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Is there a GOD?

Do you believe in GOD?

  • Absolutely no question--I know

    Votes: 150 25.6%

  • I cannot know for sure--but strongly believe in the existance of god

    Votes: 71 12.1%

  • I am very uncertain but inclined to believe in god

    Votes: 35 6.0%

  • God's existance is equally probable and improbable

    Votes: 51 8.7%

  • I dont think the existance of god is probable

    Votes: 112 19.1%

  • I know there is no GOD we are a random quirk of nature

    Votes: 167 28.5%
  • Total voters
    586
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WYSIWYG : I do believe you've hit the nail on the head with that statement.
There is no good or evil in Nature - We just perceive things as good or evil depending upon how they impinge on our own existence.
EDIT: and as such - we don't need an anthropomorphic God to explain problems or good & evil.
 
Some quotes by Sitting Bull

Behold, my friends, the spring is come; the earth has gladly received the embraces of the sun, and we shall soon see the results of their love!
Sitting Bull

Each man is good in His sight. It is not necessary for eagles to be crows.
Each man is good in the sight of the Great Spirit.
Every seed is awakened, and all animal life.
God made me an Indian. I am here by the will of the Great Spirit, and by his will I am chief.
He put in your heart certain wishes and plans; in my heart, he put other different desires.
I am a red man. If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man he would have made me so in the first place.

I know Great Spirit is looking down upon me from above, and will hear what I say.
If a man loses anything and goes back and looks carefully for it, he will find it.
If I agree to dispose of any part of our land to the white people I would feel guilty of taking food away from our children's mouths, and I do not wish to be that mean.
In my early days, I was eager to learn and to do things, and therefore I learned quickly.
Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my skin is red? Because I am Sioux? Because I was born where my father lived? Because I would die for my people and my country?

It is not necessary for eagles to be crows.
It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even to our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves to inhabit this vast land.
Let us put our minds together and see what life we can make for our children.
Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever. Now they threaten to take that from us also.

Strangely enough, they have a mind to till the soil, and the love of possessions is a disease in them.
The earth has received the embrace of the sun and we shall see the results of that love.
The white man knows how to make everything, but he does not know how to distribute it.
There are things they tell us that sound good to hear, but when they have accomplished their purpose they will go home and will not try to fulfill our agreements with them.
They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse.
This nation is like a spring freshet; it overruns its banks and destroys all who are in its path.

What treaty that the whites have kept has the red man broken? Not one.
What white man can say I never stole his land or a penny of his money? Yet they say that I am a thief.
What white man has ever seen me drunk? Who has ever come to me hungry and left me unfed? Who has seen me beat my wives or abuse my children? What law have I broken?
What white woman, however lonely, was ever captive or insulted by me? Yet they say I am a bad Indian.
When I was a boy, the Sioux owned the world. The sun rose and set on their land; they sent ten thousand men to battle. Where are the warriors today? Who slew them? Where are our lands? Who owns them?
Yet hear me, friends! we have now to deal with another people, small and feeble when our forefathers first met with them, but now great and overbearing.

Another Chief had a quote once... "When the white man came, we had the land, and he had the Bible - now we have the Bible, and he has the land"

PS "Given enough time, and a prize at the end of a sneeky campaign, Paleface will eventually speak with forked tongue"... 2020
 
There is no good or evil in Nature - We just perceive things as good or evil depending upon how they impinge on our own existence.


Dukey, that is a good point. Some bugger once said that "we can only see things through the eyes God has given us", alluding to our own limitations when in comes to the potential for divine realisation. Is it possibly our simple failure to grasp a reality beyond our own physical existence, that gives such weight to our assertions of nature and laws and and the linear traversal of time (biological advancement of man). That is, we fail to grasp how time works - at what point did the second hand start ticking at the beginning of the universe, and from whose perception did time start moving? And if we move linearly, where is the endpoint of time? Does the end of Earth mean all the universe stops moving because there is no perception of time as we define it?
We have to develop constructs that make sense to our rational mind and make sense of the infintissemally small part we play. That is, we may actually make rational constructs due to our limitations to understand as well as spiritual constructs due to our same failures.

Potentially, one could pose the question that if there is no God, why is there an incessant advancement of the human race. We all understand the biological benefits of advancing but is there a more philisophical drivinf force at play: What are we striving for? Why was there a need to grow from being a person in 900BC. Why did we just not stop here - the food was good, sex was great (so I've heard) and the climate might have been good). Is it simply an innate force to better our world, is there a yearning for something that we're not yet seeing?
 
sorry , this is a long post - just that , if you crop the songs, then the point might be lost. (assuming there is a point ) - just two people's thoughts on death, Chief Seattle, and Billy Joel.
1. I would agree with Chief Seattle, - I lov that concept of , "when you walk on the earth, remember that you are walking on the ashes of your ancestors"

2. Genes maybe, but in my will I want to be buried in my jeans – they’re going with me, wherever we go.

3. Your ideas live on …yep Likewise , Billy Joel seems to adhere to this philosophy mate the following is a repeat of a post on "favourite lyrics" thread...
Here’s that Chief Seattle song – but it has been reworked a bit, rhyme, metre, all those constraints that the red indian didn’t worry about
 
A few questions I've never understood about God.(I don't believe in God)

1. Why didn't God just make a Heaven and be done with it? Instead of this elaborate "test" of faith etc - are we just an experiment? Seeing as God knows everything, God surely should have known the outcome.

2. In the scheme of the universe we are the equivalent of nothing more then the smallest bacteria on the nail of our little toe, yet we seem to be the centre of the universe as far as religion is concerned. Did God create this whole universe just for us? I find this hard to believe.

3. Why does this supreme being want us to worship him? Maybe God has an ego?

I was forced to grow up in a strict church environment and as such saw too many inconsistences in religion to believe in a God.

IMO the only reason there is a God is because mankind invented God to explain our own mortality and the many unexplainable things in our world. People need God to believe in because they need/want there to be more to life than just our current physical existance, that there must be more than just this. As long as people continue to believe in a God there will be a God.
We seem to be the only living organism on this planet who needs to have a God, yet all the others seem to exist okay without one.
 
tech/a said:
I cant see how evolution can be argued against.
Its happening all the time.
Click to expand...

I'm just bouncing in between dinner and playing my wife scrabble (three nights in a row lol)

Firstly, have to say what a great debate has developed here .... well done to all contributors ...............

I don't have time to get too deep, but re your point above Tech, ........ it is commonly scientifically accepted that "evolution" is generally caused by "mutation" of the original cell structure, due to chemical or environmental
modifications ............... ie Evolution is a simply a "degredation/modification" of what was originally there in the first place !! .................. No real point I'm making other than evolution could be described as a "decreasing" phenemenom which actually lowers our "options" as a species, as opposed to how most people percieve it, thinking that it creates "more" options ............. therefore initial life form/forms would have been required to have "all" the available structures of life to allow for evolution "mutation" etc to take place .................. Hope that makes sense to somebody out there .................. Just a side issue really, but worth considering with respect to the original question ...................... Cheers ........... I will now go and find a triple letter score for my "Q" !!!!!
 
Barney.

Evolution of existance not from the Big Bang (Or whatever) to where we are now.

Not just the human species.
 
This thread got way off track right from the beginning! The question was "Is there a GOD?" & there have been countless posts about religion following.
There are so many religions the chance of your own faith being right & the rest wrong are incredibly remote (mathematically & logically).
There is so much more than our 5 senses can sense, including other dimensions many physicists now beleive exist, If there is a "GOD" it is so far beyond our comprehension......
Closer to home nature, our mother Earth & the continuation of "being" beyond the grave?
Star Wars had it right, there is Good & Evil everywhere we look (& shades of grey), opposing force that permeates the Universe, Yin & Yang,

"May The Force Be With You"

PS: I am nominally a Buddhist because The Buddha said His Way (to enlightenment) was not the only way just the way he had found. i.e he left the door open to all faiths & beleifs. If only Mohammed & Jesus etc had been so wise.
 


He chose to create us for His own pure enjoyment. It's no different with us - parents simply choose to have children to love them and raise them.
 
Barney - you old devil, lol - playing scrabble with the missus, when the rest of us are sorting out the universe here lol.

OTS - when you say "May the Force be with you" is that the Police Force? or something else lol. The only force I've got going for me is... gravity?

PS here's that song I mentioned back there - I like it anyway
Mark Schultz song "Walking Her Home"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVZiWTmKNc0&mode=related&search=
 

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VBQ !!! Very Big Questions $20 - and by and large they are beyond me... I've always wondered why time seems to get faster as we get older. But then each new day or year is a smaller fraction of the sum of your life right?? - Maybe it's another version of relativity?

A couple of ideas recycled from others about 'advancement of mankind and purposes'.

Evolution in the broader sense of 'development based on best-fit' can be seen in many realms in addition to the biological one.
ie - think about the development of the car. From chariots, horse drawn wagons, engines and gearboxes, to on board computerized fuel injection etc. Its an evolutionary process - driven by mans desire for better/best transportation. Good design changes (adaptations) are retained, crazy ones are rejected (like the guy who strapped a jet fighter engine on his pick-up!... and killed himself - maybe an urban myth?) - but you get the idea.

I like the ideas of Robert Pirsig - who is the dude who wrote 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance', followed many years later by 'Lila'. In the latter he develops a kind evolutionary philosophy/metaphysics in which evolution acts upon a hierarchy of realms, with each successive realm taking a kind of 'moral' priority over the prior ones.
1st = physical realm. Atoms, rocks - non-living stuff.
2nd = biological realm - speaks for itself and the process is Darwinian evolution.
3rd = he proposes as 'social' realm - which is where organisms interact and form societies of various kinds.
4th = is (i think) the Intellectual realm - where we humans reside - probably alone.

So I from this model you might say that our advancement has largely been driven by 'Darwinian evolution' - the aim of which is simply to 'best-fit' the organism to it's environment. Maybe this kind of evolution dominated until the point came when we broke into the "intellectual ' realm. Then, we started using our own unique intelligence to push our 'social' and 'intellectual' evolution in different directions. (example - we humans couldn't fly but we wanted to, so collectively, we used our intelligence to 'evolve' our land based transportation - using lessons from Nature - to make them fly. Then we evolved from bi-planes to F18 jets... and bomb the crap out of each other - go figure?) This kind of evolution seems to be faster than the 'best-fit' that happens in the biological realm... and getting faster all the time!!

So I think that in effect - evolution has jumped beyond the biological and social realms to a 'the higher intellectual' realm. Maybe this happened about the time that civilizations really started booming - like around your figure of 900BC ??
But now 3000 years later - and equipped with our more evolved intelligence we can decide our own purposes or aims (as individuals and as a race).
Just what that aim or the purpose of Mankind should be I'm not sure.
Maybe the biggest question of all time - especially for those of us who don't believe in a conscious God.
'Preservation and even cultivation of life on earth and maybe even in the wider universe ' could be a possible candidate??

Phew - I've worn myself out. gotta go eat some curry.
 
The Mint Man said:
ditto that!
If bullmarket was still around this thread would have turned to **** on the very first page
Good thread tech
Click to expand...
I was thinking exactly that earlier today, Mint Man. Thank goodness he appears to have given up.
 

That is bizarre 2020.I just spent an hour looking at the Sir Isaac Newton: The
Universal Law of Gravitation and tuned back in here at about 10.08 to see you had mentioned gravity .I have never been to the site before and that would have to be coincidental to be mentioned while I was there..
 
apologies in advance (this is several times more corny that Kansas in August) :-

They speak of forces, global, massive, starting with this big bang theory
then of course the planets passive, spinning round for eons weary
gravity's a certain bet, - little there to worship , ha,
- what you sense is what you get, (the one I fight's inertia )

what you worship, what you love, is yours to choose, where crossroads fork -
should you choose some god above, or simply "walk-the-conscience-walk"
what we choose to call "life's light", one day will sadly be "put out" -
through the long eternal night, I'll remain, I fear, in doubt.

My own version of all this ? "An honest man is the second noblest work of God - right behind an honest woman"
The other biggie (although I just enunciated it for the first time) is "the biggest sin is to leave the world a worse place that when you arrived " (BTW, if you hadn't already guessed, I agree with Chasers that having sex under apple trees is only a very minor sin - probably only a couple of Hail Marys and God will understand - until the next time )
 
yet another question, closely related. Was Jesus closely related to God?

Retro introduced the topic of CS Lewis, and I just realise that he wrote 'Mere Christianity'. I read it years ago - suspect I would fault it more now than I did then ... For example the following :-
Personally I would argue
a) does Jesus's philosophy of forgiveness work or doesn't it? (irrespective of any reference to Son of God / Divine / etc)
b) If it works, then why not try to live by it, accepting him as a moral teacher (only). And what compulsion is there to accept the (completely separate) argument that he was the Son of God.
(Notice how I was very self-controlled above, and didn't give all those other explanations ... eg "5. Jesus found out he could turn water into wine, and had just installed a new 2000 litre water tank" etc
 
Further to previous
a) it's a shame that JC was resurrected and "beamed up" to Heaven, body and soul - if he was buried somewhere, we could do a thorough DNA on him, and get a few more clues about big daddy.

b) If God is a Sphere (as Xenaphane proposes) , then why doesn't Jesus have at least a bit of a spherical look about him - maybe a beer gut or something ?

ok ok , i realise i'll go to hell for this post - but the moving keyboard writes, and having writ moves on....
 

:topic 2020 .. that is humorous but expect some punishment to be handed out.Hell will be the least of your worries .

 
2020hindsight said:
yet another question, closely related. Was Jesus closely related to God?

... eg "5. Jesus found out he could turn water into wine, and had just installed a new 2000 litre water tank" etc
Click to expand...

With our glut of wine, I wish he would com back and turn wine into water.

Seriously though, the concept of Jesus as God is not unfathomable. If you use my arguments that we are a manifestation of God loving God, then there is potentiality for the spirit to be completely (consciously and subconsciously) aware its true self. How is gets to this point I do not know - is there any intervention involved? When you realise yourself, you can't help but walk around saying "God's da Bomb, MAN" (from the lost Gospel of $20Shoes) (Oh yeah, speaking of Bombs, you should do your own research on a newly listed - BOM. Has promise).

We can also use a positive construct - we can only know what life if like without a divine figure if we have had a divine figure.

I don't want to enter into how religion has taken the story of Jesus and tinkered with it. There are some things I accept and others that I need to question.

My main point, and that of Donald Walsch, is that you may actually somehow be God trying to experience God. The notion, which might be too convenient for some, is that a punishing God, or hell, disappears.
SATAN BE GONE. I'm not sure where this leaves Satanists?? Perhaps they could put on a show for us at you local thatre-restaurant.
 
$20shoes said:
SATAN BE GONE. I'm not sure where this leaves Satanists?? Perhaps they could put on a show for us at you local thatre-restaurant.
Click to expand...
I liked Unc Festive's one about the dyslexic santa worshippers
DNA = national dyslexic association.

PS did they have paternity tests in those days ?
when JC said "I am the son of God" was this just speaking relatively, or was it a relative speaking ?
wysiwyg, thanks for those comforting comments about thumbscrews etc.
(you know the one about the big bolt of lightning comes down and hits the priest and the blasphemer playing golf - and the big voice booms out "JESUS I Missed."
 
2. In the scheme of the universe we are the equivalent of nothing more then the smallest bacteria on the nail of our little toe,
Click to expand...
So what does that make the bacteria... and the backteria on his toe? I think I might start another thread, 'What came first, the chicken or the egg?'
nomore4s said:
I was forced to grow up in a strict church environment and as such saw too many inconsistences in religion to believe in a God..
Click to expand...
Ive heared that sooo many times before, good on you for having your own brain and/or saying what you really think. I have seen familys that just wont allow other family members believe in anything other then 'their god', beliefs or religion.
 
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