RE: Why be good?
June 5, 2015 at 10:28 am
(This post was last modified: June 5, 2015 at 10:47 am by Jenny A.)
(June 4, 2015 at 10:19 pm)Randy Carson Wrote: Now, I can't gloss over the fact that you are NOT seeking God per se, but in that you may be trying to do (what is actually His will) known to you only by the dictates of your own conscience, you may be saved.
Sorry, I must admit I am not seeking god. Not your brand or any other. You see things that exist, don't have to be sought out in this way. You may have to search to find something, but the results aren't dependent truly wanting to find it. The Higgs Boson particle for example was very difficult to find, but there were good reasons for thinking it existed, and finding it depended not on faith, but evidence.
Now, if god obviously existed, it might make sense to say you have to seek out an acquaintance with him in the ways you've suggested. But that's not the case. God appears to be findable only with pick your phrase: an open heart; grace; contrition, etc. We don't find real things by the dictates of our conscience. That is simply a way of saying, you can only find him by fooling yourself. Sorry, but I don't fool myself on purpose. God either exists or he doesn't and my conscience has nothing to do with it.
And it's perfectly obvious that as a method of fooling yourself, ask, seek, find works really well. You can use it to "find" Allah, that The Book of Mormon is true, Yahweh, Jesus, and messages from your dead grandmother. The fact that things people find this way are culturally dependent, and contradictory ought to be fairly good evidence that as a method it's flawed.
If there is a god, I want to believe that there is a god. If there is not a god, I want to believe that there is no god.