Our God
 

Our God is so pathetic that we have to kill people for It. It doesn't know how. So we do God's work.

A small god for small people.

Je Suis Charlie

Or God
Is a very very very fine God
With 2 cats in the yard
Life used to be so hard.
Now everything is easy cuz of you.

Must be. I said god damn people, and he did.

No. That's your god.

My God is an awesome God.

No one on this planet is killing people for God.

They may think they are...

Our God?


You got a mouse in your pocket?

You are easily decieved, grassshopper, by false prophets. The force is strong. Go with the force. Impose your god's will. Do unto others as he cannot do. As was decreed by the Founders. May the Lord be with you.

Kiss my ass.

Whose god???

There are SO many of them!

Its all about someone's god being better than someone else's god. Just stop the nonsense altogether. Please. Just take god out of the equation.

Enjoy hell. I hear it's cozy warm.

hearsay: inadmissible

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is not omnipotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is He neither able nor willing? Then why call Him God?

Epicurus (c. 341 - c. 270 BC)

The question is who defines evil? A toddler thinks it's evil when his mother doesn't let him eat ice cream for breakfast, but from our perspective we can see he is wrong. From God's perspective maybe human suffering and death aren't really as bad as we think they are, because there is more going on than we can understand with our immature little brains.

He came to us in the form of George Burns. He told us quite simply how he works. Epicurus was too old (and dead) to hear him.

Is that what your call your head. Explains the extremism.

It was and is those immature brains that conceive of a God Almighty, in the first place.

The argument doesn't pend on the definition of evil, just the existence, which religions generally assume.

I don't equate religion with God, myself.

I am evil, hear me roar. Meow.

Do you not think there is evil in the world?

It's a loaded word. I think there are things in the world which are less than good. But those things are also necessary to existence. Tragedy can make us stronger. Struggle gives us purpose. Loss makes us grateful for what we still have. Any advancement has to presuppose a less-than-ideal situation to begin with. There is evil, but in the long run it's good for us.

That is a new perspective. Please expand on it.

God is God. Religion is rules people try to make about God.

Striving to understand God is laudable; believing one has even come close to doing so is laughable. But the toddler analogy holds--most of it is as harmless as it is petty, like watching children on a playground figure out for themselves how to deal with each other and the world. It's good for the toddlers to learn how to pretend, and feel, and search for answers, and militant atheists are like the six-year-old rolling his eyes at the dumb babies. The six-year-old doesn't know shit either, but the adults don't hold that against him.

The 90 year old's are nearly as ignant, relative to God scale. I agree. We have no idea what we don't know.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRqijH1dDdI

'nuff said.

Cellar member, tuba player, and blogger Kirk Israel, is the son of two ministers. Both Mom and Dad being long time soldiers in the Salvation Army. He's written an interesting piece about his journey with the faith.

That's how it works in movies; add people to the story whose purpose is to die, sometimes horribly, so the hero gains motivation.

In scriptwriting, it's a bit lazy and cliched. Doing it with actual people would be malevolent.

Unless a worse malevolence would actually be to have everyone sitting on a beach, relaxing, never doing or feeling anything at all for eternity. I'll take the pain and triumph package over the numbness any day.

The movie is only cliche because it is necessarily short on time and nuance. But if you bring the view up to a grander perspective on humanity as a whole, a person's complete life becomes lazy and cliche. Over the course of our lives almost everyone gets to be a dozen different types of both hero and sacrifice at different times--or at least we are offered the opportunity to be--and anything less would effectively be like being dead anyway.

Except for those who die young, presumably to keep everyone else's lives eventful.

You just said that you believe that you are superior to the vast majority of people on Earth.

Wow.

:3_eyes:

I just can't get myself to accept the idea that the entirety of the universe, and everything in it, is all just one big coincidence.

YMMV, of course.

You didn't read/understand the post that Pico and ME was responding to.

You say you don't know the nature of the universe. Well yeah. It doesn't come with a user manual. But you say you know the nature of God? Are you sure?

How could you know? Do you think you know because of those books humans wrote, where *they* claimed to know the nature of God?

There have been countless deities worshipped over countless centuries and everyone that believed in them were sure their "God" or "Gods" were the only true ones. I'll stick with just being as good a person as I can because it's the right thing to do and, in the words of Iris Dement, "I think I'll just let the mystery be."

right. doing the right thing for the wrong reason is not much better than doing the wrong thing.

I gotta disagree there. Doing the right thing is always much better than doing the wrong thing, regardless of motivation. It makes for fewer dickheads in the world, and we all appreciate that.

so intent is irrelevant?

Who decides what's the right thing and what's the wrong thing?

Not to mention deciding when it doesn't matter, like trying to decide whether to scratch an itch with the left or right hand.

I thought that "eventful" was equivalent to "evil," in your mind. Doesn't the one who dies young get the better deal, then?

Do you believe in the possibility of a malevolent God?

No, the "evil=eventful" was from your "without evil we'd be bored on a beach" scenario. I'm not the one equating evil with life experience.I don't believe in any gods. "Believe in the possibility" is different; if a god is defined in a way that it could magically hide from any detection, then it is logically possible that it is doing so.

But if you're asking whether I think that whatever a theoretical god wants or does is, by definition, good, then I do not believe that.

I am incapable of understanding the true nature of God, as all men are.

Your making up things I didn't say. I never said I understood the true nature of God.

No one has the right to belittle my faith, just because they have none [/paraphrasing "Broadchurch", somewhat], and I am not belittling anyone's lack thereof.

I responded to a statement that it took an immature mind to conceive of God, as we are speaking of God. If one logically allows that statement to continue, it would follow that anyone who believes in God would therefore have to have an equally, or even more immature mind. Which would lead one to believe that the speaker of that statement obviously believes himself or herself to be of a more mature mind than that of the majority of people who believe in God, which, like it or not, is most of the people on Earth.

Where did I infer that I have an understanding of the true nature of God? Anyone with any knowledge of any religion (that involves God) knows that man cannot understand the true nature of God. If they could, they would know which religion is 'correct', and we would not have all these conflicting ideas.

We also wouldn't have arguments like this one.

Well sorry, I screwed up.

I think maybe I didn't mean to say you as in you, Gravdigr, but you as in, all y'all. But somewhere in writing it I didn't drift that way, after quoting you, and that was just terrible of me.

The question applies to all, doesn't belittle anyone.

I feel like I can't belittle anyone, because I have been wrong about so much in my life, that it is surely not for me to say what is right for anyone else.

Undertoad: Agressively Humble

Like everyone else. Some others just have better safety nets. :haha:

My road to wisdom... Finding out how much I don't know, then finding out how much I was sure of but was wrong, followed by the revelation I don't know shit... but neither does anyone I know. :blush:

No one knows how much they don't know. Knowing you don't know how much you don't know let's you know that you'll never know how much everyone else doesn't know. Knowing that no one else knows what they don't know makes you... Sorry, lost my train of thought.

If the dice are thrown enough times, then it was not a coincidence. It was inevitable.

On the scales we're talking about, it's just as likely to say that a more intelligent, more powerful, more overarching life form is also inevitable. Then the only question is, how much more intelligent/powerful/overarching does a life form have to become before it is indistinguishable from what our puny brains would think of as a God?

I judge them by penis size. :D

You ask it what it needs with a starship.

Coincidence and chance are terribly close to the same thing.

Happenstance.

Six of one, a half-dozen of the other.

An accident.

But only after you declare that suffering is good for you.

Just in case that's the case, I went back and re-read the post that she quoted in her post. I think I understand it well enough.

But just in case that wasn't the case, I re-read the entire thread.

I stand by everything I've said.

You called out Pico and ME for reusing Clodfobble's phrase.

You and I may not agree on what Clod was saying.

Maybe I misunderstood what Clod was saying.

Maybe you misunderstood what Clod was saying.

If you take away someone's guilt for something they've actually done, you turn them into a monster, but Kirk would (and did) happily go back in time to prevent something bad from happening, when he could.

Different context.

And from any perspective, the same immature brains that are incapable of comprehending God's purposes are the same ones that invented religion.

I'm pretty sure Pico was talking about the fact that if there is this superior being who might be called God, our brains (the whole human race) would all be considered immature. Even the brains of the most enlightened among us.

Anyway, this thread is too philosophical for me. I really can't be arsed.

How immature am I?

Pico can talk? IT'S A MIRACLE!

I'm sure ME is capable of explaining her meaning.

Yes, but there still seems to be confusion, and I don't think there should be, so I am speaking for her.

Probably she couldn't be arsed anymore either though. It's all speculation anyway and I think it's unfortunate that this discussion has made at least one member feel bad.

I am trying to be a peacemaker, so stop being a dick.