[split] Are Questions About God Important?

[The Grand Nudger]

Boy, we're learning all sorts of new rules from our new friend. Worthwhile making properties, what we can and can't say. Fuck, got an opinion on peckers? Go for the trifecta!

[Confused-by-christianity]

Boy, we're learning all sorts of new rules from our new friend. Worthwhile making properties, what we can and can't say. Fuck, got an opinion on peckers? Go for the trifecta!

I wouldn’t get too serious about it - it’s just a word game ;-)

It’s helped me think about god though :-)

[The Grand Nudger]

That's a new response - confronted with what sounds like a terrible terrible issue for your own self stated beliefs about gods and worthwhile making properties..and after you implore everyone not to be childish, and in a thread where you insist that this god stuff is important. Now..just wordgames?

You're not at all worried that god heard you say that, I assume?

I'm glad it's helped, but how?

[h4ym4n]

I think god has attributes that are worthy - like goodness, love, truth, beauty, personality, courage.  They shine out of god.

Is this the same god that drowned everything on earth?

Is this the same god that raped a young virgin to give birth to himself/son?

Is this the same god that created everything just to kill his son?


Just making sure

You’re talking about religion here

Your god didn’t murder everyone but 8?

[The Grand Nudger]

Suicide-by-god, I believe it goes.

[brewer]

Sounds to me that you're not really confused (user name), I think that you believe. It's more like you can't actually explain/justify to non believers.

That's OK, believe what ever you want if it gets you thru your day.

I want truth.

So I put my cards on the table to see if I can expand my worldview, “bump my corners off”.  Refine my understanding.

And yes - some of Christianity confuses me - atheists and I share similar confusion - like sacrifice for sin ???

Truth is subjective. So, for you, it comes down to faith. Faith is belief without evidence, that's what you have.

I'm an atheist and not confused. When it comes to god/religion (s) I require concrete evidence for belief, not abstractions. Nobody can argue a god into existence, at least nobody that I've run into.

If you don't like parts of the god/religion story you can choose not to believe the 'sacrifice for sin' part and still consider the rest truth if you like. Most believers pick and choose, there is no reason why you should be different. I doubt your god and some other believers god/religion are the exactly same.

Time to make some choices.

[Harry Haller]

Why should there be questions about "God" in the first place?  If you accept the premise that "God" is the perfect, omnipotent, creator of the Universe, then why should important questions about what God is and what God wants exist? It seems that it should be self-evident and non-refutable.  

Instead of this perfect clarity, we have no practical evidence of existence and thousands of variations on the message.

Id really not expect it to be self evident.  

an allperfect, allpowerful, allfather being - that clearly visible and understandable with my eyes??

I think you'd have to grow a lot to make sense of a being like that.

In fact, I think that's what this life and eternity is about - revelation, growth, harmonisation, revelation, growth, harmonisation and so on ....

That makes things important beyond just my say so.

I would expect that the omnitpotent and all powerful being that created me and everything else I know could also devise a method using these materials to clearly communicate any messages he wanted to deliver to me in a clear and self-evident manner. 

It is easy to excuse that we would need to grow to understand... but that premise is easily defeated with the notion that we were created by him the way he wanted us to be.  

He either wanted us to be confused and unsure of his existence or he is a poor designer or he doesn't exist at all and Man is just trying to ascribe powers onto an imaginary being.

[The Grand Nudger]

Welcome aboard Harry. It's interesting the expectations we would have for such beings. I'm not sure we're really equipped to predict what an animal like a god would or even could do. To understand what it might or might not know. I use the terms loosely..but, by the stories we tell about them....

I also think that there's something superficial in saying that..when we disagree with a god or someone's god or..I guess, whatever someone says about what a god says....that it's our relative development that is the entire problem. I mean...we're obviously not gods, but we're not rocks either. If anything a god or someone's god, or what someone says about what god says is true...I strongly believe that we would be able to apprehend at least some piece of whatever content that was. One more piece, at least, than a rock - that apprehends nothing.

This is directly related to how I think that god-meaning is often employed, actually. That, when we have some thing we believe x, and maybe we have all sorts of reasons for believing it....that thing x is so important to us that even if we do have what anyone would allow were objective reasons for it..that's still not enough™. So we say,..."well, I believe x for y reasons that are z impossible to deny...the z being...also, too, GOD says x"

What do you think? If we simply discarded all of those z-reasons, or all of that god-meaning, would we not still have all of the y content, and y facts, and y meaning - the purportedly objective....of x?

[Ravenshire]

I want truth.

No, you don't. You want confirmation of your beliefs.

[The Grand Nudger]

Of course, but lets not give it to these low effort dunces. What do you think? How are things important...if they are, indeed, important.