What is so special about us?!?

[tackattack]

why do you have to attribute the negative things in this world to God?

[Zen Badger]

why do you have to attribute the negative things in this world to God?

But I don't attribute them to God, he doesn't exist, Remember?

They are either the acts of people being crappy or natural events(Earthquakes etc)

that are the results of Chaos theory playing out.

It is Christians go on about God being so "loving" but when shit happens that is somehow not Gods fault.

Even though he is supposedly responsible for everything.

[tackattack]

But you did in your question above. I agree that they are either the acts of people being crappy or natural events. The responsibility / accountability lies with the doer not the observer. I know of no Christians in my church who would state God is liable for everything. They would state he is the originating cause and continues to work in our lives. You're supposing a definition of liable as primary cause of individual acts from involving responsibility of the initial cause. He gave us this world (per the bible) and we've done a good job of messing it up. Neither does this responsibility in either definition correlate to him loving us at all.

[Watson]

[quote='Watson' pid='55361' dateline='1265923965']
[quote='Purple Rabbit' pid='55358' dateline='1265923412']
So to look around you tells you what god feels? Are you serious? You can't even know how I feel from looking around. You are trying to mind read a fabulated being. According to your religion it is exactly the other way round, god is constantly mind reading you.

haha, no, according to my beliefs God is a part of me. As He is a part of you. As He is a part of everything. So to look around and see the gift I've been given(y'know, life), I can't think of any other reason He would do that other than out of pure love. I can feel that love.
[/quote]
You certainly cannot honestly claim he is part of me because you cannot check my mind. If you belief that you are just fabulating without evidence and we can all just ignore it. It is only your belief. Your belief cannot be valid argument for others. That would be a fallacy (argument from personal belief) not an answer to my question how I would know what god feels. You sadly failed to answer the question.[/quote]
I never said I could find God by looking in your mind, nor did I ever claim that I have looked into your mind. My belief about God, as per what I have observed in the world of His characteristics, is that He is a part of all things, and the universe is in turn a part of Him.

Of course I'm arguing from my beliefs! No one can argue from anything but beliefs. Person A telling Person B of an experience doesn't mean Person B will automatically go out and have said experience. Hell, they might be having the experience all the time and no even realize it for what it is. *ahem*

But what person A telling Person B does is expand person B's mind, hopefully, to the possibility that what they experienced might be the same as Person A, without their even realizing it.

[quote='Purple Rabbit']Ever seen gangrene, cancer? Seen a calf in a herd singled out by prey animals? What feeling does that give you? If that's love to you than the cognitive dissonance of religion is utterly complete and the assertion that it reflects the morality of a divine being only leads to the conclusion that the divine being has abject moral.

That is no tlove to me, that's just life. It's how things work, there's a natural order. Life works independent of how we feel about it. It's a matter of continuing to see the good in life, regardless of how much bad there is.

OK, so you're just happily cherry picking your 'evidence' for the love of god while neglecting evidence of the contrary. Another fallacy. Please return to reason, illogic makes it very hard to communicate with you.[/quote]
I'm not cherry picking anything. I told you, all of life is a gift of love from God, even the bad stuff. It isn't that He is in support of evil and bad things, but that He knows these things are a part o flife and so puts them there for us to witness. We are given the free will to look at the bad and say either "Wow, that's terrible and shitty and life must obviously suck." OR "Wow, that's terrible and shitty but I'm not going to lose hope that not everything is like that."

"One drop of love could evaporate vast oceans of hate." Or something of that nature, that's not the exact quote.

Well I am not arguing against the benefits of love. But you uniquely attributed it to your god and presented fallacies as argument.

[quote='Watson'][quote]Furthermore your god can technically have no feelings and desires if he's a perfect being. That would mean he is changeable. Ask fr0d0 about it.

God is changeable.

Haha, stepped into the trap. If he's changeable he cannot be perfect and you're at best dealing with a demi-god. And at least get it clear amongst you christians what it is you want the world to know as an absolute truth. Which attributes does your god have? [/quote]
Love. Pure and simple, that is the most prominent attribute of God, and the most perfect, divine emotion. Don't try and blame the fallacy of human politics and disagreement on me, my friend. I am Christian through and through, what the next Christian believes is up to him, not me.

And how does being changeable make him a demi-god/imperfect? That's arguing from a belief about what perfection should be, and is a logical fallacy, a term you here like to swing around a lot. I argue that a perfect being would be always changing, adapting, perfectly fitting itself to each new groove it must fill. This is also directed at tackattack, on the view of a changing God.

[quote]But if you think he can have feelings then answer me this: Can he feel guilt? I'm anxious to learn about this.

He views life through the most divine and perfect feeling there is; love. He doesn't have time for smaller and lesser emotions such as guilt.

If he cannot feel guilt, the story of Jesus was a sure lie. Than Jesus was not a man among men.
Also if he has never feel guilt than he cannot be complete.
[/quote]
Maybe it was improper wording of me to say He cannot feel guilt. The story of Jesus, however, was not about God feeling guilty for anything, it was about God trying to be among us and simultaneously understand why we were the way we were. His message in Jesus was "Hey, I'm not too good to be a man."

God can feel guilt and shame and other human emotions, but not in the way that we feel them. He carries with Him the emotional capacity of all that is.

If God loves us so much why does he keep acting like a mean kid with an antfarm and a magnifying glass?

I love this one. I call it the 'Blame it on Cain' principle.

What happens in life happens in life. We all know that. Bad things are going to happen, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop that. Some days you're the pidgeon, and some days you're the statue. It's your decision whether you lie down in the mud and take it, or if you get back up and trudge on through.

But you need someone to blame for all that bad crap, so you pin it on God because it doesn't seem to have any other cause. Life is what you make of it, not what god makes it for you.

I also love this argument from atheists because, apparently it's not okay for a Christian, when asked about how the world works and what caused a certain thing to say "God did it." But, it is okay for an atheist, when bad things happen for seemingly no rreason to say "God did it...why?" HA HA

You've felt something transcendental? Isn't that...impossible? How can you feel something outside of this world when your only way of interpreting feelings is in this world?

How would I know what God feels? Why, just look around you! Life is His gift to us, and I don't think such an amazing gift would be given out of anger, hate, or any other less divine emotion but love. It is not an unhuman feeling, it is an above human feeling which we have access to.

To quote a friend of mine, "Welcome to Beta, bitch!"

[Tiberius]

How would I know what God feels? Why, just look around you! Life is His gift to us, and I don't think such an amazing gift would be given out of anger, hate, or any other less divine emotion but love. It is not an unhuman feeling, it is an above human feeling which we have access to.

To quote a friend of mine, "Welcome to Beta, bitch!"

That didn't answer my question.

[Watson]

First of all, look up the state of mind known as 'Beta.' That may answer a bit of your question.

Second, what I'm saying is that the human being as it is is capable of going above and beyond what it is supposedly 'limited' to, and thus transcends into something greater than itself.

[Tiberius]

Yes, and my question was how, not what.

[Welsh cake]

I never said I could find God by looking in your mind, nor did I ever claim that I have looked into your mind. My belief about God, as per what I have observed in the world of His characteristics, is that He is a part of all things, and the universe is in turn a part of Him.

And you know this how? I know you're advertising beliefs in the god concept but you've banged on several threads with the notion of replacing the label 'universe' with 'god', hey that's fine, can't see what's wrong with simply addressing it as the universe, heck call it "Perrywinkle" if it pleases you, but you're here claiming the universe is actually a living god, and its the Christian God no less (Surprise Surprise).

Watson we can't even observe through current technology what star clusters may lie on the other side of the galactic center of our own Milky Way galaxy, the same one that we live in, it's obscured from our view. We can't detect them.

If there are trivial things such as these beyond mankind's knowledge, then how did you arrive at the hypothesis that the entire Universe is *alive* considering it displays no characteristics that distinguishes it as having any self-sustaining biological processes, indeed the vast void of space is hostile to life. It's a huge leap. The universe demonstrates no attributes of a vastly complex higher life-form, like a deity, let alone this magic man who hides himself in the clouds (aka heavens, not universe).

[Watson]

I am not merely suggesting that God is the universe, and that the universe is the living embodiment of God, because that would suggest that God is a biological organism, which he is not. Also, I have already expressed a distaste for this "invisible man in the sky" tripe that keeps popping up; no one is asserting that there is an invisible man in the sky except the atheist stand-point, which is searching for said invisible man.

God is no a biologically living thing. His existance is hand-in-hand with the universe's, that is all.

Adrian - They are the same. Getting there is a state of mind, placing oneself in a higher consciousness level than the ordinary process of thought. In so doing there is a clarity which reaches above and beyond, because it is a state of thought/mind which brings about these feelings.

[Tiberius]

Adrian - They are the same. Getting there is a state of mind, placing oneself in a higher consciousness level than the ordinary process of thought. In so doing there is a clarity which reaches above and beyond, because it is a state of thought/mind which brings about these feelings.

Sorry, but "what?" and "how?" are completely different questions. All you've shown me is that you don't know how, so you don't have an answer...only meaningless drivel.