Why should one care if ''God'' exists?

[bhsmte]

No, I believe that part because I have experienced it as a reality....I have faith in the Reality.

Biblical definition of faith: Heb 11:1 Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.

The "hoped for" part is belief. The substance and evidence is confirmation of belief, aka proof, aka knowledge by direct experience.

Ok, so there are some parts you believe, because they line up with your own personal experience.

 

[rockytopva]

I was brought up in the military and ended up spending high school in Michigan. My mother made me go to a church where I use to look out on the winter Michigan tundra and wonder what was more dead and lifeless, the outside or the church I was in. I would also go outside to smoke a cigarette and wonder how on earth there could be a God with an ice cold wind blowing.

I believe that everything came together with energy and light and that there are three varieties...

Natural E/c2... The sun is E/c2 in the form of plasma... The Earth is cooled E/c2.
Mental E/c2... Our ability to think comes from E/c2
Spiritual E/c2... Energy (Motivation, Warmth, Love) / c2 (Faith, Hope, Charity, Joy)

so... Lets take the opposite of all that...

The opposite of m = E/c2 is n = z/d

Nothing (n) - That which outer space is made of between the celestial objects.
Absolute Zero (z) - The coldest it can get!
Darkness (d) - That which is devoid of light.

Natural z/d - Nothing! Space! Null and Void!
Mental z/d - Nothing!
Spiritual... z (Laziness, Cold, Apathy, Hate) / d (Fear, Despair, Greed, Sorrow).

It is my conviction that there are three spiritual extremes…

Spiritual light – Love, warmth, faith, hope, charity joy, goodness, peace…
Spiritual darkness – Hate, cold, fear, depression, sorrow, greed, evil, war…
The Flesh – Ego, perverted sex, filth, witchcraft, anger, strife, divisions, mysticism… Where does that fit? It is neither light or darkness!

I have heard that the flesh and the devil are so akin that it is hard to discern between the two of them. There is a path I believe to perfect spiritual light, or Caritas (Latin for pure love)... Things that cannot be taught for virtue is not knowledge!

1. Hope - All things begin with a hope
2. Faith - Motivation is a child of faith and hope
3. Charis - Grace - A powerful neighbor of caritas
4. Dynamos - Greek for virtue and motivation
5. Eucharisteo - Much grace... Gratitude
6. Charisomai - Well favored - A lucky kind of feeling
7. Euchrestos - Greek for profitable
8. Chairo - Greek for cheer - "Cheerio mate!"
9. Chara - Greek for joy
10. Chrestotes - An 'Aunt Bee' kind of Goodness
11. Charisma - Heavenly Graciousness
12. Chrisma - Heavenly Anointing - The Holy Grail!

Finally I came to God because I met him on a spiritual basis and by seeing its effects as on the individual below... The older gentlemen in the Pentecostal Holiness church would sit on the front pew weeping as the Holy Spirit would fall. And if they ever made eye contact with you they would point to the altar, as souls were being laid out in the spirit, and declare, "The Holy Ghost! The Holy Ghost!"

After experiencing a revival one late summer, I felt a voice speak to my heart as I lay there listening to the kady dids sing outside the door. The voice said, "Put the book down" in which on doing so the voice speaks again... "Where is all that hatred and strife?" On examining my spiritual man there was noting there but pure beauty. A well of spiritual E/c2 flowing out from my inside spiritual man.

From that point on I took an interest in the word of God. But it was not the word of God that saved or converted me, but a God encounter that changed the spiritual man.

So I do not believe that we can penetrate the atheist mind on these issues. They will be converted if they feel God's Spirit enter their heart. They will take interest in the word of God because that is where God's Spirit will lead them. I doubt no intellectual argument will do it.

It is too bad that the newer generation of Christians get the ego confused with the anointing The people that I knew who were filled with the Holy Ghost were perfect and pure... Without the useless mental web.

I miss these type men! As John Bunyan's influence spread, and even in London, when he preached, he attracted throngs of people. The story is told that Dr. Owen was one of his frequent hearers in London. When the erudite and highly educated divine was sneeringly asked by Charles II how he could go to hear a tinker preach, Owen responded: "I would give all my learning to be able to preach as well as the tinker."

When DL Moody went to England he too attracted throngs of people. When a jealous clergyman asked an Englishman why it was that people were listening to a shoe salesman when there were so many more educated preachers here in the states the Englishman replied, "Because the shoe salesman preaches with tears.

RW Schambach also fit the same model. I miss these type of men who walked not after the doctrines of men but by the leading of the Holy Spirit! @ 4:30 God did not call us to be a parrot. We are not parroting the doctrines of a church organization! But we are suppose to be men and woman of God that will be a vessel that God can use to speak what thus saith the Lord!"

RW Schambach - What is a Man of God? - YouTube

 

[Usus Vox Tractus]

Ok, so there are some parts you believe, because they line up with your own personal experience.

There are also parts I believe and parts I do not, and neither of them line up with my personally verifiable experience.


The parts I have experienced add to my living faith (active spiritual relationship with God). This would continue to live and grow if all books disappeared over-night.

In fact my relationships with God, Man and all creation would likely increase many-fold!

Brings up some interesting contemplation!

 

[Deidre32]

Ok, so there are some parts you believe, because they line up with your own personal experience.

that looks to be the definition of religion.

 

[Aldebaran]

Ok, so there are some parts you believe, because they line up with your own personal experience.

If he experienced it, then it becomes reality for him. Doesn't something become real to you once you experience it?

 

[Usus Vox Tractus]

that looks to be the definition of religion.

Here's something fun =)



The etymology of “religion” is indeed disputed. This is not, of course, the case when it comes to English, which clearly inherited the word from Latin religio. Rather it applies to Latin itself, in which it is not clear what the component parts of the noun religio are or mean. The ancient Romans disagreed about this. Cicero, for example, thought that religio derived from the verb relegere in its sense of “to re-read or go over a text,” religion being a body of custom and law that demands study and transmission.

On the other hand, the Christian writer Lactantius, writing in the early fourth century, opted for religare, a verb meaning “to fasten or bind.” “We are,” he said in his book “Divinae Institutiones,” “tied to God and bound to him [religati] by the bond of piety, and it is from this, and not, as Cicero holds, from careful study [relegendo], that religion has received its name.” Lactantius’s greater contemporary, Augustine, preferred this etymology to Cicero’s while suggesting yet another possibility: re-eligere, “to choose again,” religion being the recovery of the link with God that sin has sundered.

It may be that Lactantius and Augustine rejected Cicero’s etymology because it made religio seem too close to such Jewish terms as torah, mishnah and talmud, all Hebrew words having to do with teaching and studying. Since unlike the practice of Judaism, the Christian religion, as they saw it, was a matter of binding faith and commitment rather than of accumulated knowledge, the religare etymology may have appealed to them for the opposite reason than that proposed by Rappaport: as a way of distancing Christianity from Jewish concepts rather than of adopting them.

...

To return to the word “religion,” it is a curious fact that, although all the ancestors of today’s Europeans had (like the ancestors of all the world’s inhabitants) what we would call religions, no ancient Indo-European language had a specific word for religion, Latin having been the first — which is why the great majority of modern European languages have some version of religio as their term for it. Probably this was because, precisely since religion was everywhere in the ancient world and no activity was divorced from it, it never struck anyone as a distinct aspect of life calling for a name of its own. There were names for specific gods, ceremonies, rituals, forms of worship, cults, sects, etc., because all these were discrete things; religion itself was the unnamed totality of them all, the forest that couldn’t be seen for all its trees.

It took the Romans, who in conquering the world were forced to become its first anthropologists, to realize that behind all this multifariousness was something about which it was possible to generalize. From its original meaning of “punctilious respect for the sacred,” religio came to denote any comprehensive human system of organizing and expressing such respect. Religio was, Cicero wrote, cultus deorum, “the worship of the gods.” Whether he was also right about where the word came from would appear to be anyone’s guess.


Read more: Roots of ‘Religion’ – Forward.com

 

[bhsmte]

If he experienced it, then it becomes reality for him. Doesn't something become real to you once you experience it?

In my own head, yes the experience is real for me and me alone, unless I can show (with objective evidence) this experience should apply to others.

 

[Aldebaran]

In my own head, yes the experience is real for me and me alone, unless I can show (with objective evidence) this experience should apply to others.

You say that you'd have to be able to show why this experience should apply to others with objective evidence, but why would you need to do that? Why does it need to be shown that way? Can't it just "happen"? If you cut your hand with a knife and you experience pain, do you need to show objective evidence to someone else (a young child is a good example) why your experience should apply to them? How would you go about that? The child would have to pretty much take your word for it. There's no way you could apply your experience to someone else that way.

 

[Deidre32]

Here's something fun =)



The etymology of “religion” is indeed disputed. This is not, of course, the case when it comes to English, which clearly inherited the word from Latin religio. Rather it applies to Latin itself, in which it is not clear what the component parts of the noun religio are or mean. The ancient Romans disagreed about this. Cicero, for example, thought that religio derived from the verb relegere in its sense of “to re-read or go over a text,” religion being a body of custom and law that demands study and transmission.

On the other hand, the Christian writer Lactantius, writing in the early fourth century, opted for religare, a verb meaning “to fasten or bind.” “We are,” he said in his book “Divinae Institutiones,” “tied to God and bound to him [religati] by the bond of piety, and it is from this, and not, as Cicero holds, from careful study [relegendo], that religion has received its name.” Lactantius’s greater contemporary, Augustine, preferred this etymology to Cicero’s while suggesting yet another possibility: re-eligere, “to choose again,” religion being the recovery of the link with God that sin has sundered.

It may be that Lactantius and Augustine rejected Cicero’s etymology because it made religio seem too close to such Jewish terms as torah, mishnah and talmud, all Hebrew words having to do with teaching and studying. Since unlike the practice of Judaism, the Christian religion, as they saw it, was a matter of binding faith and commitment rather than of accumulated knowledge, the religare etymology may have appealed to them for the opposite reason than that proposed by Rappaport: as a way of distancing Christianity from Jewish concepts rather than of adopting them.

...

To return to the word “religion,” it is a curious fact that, although all the ancestors of today’s Europeans had (like the ancestors of all the world’s inhabitants) what we would call religions, no ancient Indo-European language had a specific word for religion, Latin having been the first — which is why the great majority of modern European languages have some version of religio as their term for it. Probably this was because, precisely since religion was everywhere in the ancient world and no activity was divorced from it, it never struck anyone as a distinct aspect of life calling for a name of its own. There were names for specific gods, ceremonies, rituals, forms of worship, cults, sects, etc., because all these were discrete things; religion itself was the unnamed totality of them all, the forest that couldn’t be seen for all its trees.

It took the Romans, who in conquering the world were forced to become its first anthropologists, to realize that behind all this multifariousness was something about which it was possible to generalize. From its original meaning of “punctilious respect for the sacred,” religio came to denote any comprehensive human system of organizing and expressing such respect. Religio was, Cicero wrote, cultus deorum, “the worship of the gods.” Whether he was also right about where the word came from would appear to be anyone’s guess.


Read more: Roots of ‘Religion’ – Forward.com

that was very interesting, i appreciate it.

In my own head, yes the experience is real for me and me alone, unless I can show (with objective evidence) this experience should apply to others.

and therein lies the crux of it all. if you discover verifiable evidence to support the existence of a deity, would you force others to believe it, if the evidence suddenly vanished? that's religion. even if people believe that what they have felt, or seen, in the past or present, is somehow 'real,' why make others feel shame simply because they don't buy into your experience?

this is why faith/religion is largely subjective. there is no verifiable, objective evidence to support the existence of a god.

 

[Aldebaran]

this is why faith/religion is largely subjective. there is no verifiable, objective evidence to support the existence of a god.

This evidence people seem to want is usually physical evidence. How can we use physical evidence to prove the metaphysical or interdimensional?

 

[fireof god98]

This evidence people seem to want is usually physical evidence. How can we use physical evidence to prove the metaphysical or interdimensional?

well if god wanted people in heaven,would he not show himself to people who need physical evidence and objective evidence like bhsmte?

 

[Usus Vox Tractus]

This evidence people seem to want is usually physical evidence. How can we use physical evidence to prove the metaphysical or interdimensional?

This is why metaphor is traditionally heavily employed.

Here's another insight on the nature of this problem from the department of physics in Oregon:

Birth of the Universe :

Physics of the early Universe is at the boundary of astronomy and philosophy since we do not currently have a complete theory that unifies all the fundamental forces of Nature at the moment of Creation. In addition, there is no possibility of linking observation or experimentation of early Universe physics to our theories (i.e. it's not possible to `build' another Universe). Our theories are rejected or accepted based on simplicity and aesthetic grounds, plus their power of prediction to later times, rather than an appeal to empirical results. This is a very difference way of doing science from previous centuries of research.

 

[bhsmte]

You say that you'd have to be able to show why this experience should apply to others with objective evidence, but why would you need to do that? Why does it need to be shown that way? Can't it just "happen"? If you cut your hand with a knife and you experience pain, do you need to show objective evidence to someone else (a young child is a good example) why your experience should apply to them? How would you go about that? The child would have to pretty much take your word for it. There's no way you could apply your experience to someone else that way.

You don't have to show anything to anyone else, for yourself to believe.

But I have a feeling, if a Hindu was telling you about their experiences and why they feel they are correct, that just wouldn't cut it for you.

 

[Aldebaran]

You don't have to show anything to anyone else, for yourself to believe.

I'm glad to see you finally understand.

 

[bhsmte]

I'm glad to see you finally understand.

You haven't paid any attention to my posts on this board if you are just seeing that I acknowledge each person can have their own experiences and or perceptions, that are specific to them.

 

[Deidre32]

I'm glad to see you finally understand.

But only for yourself to believe. Religion doesn't stay private though, it seeks to recruit others to it often through fear of something bad happening if the person doesn't believe that the other person's experience should also be theirs.

If you believe that Jesus Christ is Lord, that's fine. Telling me that I should believe it too, is wrong.

 

[Aldebaran]

well if god wanted people in heaven,would he not show himself to people who need physical evidence and objective evidence like bhsmte?

Because Jesus said that those who believe in Him must believe through faith, not through sight.

 

[Aldebaran]

But only for yourself to believe. Religion doesn't stay private though, it seeks to recruit others to it often through fear of something bad happening if the person doesn't believe that the other person's experience should also be theirs.

If you believe that Jesus Christ is Lord, that's fine. Telling me that I should believe it too, is wrong.

Another way to look at it is to say that a person's experiences and thoughts don't have to stay private. If something great happens in your life, or you learn something new, I'm sure you're anxious to tell others about it. It's not always to avoid something bad happening to them that is a motivation either. Oftentimes, it's because you want to share good news or information with others so you can have joy in someone else sharing the same good news.

 

[fireof god98]

Because Jesus said that those who believe in Him must believe through faith, not through sight.

but why did he say this? if he really wanted people in heaven then he would give us what we need to believe. instead of playing games with people

 

[Noxot]

well if god wanted people in heaven,would he not show himself to people who need physical evidence and objective evidence like bhsmte?

okay, here is some evidence. 'all of reality'. but atheist can not accept that because they already have certain opinions about how the universe was made and functions. since atheist share certain ideas that are also common to religions people they have come to the conclusion that it is irrational to believe in a god. with the same common evidence that both atheist and believer holds ( which is not that stable of a foundation at all ) religious people blindly follow along whilst atheist don't like this image of god that they see and thus they often dismiss the idea of god as something foolish and unworthy. I would tend to agree with them in certain respects. but just because certain people have thought foolishly about god does not disqualify god from being a reality.

atheist tend to be atheist. they don't believe in a god and thus all that they see is based in the idea that god is not. you will only see what you want to see which is one of the main things the bible teaches and yet hardly any religious or atheistic person understands that because not many have learned how to understand spiritual things.

a decent physical evidence of God is the experience of God teaching you how to understand the bible and in the manner of which the bible is constructed. but even such evidence that is seen clearly does not keep one from believing or not believing. God can afford you an entire different perspective of reality but atheist will dismiss this with their own belief system as purely natural causes and yet they are foolish in that they do not understand that God operates on all levels of reality which is why it is necessary for the physical brain to do certain things when a person has some sort of mystical experience.

atheist dismiss God because they found how certain things operate. "I know how a game works and thus it must be that no one made the game!" not very wise imho. "the game came from a bunch of zeros and ones", does that mean it was not designed?... "if the right zeros and ones come together then it makes a game program." good job in pointing out the obvious but how does that disprove the thing that made the game?

it is just speculation to believe God made or did not make the universe. you people can't know objectively. in fact you can't even prove that the universe is completely objective either! so stop acting like you have objective evidence to disprove God. you don't see and thus you do not see. simple as that. many religious people are the same way. I don't condemn you for it. you are growing and learning just like I am.