-
Starting today August 7th, 2024, in order to post in the Married Couples, Courting Couples, or Singles forums, you will not be allowed to post if you have your Marital status designated as private. Announcements will be made in the respective forums as well but please note that if yours is currently listed as Private, you will need to submit a ticket in the Support Area to have yours changed.
-
CF has always been a site that welcomes people from different backgrounds and beliefs to participate in discussion and even debate. That is the nature of its ministry. In view of recent events emotions are running very high. We need to remind people of some basic principles in debating on this site. We need to be civil when we express differences in opinion. No personal attacks. Avoid you, your statements. Don't characterize an entire political party with comparisons to Fascism or Communism or other extreme movements that committed atrocities. CF is not the place for broad brush or blanket statements about groups and political parties. Put the broad brushes and blankets away when you come to CF, better yet, put them in the incinerator. Debate had no place for them. We need to remember that people that commit acts of violence represent themselves or a small extreme faction.
What Would Evidence for God's Existence Be Like?
- Thread starter Tree of Life
- Start date
- Status
When they say "God is love" I don't think they are speaking literally, because love only exist in the context of human thought. If you are going to claim God only exists in the context of human thought, then you are saying he is no more real than Santa Clause, or Buggs Bunny. I think most theists will take issue with such a claim.
Ken
Upvote
0
Archaeopteryx
Wanderer
It's not a double-standard to ask that Christians respect the separation of church and state when it comes to public education.
Upvote
0
Archaeopteryx
Wanderer
It's something you would have to experience yourself to really know what it's like. Ever done any LSD? If so then we both have an experience in common that would be difficult to really explain to another person in a wholesale way. Or, we could tell them to go read Alice in Wonderland.
If someone under the influence of LSD claimed to have had a very interesting conversation with Elvis Presley, would you believe that the conversation actually took place? You need not question whether the person had a genuine experience of a conversation with Elvis (as far as you know, they aren't lying), but you might question whether the experience was genuinely of Elvis.
What if your friend tried to use his conversation with Elvis as a basis for authority on some matter? As an example, imagine that he told you to do something he desired and then cited his conversation with Elvis as a reason for why you ought to do it. How much confidence would you place in his claims?
Upvote
0
Archaeopteryx
Wanderer
Do you think it would be unreasonable to ask this person "How do you know that you really did have a conversation with Elvis?" or "Is this something you could be mistaken about?"
Upvote
0
Freodin
Devout believer in a theologically different God
What is there to learn about God, when the only way to find God is to have a personal experience?
Why would you have figures of authority present children with claims that cannot be backed up by evidence?
For all that claims that you didn't get your faith from your parents... why would you support your children getting their faith from their teachers?
And what would you say when you children had to learn about a non-christian God in school?
Double standard? Not on our side. Schools don't teach atheism.
Upvote
0
Archaeopteryx
Wanderer
One would think that, if personal experience were the primary means of obtaining divine insights, religious parents would be encouraging children to experience God for themselves and reach their own conclusions about what he is like and what he wants from human beings. Instead of doing that, they instruct children on what to believe, instilling the specific doctrines of their religion while spurning all others. If the child happens to report an experience of the divine, it is acceptable if that experience fits within the theological framework of her parents. If it doesn't, or if the child raises inconvenient questions about the framework, then she is chastised, and her experience apparently counts for little except as a lesson on what not to believe.
Upvote
0
K
kristina411
Guest
I do remember learning a great deal about Greek mythology in school, all throughout school. Was I ever taught about God? Nope.
Despite wether the lesson books include God or not, He will be there! Every child that follows Christ will be there to spread the word about God.
My daughter was in kindergarten last year and for story time she wanted to bring her children's bible so I let her. She came home saying they wouldn't let her read it and she got in trouble for bringing it because she was talking to her friends about it.know what I did? Sent her back with the Bible and told her to tell everyone how much she loves God. Because there is NOTHiNG wrong with anything she did.
No one will stop us from praising God and no one will stop us from declaring his name.
Despite wether the lesson books include God or not, He will be there! Every child that follows Christ will be there to spread the word about God.
My daughter was in kindergarten last year and for story time she wanted to bring her children's bible so I let her. She came home saying they wouldn't let her read it and she got in trouble for bringing it because she was talking to her friends about it.know what I did? Sent her back with the Bible and told her to tell everyone how much she loves God. Because there is NOTHiNG wrong with anything she did.
No one will stop us from praising God and no one will stop us from declaring his name.
Upvote
0
Eudaimonist
I believe in life before death!
- Jan 1, 2003
- 27,482
- 2,738
- 58
- Gender
- Male
- Faith
- Atheist
- Marital Status
- Private
- Politics
- US-Libertarian
Consider what?
I believe in the existence of the motivation to improve or defend someone's well-being, and the associated caring feelings. We call this love.
Note the use of lower case. I see no reason to increase its size to an "L". Believing in the existence of love doesn't give me any reason to believe in Love.
eudaimonia,
Mark
Upvote
0
Archaeopteryx
Wanderer
Praise away... No one is stopping you. The problem is that many Christians are not content to simply "declare his name" on their own. They want the government (and representative of the government) to "declare his name" as well, and to endorse and privilege their religious beliefs ahead of others.
Upvote
0
K
kristina411
Guest
I do think they should teach it in school for history and as a theory on the creation of the universe. Especially if they are teaching Greek mythology, which is religion that is still applied today with the "witchcraft" group I do believe.
I think it is complete and total nonsense that this is the case. Either way though, my child wont be stopped from praising him, no matter what the school says.
I think it is complete and total nonsense that this is the case. Either way though, my child wont be stopped from praising him, no matter what the school says.
Upvote
0
Colter
Member
Religious Growth
(1094.3) 100:1.1 While religion produces growth of meanings and enhancement of values, evil always results when purely personal evaluations are elevated to the levels of absolutes. A child evaluates experience in accordance with the content of pleasure; maturity is proportional to the substitution of higher meanings for personal pleasure, even loyalties to the highest concepts of diversified life situations and cosmic relations.
(1094.4) 100:1.2 Some persons are too busy to grow and are therefore in grave danger of spiritual fixation. Provision must be made for growth of meanings at differing ages, in successive cultures, and in the passing stages of advancing civilization. The chief inhibitors of growth are prejudice and ignorance.
(1094.5) 100:1.3 Give every developing child a chance to grow his own religious experience; do not force a ready-made adult experience upon him. Remember, year-by-year progress through an established educational regime does not necessarily mean intellectual progress, much less spiritual growth. Enlargement of vocabulary does not signify development of character. Growth is not truly indicated by mere products but rather by progress. Real educational growth is indicated by enhancement of ideals, increased appreciation of values, new meanings of values, and augmented loyalty to supreme values.
(1094.6) 100:1.4 Children are permanently impressed only by the loyalties of their adult associates; precept or even example is not lastingly influential. Loyal persons are growing persons, and growth is an impressive and inspiring reality. Live loyally today grow and tomorrow will attend to itself. The quickest way for a tadpole to become a frog is to live loyally each moment as a tadpole.
(1094.7) 100:1.5 The soil essential for religious growth presupposes a progressive life of self-realization, the co-ordination of natural propensities, the exercise of curiosity and the enjoyment of reasonable adventure, the experiencing of feelings of satisfaction, the functioning of the fear stimulus of attention and awareness, the wonder-lure, and a normal consciousness of smallness, humility. Growth is also predicated on the discovery of selfhood accompanied by self-criticism conscience, for conscience is really the criticism of oneself by ones own value-habits, personal ideals.
(1095.1) 100:1.6 Religious experience is markedly influenced by physical health, inherited temperament, and social environment. But these temporal conditions do not inhibit inner spiritual progress by a soul dedicated to the doing of the will of the Father in heaven. There are present in all normal mortals certain innate drives toward growth and self-realization which function if they are not specifically inhibited. The certain technique of fostering this constitutive endowment of the potential of spiritual growth is to maintain an attitude of wholehearted devotion to supreme values.
(1095.2) 100:1.7 Religion cannot be bestowed, received, loaned, learned, or lost. It is a personal experience which grows proportionally to the growing quest for final values. Cosmic growth thus attends on the accumulation of meanings and the ever-expanding elevation of values. But nobility itself is always an unconscious growth.
(1095.3) 100:1.8 Religious habits of thinking and acting are contributory to the economy of spiritual growth. One can develop religious predispositions toward favorable reaction to spiritual stimuli, a sort of conditioned spiritual reflex. Habits which favor religious growth embrace cultivated sensitivity to divine values, recognition of religious living in others, reflective meditation on cosmic meanings, worshipful problem solving, sharing ones spiritual life with ones fellows, avoidance of selfishness, refusal to presume on divine mercy, living as in the presence of God. The factors of religious growth may be intentional, but the growth itself is unvaryingly unconscious.
(1095.4) 100:1.9 The unconscious nature of religious growth does not, however, signify that it is an activity functioning in the supposed subconscious realms of human intellect; rather does it signify creative activities in the superconscious levels of mortal mind. The experience of the realization of the reality of unconscious religious growth is the one positive proof of the functional existence of the superconsciousness." UB 1955
Upvote
0
- Status
Similar threads
