Searching for GOD...

[Walt Zingmatilder]

Did you choose to believe in God? I was sure you previously stated 'he' found you?

I chose to let Him into my life.  He then made Himself known to me in a most profound way.  When I was younger, I believed in God but I did not act much upon this belief.  I was drawn to God when I chose to attend a series of "Life in the Spirit" seminars, and it was through prayer and scripture during these seminars that He made His real presence felt.  It was truly a life changing experience that began my personal relationship with Him.  I no longer just believe in Him, because now I know Him.

I'm sorry, Alan, you didn't choose to let him into your life, he was already there in your mind. You obviously believed he existed or you couldn't have said that you chose to let him in.

I've edited your post for ''Jamesballs''.
I think your are missing the distinction of belief and faith as trust.
It can go the other way of course and a believer rejects trust in God, or finds God sufficiently real to be disturbed by Him and to start avoiding God and the things of God.

I'd love to hear a conversion to mechanistic, materialist naturalism but the words used by people like yourself like er, ''enlightenment'' are a bit vague and Guffy.

[Shaker]

Dear Shaker,

Karen Armstrong, from what I have read in your posts on this thread she may just give you a different perspective.

I'd be immensely surprised if that were the case, Gonners old fruit. I admit that I haven't kept up with her work and I haven't read her more recent books, but many moons ago A History of God was read to destruction by me - fascinating stuff (you've just reminded that it's high time to re-read it - just been and got it off the shelves and added it to the to-read mountain), but nothing that changed my mind in any significant way as many of the arguments presented struck me as either specious or obvious.

[Shaker]

... it is possible to suspend ... disbelief

Not for me, it's not.

[ippy]

No human or entity should be worshipped. Anyone or thing which requires worshipping is too up themselves!

Errheher!

ippy

[SusanDoris]

Very interesting posts to read, particularly #66;9 by Shaker.

[Leonard James]

Whether this intellectual and temperamental divide is basically genetic I have no idea; something has to explain it.

I am firmly of the opinion that all human thought is nature/nurture based, and that there is no outside agent involved. I can't prove it, of course, but until I am presented with some believable evidence to the contrary, that's how I see things.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

Sorry to drag this back, but I'm just catching up...

[ In some forms of panentheism, the cosmos exists within God, who in turn "transcends", "pervades" or is "in" the cosmos. While pantheism asserts that 'All is God', panentheism goes further to claim that God is greater than the universe" (wiki)

Panentheism is not 'god being in things'. That would be Theoenpanism.

ht

But You said in the previous sentence that God is ''in the cosmos.''

[Gonnagle]

Dear Shaker,

Well off the top of my head, my thoughts on Armstrong stem from your conversations with Alan Burns concerning belief, finding God.

I hope I have her thinking straight but belief and finding God are somehow secondary to actually walking the walk, searching the religion first finding out what lies at the heart of it, anyway my posts do not really do her books justice, in my own words, Christians are obsessed with worshiping God but it is how you do that, real worship is how you treat your fellow man, how you treat his children.

Gonnagle.

[Shaker]

Christians are obsessed with worshiping God but it is how you do that, real worship is how you treat your fellow man, how you treat his children.

James 1:27, old bean 

[Gonnagle]

Dear Shaker,

Yer good old son, fancy a job, the Church of Scotland are having a recruit drive at the moment, the belief bit could come later

Gonnagle.

[Sassy]

what is so wonderful and awe inspiring about this bit of the world and universe?

http://www.shutterstock.com/s/starving+children/search.html?page=1&inline=208077175

This world is full of heartache too. Cause by mans selfishness and unwillingness to share or be responsible for anyone else.

Has it changed since man has become wealthier?

19 There was a certain rich man, which was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day:

20 And there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, which was laid at his gate, full of sores,

21 And desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man's table: moreover the dogs came and licked his sores.

In Gods Kingdom everyone is welcome... the people are to take care of each other... But the truth is the people in the world are too busy taking care of themselves and putting their neighbours down and leaving them without.

[floo]

Sass has really had me giggling at her nonsense posts this morning!

[Rhiannon]

I dunno. There is a lot of suffering. It isn't a beautiful world for everyone.

All we can do is tend the parts of the garden within our reach.

[horsethorn]

Sorry to drag this back, but I'm just catching up...

In some forms of panentheism, the cosmos exists within God, who in turn "transcends", "pervades" or is "in" the cosmos. While pantheism asserts that 'All is God', panentheism goes further to claim that God is greater than the universe" (wiki)

Panentheism is not 'god being in things'. That would be Theoenpanism.

ht

But You said in the previous sentence that God is ''in the cosmos.''

Can you quote exactly where in the 'previous sentence' I say that?

ht

[ippy]

In no way are they weak-minded, they are just over credulous and under sceptical, through no fault of their own.

Certainly no fault of their own.

Rhiannon's posts are always interesting and just a few days ago - certainly less than a week, I'm sure - she said something that I found especially thought-provoking to the effect that some people just seem to be born with a mystical bent, predisposed to find religious concepts not just plausible but believeable. If this is true, and I suspect it may very well be, the corollary of this is that some people are also born to be non-mystical, and I have to say that I would place myself in this group. The other night I was lying in bed leafing through Eknath Easwaran's Classics of Indian Spirituality, a three-volume box set of the Upanishads, the Dhammpada and the Bhagavad Gita. Maybe some remember that this was an item that I put on my list of essential desert island books recently. As interested as I am in Eastern ideas in a purely sort of academic way, as I was reading I was very conscious of the fact that I was experiencing not just an intellectual but very visceral, temperamental rejection of what was being said about other spiritual realms and whatnot. It's not just the case (though it is the case) that the purely rational and intellectual arguments against this kind of thing are as far as I'm concerned watertight; it's also a instinctive, almost automatic rejection of ideas of different (and, it's assumed or sometimes explicitly stated, better) realms of being and people who believe in them. (Nietzsche called them afterworldsmen). My current signature from the late, great American environmentalist Edward Abbey sums it up for me: to him and to me, to hold these ideas as true is an insult to the real, the true and the actual, right here and right now in the only mode of existence of which we can be entirely certain. I suppose I'm just one of those dullards to bound up in this life now to place any credence in concepts of anything and anywhere else. "Other world? There is no other world. Here or nowhere is the whole fact," as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it.

Again, it's easy for me to say. I'm in good health, well-fed, well-clothed. If I get sick I toddle off to the GP for a short course of antibiotics and if it gets chilly I put the central heating on. While things were relatively tight whilst growing up, I've never known real hunger, want or deprivation in my life. Or really desperate tragedy either, come to that. Plenty do. The standard answer to that, in my view, is that even if you're starving and do know truly horrible poverty, want and deprivation, while the desire for there to be a God to believe in is perfectly understandable from a psychological point of view, that state of affairs doesn't somehow suddenly make the existence of the personal, personalistic, interested god of theism any more likely actually to exist.

It seems to me that if you consider yourself to be (for example) a Christian, you have one foot in this world but, if not a foot, then at least a toe - even if it's a little toe - in another realm where a miracle-working god-man born of a virgin who rose from the dead two thousand years ago is still somehow alive, where the regularities of nature can be suspended at the whim of a deity and all the rest of it. Christians would quite rightly counter that they live in the "real" world and get married, raise kinds, push the trolley round Asda and take the car in for an MoT exactly the same as anybody else. All true enough. But I don't see how you can regard yourself as a Christian or any other kind of theist in any tolerably traditional sense and not have this whole other raft of beliefs about what constitutes relaity which find no support in science or, for me at any rate, in reason or logic. This - believing all this - is absolutely and utterly incomprehensible to me. Whether this intellectual and temperamental divide is basically genetic I have no idea; something has to explain it.

The Upanishads and the Gita (and other Indian mystical philosophies) are largely about Self development and about seeking higher levels of Consciousness. Its not about spiritual realms somewhere out there. Its not that other spiritual realms don't exist....but that they are accessed only through the inner mind.

For people who believe that the mind is a product of electrical and chemical processes in the brain all this will obviously seem meaningless.

About the predisposition of different people towards mystical and non-mystical experiences....yes...this is what I have written about many times as a 'faculty'....such as eye sight.  Many people have it some don't. Maybe it is genetic or epigenetic.

But speaking personally about you.....your vegetarianism and your interest in such mystical matters in spite of your predisposition against it, is an indication that you'll probably develop this faculty as you age...or at least in your next birth (never mind that you don't believe in it). 

Sriram I guess you've been here in the UK for some time even if you weren't born here so you may well know why I ask;  only your post reminded me of and made me wonder, what was the name of that tune they play at the beginning of those old Laurel & Hardy films?

ippy

[Dicky Underpants]

Reminds me of Bishop John Robinson (Honest to God chappy) who said that people need to cast aside their old conception/definition of a personal deity and see God as much in cancer as in a sunset.

He was dying of cancer at the time so it wasn't exactly a flippant throwaway remark made by someone who knew nothing about it.

It comes across to me as pantheism through and through, but that's OK - institutional religions could do with a lot more of that.

Robinson was little more than an attention-seeker, whose theology was extremely weak..  You do the same thing you have criticised others for:  you quote him without knowing exactly where he was coming from.

Man dying of cancer seeks to deal with it in his theology, mocked by you because your theology is so much better. Mmm...

For goodness' sake, read up the story of the loony and his doings..

Man dying of cancer mocked as 'loony'... unpleasant in many ways.

Has Bashers expanded on this denigration of Bish Robinson? I've only just noticed this.
For my part, I've read Honest To God, Can We Trust the New Testament? and The Priority of John*. (All these quite a long time ago) These did not strike me as the work of a 'loony'. As for Honest to God, I understood that this was an attempt to make some of the ideas of European biblical criticism accessible to English speakers - the English Christian believers being about a hundred years behind the times in these matters, as usual. Robinson made frequent reference to the work of Paul Tillich, about whom perhaps one ought not to be unequivocally enthusiastic. I get the impression that Tillich's writing aims at profundity, but tends to be woefully obscure. And Tillich's private life was not the best example of traditional Christian virtue.

Maybe Bish Robinson tried to emulate Tillich by having a rich sex life - maybe this is what got up BA's nose. But we've always known that Bashers is a bit sensitive (Thinks the idea of a woman breast feeding in public is quite depraved - but claims never to have never seen this phenomenon).

Perhaps BA will tell us more of why he thinks Robinson was a 'loony', and why his theology was weak?



*This seems to have been a complete volte face to the usual conclusions of the Higher Criticism, and many scholars thought he was either having a joke, or indeed had gone a bit senile.

[Dicky Underpants]

Dear Shaker,

Karen Armstrong, from what I have read in your posts on this thread she may just give you a different perspective.

I'd be immensely surprised if that were the case, Gonners old fruit. I admit that I haven't kept up with her work and I haven't read her more recent books, but many moons ago A History of God was read to destruction by me - fascinating stuff (you've just reminded that it's high time to re-read it - just been and got it off the shelves and added it to the to-read mountain), but nothing that changed my mind in any significant way as many of the arguments presented struck me as either specious or obvious.

You mustn't tell BA that you've read any books of religious or biblical criticism - if he has to accept this, he may end up by having a seizure. But I suspect he'll continue to think that all atheists and agnostics get all their information by googling. One of his more irritating traits, even if the cap does fit some of the posters on here.

Karen Armstrong - always stimulating and eminently readable. Have to confess that I came across most of her work after I'd just about given up on 'spiritual views', and though I've read probably the greater part of the books she has written, I tend to enjoy her take on e.g. how the Bible came to be written and the comparative beliefs of differing religious systems, rather than being persuaded that there really is a 'transcendent reality' (which she still appears to argue for).

[BashfulAnthony]

Reminds me of Bishop John Robinson (Honest to God chappy) who said that people need to cast aside their old conception/definition of a personal deity and see God as much in cancer as in a sunset.

He was dying of cancer at the time so it wasn't exactly a flippant throwaway remark made by someone who knew nothing about it.

It comes across to me as pantheism through and through, but that's OK - institutional religions could do with a lot more of that.

Robinson was little more than an attention-seeker, whose theology was extremely weak..  You do the same thing you have criticised others for:  you quote him without knowing exactly where he was coming from.

Man dying of cancer seeks to deal with it in his theology, mocked by you because your theology is so much better. Mmm...

For goodness' sake, read up the story of the loony and his doings..

Man dying of cancer mocked as 'loony'... unpleasant in many ways.

Has Bashers expanded on this denigration of Bish Robinson? I've only just noticed this.
For my part, I've read Honest To God, Can We Trust the New Testament? and The Priority of John*. (All these quite a long time ago) These did not strike me as the work of a 'loony'. As for Honest to God, I understood that this was an attempt to make some of the ideas of European biblical criticism accessible to English speakers - the English Christian believers being about a hundred years behind the times in these matters, as usual. Robinson made frequent reference to the work of Paul Tillich, about whom perhaps one ought not to be unequivocally enthusiastic. I get the impression that Tillich's writing aims at profundity, but tends to be woefully obscure. And Tillich's private life was not the best example of traditional Christian virtue.

Maybe Bish Robinson tried to emulate Tillich by having a rich sex life - maybe this is what got up BA's nose. But we've always known that Bashers is a bit sensitive (Thinks the idea of a woman breast feeding in public is quite depraved - but claims never to have never seen this phenomenon).

Perhaps BA will tell us more of why he thinks Robinson was a 'loony', and why his theology was weak?



*This seems to have been a complete volte face to the usual conclusions of the Higher Criticism, and many scholars thought he was either having a joke, or indeed had gone a bit senile.

I refer you to this, which says it all fully:      ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Doubts_About_Doubt.htm‎



"(Thinks the idea of a woman breast feeding in public is quite depraved - but claims never to have never seen this phenomenon)"  I still haven't seen!

  Please quote where I used the word, "depraved."  It's just you lying.

[Shaker]

I refer you to this, which says it all fully:      ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Doubts_About_Doubt.htm‎

What that page is is a thoughtful critique of Robinson's ideas, in which "loony" and "attention-seeking" are nowhere to be found.

[Dicky Underpants]

"(Thinks the idea of a woman breast feeding in public is quite depraved - but claims never to have never seen this phenomenon)"  I still haven't seen!

  Please quote where I used the word, "depraved."  It's just you lying.

Sorry - I don't think you used the word, but I seem to remember your giving the impression that you didn't at all approve. I admit to being astonished that you had never seen it.

[BashfulAnthony]

"(Thinks the idea of a woman breast feeding in public is quite depraved - but claims never to have never seen this phenomenon)"  I still haven't seen!

  Please quote where I used the word, "depraved."  It's just you lying.

Sorry - I don't think you used the word, but I seem to remember your giving the impression that you didn't at all approve. I admit to being astonished that you had never seen it.

But it's true.  I guess I should get out more!

[BashfulAnthony]

I refer you to this, which says it all fully:      ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Doubts_About_Doubt.htm‎

What that page is is a thoughtful critique of Robinson's ideas, in which "loony" and "attention-seeking" are nowhere to be found.

I think it is more of a critical denunciation!

[Alan Burns]

..... This - believing all this - is absolutely and utterly incomprehensible to me. Whether this intellectual and temperamental divide is basically genetic I have no idea; something has to explain it.

Genetics may well have some influence, but I am sure your pre-disposition is not cast in stone.  It is possible to change track, as CS Lewis did - after rejecting his religious upbringing, he concluded that there was no God, and could not understand why some of his close friends at Oxford still adhered to their Christian beliefs.  In his book, "Surprised by Joy", he describes how he reluctantly had to discard his well thought out atheist philosophy and become what he describes as "the world's most reluctant convert".

[Alan Burns]

Dear Shaker,

Karen Armstrong, from what I have read in your posts on this thread she may just give you a different perspective.

I'd be immensely surprised if that were the case, Gonners old fruit. I admit that I haven't kept up with her work and I haven't read her more recent books, but many moons ago A History of God was read to destruction by me - fascinating stuff (you've just reminded that it's high time to re-read it - just been and got it off the shelves and added it to the to-read mountain), but nothing that changed my mind in any significant way as many of the arguments presented struck me as either specious or obvious.

In her more recent book "The Case for God" she does a very good job in illustrating the shallow thinking of most prominent atheists.

[Leonard James]

..... This - believing all this - is absolutely and utterly incomprehensible to me. Whether this intellectual and temperamental divide is basically genetic I have no idea; something has to explain it.

Genetics may well have some influence, but I am sure your pre-disposition is not cast in stone.  It is possible to change track, as CS Lewis did - after rejecting his religious upbringing, he concluded that there was no God, and could not understand why some of his close friends at Oxford still adhered to their Christian beliefs.  In his book, "Surprised by Joy", he describes how he reluctantly had to discard his well thought out atheist philosophy and become what he describes as "the world's most reluctant convert".

People who are midway between credulity and scepticism probably have more difficulty in becoming convinced than the rest of us, and I feel sorry for them.