(December 23, 2013 at 4:11 pm)ronedee Wrote: Tonus - you as many, partially blame others(religion) for your lack of faith.On the contrary, Ron. I am grateful to those who, while seeking to instill me with an unquestioning trust in religion, nonetheless unwittingly gave me the keys to judge it more thoroughly. I don't blame them for my lack of faith. I thank them, in a way.
ronedee Wrote:In all seriousness.... what do you expect of God?I don't expect anything of god, in the sense that I no longer believe that there is a god. I cannot ask anything of someone who is not there. With that belief no longer in place I am free to reshape god as I think he should be, but that is just fantasy scenarios where I can use as many colors as I want and paint outside the lines without any concern.
To me, the best image of god may be the deist version that creates the universe and then lets it develop however it will. He demands nothing of us and we expect nothing (more) from him. No limits, no rules, no one to blame but ourselves, and no one to stop us from being all we can be. There may be variants of god that are more involved and more "good" and more fun, but those all require some level of giving up who I am because he's always got a hand on my shoulder.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
