Does God Exist?

what i get is that the god of christianity and 'thedope' is no real god at all, but a real got, or something close enough like it, really does exist.

i'm not TRYING to be disrespectful of one belief over others. but there is something that ought to be obvious, to anyone who isn't so programed by fanaticism as to not even know when they are deceiving themselves.

if everyone wants everyone else to be reasonable, and whine about when they're not, but no one wants to be reasonable themselves, where do they expect this reasonableness of everyone else to come from?

if we, refuse to understand how reality works, we cannot avoid causing harm. if all of us refuse to avoid causing harm, we are all be harmed by our refusal to do so.

 

I have a sense of right and wrong. Children without any schooling have a sense of right and wrong. We all have compassion and empathy that developed and evolved with mammals as they cared more and more for their offspring.

The origins of religion and God have nothing to do with good and caring, quite the opposite. Religion really comes in to play when when a caring person has to justify killing someone else's family to survive. Religion is all about justifying the unjustifiable. Convincing yourself you are right and they deserved to die, they were bad people. When the reality was they were probably nicer people than yours. People have been doing this shit to each other for millions of years.

 

Exactly.

Religion is a different subject from the question does god exist.

There is general agreement among cognitive scientists that religion is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved early in human history. However, there is disagreement on the exact mechanisms that drove the evolution of the religious mind. The two main schools of thought hold that either religion evolved due to natural selection and has selective advantage, or that religion is an evolutionary byproduct of other mental adaptations.

Any way they include the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm (agent detection), the ability to come up with causal narratives for natural events (etiology), and the ability to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions (theory of mind). These are adaptations that allow human beings to imagine purposeful agents behind many observations that could not readily be explained otherwise like lightning and thunder, earthquakes, or the complexity of life. The emergence of collective religious belief identified the agents as deities that standardized the explanation.

The purpose of religion then, just as it is the purpose of science, to bridge the gap between what you know and what you don't and being right is something you will fight for. Just as atomic energy has peaceful civilian applications it also has massively destructive military applications. Religion's origins are in the rightly inquisitive mind, the adaptation of imagination. Religion's abuses are political.

 

I would say I am far from idolatry then considering what is not real does not exist but my will is consistent with my source. Being child of god, I arise in conception. I personally prefer the word real to the word god as all questions on the subject involve an authority problem.

As far as christ teaching, it is not a theology but a collection of axiomatic statements that are used as a basis for further reasoning. Most fundamental being the measure you give is the measure you receive or in modern parlance for every action there is an equal and complementary reaction.

Obviously they expect the advent of some critical mass, perhaps a second coming? More often they rely on the police or personal unpleasantness.
Let those without blame cast the first stone. Get out of the blame game and use the stones you cast to build an enduring edifice of understanding.

First cause no harm, do not punish.
Forgive them they know not what they do so accusation is not justified.
The truth sets us free or education is key, suffer the children to come unto me. All behaviors arise with conception i.e., he who is angry is liable to corrupt behavior and a mind without anxiety is wholly kind as our protections extend naturally to those things we call ours or our own. Therefor to love your neighbor, the person standing next to you, as yourself or one of your own is to relieve the world of suspicion and it's call to meanness. Let your natural invocation to good claim everything you see as it's own. Then you will be inspired for not set upon by the poor or the sick, the injured or the contrary and insane.
Any such person so engaged whether having ever been in contact with religion or not, is a teacher of god.

 

I think you're being naive. Children are often "natural" playground bullies, and notoriously selfish in their demands. I'm sure you have a sense of right and wrong, but I don't think your genes, as opposed to your upbringing and the values you absorbed from your culture, deserve sole credit. I think we do have natural feelings of empathy, but historically these have often been confined to relatives and fellow tribesmen. If we look at our nearest primate ancestors, this pattern of aggression toward outgroups seems to hold--presumably in the absence of religion.
It has taken a long, painful process of cultural development for these values to be universalized, and religions have played an important role in that process.

I agree that religion possibly evolved partly as a means of solidifying ingroup bonding, often at the expense of outgroups. But some religions are longstanding pacifist. You present a caricature of religions as being predominantly warlike. Your thesis resembles Rousseau's noble savage. Humans are born good and messed up by society. The anticlerical idealists of the French Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution thought that if they could sweep religion away, the world would be a better place. But the consensus of historians is that they were wrong. Atheist regimes of past and present seem to be, by most assessments, worse than their religious competitors, and have certainly contributed to human misery.

You seem to imply that atheists, or at least you, are somehow free of unconscious needs and drives, like the "collective subconscious superego", but really we all have superegos, and by and large, they're a useful check on the id. If supernatural beliefs were somehow eradicated, history has given us every reason to believe that secular religions like nationalism and Marxism are fully capable of taking over. Nature abhors a vacuum.

 

Easy to solve. Use the auth family of words:

author
authentic
authority

And all of their forms: http://www.wordhippo.com/what-is/words-starting-with/auth.html

Authenticity is the quality of a true authority.

Authority itself is not bad or wrong. Human beings simply dislike authority, for a lot of sore reasons (abuse of power, corrupt power, intimidation, fear, feelings of mistrust, apprehension .. and on and on).

 

Well logically you have to look at god backwards which is dog. Does a dog exist? Of course. I rest my case

 

Hounds of Hell.

 

my experience with bullies is that most were messed up from home or other places and it is a learned behavior and trust me, I have a great deal of experience with bullies.

 

That argument cuts both ways. We all had parents. In my experience, the nice kids tended to (though not always) have nice parents who tried to impart societal values from that "collective unconscious super-ego" Relaxx mentioned, and where nature leaves off and nurture begins isn't easy to determine. I see no evidence for the generalization that people are born good and only made bad by religion--or that cultural values (including religion) have no positive role to play. In particular, I think that if parents just let their kids do as they please and follow their natural instincts, the kids will turn out well.

 

What I mean by authority problem is the question itself, does god exist? Is god real? I don't mean we have a problem with authority. The fact is if it seems authoritative to you then you are happy to be aboard.

 

If the question of God's existence is primarily, or seconds as, an authority problem .. I'd still suggest that there's a way to understand the "authority" thing with ease. It lessens the potential offense. If God is not called authority but is called authentic, that could remove (or has the potential to remove) some of the extremely rigid barriers to God (of which, there are very many).

But it can only serve those who WANT to know and understand. Those who don't .. no amount of proof or evidence or material or explanation is ever going to register for those people. The truth can be right in their face .. they're not going to see it or acknowledge it.

 

The God I worship doesn't "support war, let alone just about every side." God is the felt presence of a Higher Power "in whom we live, and move, and have our being", so it's not unusual that different believers have different ideas about the deity. Governments and politicians are famous for using God to justify their decisions. In my opinion, existing religions including Christianity have been warped and perverted by politicians over the centuries. It's the job of sincere believers to sort it out and resist being used in this way--not an easy task but an essential one for a full understanding of the power of God's Truth. We do this as best we can, using our reason, personal experiences, and best judgment within the bounds of logic and available evidence.

You give the impression that most religions preach hatred and warmongering. I've never encountered that in all my years of church going. The ones I encounter preach peace, love compassion and understanding for all, including Muslims and atheists. On the other hand, what we hear from you is a steady drumbeat of anti-religious diatribe. I don't want to discourage you from speaking your mind, nor do I hate you or even dislike you for doing so. It's useful to air these views, extreme as they are. But they're as distorted as anything I've ever heard from a Christian pulpit.

 

Or the destroyer of the world. You left your case unattended in a public area. Very suspicious activity almost like a guerilla bomber!

 

I know it was not addressed to me but, just in my life I did not run into the type of church you have (one MCC accepted me) the rest all would take me in saying what you say and then pound me after a while about who I am.

 

Yeah, on second thought I have run into people who've had bad experiences with hateful churches. I used to go to meetings with some refugees from the Church of Christ who were shunned by their church because they were divorced. In that church the husband is always held responsible for a failed marriage because he should have had his wife under better control. I also know some ex-Nazerenes, now atheists, who left their church because they got tired of hearing they were going to hell. Jesus said "love they neighbor" and "judge not". Go figure!

P.S. I hope nobody saw U.C.C. that I had originally used instead of Church of Christ. The U.C.C. is one of the most liberal Christian churches in the country, and would never do anything like that!

 

Human are complicated, we are a mixture of greed and compassion, we are a chemical soup of emotions. Especially inside the developing minds of kids. The fact that kids and humans are a conflicting mix does nothing to prove a supreme God creator, and it does nothing to discredit the evolution of caring in sentient mammals. Nature is after-all, survival of the fittest, not kindest.

Cults of personality have to be intrinsically atheist. The atheism itself has absolutely nothing at all to do with the CULT agendas. Even without God, superegos will find a way to merge and start shit. Sure thing, that's what superego's have been bred to do. Does that human trait also go anywhere to prove a supreme creator?

 

So where was "your God" for countless millions of soldiers? Their Gods were all false and yours is the only true God or what? Your genes didn't evolve from 2 million years of false God warfare? Did it take all these billions for God to mature as a peaceful being now residing in your head alone? Are you sure you're a human being?

I don't know, still sounds to me like your worshiping an idealistic IDEA,
in your head.

 

Some boys dream of growing up to be a soldier. Generals and majors always seem so unhappy unless they got a war.

Humans, some of them, LOVE to battle. To the death, they (some of them) LOVE to battle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCdxDh5D-1U"]XTC - Generals And Majors - YouTube

 

How does that answer my question or help prove God?

So some descendant benefactors (survivors/winners) of 2 million years of warfare tend to glorify war... and that's supposed to be surprising or something.