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STT
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He is able to do things which is beyond our capabilities and imagination. Gods are not creator and the only distinction between them and us is on the fact that they are by far superior to us.
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STT
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I have problems with the concept of creation, including the creation of Angels. Therefore I don’t believe in Angels as beings which are created by God. If you wish I can give you the link to the thread which I discuss the issues related to the creation.
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Aloysium
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I isolated this quote from your excellent post to highlight the fact that we do not approach God as individuals alone, but as part of a religious community - His Church. Faith is not something we make up or figure out, but is rather a shared gift from God. He grants us the knowledge, sowing its seeds with reckless abandon, for us to grow and pass on to one another, neglect or abandon as we we will. The wisdom and understanding He has provided through scripture, tradition and our various experiences unite us as one body, made real through our actions, compliant with His divine will that we become Love.
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o_mlly
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Eucharist, the source and summit of our Catholic faith, allows us to break the bonds of time. At Eucharist, doing as Jesus commanded—“Do this in memory of me,” we call to mind the sacrifice of Jesus making His sacrifice a present reality.
Receiving the sacrament increases the communicant’s union with the Risen Lord and strengthens the bonds of charity between the communicant and the community, reinforcing the unity of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ. While Eucharist is personal experience of communion with Jesus, it cannot be only that. Paul knew that Christ cannot be separated from his members, and chides the Corinthians for their poor devotion to the Last Supper (1 Cor. 11:18-25).
Paul’s message is not liturgical but theological. He was not criticizing the Corinthians for praying the wrong prayers, singing the wrong songs, or standing up instead of kneeling down. He criticized them for trying to remember Christ without remembering his Body. The Risen Christ is glorified in all his members, including the poor and the suffering.
At the Eucharist, I am most aware of God’s loving presence. My route to Communion at our Church leads me by the last seven Stations of the Cross. As I pace toward the minister, my eyes pass slowly over the images. I am awed and ashamed at the pain we inflicted on this loving man and my heart wrenches at the sight of His mother holding the lifeless body of her innocent son. While there is nothing I can do to merit God’s love, there is also nothing I can do to lose it. Christ’s love is at once an inexhaustible gift and lesson to me. I acknowledge to the minister my belief and receive Jesus. I walk back to my pew, astonished and grateful that His love persists.
I experience Eucharist, at first, as communion with Christ; an intensely personal experience of gratitude for the gift of God’s unconditional love. The experience of Christ flows easily to an experience of community. Through Him, with Him and in Him, we are one Bread, one Body.
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Aloysium
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fhansen
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We’re created beings, dependent on a designer/creator. We don’t make the rules. We’re the recipients of our existence and the life we’re born into. We experience a world that’s already set up-and that we’re an innate part of the moment we enter it. We already know many things, how to smile, play, interact socially, we have many instinctual appetites that we act upon-all without needing to learn. And, believe it or not, we know God when we “see” Him. And that’s because we’re already programmed to. Now, being limited, finite beings we arguably cannot say we know *anything *with absolute certainty-or at least we can always question our knowledge and our ability to know anything. And yet we must act upon our beliefs all the time, just as we act upon scientific knowledge or theories in order to accomplish one endeavor or another.
But what I’m getting at is that the knowledge of God, to know Him in the direct, immediate sense, to commune with Him, is something we’re made for. And so that knowledge, that “vision”, is recognizable as it’s received, and to the degree that it’s experienced; it can be made clearer or dimmer depending on ourselves and God’s grace in granting it. And so, to put it another way, we know goodness when we experience it, as other posters have mentioned. To know God immediately, to be in His presence, is to know a peace and well-being and acceptance that passes all understanding. It’s to experience love on a scale that one cannot begin to imagine-or adequately put into words. It’s a virtually tactile knowingness, to put it poorly I’m sure, and a total gift.
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STT
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There are beings that are able to give the impression that they are whoever they want.
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STT
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How? The impression is the impression. There is nothing you can do about that?
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fhansen
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Because God made us to know Him. It’s not as if it’s impossible to fool us-and I’ve already stated that we’re limited in our ability to know anything for sure. But many would say that if the God they’ve been shown is somehow *not *the real one-He’d still be worth spending eternity with. We have to have faith at some point, that just as we know and experience and desire good things in this life, there are also good things that are recognizable and desirable in the spiritual realm. And *He *doesn’t fool us:
**“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. 8For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.
9“Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? 10Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? 11If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him! ** Matt 7:7-11
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fhansen
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And also, the more intense experiences can carry with them an almost strange sense of total familiarity-as in family-as if you’ve met someone who you’ve once known intimately in the past like a long-lost relative-someone you forgot you knew until you met them again. But strange at the same time because of the incomparable profundity of the experience and because you’re also acutely aware of the infinite superiority of this Being who’s condescended to meet you, and who loves you with a boundless, unconditional love.
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BrunoMaria
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“Which God” you seem to ask - do you? A to God terribly insulting question; for all man-made “gods” are dead mateial - stones, or imagination. The one and only alive God, is the One who revealed Himself in the Old Covenant by „I am who I am - the I am“ in Exodus 3,14, and later manyfold revealed in the New Covenant by Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father. Match “The Creed”.
A silly young man asked me, when I tried to convince him about God: „which God do you mean, every religion’s git its own God!“
That’s ridiculous and attests the complete lack of education about the one and only truth we were given by God Himself. The God of Abraham, Izaak and Jacob, who revealed Himself manifold.
In such cases one’s got to start by nil, as if talking to a San who’s never seen a book.
Or is your question rather of the kind like: What most convinces you that God whom you are connected with in prayer, is actually with you?
That then would be another thread
Yours
Bruno
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fhansen
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deleted, redundant
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the_universal
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I didn’t experience God until I started learning more about the Church teachings on faith and reason, origins of the universe, reconciling science with religion etc. I studied physical sciences all through school and post-secondary school, and believed that science had all the answers I ever needed. Then I had a realization that science was not the thing I needed to pursue in and of itself but that science was a tool I was using to discover truths about a created universe. Science was a window into another realm that I will not truly know until after this life.
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