In reading your post the descriptive image of the Ying and Yang came to mind - force for good and a force for evil being essentially evenly matched - doing good and evil deeds respectively as they interact with the world and the humans in it. Is this a valid description of your explanaiton[sic]?
the yin-yang is a motif. it is an easy way of approximating reality. but it isn’t the measure of tao.
The Tao gives birth to One.
One gives birth to Two.
Two gives birth to Three.
Three gives birth to all things.
All things have their backs to the female
and stand facing the male.
When male and female combine,
all things achieve harmony.
Ordinary men hate solitude.
But the Master makes use of it,
embracing his aloneness, realizing
he is one with the whole universe.
After we recognize that whatever we come up with will have genuine limitations…
i can imagine a world without gods, and i live in that world.
my guess is that theists cannot. they cannot imagine a world without their personal jesus, an important limitation that all christians should be aware of.
just because you can only imagine that men are the only animals that do this or that doesn’t mean that somebody else can’t have a deeper understanding of nature. other animals besides people DO do things like form gangs and rob other animals (ants, notably).
watch this video, it shows that elephants have feelings.
video.nationalgeographic.com/video/animals/mammals-animals/elephants/elephant_african_mourning/
here is an elephant painting
youtube.com/watch?v=He7Ge7Sogrk
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In all of creation there is nothing recorded of anything - except man - identifying that God exists and that worship of God is appropriate behavior.
how can you know this? please be specific, this is a real question. you speak like there is an easy way to check, across the entire universe, whether some other animal hasn’t developed religion. there have certainly been other animals on this earth (cro-magnon) in the past that exhibited religious tendencies.
and then there all the modern humans, and their myriad religions. it seems to me that the most likely predictor of a person’s religion is where they were born, and how they were raised. but if you are a true christian, you are limited to only using the bible for reference, which means that you are stuck in a world, in the middle of a tiny universe, that is only 6000 years old.
so that’s a limitation, but it does solve the problems of other animals having religions. if the bible says the earth is 10k yrs old, and cro-magnons are 45k yrs old, then hey presto, cro-magnon didn’t exist. and it’s an easy way to keep believing in other fables, like noah, if you can just limit your understanding in a particular way. it’s like a labotomy.
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This means that there are those who freely choose NOT to worship God.
is there a distinction to be drawn between worshipping God and actually believing any of it? this is another real question;p
free will is an illusion.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will#Free_will_as_illusion
but your statement basically accuses me of not believe in God because i don’t feel like it. you don’t call me lazy, or evil, or anything like that, you don’t assign any motives.
if i told you that you had to worship a unicorn, and that if you did, when you died you went to ice cream mountain, would you do it? you don’t have to believe any of it, just worshipping the unicorn is enough according to this weird unicorn religion. would you do that?
i guess that i could force myself to worship your God, but i don’t think i could ever believe any of it. and this might well be due to my own limitations. i haven’t ever seen any miracles, so i don’t believe in them.
but i like to think that if jesus christ floated down on a cloud to talk to me, i would listen. and if i met st peter after i died, i would seriously alter my world-view at that time when newer, better evidence became available. but right now, i’m limited by my understanding of life/death, and total un-belief in an afterlife. i’m still religious, so you can attribute this to my misunderstanding of tao;p.
There are no areas of worship constructed by cows to worship God, or areas where the herd engages in prayer or some kind of aspect that freely worshiping God is what a cow should do. This is unique to man, and it stems from the ability to go beyond nature, use intellect and then freely make the conscious choice to engage in worship of God.
