressed by Christianity in its pristine teachings.
I must finish this later.
"Also does the aggressive mission with people who have nothing to eat and happily change their faith for earthly help like a handful of rice. I've witnessed this happening and I find it disgusting on many levels."
I couldn't agree more, provided only that the missionaries concerned would not have chosen to share their own werewithal, anyway. I know some American Protestand missionaries were/are motivated on a deeply cynical level, perhaps even sponsored by the CIA and/or State Department. Our own dear Prosperity Gospelers might be, or be associated with the people concerned. Those missionaries used their mission as a front for, if not the spread of capitalism (that was assured by the Monro Doctrine long ago), as a rear-guard action against the spread of the true Gospel of Christ and Socialism.
"... and we know just wanting something to exist doesn't make it true."
If only! Alas, what you believe about ultimate truth is what you want, what you choose to believe. Just like the rest of us. Christianity, too is wishful thinking. The difference, however, is that it just happens that God made the world to accord with the wishes of those of us who don't believe that the truth must necessarily be undesirable, not to be wished for, not to be hoped for, ugly as sin - even in the face of the wickedness and sorrow all over the world. It is directly and personally infused knowledge, supplementing what we learn from scripture and the teachings of the Christian church.
The Holy Spirit coordinates the strands of our intelligence. Faith and knowledge form a continuum, even the secular versions, and they in turn form a continuum with our Christian faith/knowledge, corresponding to our space-time universe.
"About the voluntarism I will have to point to mission and social pressure, they can't just be ignored." If good people don't spread a good message, you may be sure that bad people will spread their version. Leaving people in a vacuum is not an option. We are at war with the forces of evil.
I'm not arguing about the ins and outs of it, merely the fundamental truth. Charlemagne won most of Europe to Christianity by the edge of the sword, but would it have been better to have left the peoples of Europe to their penchant for human sacrifice - women and children, I believe being the favoured vicitms. One of the first questions put to the Pope by a bishop in one of the conquered countries was, "How should the sale of a slave for human sacrifice be treated; to which the reply was, "as murder". Corrupt as the Church was in the Middle Ages, it was the Church that set up the first hospitals, and at least passed on the teachings of Christ, the supreme goodness of which has never been surpassed. Sure Chesterton rightly observed that Christianity has never been tried and found wanting. It has been found hard and left untried. But enough of the goodness of Christ's has managed to emerge to treasure it. Bear in mind that the history of mankind has been largely a chronicle of the ministrations of psychopaths, so it has always been an uphill battle. Just consider most of the leaders of today's world.
It has done so much for humanity, not least of course, simply by spreading the Gospel of Christ. It's clear from Matthew's gospel that a conscious belief in Christ is not essential for salvation, but anyone who can remember the forties and fifities will be all too aware of how, with the rise of secularism, our Western societes (notably, the US and UK) have sunk into a morass of unbelievable wickedness, which was not only unheard of in that earlier day, but was unimaginable. Yet we read about new kinds of atrocities every day now.
Prima facie, infant baptism doesn't make sense, but I can tell you from my own experience that I felt the benefit of it very strongly as a young child.
The leaders of all the mainstream religions, share the view that the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes are arguably the most sublime ever written. Ghandi was certainly deeply impressed by Christianity in its pristine teachings.
I must finish this later.
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You may want to check your source for this claim. According to Daniel Gardner in his book "The Science of Fear," modern western societies, and societies in general, have statistically never lived in a more safer time. There has never been a time in human history that is safer than now.
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You are saying I think that everything is God like it seems to me the Buddist teach. That results in no meaning to my life or yours. It does not comfort me that bugs will be alive after I am dead or that I might come back as a bug but unaware I had ever been a human being. When everything becomes God then God no longer exists and gone is the hope for destiny and meaning that transcends this short life span. It may be reality. We cannot know if it is reality that we in fact have no destiny and no ultimate meaning to our existence. It may also be reality that we do have a destiny of life and not oblivion and that our life does have the potential for meaning beyond this short period we call our mortal existence. This latter possibility gives me hope while the former offers no hope.
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Our genes are being reincarnated all the time.. the cells in our body are constantly dying and are being replaced.. Look at you hand.. for example.. Is it the same hand that you were born with..?
The body has been reincarnated many times in a life time.. this is how nature does things.. by means of reincarnation.. it is happening all around us.. all the time.
As for proof..
Can you prove to me what you are perceiving.. thinking and feeling and what you dream.... ?
If your answer is… No.
Does that mean your perceptions.. thoughts.. feelings.. and dreams don't exist.. ?
Fortunately.. you yourself are the proof of their existence..
Likewise.. we actually can prove to ourselves that something greater exists within us.. by means of the practice of meditation.. and I am speaking from experience.. not theory.
Anyone who practises meditation for many years.. knows this to be a fact.. Our everyday self is not the only "reality".. that we are capable of perceiving.. there is much more to us than meets the eye.
As for the idea that EVERYTHING must be proven..
Science has known for a long time that it cannot prove everything.. there are limits.. for example.. Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem..can’t be proved...... but nevertheless is True…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxoZ8REpH-g
There are more things that are true.. than there are that can be proved...
This is why science consists many theories.. .
For example.. we cannot prove M Theory..
But on this basis should we reject what science is saying..?
On this same basis.. should we reject religious wisdom too.. ?
“Do you remember how electrical currents and 'unseen waves' were laughed at?
The knowledge about man is still in its infancy.”
Albert Einstein
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What is relevant to you that my hand is reincarnating but when I die it turns to dust? How does my reincarnating hand now have anything to offer me when my body dies?
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razeontherock
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The answer to your question is "seeking G-d's face." Really, it is as simple as that. Personal revelation, from G-d the Father, to each of us individually. This is the Rock this Ray is on, and is also what Jesus was talking about when He surnamed Simon, as Peter. (He never named him Pope, so good on you for turning your back on excessive religiosity)
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chilehed
Veteran
I've studied this paragraph six or seven times and quite honestly don't understand what you're getting at. I guess I have to bow out.It's not that simple. I defined God in this thread as a form of higher intelligence. I never said that we are not capable of rational thought but it wouldn't make sense to think that rational thought is like a spark that was given to us and either exists perfectly and unchangeble or does not. From my pov rational thought is something that has developed and exists on many different levels. Obviously it has to have come about this way when you think of the different species of human beings that have existed before us. It wouldn't make sense to think that the first homo sapiens (who of course didn't come about as "the first homo sapiens") lit a light bulb in his head and was all of a sudden capable of rational thought while there was no such thing before him and none will follow either. The sheer mind boggling that comes with trying to imagine the thoughts of our earlier ancestors should give you an idea about how hard it is to understand more "primitive" thoughts of a different being (as we all observe in this thread it's already mind boggling to understand each other's way of thinking)....
Thanks.
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I don't think there is much point in my pursuing this, eugler, as you expect to understand with the analytical intelligence what is utterly beyond it. And that goes for quantum mechanics and the dolts who still cling to the mechanistic paradigm, so that instead of understanding that a paradox is an ABSOLUTE contradiction in terms, plum illogical, they've come up with the term, "counter-intuitive". Indeed, it is anything but. A paradox is anti-rational. Were it untrue, it would be an oxymoron.
This state of affairs is perpetuated by the Beasts of the Earth, the multinationals who increasingly fund research, even now setting up departments in Ivy League colleges such as Princeton. You want funding, you toe the line. You take the direction we tell you. It's all about "manufacturing consent". The perfectly comprehensible, thoroughly logical, mechanistic paradigm is ideal fodder to bamboozle the public, when any consumer controversy arises. "Scientists tell us that that their research..., bla, bla." The ultimate paradigm of all knowledge! Indeed, 'science' used to mean just 'knowledge".
There is a YouTube clip on beauty and Truth in science of a talk by Murray Gell-Mann. Bursting with laughter, he said that when people told Einstein so and so has proved a flaw in your 'relativity' theory, he'd just say, 'Oh, it'll go away...' It evidently happened a good few times.
When the truth of the matter is that physics is as full of paradoxes, absolutely imponderable, never mind insoluble, mysteries, as the divine mysteries of Christianity. And with quantum physics this is never-ending.
I quoted on here from the Science folder of Guardian Talk, a post by a physicists who had been a member of the team that pioneered satellite communications, and who had, as a student at Caltech, been a personal friend of Feynman, and three other, named, Nobel laureates, as well as a good number of other very distinguished scientists. He had many conversations with them, and he said that when the "suits" were not around, - although often in their homes, as well - they were all of the opinion that the paradoxes of physics are just that - 'counter-rational', not 'counter-intuitive'.
Physicists are actively discouraged from thinking about quantum physics:
A Lazy Layman's Guide to Quantum Physics
Like so many people with a conscience, you have obviously been deeply scandalised by the history of the Church, particularly perhaps, the Catholic Church, but all power structures attract psychopaths and sociopaths, and they do tend to gravitate to the some of the highest positions.
However, without the good, sometimes heroically virtuous people in the Church, there would be no Christianity today; and the strangest thing is - and I know this form personal experience - that the values taught down the centuries by the Church (concurrently with the scandalous witness), we assume we were born with, that they are our birthright. They are not. When the reality is that it is those same values that enable to feel such keen outrage at the wickedness perpetrated. With the spread of secularism those of us old enough to remember the forties and fifties (with the honourable exception of African Americans), are witnessing, day by day, our societies plummeting into an abyss of wickedness we could not even have imagined in those days. Each day, some new unheard of level wickedness is reported - perhaps the most horrifying, by children, committing rape or sodomy on their young class-mates, or babies being ripped out of the woman of an expectant mother, by another woman, unable to give birth herself.
Your blanket strictures re missionary activity just seem to me extraordinarily naive for such a worldy-wise person. Despite the truth of the African person who said: When you came here, you had the bibles and we had the land. Now we have the bible and you have the land,' the missions are one of the crowning glories of the Church. Ask the poor in South America and other oppressed areas?
Do you think secularists will stamp out the murder of people who are albinos or accused of witchcraft? Secularists are only interested in their countries' natural resources, and they don't even give them a bible.
Anyway, you sound a good person to converse with, and it's been a pleasure, as far as it's gone.
This state of affairs is perpetuated by the Beasts of the Earth, the multinationals who increasingly fund research, even now setting up departments in Ivy League colleges such as Princeton. You want funding, you toe the line. You take the direction we tell you. It's all about "manufacturing consent". The perfectly comprehensible, thoroughly logical, mechanistic paradigm is ideal fodder to bamboozle the public, when any consumer controversy arises. "Scientists tell us that that their research..., bla, bla." The ultimate paradigm of all knowledge! Indeed, 'science' used to mean just 'knowledge".
There is a YouTube clip on beauty and Truth in science of a talk by Murray Gell-Mann. Bursting with laughter, he said that when people told Einstein so and so has proved a flaw in your 'relativity' theory, he'd just say, 'Oh, it'll go away...' It evidently happened a good few times.
When the truth of the matter is that physics is as full of paradoxes, absolutely imponderable, never mind insoluble, mysteries, as the divine mysteries of Christianity. And with quantum physics this is never-ending.
I quoted on here from the Science folder of Guardian Talk, a post by a physicists who had been a member of the team that pioneered satellite communications, and who had, as a student at Caltech, been a personal friend of Feynman, and three other, named, Nobel laureates, as well as a good number of other very distinguished scientists. He had many conversations with them, and he said that when the "suits" were not around, - although often in their homes, as well - they were all of the opinion that the paradoxes of physics are just that - 'counter-rational', not 'counter-intuitive'.
Physicists are actively discouraged from thinking about quantum physics:
A Lazy Layman's Guide to Quantum Physics
Like so many people with a conscience, you have obviously been deeply scandalised by the history of the Church, particularly perhaps, the Catholic Church, but all power structures attract psychopaths and sociopaths, and they do tend to gravitate to the some of the highest positions.
However, without the good, sometimes heroically virtuous people in the Church, there would be no Christianity today; and the strangest thing is - and I know this form personal experience - that the values taught down the centuries by the Church (concurrently with the scandalous witness), we assume we were born with, that they are our birthright. They are not. When the reality is that it is those same values that enable to feel such keen outrage at the wickedness perpetrated. With the spread of secularism those of us old enough to remember the forties and fifties (with the honourable exception of African Americans), are witnessing, day by day, our societies plummeting into an abyss of wickedness we could not even have imagined in those days. Each day, some new unheard of level wickedness is reported - perhaps the most horrifying, by children, committing rape or sodomy on their young class-mates, or babies being ripped out of the woman of an expectant mother, by another woman, unable to give birth herself.
Your blanket strictures re missionary activity just seem to me extraordinarily naive for such a worldy-wise person. Despite the truth of the African person who said: When you came here, you had the bibles and we had the land. Now we have the bible and you have the land,' the missions are one of the crowning glories of the Church. Ask the poor in South America and other oppressed areas?
Do you think secularists will stamp out the murder of people who are albinos or accused of witchcraft? Secularists are only interested in their countries' natural resources, and they don't even give them a bible.
Anyway, you sound a good person to converse with, and it's been a pleasure, as far as it's gone.
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Nope.
Ok, then I misunderstood your intention. What remains is: what does that have to do with the initial question?
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I see you're argument. The problem is that you see my position as an assumption. "I don't know" is not an assumption, it's the default. While you - if I understand what you're saying - chose to assume there is a god and it happened to be the Christian one, I did not make any such choice. And if I "chose" to believe a story that doesn't make sense in so many ways, wouldn't that be makebelief?
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When it comes to the existence of God, I think "I don't know" is simply a fact of reality for all of us. Believe is a word that we can talk about and neither of us understand the sence in which the other is using it. You are going to have to make a choice in assumptions on how you live because you don't know if God exists or not. You can assume no Creator, or a loving Creator, or an absent Creator that is neither loving or unloving, or an unloving Creator, or a Creator that is sometimes loving and sometimes unloving. Whatever your world view, it is a choice and an assumption.
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Are you by any chance into Noam Chomsky? "Manufacturing Consent" sounded an awful lot like him, maybe that's something we have in common after all. On a side note, in my language, the word for science would be translated directly "the creation of knowledge".
I here these arguments quite often. They imply that science and religion are something similar. That is simply not the case. Furthermore science doesn't disprove religion, that's not even the intention of science. I don't understand why this comparison is even used since there is irefutable evidence that scientific knowledge works. Even Quantum Mechanics works, the implication we draw from it are counter-intuitive and maybe even paradoxical but the results work otherwise I wouldn't have a computer to type this into and this conversation never would have happened in the first place.
I've worked in a little hospital in the Indian countryside. Although people had nothing to eat and lived in mudhuts, there was at least one solid building in every village, a church. I myself was working for a Christian order to get there. India banned white missionaries so the ones working there were Indians themselves. There were many priest of different catholic orders around, always living in the best house (if you want to call it that), always bragging about their trips to Europe and the world while their sheep had never been outside the village. One of the great flight tickets could have fed and clothed the village for many months yet that wasn't even a matter of consideration. The lot of them was disgusting, with just one single exeption.
Well, yes they will, in fact in the West they have. How could a secularist accuse anyone of witchcraft? Secularists are a very diverse group with no common doctrine or morals, they only agree on the diversion of church and state (many of them are believers). So without a common philosophy there is nothing to denounce.
Likewise, although we do not agree on many things I enjoyed our conversation.
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That's true in a sense but in a very narrow one. Our DNA is not reincarnated, DNA replication is semiconservativ so that idea doesn't work. Your right about most of our body being replaced, what you are forgetting is the important part: our neurons aren't replaced. The cells that seem to be "us" the ones that form the circuitry of the brain loose the ability to reproduce long before we are born. No "reincarnation" there, when they die, they're gone.
Your trying to imply here that because some things are although improvable indeed true, everything that isn't provable can be true. That's simply not the case.
The jury is still out on whether M-Theory is even science. So far it's only a philosophy since its not provable.
Kudoz to that, so we agree that neither you nor me have a clue about god and maybe -just maybe - time will tell?
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Then I'll have to work on my conversation skills. Admittedly it was a difficult thought to be put into words. Thanks for your thoughts. Have a nice day.
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