The Reasons why "Just Following Jesus" Doesn't work

[Rekeisha]

Why do you ask?

Various documentaries have shown a basic set of morals in the ape family.  Does this mean your god gave morals to the apes?

So what are you according to your world view and what makes you have more value than a tree?

According to my world view, I am a human being, and I value myself more highly than a tree because my species has evolved with a survival instinct that inspires me to value my life (the same way it does in other humans, usually). There are humans that I value about the same as a tree, or a table, or a feral cat, and this is because of a concept known as the monkeysphere. Theoretically there are other humans out there that place little to no value on my life, even if they know who I am and maybe even if they know me personally. Value, like morality, is another one of those funny things that's always subjective; nothing has absolute value, only the value attributed to it by the individual. It's the same reason you see faith as valuable and I see it as a detriment to one's mental health.

So I am not trying to attack you but understand you. The reason you value your life over a tree is because you have a survival instinct? If this is what you are saying why does it matter than your progeny survive or that they Human race survives? How does a species become aware enough to see the need to survive?

[Rekeisha]

I keep hearing "life without God is meaningless" but still no one will tell me what this meaning is if there is a god.

I could make another thread about it I suppose, but I get barely any answers when I ask difficult questions like this. I've kind of given up bothering to try anymore. I know we don't have many theists, but I only get about 5% of them to answer, if I'm lucky. Clearly they don't want to think about certain questions.

How does a super-powered being keeping a tally of good deeds versus bad deeds give life any meaning? To me it reduces the whole thing to a joke, a joke I must live through none-the-less and I'll do it as best as I can and ignore the insane tallying God.

I suspect the "meaning" is invested in the hope that life isn't going to end. This implies that a finite existence is utterly pointless, which is a very scary conclusion; but a big insight into the mind of the person claiming this to be the case. This isn't any meaning at all of course, it's just a delusion to avoid having to face reality. (Cue the argument from ignorance.)

The meaning of life is to enjoy God. ( if you want to start one I will join it just point me to it)

God being all knowing knows how many wrong or rights you are doing He doesn't need to keep a tally. He already knows you far more about you than you know  yourself. Also He is sitting there on the edge of His seat just waiting for a chance to smite you. 

So I am going to use myself as an illustration. I have a tendency towards wanting to be comfortable and pride. I have grown and I believe one day this will not be a problem but yep that is what I struggle with. So before I was even born God knew this yet He still determined to die for me and make Himself known to me. I have failed God, I don't know how many times, yet even when I get mad at Him He is waiting patiently for me to return. It has been about 25+ years with God and I have done some really stupid stuff yet God is still with me because it isn't based on my ability to do good. He already knows I will not always do what is right. Or relationship is not about what I get right and what I get wrong. It is about getting to know Him and the more I know Him the more I want to be like Him. At this time in my life I enjoy God more than I ever have. He is so near to me and gives purpose to every aspect of my life even something as mundane as taking care of the dishes. So yes God hates sin, absolutely, because His standards reflect His nature. Yet He is willing to stoop down and make anyone who is willing right with Him If they would repent and trust in Him as their Lord and savior.

[Celestine]

While I might attract the ire of the more fringe side of Christianity with this comment, I am fairly certain cannibalism is not going to grant me eternal life in a paradise. Christians often practice this in what they call the Sacrament of Communion and since many would find it detestable to actually eat the flesh of another human or drink their blood they replace the substance with wine and bread which through a process of unseen transfiguration becomes the literal body and blood of their undead god whom they believe has risen from the dead and will come back again bringing about the apocalypse of their world and rewarding those who were loyal to him, by raising the bodies of the dead.

While I understand that the original question may have been meant differently, I took it to mean as in a general sort of thing and chose to tackle this aspect of it. As you can see it's... really weird what the Christians believe in, but I suppose the same can be said for just about every other religion out there.

[Redbeard The Pink]

Various documentaries have shown a basic set of morals in the ape family.  Does this mean your god gave morals to the apes?

According to my world view, I am a human being, and I value myself more highly than a tree because my species has evolved with a survival instinct that inspires me to value my life (the same way it does in other humans, usually). There are humans that I value about the same as a tree, or a table, or a feral cat, and this is because of a concept known as the monkeysphere. Theoretically there are other humans out there that place little to no value on my life, even if they know who I am and maybe even if they know me personally. Value, like morality, is another one of those funny things that's always subjective; nothing has absolute value, only the value attributed to it by the individual. It's the same reason you see faith as valuable and I see it as a detriment to one's mental health.

So I am not trying to attack you but understand you. The reason you value your life over a tree is because you have a survival instinct? If this is what you are saying why does it matter than your progeny survive or that they Human race survives? How does a species become aware enough to see the need to survive?

Not every animal cares deeply about the survival of their offspring, but in humans this tendency is likely also the result of evolution. Beings that don't produce a lot of offspring at once tend to be very protective of their young, and this is likely because beings with low birth rates who didn't protect their young didn't survive as a species. Spiders don't have to care for their babies because there are so many; statistics says that at least a few will survive, even though they're so tiny and edible. Humans, on the other hand, most often have only one baby at a time, which means we would have died off if we hadn't tended toward caring for our babies. The tendency to survive long enough to replicate itself seems to be an innate quality of life that doesn't even require a consciousness to function. Survival even at the microscopic level takes some work, so things that don't work toward survival don't achieve it. Awareness is simply an evolved quality that makes the survival of certain species more likely. The need for survival predates the need for awareness; not all levels of life require awareness to survive.

[Whateverist]

But I completely agree with you about picking and choosing.  I mean, why the bible?  Personally though I don't say God is evil even though the entity that goes by that name in the old testament certainly seems to be played that way.  No, for me, the problem with God is the incoherence.  What the hell is a god?

That would take an eternity to answer. So God is a being that is beyond time that created everything for His glory. He has no evil in Him He is holy and created people to be holy and to love him. We failed at that so by his grace and mercy He paid the penalty for our sins on the cross to that we could be put back into right relationship with him and continue to spread the glory of God.

I have been reading a little bit on why some people see God as incoherent or a contradiction but I would like to know why you think this is so.

You hear many qualities attributed to God but without a god to examen it is hard to know where these attributes come from.  The idea of existing outside of time is absurd to me.  What else is there that exists outside of time which makes this possibility seem so plausible to you?  

The whole idea of everything there is requiring a being to bring it into existence just seems ass backwards to me.  Experience teachers that what is more complex is built up from what is less complex.  If God is so super duper special, then He too must have evolved from what is less super duper, not the other way around.  That whose origins cannot be accounted for cannot be the source for that those things we can account for.  Defining a being as such is gratuitous and entirely unconvincing.

Some think the afterlife gatekeeper function is an essential attribute of God.  But again I have to ask, what afterlife?  There is no reason to think such a thing exists.  On top of that, to think that a being of infinite extent in space and time would go out of its way to provide a dimension of unending torment for some and another of eternal bliss for others does again seem absurd.  To think that this being is then monitoring not just our words and deeds but even our thoughts in order to sort us into these afterlife bins seems beyond absurd.  No one but ourselves could possibly think every deed is so precious and important.

But the most absurd aspect of 'gods', to me, is that they are what is called "supernatural".  That is a category I am sure is empty.  Nothing is other than natural.  If your god was truly a part of everything then it too would be natural.  Every supposed miracle would involve not magic but a skill and knowledge we do not possess.  I do not claim that gods do not exist, only that their description is incoherent for these reasons.  What I do claim is that if a god exists it is a natural phenomenon albeit one we do not yet or may never understand.

[Here I ignore all the self contradictory properties of the supposed omni-powers of your God. That and historical evidence I count as low lying fruit unworthy of my time.]

[IATIA]

The reason you value your life over a tree is because you have a survival instinct?

All lifeforms have a survival instinct of one form or another.

[Rekeisha]

While I might attract the ire of the more fringe side of Christianity with this comment, I am fairly certain cannibalism is not going to grant me eternal life in a paradise. Christians often practice this in what they call the Sacrament of Communion and since many would find it detestable to actually eat the flesh of another human or drink their blood they replace the substance with wine and bread which through a process of unseen transfiguration becomes the literal body and blood of their undead god whom they believe has risen from the dead and will come back again bringing about the apocalypse of their world and rewarding those who were loyal to him, by raising the bodies of the dead.

While I understand that the original question may have been meant differently, I took it to mean as in a general sort of thing and chose to tackle this aspect of it. As you can see it's... really weird what the Christians believe in, but I suppose the same can be said for just about every other religion out there.

If we believed that it would be weird but those who understand the text correctly don't. When Jesus spoke of eating my flesh and drinking my blood (John 6:56) the Nation of Israel was celebrating the feast of booths which was a reminder of the nation about how God redeemed them from slavery in Israel and took them through the wilderness. While in the wilderness the Israelites were sustain by Manna that come down from Heaven, a flaky substance that they would make into bread. Earlier after he feeds the 5,000 the people come to Him and this is how the conversation goes.

John 6:28 Then they asked him, “What must we do to do the works God requires?”29 Jesus answered, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”
30 So they asked him, “What sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do? 31 Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”32 Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. 33 For the bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”34 “Sir,” they said, “always give us this bread.”35 Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.

So later as Jesus is standing up there and telling the people to eat his flesh and drink His blood He is pointing to this time period in the Jewish history. He is claiming, in a very cryptic way, that He is the bread that came down from Heaven. They also receive water from a rock in the wilderness and that is symbolic of Jesus as well, which represent living water. So He is saying in a spiritual since take me into your body because I am the source of spiritual life. If you look at this phrase in the natural it would seem very strange but as you know we Christians believe in the supernatural so that is why we read the verse this way. You may want to read John 6-7 to get more of the story.

[Rekeisha]

So I am not trying to attack you but understand you. The reason you value your life over a tree is because you have a survival instinct? If this is what you are saying why does it matter than your progeny survive or that they Human race survives? How does a species become aware enough to see the need to survive?

Not every animal cares deeply about the survival of their offspring, but in humans this tendency is likely also the result of evolution. Beings that don't produce a lot of offspring at once tend to be very protective of their young, and this is likely because beings with low birth rates who didn't protect their young didn't survive as a species. Spiders don't have to care for their babies because there are so many; statistics says that at least a few will survive, even though they're so tiny and edible. Humans, on the other hand, most often have only one baby at a time, which means we would have died off if we hadn't tended toward caring for our babies. The tendency to survive long enough to replicate itself seems to be an innate quality of life that doesn't even require a consciousness to function. Survival even at the microscopic level takes some work, so things that don't work toward survival don't achieve it. Awareness is simply an evolved quality that makes the survival of certain species more likely. The need for survival predates the need for awareness; not all levels of life require awareness to survive.

Again this is not an attack but evolution seems to be like a magic word for grand leaps of development in an organism life. I don't know if you ascribe to this but how does a collection of atoms 1) produce life and 2) how does this collection of atoms produce a self aware organism? Where is this in the process of evolution and how did this start to happen?

[Rekeisha]

That would take an eternity to answer. So God is a being that is beyond time that created everything for His glory. He has no evil in Him He is holy and created people to be holy and to love him. We failed at that so by his grace and mercy He paid the penalty for our sins on the cross to that we could be put back into right relationship with him and continue to spread the glory of God.

I have been reading a little bit on why some people see God as incoherent or a contradiction but I would like to know why you think this is so.

You hear many qualities attributed to God but without a god to examen it is hard to know where these attributes come from.  The idea of existing outside of time is absurd to me.  What else is there that exists outside of time which makes this possibility seem so plausible to you?  

The whole idea of everything there is requiring a being to bring it into existence just seems ass backwards to me.  Experience teachers that what is more complex is built up from what is less complex.  If God is so super duper special, then He too must have evolved from what is less super duper, not the other way around.  That whose origins cannot be accounted for cannot be the source for that those things we can account for.  Defining a being as such is gratuitous and entirely unconvincing.

Some think the afterlife gatekeeper function is an essential attribute of God.  But again I have to ask, what afterlife?  There is no reason to think such a thing exists.  On top of that, to think that a being of infinite extent in space and time would go out of its way to provide a dimension of unending torment for some and another of eternal bliss for others does again seem absurd.  To think that this being is then monitoring not just our words and deeds but even our thoughts in order to sort us into these afterlife bins seems beyond absurd.  No one but ourselves could possibly think every deed is so precious and important.

But the most absurd aspect of 'gods', to me, is that they are what is called "supernatural".  That is a category I am sure is empty.  Nothing is other than natural.  If your god was truly a part of everything then it too would be natural.  Every supposed miracle would involve not magic but a skill and knowledge we do not possess.  I do not claim that gods do not exist, only that their description is incoherent for these reasons.  What I do claim is that if a god exists it is a natural phenomenon albeit one we do not yet or may never understand.

[Here I ignore all the self contradictory properties of the supposed omni-powers of your God.  That and historical evidence I count as low lying fruit unworthy of my time.]

I am not surprised that you find it hard to understand what I am speaking of because you throw out the possibility of the supernatural. I believe in the supernatural and I don't believe that all thing were built up form less complex materials to more complex. I would say that our DNA is very complex I would say that an atoms are complex. What may seem simple it often much more complex then we give it credit to be. I also know that God did not evolve.

The way I see life is that God is outside the box of creation. I believe that what is outside of all the physical attributes of the universe is God because he made it. He doesn't occupy space as we do because He is a spiritual being. What you see as a contradiction my just be a mystery because there is information you have rejected and have yet to receive. I am not totally sure what light is but light does not seem to occupy space as we do. A room can be full of light and we can still move through it. This could easily be a picture of how the Spiritual side of things work.

[Celestine]

While I might attract the ire of the more fringe side of Christianity with this comment, I am fairly certain cannibalism is not going to grant me eternal life in a paradise. Christians often practice this in what they call the Sacrament of Communion and since many would find it detestable to actually eat the flesh of another human or drink their blood they replace the substance with wine and bread which through a process of unseen transfiguration becomes the literal body and blood of their undead god whom they believe has risen from the dead and will come back again bringing about the apocalypse of their world and rewarding those who were loyal to him, by raising the bodies of the dead.

While I understand that the original question may have been meant differently, I took it to mean as in a general sort of thing and chose to tackle this aspect of it. As you can see it's... really weird what the Christians believe in, but I suppose the same can be said for just about every other religion out there.

If we believed that it would be weird but those who understand the text correctly don't. When Jesus spoke of eating my flesh and drinking my blood (John 6:56) the Nation of Israel was celebrating the feast of booths which was a reminder of the nation about how God redeemed them from slavery in Israel and took them through the wilderness. While in the wilderness the Israelites were sustain by Manna that come down from Heaven, a flaky substance that they would make into bread. Earlier after he feeds the 5,000 the people come to Him and this is how the conversation goes.

John 6:28 Then they asked him, “What must we do to do the works God requires?”29 Jesus answered, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”
30 So they asked him, “What sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do? 31 Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”32 Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. 33 For the bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”34 “Sir,” they said, “always give us this bread.”35 Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.

So later as Jesus is standing up there and telling the people to eat his flesh and drink His blood He is pointing to this time period in the Jewish history. He is claiming, in a very cryptic way, that He is the bread that came down from Heaven. They also receive water from a rock in the wilderness and that is symbolic of Jesus as well, which represent living water. So He is saying in a spiritual since take me into your body because I am the source of spiritual life. If you look at this phrase in the natural it would seem very strange but as you know we Christians believe in the supernatural so that is why we read the verse this way. You may want to read John 6-7 to get more of the story.

Yeah keep telling yourself that.