Bob the Unbeliever
Well-Known Member
Demonstratively false. See my previous post-- people are dying even at this very second.
Dying without experiencing your idea of "god". So your claim is false-- or else your god?
Malicious, capricious and evil.
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If God spoke directly to everyone...
- Thread starter Trailblazer
- Start date
Demonstratively false. See my previous post-- people are dying even at this very second.
Dying without experiencing your idea of "god". So your claim is false-- or else your god?
Malicious, capricious and evil.
That's a different matter. To me it's not so much as God speaking in a way that some KNOW it's God but of those people having hearts that are not full of themselves so they can hear and know the source of the message.I did not mean speak as in a literal voice that could be heard. I meant speak in a manner that one KNOWS it is God and nobody else.That is how God spoke to all the Messengers and that is why they all had so much confidence.
It is also in the East: Kalki for Hindus and Maitreya for Buddhists and so forth.
Trailblazer
Veteran Member
Perhaps that is true, but after you come to believe then you have lots of choices to make, including whether you want to join a religion or not.
When I said "God wants belief to be a choice" all I meant is that God does not want to force us to believe what we would not otherwise come to believe on our own. In other words, God does not want to tip the scales by speaking to us directly.
I am not convinced that belief is not a choice because I believe we have free will. That does not mean we can always choose to believe but I believe there is an element of choice involved.
I also believe we have the capacity to believe in God and His Messengers because Baha'u'llah wrote that. Whether or not we can exercise that capacity depends upon many factors.
Spirit of Light
Be who ever you want
Look around you in the world, how much evil do you see? war, killings, rapes, stealing, lies, cheating, i would call that low level of spirituality.
And God is spirituality. What we call human beings are actually spiritual beings trapped in the human body because of our wrongdoings in the past. If you disagree that is fine, i am not here to convince you that a spiritual lifestyle is real.
Perhaps that is true, but after you come to believe then you have lots of choices to make, including whether you want to join a religion or not.
Of course, but the belief itself is not one of them.
And my point was, that's a silly position for your god to take, because all of our beliefs are "forced" in the sense that we don't choose them. So he's not saving us from being "forced" to have beliefs by hiding.
I don't know how, because we just walked through it and there is no choice involved in our beliefs in any meaningful sense.
Trailblazer
Veteran Member
That is an assumption you are making, but God does not want us to know He exists whether we want to or not.
But you are right that everyone will know that God exists in the future just like gravity, because it will be obvious to everyone. It is not that way yet because humanity has to evolve in stages, but God knows we all all believe in the future so it is not as if He is a bad God.
I do not believe there is any kind of hell for sincere people like you who want to believe but can't, but I think there might be a kind of hell for arrogant people and evil people. Hell is not a place, it is a state of the soul.
Trailblazer
Veteran Member
God is real so the time is coming when there will be only one religion, and there will be no more religious wars, because that is what God has ordained.
Unfortunately, you won't see it in your lifetime because it takes a long time for people to be willing to relinquish their older religions and unite under a new religion.
Trailblazer
Veteran Member
When I said there will come a time when everyone will know God exists I meant a time in the future...
Nobody ever dies, except physically. Death is simply a transition to the spiritual world, so if you do not know God in this world there is a good chance you will know God in the next world. Some fruit only ripens when it falls from the tree.
Trailblazer
Veteran Member
It is a choice whether one wants to seek truth about God even if what one ends up believing is not a choice.
No, I do not buy that because we all have a choice whether we want to spend our time seeking truth about God or doing other things. We cannot blame God if we did not make any effort to believe. There is no reason why belief should be easy to acquire or maintain. It is easier for some people than others but maybe other things in their lives were more difficult. If we do not even look there is no chance we will ever find anything, just like if we do not apply for jobs we will not get a job. That is logic 101.
But it is a choice we make as to whether we will keep searching for God, just as I made a choice to keep searching for another job in my field for 8 years after I lost my job due to downsizing in my state agency. And I finally got the best job of my life after searching for 8 long years, day and night. I had no time to think about God or anything else during those years.I don't know how, because we just walked through it and there is no choice involved in our beliefs in any meaningful sense.
No, my wants are not choices.
You are still treating beliefs as a choice that we need to "make an effort" to obtain or maintain. This is just a basic misunderstanding of how beliefs work. They're not choices. You can argue we have a choice whether or not we spend our time researching God, but that's also a function of our beliefs about God. If I believe God is as ridiculous and irrelevant as Bigfoot, it's likely that I will spend little to no time researching him.
You're basically trying to make it out as a moral failure of non-believers that they don't believe (because they should have "tried harder" to believe?), while absolving God of any responsibility for hiding from us. Sorry, that dog don't hunt.
Aren't you admitting then, that even "searching for God" is not a free choice we make? You couldn't when you didn't have time because of more pressing matters (so much for all material things being nothing relative to God...).
Trailblazer
Veteran Member
I did not say wants are choices but we have to want to believe enough to make choices if we are going to search. If we do not search for truth we cannot find it.
I understand that you have already gone through some of this so maybe that it it for you, I don't know. I had a completely different experience than you, I always had one belief and I never questioned it.
Of course you would not waste your time searching for something you think is too unlikely or not worth the bother searching for. I did not know you felt that way.
Okay, it took a long time, but we finally got to the heart of the matter.
I admit that I think it is our responsibility to search for God, not God's responsibility to do anything differently. God has done all that God is going to do by sending the Messenger, so God is absolved of any more responsibility. If you do not accept that there is no point pursuing this any further.
I said nothing about a moral failure. If people do not want to search that is their choice.
It was a free choice I made all those years to put other things before God, but I did not really believe in God back then the way I do now, so I did not understand that was what I was doing.
These things that seemed more pressing were primarily my education, 15 years in various colleges and universities, and most of that time I was going to school for a new career because I wanted to help people. Back then I thought that was the best way to be a good Baha'i but I do not believe that anymore. I was never materialistic but I admit I placed far too much importance on sex and wasted time on it, but that was something I had to go through. I finally got to where I needed to be, but it took a long time and I still have lots of work to do in the God and religion department.
If you say so....I supposed God revealed that to you, as well. But since he's not interested in revealing anything like that to me, I can safely ignore it.
Audie
Veteran Member
FLYING SAUCERS appear to everyone but most wont look.
IndigoChild5559
Loving God and my neighbor as myself.
It's more than knowing God exists. It's knowing God. See the difference?I agree, there will come a time when everyone will know God exists because that is in the Bible and in the Baha'i Writings. I believe this will happen during the Messianic Age which has already begun. According to Baha'i beliefs this will happen when everyone has recognized Baha'u'llah:
“The day is approaching when God will have exalted His Cause and magnified His testimony in the eyes of all who are in the heavens and all who are on the earth.” Gleanings From the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 248
Baha'is believe "His Cause" refers to the Cause of Baha'u'llah. I do not know when or how God will exalt His Cause, nobody knows that except the All-Knowing God.
This is problematic, considering except for the very rare instances where something likely rather traumatic happens in one's life to make them question their beliefs, the normal pattern is for everyone to be programmed with beliefs from their culture, through your parents as the first programming agents of culture. The beliefs "choose them" in other words, not the other way around. Most people see the world through the set of eyes their culture's belief systems program them with, and will never truly question any of them, including their programmed beliefs about God.
So, what is it exactly God wants us to "believe"? Does God care how you believe? I don't believe so at all, personally.
Yes, if we want to believe. Not everyone does. And that's not their choice. Plus even if you want to believe, that doesn't mean you can or will.
I wasn't talking about me per se, just generally. I'd say my religious background has made me more interested in the subject than the average person. I know many people who weren't raised religious (or only nominally) who almost never think about this subject.
Okay, it took a long time, but we finally got to the heart of the matter.
I admit that I think it is our responsibility to search for God, not God's responsibility to do anything differently. God has done all that God is going to do by sending the Messenger, so God is absolved of any more responsibility. If you do not accept that there is no point pursuing this any further.
Very well. I don't accept it at all, it makes no sense and makes people responsible for things outside their control. Whereas your god is allegedly omnipotent.
No. It isn't their choice to want to search. We've been through this.
If you think people are responsible to do x, and they don't, that implies a moral failure. That's why you're insisting on couching everything we're talking about here as a choice - because if you admit that it's not, your excuse for why your god is hiding falls apart.
I don't know what "free choice" means, but okay.
That's not what my world looks like. I am surrounded by beauty, love, and friends. Would you call me spiritual on that basis?
Probably not if you mean by the word what it seems most people mean - a kind of vague combination of beliefs in things transcendent, and a focus on other worlds with a dash of magical thinking, and an aversion to distinct ideas - ideas called higher consciousness, but not by me.
You also seem to think that the higher human values that cause some to eschew war, killing, etc.. constitute spirituality rather than qualities like integrity and compassion
Yes, but where does that voice come from? A sentient agent distinct from ourselves and our minds, or our own neural circuits? There's precedent for the latter, as when a voice tells me I'm thirsty and go get a drink. At least some of these intuitions are natural and endogenous, perhaps all of them, including the inspirations of messengers and prophets.
The history of human understanding of intelligence is interesting. There must have been a time when humans were unable to conceive of such a concept as intelligence, and eventually, the idea took form. Early on, it seems that we did not understand that we could be the source of dreams and inspirations. They were always understood as some external agent communicating with us. The ancient Greeks believed that artistic and creative inspiration came from muses, literal beings known only by their whispering into our heads to provide us with new ideas. It apparently didn't occur to them until much later that a brain could do this, at which time muses were relegated to the category of metaphor for creative thought.
Go back even further to a more primitive time when there was no concept of intelligence. Man feared the beasts whose powers seemed to make these creatures his superior. They were often stronger, faster, could fly, etc.. Not surprisingly, man worshiped these beasts to placate them, and his gods were animals, as with the indigenous North Americans worshiping crows and bears.
Eventually, man came to understand what intelligence was, that he had more of it than the beasts, and that this was the supreme skill. That may be when theriomorphic gods (animal form) began morphing into therioanthropic forms (half man-half beast like Horus and Pan), and then finally into anthropomorphic gods like the Greek and Viking pantheons, which later became a single god. We see man go from revering animals to revering anthropomorphic gods with greater and greater intelligence culminating in the omnisicient god.
Anyway, this theme of misattributing ones own thoughts - It seems to me that people are just projecting them outward onto a world that now seems to say God everywhere. To me, such people are like the Greeks with their muses, misunderstanding the source of their thoughts and feelings.
But none of this negates Rumi. We still want to listen to that non-linguistiic voice, but we don't have to attribute it to anything more than neural mechanisms. Our conscience is one such voice, also once depicted as an external agent, or two more properly - an angel and a devil sitting on opposite shoulders giving conflicting advice, a nice metaphor for our dual minds that can hold conflicting desires (I want to quit smoking and I want a cigarette simultaneously), but I suspect an idea once believed literally.
How did you rule out that the main reason gods don't speak to us is that they don't exist? I've been unable to rule that idea out.
The problem with your argument is that is begins with an unshared premise - the existence of a god. Nothing that follows can be accurate if that premise is untrue.
You say that "God rewards true seekers." I was a seeker once, which is how I came to Christianity in the first place at about age 20. I did finally find what I was looking for, but only by leaving Christianity and embracing what I later learned was called secular humanism. This is where I found meaning and satisfaction. My search was over.
So perhaps you could say that some god actually did reward me for truly seeking truth, but I found it outside of religion and god beliefs, which tends to speak favorably on the decision to leave religion.
One thing I learned in my journey was that faith was a poor method of deciding what is true about our world, and not to trust those that say, "Just believe me" when they could have provided evidence if they had any. People that can demonstrate their claims do. Why would gods be different?
You said that god wants us to use our innate intelligence, and I agree that we should do that whether gods exist or not. My mind tells me that there is no reason to believe in any gods, and that faith cannot be a path to truth, since any idea or its mutually exclusive, polar opposite can equally well be believed by faith, even though at least one such idea is incorrect. And even if you happen to guess correctly, you cannot know that you have until you acquire evidence, anyway.
So any call to believe by faith is rejected and the source discredited for requiring it. .
I have to side with @Left Coast on this one, namely, that belief is not a choice to certain kind of mind, which suggests to me that people who can choose what to believe have different kinds of minds from those who can't. You don't seem to acknowledge that this other kind of mind exists. But I assure you that it does.
This kind of thinking - critical thinking - may have been a choice to pursue, but once made, there are no further choices, just the valid analysis of evidence and tentative belief commensurate in strength with the quality and quantity of the relevant evidence. It is learned, generally in the setting of a formal education, but I doubt that anybody that has taken that path could ever return to faith-based thought without some cognitive or emotional crisis occurring first. I'm thinking of Anthony Flew now.
I've only seen that once. “As I shared with my professors years ago when I was in college, if all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate” – creationist Kurt Wise
I'd say that this is a pretty rare way to think. Reason and evidence-based thinkers simply go with the evidence, and faith-based thinkers seldom find it convincing. To find the evidence convincing but choose to ignore it anyway seems to be a rare trait in human minds.
Do you think that that is a fair comparison? These human beings are making every effort to be heard and believed, because that is what reasonable people do that want to be understood and believed. You mentioned earlier that we are expected to use our intelligence. I don't know about expected, but I will rely on my wits whatever its origin, and my mind tells me that if there is a god in this orderly, mathematical, reasonable, comprehensible universe that it expects me to use the faculties I was gifted with, which means that if there is a god, those are things it admires, and so do I.
As I indicated, we should be suspicious of those who advise us to suppress reason and just believe by faith anyway.
You seem to use the words choose and choice differently than I do. For me, there has to be two or more options all available to the chooser to call it a choice. In fact, when we only have one option, some people call that having one choice, but I would call it having no choice.
Free will is an interesting topic. It appears to be essential to Christian doctrine, but there are good reasons to question whether any of our choices are indeterministic, and whether the felling of being free to choose isn't an illusion itself generated deterministically.
Except that no two got the same message. The reason I trust reason and evidence over faith is that the former is tied into physical reality, which is why there have been thousands of gods reported, but only one periodic table of the elements. If the scientists used faith rather than observation, they'd each have their own table, and none would be expected to be correct.
I can agree with that. I did seek truth about gods and think I found it, although I doubt that you would find my conclusions useful to you. The world makes more sense without god beliefs. I no longer need to ignore evidence that contradicts my former god belief. I no longer need to wonder why little girls are allowed to die of leukemia. I no longer need to find endless excuses to justify the internal contradictions, unkept promises, moral and intellectual failings of a deity, failed prophecies, and errors in science and history. The world makes more sense.
You seem to assume that seeking a god mans finding one. I can assure you that that is not always the case. After a sincere and prolonged effort to sort out what's what, I arrived at tentative conclusions that have served me well and which I have no incentive to modify, or as others say, no incentive to continue seeking.
It's interesting how seeking forever is considered a virtue by many. My guess is that if one is still seeking, he has an unsatisfied need, and if he has been seeking for decades and decades, he's going about it wrong and will never find what he's looking for. like a man searching for his keys for decades. What is desirable is not to seek, but to find.
Now, let's look at your comment again, but substitute keys: We all have a choice whether we want to spend our time seeking our keys or doing other things. Eventually, we should choose to stop looking for them. There is no virtue in spending sixty or seventy years unsuccessfully looking for them. Likewise with gods.
Then we can blame God if we did make that effort, but still don't believe?
I suspect that you would say no, that we can never blame God for anything, but once again, I would disagree, even though I don't accept the existence of this god, which I must discuss in the hypothetical. With omniscience and omnipotence comes omniresponsiblity, which means that all praise and blame go to such an agent. If a person makes a sincere effort to find a god and fails, either no such god exists, or a god exists that is indifferent to us, incapable of communicating with us, or unaware of us.
Belief is very easy to the faith-based thinker. He simply chooses to believe, and voila, it is done.
For the reason and evidence-thinker, belief is easy if given the evidence. It is irrational to posit that a loving god that wants to be known, understood, loved in return, obeyed, and worshiped would withhold convincing evidence.
"If there is a god, that god should know exactly what it would take to change my mind...and that god should be capable of doing whatever it would take. The fact that this hasn't happened can only mean one of two things: 1. No such god exists. 2. Whatever god exists doesn't care to convince me, at this time. In either case, it's not my problem and there's nothing I can do about it. Meanwhile, all of those believers who think that there is a god who does want me to know that he exists - are clearly, obviously, undeniably... wrong." - Matt Dillahunty"
Thief
Rogue Theologian
please excuse my knee jerk response.....not having read the entire thread
so...Adam walked alone in the garden
Moses had no encounter
Jesus had no Guidance.....
then religion is bogus
and the scriptures are fuel for the fire
are you wanting to deal that card...???
even if you COULD
would THAT be the wise thing to do?