Yahweh!

Montana Smith said:

Here's a little materialistic parable that is in no way meant to poke fun at faith:

When I was a child I was brought up to believe in the wonder of Lego.
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So, I do understand the warm and fuzzy feeling of comfort that some people can obtain from religious faith. It's just that I get the warm and fuzzy feeling from material objects that inspire nostalgia,

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Well, Montana, I hope for your sake that when you leave this world you run into Lego Jesus!

'Cause you don't want to see Lego Hell!

Good luck with material objects!

Mickiana said:

There is no correct path. The religious feeling is a very personal one and is also much the same by nature for everyone. The inspiring architecture of an old church, the majesty of a mountain, the serenity of a backyard garden, the stars or a kind act - are some of the things that can bring about a religious or reverent feeling. We are here, at least, to ponder.

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Funny, but There Is No Correct Path is practically another term for the New Age path. It's like goths saying they're nonconformists because they all wear the same black, noncomformists' uniform. (And New Age and pagan are almost synonymous. They just repackaged it and gave it a new name to make it more appealing.)

As RS said (almost correctly), who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life? That's what Jesus Christ called himself, saying, "No one gets to the Father except through me." The three options for this statement were the subject of a book. He's either liar, lunatic, or Lord. You can't say he was a great guy like many other great guys, or a prophet, like many other prophets.

And though no one has said it in this thread, 'All paths to the same God' is sure to come up at some point, so I'll head it off here by bringing it up myself. All religions are paths to the same God if you kind of close one eye, squint, and ignore 98% of each path's beliefs.

Now, as for the issue of eternity, heaven, and hell, look at it this way. Most people will at least admit that heaven and hell are possibilities. Give it a percentage if you like. Say there's a 10% chance, in your mind, that heaven and hell exist. Now, people spend a lot of money on the 1 in 600 million shot at winning the lottery. If you're a nonbeliever, but you're able to admit the possibility of heaven and hell, are you willing to risk eternity over a 1 in 10 chance?

That's a thought worth pondering.

goodeknight said:

Well, Montana, I hope for your sake that when you leave this world you run into Lego Jesus!

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goodeknight said:

'Cause you don't want to see Lego Hell!

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It's going to be all whiffy molten plastic.

Montana Smith said:

It's going to be all whiffy molten plastic.

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Rocket Surgeon said:

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Yeah, that guy looks much more fun!

(Trust you, Rocket!)

goodeknight said:

Now, as for the issue of eternity, heaven, and hell, look at it this way. Most people will at least admit that heaven and hell are possibilities. Give it a percentage if you like. Say there's a 10% chance, in your mind, that heaven and hell exist. Now, people spend a lot of money on the 1 in 600 million shot at winning the lottery. If you're a nonbeliever, but you're able to admit the possibility of heaven and hell, are you willing to risk eternity over a 1 in 10 chance?

That's a thought worth pondering.

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Pascal's wager, eh?

I know which side of the fence I'm on and am quite happy with my chances, thank you very much, but I've even run into a few believers who dismiss this beaten argument. You either have faith, or you do not, it's not an issue to gamble with - safe bet or not. Those who do suggest it either deserve a good smack on the head or should at the very least go into themselves and first check the purity of their own faith.

Their opinion, naturally, not mine. Though I admit I find it humorous.

Finn said:

Pascal's wager, eh?

I know which side of the fence I'm on and am quite happy with my chances, thank you very much, but I've even run into a few believers who dismiss this beaten argument. You either have faith, or you do not, it's not an issue to gamble with - safe bet or not. Those who do suggest it either deserve a good smack on the head or should at the very least go into themselves and first check the purity of their own faith.

Their opinion, naturally, not mine. Though I admit I find it humorous.

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You can't go round "saving" those who have no intention of being "saved". It's like being eaten by a shark, and a killer whale swims along and swallows both the shark and yourself.

To quote from Star Wars or Jewel of the Nile, "You call this a rescue?"

You can't give faith to anyone else without it being treated with suspicion. You have to find it for yourself, otherwise it's that quote from Romans about "all that is not of faith is sin", because it's a lie or a self-delusion.

If there was a God, I'm sure He'd understand. And if He didn't, well, in that case I wouldn't want to be in His gang.

There are plenty of paths to belief and they are all arbitrary. I don't believe in a creator god. If there is an omniscient god how does he allow eternal damnation for some of his creations? There's too many absurdities to even bother arguing about.

Don't classify me with new age. I'm not new age, old age or any age.

I don't know what the Truth is, but I know a few things that are not it. I'm both inspired and mystified by a statement by Krishnamurti: "The truth is a pathless land." Let's just ponder those words...

Mickiana said:

There are plenty of paths to belief and they are all arbitrary. I don't believe in a creator god. If there is an omniscient god how does he allow eternal damnation for some of his creations? There's too many absurdities to even bother arguing about.

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Well, the most frequent solution to this is at least somewhat compelling, I'd say: so that we might have free will. Without that, there's truly no meaning possible in human life.

Sincerely thank you, Attila. Yes, Free Will, capitalised in all its glory. But what is it? It's OK if it is still just an intellectual concept because that is a starting point, but how do we manifest it? Well, here's the conundrum, there's no one way to get there and there is not really a 'there' to get to.

Mickiana said:

Sincerely thank you, Attila. Yes, Free Will, capitalised in all its glory. But what is it? It's OK if it is still just an intellectual concept because that is a starting point, but how do we manifest it? Well, here's the conundrum, there's no one way to get there and there is not really a 'there' to get to.

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I'm not sure I have any idea what "there" you're talking about. To free will? I mean, we have it, to varying degrees. There's coercion, but humans are free agents, whether there are deities in the picture or not.

I'm not in this thread as an advocate for any given religious system. And yes, the free will narrative is generally a Judeo-Christian answer to theodicy, but Heaven's not a part of my schtick right now. I'm all for it, but I'm moreover for people acting meaningfully in <I>this</I> life. We need the concept of free will because we need the obligation to take responsibility for our actions. That's why the free will answer is compelling, not because it's ennobles the species. (I mean: it does. But it's not all we have going for us.)

So what's this "there," then?

Attila the Professor said:

I'm not in this thread as an advocate for any given religious system.

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I shouldn't encourgage this then, ...but

We need the concept of free will because we need the obligation to take responsibility for our actions.

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...are you saying if we didn't have free will, we would be truly free from the need of obligation?

This reminds me what a great man once said...

George Carlin said:

Thou shall keep thy religion to thyself.

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Pale Horse said:

...are you saying if we didn't have free will, we would be truly free from the need of obligation?

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More that the idea of obligation becomes incoherent without free will. If we are simply operating in accordance with, say, a divine plan, or are not in possession of our faculties and thereby unable to engage in choice for that reason, the morality of our actions can't be judged, and nothing can be required of us. Consider how we treat those who were insane at the time they committed a crime differently from those who weren't.

Another partial implication of this, I'd argue, is that you can't be truly, meaningfully religious without free will either, because you can't do good without choice. (But then we get into Protestant and Catholic disputes over works, and Jewish mitzvahs...and I don't think anybody wants that right now.) It also would mean that you can't be good in an Aristotelian framework, which more or less would assess the good of an action by whether it was the right act done for the right reason in the right situation to the right extent, or in a Kantian framework, which would require the use of autonomous reason for the doing of good. You can really only have a utilitarian morality without free will.

Attila the Professor said:

More that the idea of obligation becomes incoherent without free will. If we are simply operating in accordance with, say, a divine plan, or are not in possession of our faculties and thereby unable to engage in choice for that reason, the morality of our actions can't be judged, and nothing can be required of us. Consider how we treat those who were insane at the time they committed a crime differently from those who weren't.

Another partial implication of this, I'd argue, is that you can't be truly, meaningfully religious without free will either, because you can't do good without choice. (But then we get into Protestant and Catholic disputes over works, and Jewish mitzvahs...and I don't think anybody wants that right now.) It also would mean that you can't be good in an Aristotelian framework, which more or less would assess the good of an action by whether it was the right act done for the right reason in the right situation to the right extent, or in a Kantian framework, which would require the use of autonomous reason for the doing of good. You can really only have a utilitarian morality without free will.

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Once more you are a voice of reason, Attila. This really is that quote "all this is not of faith, is sin." You cannot choose to believe out of superstition or just to hedge your bets in case there is a God. You either have faith or you don't. There isn't a middle ground where you can sit smugly in the safe knowledge that because you paid a nod to a possible God, that you will not be damned to an underworld after death.

I already wrote that it would be a lie for me to claim or seek faith. If I'm being eaten by that shark I'll keep punching it on the nose, rather than wait to be saved by the killer whale.

Montana Smith said:

You either have faith or you don't. ...

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But, we all have faith. Hence the conundrum of Pascal's Wager. What you put your faith in, should be the discourse, not whether or not we have the capacity to.

Pale Horse said:

But, we all have faith. Hence the conundrum of Pascal's Wager. What you put your faith in, should be the discourse, not whether or not we have the capacity to.

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I'm not questioning the capacity for faith. Since we presumably share the same human brain construction, the capacity must be there somewhere. When I write "faith" in this thread, it's specificially religious faith, i.e., faith in something that cannot be proven by material means.

If I must have faith (and it's a word so highly charged that I treat it with caution), then it's in material things. Those hard scientific facts. Everything else is subject to change - because we all see the world through our own eyes, and we cannot express every minute detail of those senses to another individual: how does that individual know that you aren't lying to them? They must experience whatever faith is themselves, before they can "truly" say that they have faith.

Why should one person believe another who says that God exists? They might eventually come to such a belief by personal study, and their own rational thought processes of how they understand the universe to operate. They might come to it by some personal 'revelation'.

For some a miracle is a divine thing. For others it's just coincidence. How you determine the truth of the matter is a question of interpreting, based on the knowledge and understanding you have at hand.

Who was it that wrote that "Moses was but a juggler," ? (Foucault?) It's that questioning of absolute truths that will always stand in the way of accepting religious faith.

Can we put faith in the Logos, or Word of God, when the words have been interpreted so radically differently by various followers of them? Each person will choose to follow the path they feel right, and in the end as long as it doesn't adversely affect another's right to freedom, or lay claims that inflict the rights of others, then religious faith is a valid social choice by those who take it.

Attila, 'there' is not anywhere. What 'there' is I don't know. I just know that I don't know. There's other names for 'there', such as Truth, Heaven, Nirvana, Paradise, Enlightenment. I imagine 'there' is not a place like the literal views of Heaven which is of course only imagined itself. I am intellectualising here, but I'm deducing 'there' is a state of mind - perhaps. "Perhaps' is a possible disclaimer, because I'm ever ready to have my preconceptions shattered, or so I'd like to think.

Free Will doesn't mean free to think whatever you want. Of course we are legally free to think whatever we want, as long as you keep a lot of it to yourself. More like freedom from thought. And I don't think Free Will means no obligation, it does and it doesn't, although there will be a better word than 'obligation' to use. More like 'mission', perhaps. The will that is free, what could that be, what might it imply? I'm pondering out loud here because I'm still workin' on it myself.

It isn't surprising that the idea of an afterlife is in the mind of man, since the alternative is an animalistic eat, procreate, die, rot, add nutrients to the soil to enable life to continue.

It boils down to us being just another part of the food chain on earth.

Ashes to ashes.

When that becomes too bleak man perhaps invents the concept of an afterlife? The afterlife is also great for blackmailing others into committing certain actions, or else...

So in one sense it's obvious why we're here. We're part of an inter-connected natural order, eat or be eaten. Yet we've acquired the capacity to think beyond that basic need. Which brings us to the bigger questions of Why and How? How anything came to be, or Why they came to be, are the never-ending noodle friers of life.

Not having had any personal revelation, I cannot envisage having faith in an entity that is beyond time, and beyond our humble thought processes.

I'm sorry..I did not mean to start an argument on here!....I was just wondering if anyone else was keeping the sabbath and that they knew Yahweh...I was not trying to start an argument!.....If anyone believe in Yahweh...they post.....if not...they don't post......I was just wondering how many people knew Yahweh......thats all...and everyone wonders..."Why is an a person that like Egypt..love Yahweh"?....Well its because.....I love Yahweh ....He is my whole life......and I'm very interested in Ancient Egypt...sure..the pharaoh of the Exodus did a bad thing....but not all of Egypt in history was like that!...

EgyptianPharaoh said:

I'm sorry..I did not mean to start an argument on here!....I was just wondering if anyone else was keeping the sabbath and that they knew Yahweh...I was not trying to start an argument!.....If anyone believe in Yahweh...they post.....if not...they don't post......I was just wondering how many people knew Yahweh......thats all...and everyone wonders..."Why is an a person that like Egypt..love Yahweh"?....Well its because.....I love Yahweh ....He is my whole life......and I'm very interested in Ancient Egypt...sure..the pharaoh of the Exodus did a bad thing....but not all of Egypt in history was like that!...

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Cogent explanation, cheers.

Monatana has a tendency to "over simplify" concepts. If it were important to him to discover the machinations of faith he would study them.

Just keep in mind that doubters like him are all part of God's plan and serve as examples of those without certain grace.

It's all to easy to focus on popular cultures interpretation of faith, the afterlife ect, but to discover the deeper meanings, to realize the true nature of these spiritual disciplines are philosophies and not strictly "fact" or "fiction."

Remember Saul...

Hey Montana, want to go to Damascus?