You don’t know there is a God any more than an atheist knows there is no god. You can believe there is a God. You can think there is a God. You can have faith there is a God. But there is nothing you can do to convince me you KNOW there is a God.
Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps there is something you can do to convince me you know there is a God. What might that be? How about if you told me God had given you the ability to walk on water? OK. Show me. Let me see you walk on water. If I see you walk on water and you told me that this ability was give to you to convince doubting Thomases like me that God exists, then, wow, yeah, I think I would be convinced.
This is a new thought for me and I think it answers a question I have pondered without resolution before. I think that the teachings of Jesus are really wonderful. Love thy neighbor. Love your enemies. Love everyone. Do not judge others. Really great stuff. My question has been why the supernatural stuff like walking on water and virgin birth. I simply don’t believe in things like that that go against all of the experiences that have come to me through my god-given body. It doesn’t matter to me. The supernatural things don’t take away from the wisdom of his words that I can relate to and actually put to good use in the way I live my life.
So here is how I think the supernatural stuff came into being. There were these men, the evangelicals of their time, trying to get the masses to follow the teachings of Jesus but the masses were not buying it so they started attributing supernatural abilities to Him.
Are you one of those who need to have Christ with supernatural abilities? Why? Aren’t his words powerful enough without the virgin birth, turning a fish and a loaf of bread into enough food to feed the crowd, resurrection?
This is the life God gave you. There is so much to be explored, learned, and enjoyed in this life. There are so many challenges, like living peacefully, like having a meaningful relationship with another, like dealing with our deficiencies whether it be physical handicaps or mental handicaps. What a fantastic game has been developed for us—this game of life with its pleasures and its pain and suffering. There are video games that try to recreate parts of life. Think of life as the ultimate video game and play it well.
Abe Lincoln was a great man, a great thinker. He learned to use his god-given mind, his conscience, to guide him. It may well be that many people were not given a mind capable of finding within themselves a good feeling associated with doing good and a bad feeling with “doing bad”. For those a religion devised by others with heavens and hells must be necessary if we are to believe those who can’t understand how someone who doesn’t believe as they do could possible be restrained from doing bad.
Comments 7
I am sorry you feel the way you feel. I actually don’t believe anything I was taught as a child about religon etc…the one thing I can hold fast to KNOWING BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT is that there IS A GOD! Sure he’s a dead-beat worthless piece of crap that all the “children” worship and want in their lives and he doesn’t do a thing for them and wants to take credit when something good happens and denies responsibility when things go bad i.e. “It’s all Satans fault” but I can’t walk outside and not have a huge respect and complete lack of understanding how anyone can deny there is a God! I can’t fathom the amount of greatness that it took to create the world and the perfect balance! Even the demons know there is a god!
Posted 29 Aug 2008 at 4:58 pm ¶JHargraves,
You wrote, “I can’t walk outside and not have a huge respect and complete lack of understanding how anyone can deny there is a God! I can’t fathom the amount of greatness that it took to create the world and the perfect balance!”
I agree! We are using our god-given mind and senses to come to this conclusion. But what is god? A single all-powerful entity in our image? We are just putting a name, God, on the creator. This life, the perceptions I have as I live this life, is something that I can’t conceive as just happening. As a kid we used to deride others by saying “Were you born, hatched or did you just slowly accumulate?” Did the universe just slowly accumulate? If so, from what? Just because we can’t imagine something coming from nothing doesn’t mean it didn’t happen that way but since we’re trying to imagine, in a cosmic way, how this life came about and we have to use information available to us from within this life we are led to the belief that it was created—it is a creation. If a creation, someone or something must have created it. Because most people have given the name “God” to the creator, I use that same name when trying to communicate these ideas.
Posted 08 Oct 2008 at 2:43 pm ¶However, what is the nature of this creator? Henry Ford didn’t create automobiles alone. Computer programs are not created by a single person. Perhaps the creator was a committee or a race of some kind of beings about which we have no understanding. I think we limit our thoughts tremendously when we stick to the notion developed two and a half millennia ago of a single God who created us in his image.
I found this website because of a conversation I had with my brother today who is convinced that I am going to hell because I don’t believe the Bible is the word of God. I, personally, Love God, and do believe there is a Supreme Being of Love out there trying to help us appreciate our own divinity. Why do I believe in God, and it perhaps won’t be proof to you, but I have been in many-a-jam in my life, and I prayed and I received help, miraculous help! Not only that, when I was 7 I saw a vision of Christ walking down the street, how can I make you believe that, I won’t even try, it’s not for me to try to make you believe anything. I’m just sharing my own beliefs. It has been hard on me because my brother’s relationship with his beliefs has caused a wedge between us, he really does believe I am going to hell. Then I read some of the bible, to see if I was missing something, and a thought breezed past my mind, “What if Satan wrote the bible”? You know, that’s not something that I would put past him, at all. And considering the effects it’s had on humans across the world, I’m believing it more and more. The thing is, when a person believes the bible is the Word of God, there is no out. Their life is dictated by what is written and what is written sort of is contradictory, really. God who loves us will turn around and destroy us if we don’t do exactly as he says, as written in the book. It truly goes agains who I believe God is, a loving being who is trying very hard to help us to love one another. Regardless if you believe in God or not, I’m glad that there is someone out there considering this very slippery subject. My first question was, well… what about Christ, Christ is in the bible and he is a hero. But then in the book of Revelations which was added, I believe in the last 500 years, he comes as a judge and the 144,000 are men who never slept with a woman, who would then point me to the catholic church, who I believe were the ones responsible for getting the book of revelations in the bible, don’t quote me on that, I’m taking this from memory because it’s one of the things that made me leave the church, I remember thinking back then, if the catholic church is deciding what goes in the bible, man, I can’t believe this… and then I looked around a bit more at the actions of those who said they loved God and I was gone from the church… This is a fastinating revelation, Satan being responsible for the bible, truly… it has such a grip on people, I don’t know if I’ll go around talking about it much in public for fear of getting shot!
Posted 22 Oct 2008 at 6:03 am ¶I share your fear of getting shot which is why I use a pseudonym. What irony that people who profess to believe in the God of the Bible and who believe God is love are intolerant of people who don’t believe as they do to the extent that they are filled with hate. I can’t imagine hating someone and not realizing that the hate didn’t feel good in mind or body. That intolerance of the views of others and unwillingness to even consider other views is probably an indication of an unease with one’s own faith.
Posted 22 Oct 2008 at 8:52 pm ¶My greatest wish for this millennium is that the majority of people come to accept that they do not know anything outside of this life. We can each have our belief, our faith or our hope for a life after death and what that might be like, that there is a single god or many or none, and about how we came to be. However, to be loving creatures we must come to an understanding of the difference between what we know and what we believe. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you brother and you could have a discussion about your beliefs recognizing that the other’s belief is no more nor less valid than yours.
You are right about Revelations being added later and that its purpose was to bind people to the church. The Bible was written by religious leaders of their time who were thinkers and who wanted the best for their followers. We should remember, however, that these thinkers also thought the earth was flat and the center of the universe. Our knowledge and understanding of what we encounter in life has advanced tremendously since the Bible was written. It is too bad that our understanding of our philosophy for living has been mired in the thinking of those young men (considering life expectancy then and now) who lived so long ago.
Thanks! Yes, I hope there comes a day when my brother and I can sit and speak without me being cast into hell! That’s the hard part, I’m always the one doomed. And I have to confess my own desire to be right, and be careful in that, which is where I believe love comes in. If I come from a place of love in listening, then I am open and can see much more and respond better, from the heart. So, I am dedicating myself to Love, Love, Love! And trusting that Love will reign again!
Posted 23 Oct 2008 at 3:16 am ¶You are right on course.
Posted 23 Oct 2008 at 4:51 pm ¶I have put a lot of thought into the meaning of love. First is unconditional acceptance which in the negative is “judge not”. It doesn’t matter that your brother is judging you. You can’t change him but you can change yourself. Second is respect. You may not respect his views but be careful that that disrespect doesn’t intrude on your respect for him. Third is kind of the easiest as it is mostly what we think of when we think of love, a warm feeling. I’m sure you already love your brother in that familial connection kind of way. It is the other two that we usually have to work on most with family members.
Why we can’t know there is a god, an analogy.
Posted 03 Nov 2008 at 3:52 pm ¶We are confined to our lives, our perceptions within this thing we call our life. If we were born in a single windowless room we would know only what was within the room and what came and went. If food were slid through a slot, we would probably try to figure out where it came from and how. We might make some very good guesses but we wouldn’t know. Our life is similar though the room is, it seems, the universe. We don’t know what goes on outside our range of perception. Within our perception we have no knowledge or understanding of how something can come into being without some creative action. With this limited view, it is difficult to imagine our life, the universe within which we live, coming into being without a creative force or action.
Our scientific explorations have learned much about what we are, where we came from. The Big Bang theory of the universe seems to make sense but it doesn’t really solve the problem of creation because it doesn’t answer the question of where the matter came from that was pulled together for the explosion. No matter what the explanation of the beginning of the universe it always reaches a point beyond which we can understand.
Is there a God? I will give you my answer but it is a very unimportant answer. I simply define God and the answer to the unanswerable. A pure copout. I rather like it’s purity. What is God? Beats me. An entity in my image? Beats me though that seems least likely. A committee of blobs? A gaseous mass? A giant cucumber? Don’t know.
Is it at all important to my life? No. Interesting. Fun to think about. Not important, though. What is important to my life is how I live it taking all that is given and thinking about it, trying to understand my life, to understand what makes me happy, how best to use the things within life to bring me the greatest fulfillment. Life was, within my perception, what was created. If there was some reason for this life, what better way to figure it out than to explore and understand to the best of my ability what was created and why.
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