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buffalo
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He is perfectly just. He cannot lie. How would we expect differently?
Oh, by the way you can sin all your life, you can deny my existence, you can swear at me at the minute of your death and still deny my existence, but you can still get to see me in the beatific vision? If this is the condition of your soul at death it renders you incapable.
Are you expecting God to force you to choose Him?
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liquidpele
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I expect him to make the choice fair.
I don’t have anything against God or Unicorns or whatever, I simply ignore them because I don’t see any strong evidence, direct or indirect, of them. Perhaps God could provide some proof beyond tree stumps and toast with a vague resemblance of a woman on them. In short, I don’t go so far as to reject God, I simply don’t believe such a thing likely exists given my reality.
You can come up with as many rationalizations as you want for why faith is required and why God doesn’t make his presence obvious (or even why he chooses to do some miracles but not others), but I don’t care about that anymore than I care about the rantings of street preachers. If God wants my belief, I need more than a book written by people and a bunch of (mostly scientifically illiterate) people trying to cram the ideas from said book into my skull.
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buffalo
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He doesn’t hide. He is visible in nature’s intelligibility, He is with us in prayer, the Eucharist etc…
The kicker is Divine Revelation. He has revealed Himself. You have the testimony and witness of those that have gone before you as well as contemporaries.
You will not humble yourself and I assume tight now till your dying day will expect Him to knock you off your horse. You have been told, you will not listen. Until this changes you have decided your own fate.
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liquidpele
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You said it… I have the witness of people before me. People that believed the Earth was flat, that didn’t know about bacteria or viruses, etc. Even modern people I don’t believe just because they want me too. Why should I? They’re people, not God.
I won’t humble myself?? I believe I’m an insignificant spec in a cosmos so large I can’t fathom it, and that in short time I will blink out of existence forever. You believe you’re special and get to go to a perfect heaven for ever and ever. Exactly who is humble here? We all decide out fates, but we do that with the best information we have, and that’s exactly what I’m doing.
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buffalo
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Until the very end you still get to choose.
We are very humble. I am not special at all and fear I won’t enjoy God in heaven. I know without a doubt what a lowly creature I am before God and yet He still loves me and you.
We see God’s beauty and power in the cosmos. We humans can do none of that. The Bible is rich with that understanding. We stand in awe of his wondrous deeds.
I too was working with what I thought was the best information. Then I pursued the truth a bit more. I opened my mind and heart to God which is the definition of faith. It is amazing what I found and experience.
I believe I already covered the Myth of the Flat Earth.
An understanding of bacteria and viruses do not show us how to get to heaven. They are incidental.
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Cbailey2
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And so He does. The human conception of what’s “fair” however is a terrible metric for judging an omniscient deity. I guess we can take comfort in the fact that He’s a whole heck of a lot fairer than you or I would be.
I suggest you open your eyes next time you look. There is plenty of evidence that leads billions of people in this world to believe in God, but, in your analysis none of it is “strong.” That’s a nice caveat that leaves a whole lot of art to your otherwise “scientific” analysis: basically, anything you agree with is “strong” and anything you don’t isn’t. That’s not exactly a reliable framework for gauging the complex reality of the universe.
“…given my reality.” Exactly! You admit that your reality might not be the one the rest of us live in. Or do we all personally own our own realities, where we are our own little god’s, serving as the ultimate arbiter of what exists and what doesn’t (I’ve never seen an atom, says prehistoric man, therefore it doesn’t exist). My point is that every human mind is finite; all human comprehension, limited. To hold yourself up as the ultimate arbiter of reality is to live in a very small universe.
“If God wants my belief…” If there is a creator of the universe, who made the stars, the planets, all life, etc., wouldn’t it make more sense to actually pursue knowledge of Him instead of forcing Him to pursue loyalty from you? Seriously, take a moment and think about how little a potential creator of all that is would owe a tiny human being like you or me.
I’m having a hard time understanding how even in an atheistic universe you put yourself at the center! If God exists or doesn’t exist, this universe owes you absolutely nothing in the way of proof in order to exist - not an atom, not an ant, and certainly not God. If God doesn’t exist, you are less than a biological accident of chance - insignificant and as worthless as a grain of sand on a beach. If God does exist, at least you have the fact that He intentionally created you and loves you.
Finally, if you aren’t interested in “rationalizations” (which is exactly what you have done in this defense of your declared non-interest in God), why are you on this website? Trying to convince optimists that pessimism really is a more rational way to look at a glass of water?
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Detales
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“The human conception of what’s “fair” however is a terrible metric for judging an omniscient deity.” As is an anthropomorphic religionist concept of Deity.
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liquidpele
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I had written out a lot of rebuttal to your other points, but this knocked me down a little, you are indeed correct and I was ranting a little, and for that I apologize.
Why I am on this site is a good question. You and the other poster mentioned how I should take the witness of others as evidence, and how so many believed in this World. This fact fascinates me a bit. My presence here is part of my overall search for truth and understanding. In that respect, I should not have interjected my own views so stringently, I guess sometimes it’s human nature to do so though.
One last clarification though. Please keep in mind that I don’t demand or expect evidence from anything, but I do hold to the principal that it’s likely not true if I actually go and try to *find * evidence but am unable to (including asking those who claim to have seen the evidence about said evidence). I simply suppose I find it ironic that those believing in a perfect God would also believe such a being would be so black and white in his judgment when nothing in all of his creation appears to hold the same standard.
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liquidpele
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On the contrary, some of them can send you to heaven fairly quickly
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Cbailey2
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Totally agree, except when that Deity goes out of His way to reveal His truth to humankind. It makes sense to believe God when He tells us we are created in His image (anthropomorphism) and that He is the way, the truth, and the life (religionist - truth is an absolute and has a correct form).
What doesn’t make sense is when God tells you He is a just judge and then you attribute actions to Him that are unjust. Then you are dealing with a Deity who is a liar and cannot be taken seriously for anything he says.
Or you can believe that God never revealed anything to mankind because God doesn’t exist - in which case, you are free to attribute whatever attributes you want to to your deity (invisible, pink, unicornish…)
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buffalo
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Correct - you know neither the day nor the time… Good idea to be in a state of grace all the time.On the contrary, some of them can send you to heaven fairly quickly
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Cbailey2
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Hmm…I suppose I see your difficulty but I guess I’d put it this way: let’s suppose that there are a whole bunch of gods hanging around and each one decides to create his or her own universe. That is to say, they author their own creations, just as a poet authors a poem. That poem is deeply personal to that author and is a reflection of that author in every word, in every punctuation, and every space. Say one god wants to call “red” black and “green” white - in their universe, black will be red and green will be white. So too would evil become good and good become evil. Those gods, by necessity, would be perfect because they created their universes (and all of the laws in them).
I don’t agree however that nothing in this creation appears to hold the same standard. I would assert that everything but man seems to hold this standard. That reliability is precisely the reason why any science is even possible. Light holds a constant speed. The atom decays at a constant rate. Chemical reactions occur at precise mixtures. Gravity is a precise force. Carbon, despite being inorganic, somehow forms the backbone of all life. I guess I don’t understand why it would be so peculiar for there to be constant moral laws as well as the physical ones we know about. I would actually argue that the reliability of all the rest of creation would seem to imply that humankind has immutable laws that govern us as well (and a perfect God that created those laws and everything else).
A number of beliefs necessarily follow the believe in God. If you answer yes to God, then you and all other humans have been intentionally created. The question that follows is “to what purpose were humans created?” How you believe that question is answered shapes the measures and metrics that evaluate whether or not you are functioning as intended. If humans were created to kill dolphins, then your lack of dolphin killing makes you (empirically) a bad human.
We believe that humans were created to love God and love one another - how we do this things judges whether or not we are a good creation or a bad creation.
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liquidpele
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I don’t think that is a fair comparison though. Forces and other natural law are boundary conditions. Light, for instance, can be slowed down. The only thing that is constant is the maximum speed c. My problem is with the black and white decision, the cut off point. Why can we decide to do what we want as we please for a certain amount of time, and then BAM it’s forever A or B. Speaking of forever, I also find that a bit of a stretch.
I do see your point on a creation’s purpose defining it’s morality… my question to that is how do you know what your purpose is? I mean, you have a book and the assurance of a whole lot of people, but so do most religions and even cults. Do you have faith that your faith is the correct faith or something?
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buffalo
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Here again this is an age old question - why do we exist - what is our purpose?
Without outside (name removed by moderator)ut what do we conclude?
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Cbailey2
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I’ll start with the later point first. I was raised catholic but I didn’t really grow into it so well - by that, I mean I knew the theology, sort of, but I had way too many questions in high school and college to really buy in to it - you know? The realization that “love is the answer” was really the thing that brought my catholic faith back to life. I looked at the world and saw it for what it is: a deeply flawed place with a lot of problems. And the more problems I looked at the more I realized that love was the only solution. And I don’t mean the love that appears in pop music or many a novel but the love of 1 Corinthians. The only religion that focuses on love in its most expansive form - love that is God - is Christianity (i’d be open to discussion on this point).
Secular studies seem to have backed up the idea that love is the purpose of humankind: one a forty year study that followed a graduating class from yale that found the only thing that brought fulfillment was the deep bond that they had with others (read: love) and another that found that happiness is contagious. I can’t cite them off the top of my head, but I know they are out there.
As for the first point, I’ve always pictured it as thus: while we are on earth we exist in time, thus we are able to change ourselves and who we are. We can change from day to day, year to year (not that we always take advantage of that). But I believe that God exists outside of time and that heaven is something akin to another dimension where time does not flow in a line as it does in our dimension. A thousand years is a day to God and a day is a thousand years. If that is the case, our fate, our ultimate choice on whether we love God or not, is a moment that lasts an eternity - if that makes any sense (being outside of time).
Honestly, I don’t really know how it works and I’m not sure I have to. Everything I’ve seen in modern physics seems to indicate that the universe is a lot weirder than I can understand or perceive. I believe in a just God who is love, who created both justice and love.
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liquidpele
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Thank you for the interesting post, your point of view is thoughtful and well explained
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Cbailey2
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No worries - I’m glad I could return the favor that others did for me. It took me a surprisingly long time to realize that love really is the answer to most questions worth asking. It’s unfortunate that so many people think that love as an answer is too idealistic or naive: I don’t think they fully appreciate the difference between the love we see in movies and tv and hear about on the radio and the love that is true and comes from God. I hope your searching is fruitful - I encourage you to read G.K. Chesterton’s “Orthodoxy.” There are some interesting ideas in there that have been weighing on my mind recently.Thank you for the interesting post, your point of view is thoughtful and well explained
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Mhz
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Liquid, while I do appreciate Cbailey2’s response regarding love and the 40 year study of a Yale graduating class; the study referred to has been debunked clearly as a myth propogated by a whole host of motivational teachers who have used it to make the same point Cbailey is suggesting. However, if the study had been conducted I personally believe it would be accurate. Our purpose in living would be found in the search and revelation of true love. The Greek, Agape type of love. Love that doesn’t seek its own. (So let the myth continue.)
Since nobody has a definitive answer, let’s speculate regarding our “purpose” for existing; as you suggested.
First, I seriously doubt the God of religion is a very accurate image. To damn the vast majority of humanity who never were consulted on their desire to exist and then add a little more drama with the threat of endless torment of these unfortunate experiments is about as far from the definition of Agape as possible. The typical defense of such a God is to describe how loving it is to have “free will” with the opportunity for eternal bliss. Tell that to the masses who missed the boat and are stuck with results of their human bent towards selfishness and foolish choices. That’s why many people reject the God of religion.
If there is a purpose in existing it would be for the God of creation to take a “free will” being and expose him to genuine agape love, for as long as it takes, and as much as it takes for him to “get it”. Love without end and love without failure. None of this “love means we have the right to send ourselves to Hell”, stuff. Genuine love would never give up on something it created when it has the power to do otherwise… and this idealistic God of my fantasy has all the power and time and love to do it.
Maybe it’s another myth but I really think that God, not only exists, but he intends to teach every soul he creates this kind of love. That would be perfection. Just like the parable of the 99 sheep… he ends up with 100% in the end. How he does it may be different in each of us but none would escape or fail the test if this is God’s divine purpose.
Experiencing and learning the reality of unconditional love is the only thing that is universally beneficial and desired by all of us. And if you don’t desire it then all that means is that God isn’t done with you, yet! Agape (true love) never fails; it couldn’t by my definition.
If we all came into existence without such knowledge and we all remained in the classroom until it was accomplished… that would be a faith and a God worth pursuing. It wouldn’t be a fear driven “absurd” kind of kinky love, but rather the type of love that perfected each and every one of us.
I personally think there is a good chance that this is the God we have the opportunity to believe in and he isn’t disturbed by all the bad press, poor biblical exegisis, or wrong image we portray of him; because he wins in the end, no matter what we teach or believe.
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buffalo
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Perhaps a good reading for you would be - The Diary of Sister Faustina Kowalska - Divine Mercy
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