We can certainly imagine such a thing … but of course all modern man has to do is be intellectually honest with himself and he will realize there is no grand architect hidden behind the veil who will answer our prayers and whom we will spend an eternity with in a mythological garden or any other such nirvana.
How is that being “intellectually honest” any more than believing it would be? You yourself have written that it is something that we can imagine, so some people imagine that it is true and some people imagine that it is not true. It seems to me it would be more honest of you to admit that you are doing the same amount of imagining as the rest of us, unless you’ve somehow died and come back to life to report to us that there is no heaven or hell and we are all wasting our time here. Is that why you’re on this board?
However, this need not be a harsh reality. What’s wrong after all with placing our hope in ourselves? A large part of mankind is stuck with this idea that it’s unlawful or even wicked to imagine the possibility of controlling our own destiny. Every religion has a phrase for it … usually we’re accused of wanting to be our own gods.
What makes you think that man is not in control of his own destiny if he belongs to a religion? I can’t speak for others, but in Christianity you are absolutely in control: You can choose to do good and follow of the way of the Lord, or you can choose to reject Him. Both are choices you have to make, because God gave you free will so that you may CHOOSE to follow Him. The choices that you make lead to outcomes that you are informed of beforehand (if you pay attention, that is), so you absolutely cannot deny your own responsibility in shaping your own destiny. So, in reality, we are engaged in shaping our own destiny not only with regard to the sort of scientific and other achievement in the secular world that I’m sure is your personal barometer of progress, but also in the most important, enduring aspect of existence: the eternal resting place of our souls.
You have a choice, but it seems you want to convince us that religion robs you of any sort of free agency so that you can have an excuse to abdicate your ultimate responsibility to your Creator and your own soul. It is YOU who have given up the ultimate control of your life by leaving God, and now you claim that those of us who remain with Him are the ones who are surrendering our autonomy. I do not buy that for a second.
I say since god is a fictitious concept to begin with we really can’t be something that doesn’t exist now can we. What we can do is have hope in a future that we can create.
Who is talking about “being” God? Do you think you are on a Mormon discussion board?
If we want peace, a cure for all disease, no more hunger or violence, or even wilder ideas like reaching back in time and resurrecting our ancestors or living forever … the real hope we have of accomplishing any of these things is if WE do them.
Interesting examples…are you interested in living forever because, for you, this life is all that there is? I think that would be awful, but I guess to you I’m the crazy one here.
Anyway, of course these things will exist if we make them. What kind of statement is that? Is your idea of God a being who primarily concerns himself with making scientific advancements? Is heaven a scientific laboratory to you?
There are no invisible angels or demons persuading men to act one way or the other; and IMO it’s folly to even imagine such a thing and surrender our fate to the invisible and unreal.
As I argued above, it is the atheist such as yourself who is surrendering to the unreal, the illusion of this world that seems so permanent and concrete. You claim to have all the control in the world, but you do not see that this is ultimately not why any of us are here (to control the world). If you are only here to advance more and more along some sort of scalar progression of scientific progress and secular rationalism, then what happens when one does not proceed the other as you seem to think that they should? I don’t think any rational person could claim, for instance, that mankind somehow became more peaceful/enlightened with the scientific advancements that lead to the atom bomb, as spectacular and impressive as they are if you are able to detach them from the reality of what the resulting device was to be used for.
Even disregarding such a dramatic example, I could still ask how you can ever accurately measure your life and its progress via scientific means. It would seem to me that science has provided you (or is in the process of providing you) with inumerable ways to control the world. You can talk to anyone in the world at a moments notice using your phone, or write anti-religious screeds to your heart’s content using the internet, or travel the entire world in a matter of hours in an aeroplane. What does it all amount to? Is it all intrinsically good just because it is new and allows you to further your dominion over the world? In that case, what is left to do? Sure, you can imagine things that do not yet exist and work to bring them into existence (your earlier examples of resurrecting the dead, etc), but then you are engaged in the exact same thing that the religious among you are engaged in: Seeing existence as it is on this Earth as ultimately less than what it could or should be, and trying to do your part to change it. You try to do this with only science, because to you that is the only “real” source of progress, and we try to do that with religion (and science, too; there are many Catholic scientists), because to us that is the only source of “real” progress, and everything else is just temporary.
