@Platapus

No point :)


Heh, I didn't know that. Though little surprises me when it comes to religion.

A Muslim (actually a secular daughter of a Muslim immigrant) told me that the part of the Qur'an that says a man can have several wives was added after some war that cut the male population down to almost nothing. I dunno if that's true, but it certainly sounds more plausible than God (Allah) telling a blind man to write it down! :rotfl2:

Personally I reckon most religious texts have been altered and re-interpreted dozens of times over the millennia.

And how do you "know" this? I used to be a devout believer. The reason that I no longer am is the simple acknowledgement that the things I thought I "knew" were actually things I only believed. I see no evidence at all.

The Big Bang is theory, but it's theory based on observation, as are all scientific theories. Saying that it's sillier to believe the Big Bang than it is to believe in God is, to me, pretty much useless. At least people who talk about the Big Bang can show the evidence that leads them to think that way.

As for being better off believing and being wrong than disbelieving and being wrong, I used to feel that way as well. But the other problem is, believing what? What if the Jews are right? What if the Hindus are right? What if the Mormons are right? What if (perish the thought) the Muslims are right? there is no way of knowing the answer to that, just as there is no way of "knowing" there's a God at all.

I'm not a believer, but neither am I a disbeliever. I simply don't know, and I can't argue further than that. But I haven't met anyone else yet who can prove he actually knows something.

Not until you put this scheme in a book! If it is not in a book, it don't count.

I once met someone online who fervently believed that only a select few would survive the end of the world (as we know it) and be granted some kind of superlative existence (what this amounted to I was never quite clear on) by an omnipotent superhuman power.

Of course in this case the "superhuman power" was held by the survivors of Atlantis (or their descendants, again, never quite got clarification on that) and being one of the "select few" involved being included on some "list" that was being kept somewhere. And if you weren't on it, well, when the long-gone Atlanteans returned and the world ended, you were SOL.

While I had no problem with her believing that this would all go down as she claimed, and taking some comfort in believing that she was on the list and therefore safe from whatever horrors awaited those who weren't, I drew the line at being expected to take her word for it and "get [my] act together" or else be counted among the damned. :O:

Whether I will retain or regain some kind of individual existence or consciousness or "soul" after this body ceases to function is something over which I have no control and can claim no certitude by any standard that is, to me, acceptable. Whatever happens or doesn't will be a function of how the universe works, and my belief or lack thereof with regard to any theory about how it functions will have absolutely no effect on what actually takes place.

However, from what I can tell based on personal experience and study, the spiritual traditions that do posit some kind of individual existence after the one I'm now enmeshed in all seem to agree that my "status" in the presumed afterlife or next life will hinge on how I conduct myself in this one.

So, from a purely practical perspective, it seems pretty obvious to me that my primary concern should be with how I'm living this life, which is something I actually do have some control over - whether or not the choices I make here and now have "afterlife" ramifications is irrelevant. If they do, so be it. If they don't, then I still did the best I could with the life I had.

I find it hard to believe all the wonders that is the universe and life itself, is but a random occurance that came to be soley on chance. At the same time I can not believe any man made book/religion, as its made up... by man. I believe there is something, but something which hasn't and never can be explained or comprehended by mankind. Standard religious texts, I believe were written by goverments in an attempt to control the masses. Thier very wording implies this. Other religions have been crafted soley for easing our anxiety about death. Humans seem to be the only animals who have an understanding of, and there for a fear of death. Science can not prove the existance of a creator or origin of life, but it also can not disprove it. I find this fact, very interesting.

I can somehow believe that there is a god or some super being.
But do you really believe that if god existed he would expect of humanity do do all this pointless crap just to honor himself.
This would mean that we have some kind of ashole boss i think.
I would expect a little bit more from GOD.
No offense intended

:hmmm:

Do you accept Paypal?

Sure glad you know you've devoted yourself to the right god. Otherwise, what punishment will you face?

As opposed to god, which you will say has always existed. If that's the case, why can't the universe have always existed?

But that's not what the Big Bang theory says, anyway.

Where you'll find two contradictory answers, which is hardly straightforward, and which doesn't inspire confidence in the veracity of either one.

Regarding an afterlife: If it's the Christian one with a heaven and a hell, what will your existence for the rest of eternity be like if you know that some people you loved in this life are now suffering endlessly (as infinite punishment for their finite "crimes")? Wouldn't that be a rather imperfect heaven?

I reckon that too. My parents are Christians, so I used to get stuck with reading these Bibles and saw different versions. I used to be 100% into this faith til several years ago. I just don't know what's true and what's not, lol. (Oh and the bible contains contradictions too... :hmmm: ) Too many religions in this world and too many different ideas. (I liked the story of how Arabian Horses came to be... :D and I own a Pure Arabian).

And about all of this afterlife stuff... there is an afterlife. And I believe it depends on how much you believe in it. The more you believe in it, the higher in the spirit plane you will go and the better it will be. If you're a negative/evil person, you'll end up in the negative/lower plane. No fire or anything, just miserable existence on the other side. Though that can change, if I can try and get my hands on a few books from people who claim to have "Near-Death experiences" such as that man who "was in Heaven for 90 minutes" (I believe the video I viewed in church years ago is a fabrication...).
However, this kind of topic requires you to have an open mind and just... think about it. Everyone's views are different, you can take ideas and assimilate it as your own belief or just leave it as is. As far as knowledge goes on this topic, there's not much definite information (that's what I believe anyway...). I'm always happy to see what people think, because I'm just like that :up: I have no interest in clashing with beliefs or such.

As for the presence of a greater celestial being, I believe there is one but it has no definite name and no definite gender (seriously, how can you Christians tell "God" is a man? O_o I have my ideas on how this came to be, but like I said, I don't wanna clash/step on toes). It's just the Alpha and the Omega, with other beings doing their specific job such as bringing life, moderating life, and taking life when it is time.

Just my ideas, it does change over time but there are some that remains :)

Free will, its the hardest thing to control.

Faith, its the hardest thing to believe.

Some interesting views here, and even a story about people who believe atlanteans will destroy the world. Imagine that.

Personally, I believe there is a God an He sent His only Son to redeem mankind and that one day it will be on Earth as it is in heaven and I don't care if anyone thinks that's silly or not. When the day comes that their souls are judged, they will be granted entry into Paradise if I have anything to say about it, because ours is a God of mercy. Or, if that day doesn't come, at least I tried to live my life like a good person.

For the most part, I'm not afraid of dying. It seems silly to worry over the inevitable, especially when it lasts forever (or until judgement day, at least) I just hope it's not too painful. What does scare me is that, if there is no afterlife, what happens when you die? The brain continues electrical activity for a while, right? Is it possible that you could still be aware? What if you were trapped in a nightmare world generated by randomly firing neurons while your brain slowly fades away?

Someone please tell me that's not possible. And if it is, I want to be vaporized upon death.

I may be one of the few who won't fault you for saying that. I don't know that you're wrong. I just no longer believe without some evidence.

I've long believed that the reason people who are dying slowly accept death is that as the brain shuts down the awareness itself begins to dim. Have you ever been so sick that you didn't care if you lived or died? Or recieved a blow to the head that left you nearly senseless, aware but not caring? I thing a few synapses going off after the main shutdown isn't enough to leave us aware.

Of course there's that old Tales From The Crypt episode in which a dead doctor is still aware and feeling as his brother starts to cut his head open...

Personally I believe there is a God. Beyond that is pure speculation.

@Steve

I've taken lots of blows to the head and had a lot of concussions. Roughstock riding will do that to you, but it's odd you should mention that because it was an incident where I had a concussion that started me wondering about what I mentioned.

I fell off this horse and got a concussion from hitting the fence on the way down. I don't remember anything for hour after that, but everyone said I thought I was still on the horse, or just about to ride. It wasn't until I started feeling better and bent down to take off my spurs that everything suddenly came rushing back and for a brief moment, I was falling off that horse again. In reality, I was just falling on my face. Weird, huh?

I'm not sure I can agree with evolutionist/big bang types either. Kent Hovind has pretty much discredited them in my opinion. He brings up many good points - especially about how inaccurate carbon dating is.

I'm sticking with God and my faith that men and women didn't evolve from monkeys! I have to believe in an afterlife because it's too depressing to not do so. I mean really, who wants to die and just see nothing, hear nothing, be nothing? I guess you really wouldn't be able to say it's bad or good to be like that since you'd really be nothing at all. You just wouldn't exist anymore.

But while I'm here and able to think scary thoughts about things like this - it just depresses the hell out of me so I usually don't. Just have to have faith that there's going to be more after life ends. Plus, it's always nice to think about being reunited with lost family and friends.

I don't get involved with the arguments one way or the other. Any good scientist knows that today's pet theory may be tomorrow's joke. That said, I've never seen a conflict between the Bible and evolution, only with the people who insist that Bishop Ussher's timeline has to be taken literally. People who "prove" evolution wrong accept the 'Young Earth' idea without question, even though it has no scientific basis at all. Evolution scientists look a the facts and try to form a theory that best fits them. Intelligent Design believers start with an account they hold sacred and only accept facts that fit. Evolution may or may not be wrong, but I see no reason to put my faith in science that only looks at some of the evidence.

I don't fault you for that a bit. It's good to believe in something, and sometimes I wish I still did. My problem is that no matter how much I may want to, I see no evidence that would lead an impartial observer to conclude that there's a god, much less an after life. I'm not an atheist, as that would require me to actively believe there was no God, and I don't know that either.

I would love to have discussions with the great men of history, and see what they think now. Unfortunately I also believe that if the Christians are right, and putting your faith in Jesus is the only salvation, then two of the men I admire most - Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin - are quite likely burning in hell as we speak.

That's what depresses me.

Life after death? I will be perfectly honest... I am more terrified of people than I am of an empty nothingness after I die. I don't think there will be an empty nothingness, but if there is an afterlife I hope that I am strong enough to stick around and stand watch over the weak. I owe my angels that much.

In principle this is what our life is about for several decades, once we have ended our growth :O:

The clinical death criterion depends on what they call "brain death", that is a person is declared dead when there is no more brain activity that coluld be measured. While there are rare diseases/syndroms when people will give an appearance of being dead, only to find that in Edgar Allan Poe style they wake up inside a coffin, this is extremely rare. You may want to change your last will regarding being buried with a cellphone, always. :D

This is a bit OT, but anyway, my idea of heaven is: being God. Not in terms of having any power, or the ability to do anything in (or to) the world, but rather just being able to understand it and everything in it, including my former self! It would be awesome if after I died I became all-seeing (omniscient?) and understood everything.

@Steve
It's a bit of a bummer when that knowledge/belief sledgehammer hits you in the face, eh?

I fail to see why if I did not exist before I was born, why I would continue to exist after death. I am more than comfortable with the notion that there is nothing after death as, (unless you subscribe to reincarnation), there was nothing before birth.

Looking at the world and universe around me the fact that entropy can be physically proven is enough evidence for me to believe that my existence is subject to the law of entropy. Creation does not guarantee long or even endless existence, in fact endless existance would be abhorrent to me in the same way a Groundhog Day scenario would be.

As to heaven, I believe i am already there, I have a great life, great wife, great children and the ability to experience life's richness. In fact I think the traditionally held christian concept of heaven would also be abhorrent as the thing that makes life so interesting and worth living is the risks you must take in living it. Without that risk is existence worthwhile? Not in my opinion.

Does God exist? Yes. In as much as there is a belief that actually forms that existence. Is there a physical being that is god? Well that is yet to be proven.

The early Christians knew the idea of reincarnation, but I do not know how they understood the concept: as a superior essence lasting on, or an individual soul moving on from body to body. There are religion-scientists and historians who imply that maybe Jesus, before he reached the age at which the bible starts to tell tories of him, maybe was travelling to India and came into contact with Buddhist concepts. That may very well be possible, since it would explain why there are so many parallels between Buddhist and Jesus' ideas (and I mean Jesus, not what the church made of him, between the church and buddhist view of the world obviously there is no parallel at all).

Buddha denied the idea of an individual "soul" that survives the body and begins a new cycle once the former body has been destroyed. Man is not a host and soul is not a Goa'uld worm. :) However, buddha hinted at the existence of an existence that must be understood in a higher context, a true self that in basic is a One-ness, doesn't get born and thus cannot die, and of whose existence all forms are just a temporary reflections interacting with each other and giving birth to a dance of colours and shadows, each such "reflection" of the higher Oneness not so much being just a part of it but being "it" in completeness, though no reflection has any substance and existence in itself. These reflections, that we call the world, the living beings, the things, are empty in themselves, they show us a world that the way we perceive it is just a delusion - that delusion exist, we see it and we fall for it, but what it shows us in content, is not real, and has no substance. It's like a fata morgana.

In the end, if it is something like this, we all must not find any spiritual fullfillment or justification for our existence, for since we are already "there" (since we, the reflections that we are, are the One-ness anyway), we must not and cannot go anywhere anyway. We can just trouble the water by shaking the waves without need, believing in the false idea that we must "reach" something and must try to get into a "heaven" because we want to avoid a "hell". Heaven and hell are two states of human mind that man forms up - all by himself, and there is nobody and nothing promising him reward or threatening him penalty for doing so. We can trouble the water and add to the dance of reflections we call "the world", if we want. But we could as well let it be.

This is my understanding of "sin": to lose or to reject this knowledge about our already present, always existent "higher" origin, and to start making things comolicated and worse by trying to acchieve a solvation that we already are embedded in, and never had left: the salvation of understanding who, or better: what we are, and what we are not. Sin is - lacking insight, lacking knowledge, lacking own experience. We mess up things by your egos' narcissim, and our intellect running amok since we do not keep it under control. Our clever ideas and fantastic conceptions run an eons-long olympic competetion of who can run the fastest, jumps the widest, reaches the highest. Our egos claim medals for out acchievements in this championship, and it makes us believe that once we have enough medals, we will be saved and will be given access to a paradise, "paradise" understood materialistically or religiously. Not only relgions are prone to falling for this trap - scientists and social reformers can be that prone, too. The result can be unjutsified, uncritical optimism into materialistic ideas and concepts, from the hedonism of the capitalistic world to the uncritical implementation of possibly dangerous technologies that do not get crticially questioned because they are new, and "new" makes them attractive. Where all this happens at the cost of our exploration of whom and what we really are, then nothing good usually comes from it, that way we mess up the world we live in and harm ourselves in the best of intentions. It's just that these our intentions maybe are reaching too short.

Spirituality in my understanding is trying to understand the nature and reason of our existence by introspection, by observing how our minds call the world that we believe to perceive into existence, and how "mind" manifestates itself. This is the path of experiencing ourselves. Science tries to make conclusions on the nature of reality and things existing by describing them empirically, checking for patterns that may reveal to us why and how things are, where they come from, and where they go. Spirituality is about going into the thing itself, science is about describing the thing from the outside as best as is possible, and from the outer appearance make conclusions on the inner reason. Objectivity and a lack of sentimentalities are virtues in both approaches.

Religion is neither the one, nor the other, it is hallucinating and fantasy. It obstructs the path of introspection and own experience by raising a dogma that should neither be examined nor questioned, but simply should be believed and taken for granted although there is no objective justification for doing so, it just promises to be a shortcut of greater comfort and easiness, to bypass the more difficult path of spirituality and/or science. You are spiritual for your own well-being and by changing yourself becoming of benefit for others as well. But you are being talked into being religious not for your own well-being, but the interest of others for gaining control and power over people, inclduing yourself. Spirituality and (institutional) religion (dogmas) are antagonists, seen that way.

We all are dreams within one dream. Dust and shadows, winds in the leaves, the waves on the ocean's surface. Stick to the things in life as if they are substantial and real, and you will become a prisoner and miss the meaning of it all, being blind and fall to despair over the existential questions of life. Let it all go (even your desire to let things go ;) ), and become free. We shall deal with the things of life as if we do not own them, not craving for either poverty nor wealth, neither desiring them nor refusing them, but taking things for what they are: having no substance in themselves, being mere reflections of what lies behind, sometimes, rarely, shining through between the lines of reality, although it is always there.

A later teacher of mine, running a taoistic-buddhist centre in Germany, once wrote in a book this (tranlsated from the German):

The letting go of all ideas of God and all religious thoughts one is fond of, is an absolute prerequisite for true mystical experience. […] But experience has shown that the letting go of personal idols and religious symbols is espe-cially difficult for those, whose personality structure shows the strongest egocentricity and focussing on themselves. They are afraid to lose everything, and therefore they cling to their small, mortal self with all their might. When one is looking closer to it, one will recognize that most people are not about a living experience of the divine essence, but are more about a maintaining of their personal ideas of the god they are fond of, and about wallowing religious feelings. But true mystic has nothing to do with emotional rapture and inappropriate holiness, these belong to the realm of mysticism, which only is a distortion of true and pure mystic. […] Man in general tends to fooling himself and looking for a short-cut, a religion of superficial consolation, an ideal world without problems and challenges, where everything falls into its’ correct place… […] The clinging to superficial forms and religious practices is one of the greatest dangers on the spiritual way. They are shackles which bind us to signs and symbols which actually should only show us the way inwards. Therefore every symbol shows towards something that is beyond itself and that cannot be named or displayed. To go beyond religious signs and symbols therefore does not mean to refuse these symbols, but to strive for what they are pointing at.