Have You rejected God's Message?

[RabbiO]

@Tony Bristow-Stagg -

Shouldn't there be a spoiler alert tag somewhere on the original post? You know, where a member clicks on it to learn that everyone who is not Baha'i has rejected G-d's message because they have rejected the person that Baha'i regards as the latest messenger, the latest manifestation of G-d?

 

[Dawnofhope]

According to the New Testament it is part of the human condition that we all fall short of the Grace of God and are in need of redemption (Romans 3:23-24). I suspect there is a similar narrative in other faiths.

 

[Windwalker]

The title is supported by each faith in each of the Messages given, in one way or another, where rejection of the Message is lack of Faith in God.

When I was a child in faith, I thought as a child. But reason and a good heart, eventually, would not allow me to buy into the sort of reasoning that says that if someone rejected what a preacher or teacher was telling them about God, that this amounted to a rejection of God by them. I thought to myself, "how is it that someone's ability to believe how some other person thinks about God, is the key to their salvation? How is it that all the many reasons of why they may not relate to what that person is saying, determines if someone gets to go to heaven or not?" It seemed rather cruel and ridiculous, and that God who knows the heart, knows where they are at and the many reasons for why they might reject preacher Bob, or some other grandiose claimant saying they are a prophet sent by God.

The reasons for rejecting them, likely had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with their faith in God. Someone can have a profound faith in God, while rejecting many things religions say. And for the "believer" to say they are rejecting faith in God when they reject their prophet and beliefs, is the height of arrogance, judging others as God.

There are many shades to faith, and it's best for them not to assume because they believe it, no one else can possibly believe in God and believe differently. "When I was a child, I thought and spoke as a child. But when I became a man, I put away childish things". That thinking had to be let go of in order for me to grow spiritually. I'm glad I did.

Baha'u'llah has said in a prayer;

"... Be thou assured in thyself that verily, he who turns away from this Beauty hath also turned away from the Messengers of the past and showeth pride towards God from all eternity to all eternity..."

What I hear here, is a whole lot of pride. I do not hear Grace. I hear pride.

That is the discussion.

Have you rejected a Message given by God?

I have rejected many religious ideas about God. But I do not reject God.

 

[Quintessence]

Honestly, I couldn't say. How can I reject a message from a god that I don't acknowledge in my life?

As a polytheist, I contextualize my religious experiences within that framework. One might as well ask an Abrahamic-style monotheist if they have rejected any messages from Sun lately.

P.S. Wear sunscreen.

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

On the Han I do see there is an important aspect we can know and that is all the Messengers that were given a Message to Give us. That Message becomes all that we currently know about God.

I simply cannot find a way to agree with this -- all that I can know is that there are people who have declared themselves "messengers," and that we are then supposed to believe those messages have been channeled through them from God. And there is nothing I have ever, ever seen to suggest that anything like that has ever happened.

And to me, the sheer diversity of human religions speaks volumes against that very idea, unless God has some kind of multiple personality disorder.

 

[Trailblazer]

I've yet to see a message that is reliably from any deity. I'll reject any message *claiming* to be from a deity (or a messenger from a deity) unless the existence of the deity can be established first.

Unfortunately for those atheists who want to know that the deity exists before they will believe in the Messenger, it is the Messenger who establishes the existence of the deity because that is the way the deity decided it would be. And there is nothing we can do about that since the deity is All-Powerful and we are not.

 

[Trailblazer]

Tony, if a Creator exists, I'm 99.8% sure, based on substantial evidence, that the men who claimed to have been divinely-inspired didn't know any more about it than I do.

I do not know how you think you can know that.
You can believe that, sure, but you cannot know it unless you can prove it.

That is also true of believers who believe that Messengers got messages from God. It is a belief because it cannot be proven.

So, the question is this: Which belief is most likely to be true and why?

 

[Windwalker]

Unfortunately for those atheists who want to know that the deity exists before they will believe in the Messenger, it is the Messenger who establishes the existence of the deity because that is the way the deity decided it would be. And there is nothing we can do about that since the deity is All-Powerful and we are not.

That is some mighty fine circular reasoning there. I wholly reject its self-serving logic. Such as helpless view of God, IMO, BTW.

 

[Vinayaka]

I have rejected many religious ideas about God. But I do not reject God.

Me too. I reject the idea of messengers. If God is so darn smart, why would he/she need a messenger? Most especially a self-declared one with a whole whack of nutty ideas bordering on the inhumane or insane.

I communed with God twice already today, at least.

 

[Vinayaka]

@Tony Bristow-Stagg -

Shouldn't there be a spoiler alert tag somewhere on the original post? You know, where a member clicks on it to learn that everyone who is not Baha'i has rejected G-d's message because they have rejected the person that Baha'i regards as the latest messenger, the latest manifestation of G-d?

Or just one that says ... "Caution, more excuses for Baha'i proselytising!" This time we waited until post 12 before it was mentioned directly. Usually it's around post 10.

 

[joe1776]

I do not know how you think you can know that. You can believe that, sure, but you cannot know it unless you can prove it.

No one knows anything with absolute certainty (if that's what you mean). But the authors of the sacred texts of the world's dominant Western religions claimed to be divinely inspired and yet we have 2,000 years of evidence that they failed the Moral Test.

We humans have made moral progress despite and not because of the guidance offered in those sacred texts. We don't stone disobedient children to death or sell our daughters into slavery for example.

Humanity's moral progress has been made possible by Conscience (moral intuition). The best we can say about the sacred texts is that they weren't powerful enough to stop our moral advances.

 

[Vinayaka]

According to the New Testament it is part of the human condition that we all fall short of the Grace of God and are in need of redemption (Romans 3:23-24). I suspect there is a similar narrative in other faiths.

Not in mine.

 

[exchemist]

The title is supported by each faith in each of the Messages given, in one way or another, where rejection of the Message is lack of Faith in God.

Thus for a Jew, A Christian, A Muslim and many others, of other Faiths, this results in the thought process that others have rejected God by not accepting the Message they hold to.

Baha'u'llah has said in a prayer;

"... Be thou assured in thyself that verily, he who turns away from this Beauty hath also turned away from the Messengers of the past and showeth pride towards God from all eternity to all eternity..."

That is the discussion.

Have you rejected a Message given by God?

Regards Tony

How would I know if I had?

 

[Trailblazer]

Yes, though not because of "pride" as your Baha'u'llah states. I was a very serious Christian for about 6/7ths of my life. What made me finally give up that faith was through serious introspection and intellectual honesty. I simply no longer believed because the evidence for his existence is too lacking for me, and I couldn't lie to myself any longer. Deprogramming myself from the things I was raised with was a long and hard process, but now that I've loosened myself from the yoke of religion I feel much more free and happy in life.

Now, I'm not closed minded to the prospect of gods as things that might exist, but in order to believe in any gods I need to see some evidence first. Faith isn't a good tool to find out if anything is true, and only served to blind me and bind my mind for much of my life.

I've done much research on religion since then, and though I find it fascinating and often times beautiful, I don't see any new evidence that gods are an aspect of reality. I do value religion's contribution to art and cultural expression and I see much in religion that I can get behind. There are negative aspects to religion as well, but those have been covered ad nauseam, and I like staying positive.

Good afternoon. Nice to see you again. I feel like I have a neighbor now.

Thanks for sharing a little bit about your religious background. I was not raised as a Christian and I was never a Christian, which was virtually unheard of back when I was raised in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, when most everyone was a Christian. As I recall, the statistics is that in the 1950s 95% of people in the United States were Christians. Both my parents were raised as Christians but they both dropped out of Christianity before any of their children were born, so I never saw the inside of a Church or a Bible during my childhood. There was no talk about God that I can ever recall and I never thought about God.

I fell in love with the teachings of the Baha'i Faith and I got caught up in the "vision" of the Baha'i Faith, the oneness of humanity, so I became a Baha'i during my first year of college. It is a long story what happened after that. Needless to say, I was not "engaged" in the religious organization and I did not "really believe" in God. Although I believed that a God existed I had no real connection with God through prayer or meditation or the scriptures. Then about seven years ago, I made a decision to give religion and God another try which was the same time I started posting on forums. It has been quite a journey since that time and I now I "know" that God exists and I know more about God, but I still have "issues" with God, as God is depicted in religious scriptures.

Most people do not believe me, but I never read one verse from the Bible until seven years ago when I started posting on forums, because I never saw a need to. Mind you, I was not even interested in my own religion so why delve into the Bible? The reason I started reading the Bible is because as soon as I started on forums I went to Christian forums and got engaged in dialogues, mostly about the return of Christ. I later branched off into a mostly atheist forum where I spent most of my time before I came here two years ago.

But to double back, I had a kind of spiritual awakening in June 2014 because of a crisis I went through so in the fall of that year I started my own forum. It used to be quite active until I branched off into that atheist forum and was too busy to maintain it. The reason I started a forum was so I could converse with Christians on a neutral ground because I was unable to share on Christian forums without getting moderated or banned for my beliefs. But then I opened my forum up to everyone who wanted to discuss anything spiritual, including nonbelievers and any religion or just believers with no religion. What ended up happening is that I had extensive dialogues with one Christian who became my friend and most of my other posters have been atheists who were formerly Christians.

Since most of my dialogues on forums other than this one have been with ex-Christian atheists I understand many of the reasons people drop out of Christianity, but of course everyone is unique so their reasons are also unique. My other hat and one I wore much longer than my religion hat is psychology, which I studied for many years, so I am fascinated with human behavior and why people think what they think and do what they do.

 

[Vinayaka]

No one knows anything with absolute certainty (if that's what you mean). But the authors of the sacred texts of the world's dominant Western religions claimed to be divinely inspired and yet we have 2,000 years of evidence that they failed the Moral Test.

We humans have made moral progress despite and not because of the guidance offered in those sacred texts. We don't stone disobedient children to death or sell our daughters into slavery for example.

Humanity's moral progress has been made possible by Conscience (moral intuition). The best we can say about the sacred texts is that they weren't powerful enough to stop our moral advances.

Certainly wasn't religious texts that got rid of slavery, discrimination against gays, ownership rights of women, and a ton of other stuff.

 

[Trailblazer]

That is some mighty fine circular reasoning there. I wholly reject its self-serving logic. Such as helpless view of God, IMO, BTW.

You are free to believe you can have direct communication with God if you want to believe that.
As you know, that is not a Baha'i belief.

Atheists will be waiting till hell freezes over if they are waiting for direct communication from God as proof that God exists, so I feel it would not only be cruel but also dishonest for me to mislead people into believing that is possible.

There is nothing self-serving about what I wrote because it has nothing to do with me.

 

[Trailblazer]

No one knows anything with absolute certainty (if that's what you mean). But the authors of the sacred texts of the world's dominant Western religions claimed to be divinely inspired and yet we have 2,000 years of evidence that they failed the Moral Test.

We humans have made moral progress despite and not because of the guidance offered in those sacred texts. We don't stone disobedient children to death or sell our daughters into slavery for example.

Humanity's moral progress has been made possible by Conscience (moral intuition). The best we can say about the sacred texts is that they weren't powerful enough to stop our moral advances.

I consider it very unfortunate and very sad that people use the Bible as a criteria for believing in God or knowing anything about God. The Bible is an ancient text that has no real value in modern-day society. I do not know why people keep discussing it. Moreover, from my own experience I can see that the Bible is responsible for most of the atheists in the world.

 

[Polymath257]

Unfortunately for those atheists who want to know that the deity exists before they will believe in the Messenger, it is the Messenger who establishes the existence of the deity because that is the way the deity decided it would be. And there is nothing we can do about that since the deity is All-Powerful and we are not.

Well, I guess that is the claim. But until you know there is a deity, you can't know the claimed 'messenger' is from a deity, and so cannot know the 'messenger' is reliable.

It sounds like a very convenient setup for the messenger, doesn't it?

The point? ANY belief system that requires belief before knowledge is problematic. Any system that has this at its core should be rejected out of hand (in my opinion).

 

[Polymath257]

I consider it very unfortunate and very sad that people use the Bible as a criteria for believing in God or knowing anything about God. The Bible is an ancient text that has no real value in modern-day society. I do not know why people keep discussing it. Moreover, from my own experience I can see that the Bible is responsible for most of the atheists in the world.

And I find it unfortunate and sad that people waste their time believing in deities. As far as I can see, *all* theologies are merely placing one's own intuitions into the directives of an imaginary father figure. I don't know why people keep discussing it.

 

[Dawnofhope]

Not in mine.

So are you saying in your sampradaya or Hinduism generally the your God or gods do not advise you to behave morally or ethically? I had thought there were karmic consequences for whatever we do.