Everyone's Views

[Mori]

Hmm, I think this kinda turned into a decent post..

[thez]

You're not off of the hook yet, Mori!

I hope that I didn't come off as religion bashing in any way, though. What I meant to express was that I personally don't like the idea of God because He implies a lack of shades of gray. The existence of God, to me, implies that every decision must be weighed in consequence (to some extent) against an imposed moral system, rather than my own belief about the matter. God requires Good and Evil to be separate, with a line between them. The line may be so thoroughly obscured by the gray around it, but it is there; and thus are we judged.

I believe in freedom of choice...an idea which God would seems to negate. The problem is that for God to touch the world, He must do so in one of two ways: by affecting the world itself, or affecting the people in it. My problem is most easy to explain with the second. To take it to extremes, I would rather be Hitler by choice, knowing that my every action was a result of no outside force, than be Gandhi because it was Divinity shaping my way. I understand that a person is irrevocably shaped by the things that happen to them in their life, but I don't like the idea that those events were part of a Plan.

So while I don't believe in God, I don't actually care whether or not He exists. I simply choose to live my life without acknowledging Him within it, hoping that if He's out there, He will return the favor.

[Mori]

Well put thez

[PRWraith]

Now as a preface I'm not attacking anyone here.

However, in my experience from attending both a baptist and catholic church for years i've noticed something. It seems like a lot of people just go because they don't have belief in their self. Like people who have trouble standing on their own look to a diety to help them cope.

Now Granted I could be wrong and my observations of a local environment have no weight on a broader scale.

[Excellent1]

Some interesting points made all around.

I guess I'll just add a few of my experiences. When I was younger, I had some experiences with members of various churches and/or ideologies that made me tend to shun or demean the belief sets those people represented. I think that for many, if you end up having a bad experience with a person, then that person sort of takes on the face of that ideal, when most of the time they are acting out against the tenets of whatever belief they are supposed to be practicing.

For example, when I was younger, I went to a church that had the richer folks looking down on me because I grew up poor (clean but poor, lol), and had long hair and didn't fit their image of what a proper "Christian" should look like. The truth is that I let those people take on the face of what I perceived Christianity to be: cold and hateful, judgemental and unaccepting. It's not like that, just as most Muslims aren't suicide bombers, although we often see that extremist element portrayed in the media.

I guess my point is that I personally feel that a person's spiritual side is something that some of us want to explore instead of repress. I don't think it necessarily means that we lack intelligence, or security, or self-confidence (although I've seen that be true, for sure); rather I think a lot of us just have that inner certainty that there must be SOMETHING more to this than just living in a random, chaos-filled life then dying and rotting in the ground. That doesn't mean I think I'm smarter than anyone else or that other people should have to do what I do because I've found "enlightenment". It's just something that I want to pursue.

As for the comments made by Thez, I have to say that they remind me of almost exactly where I was at one point. I didn't want to accept the potential existence of God, because the implications of that are just flat out scary. There is a lot of stuff in the Bible that the honest Christian will tell you that he/she has no good answer for. Predestination, and even the creation itself are a couple of examples of what I mean. Just as htw said, I don't think we have (or ever will have, imo) the proof for some of these things.

The hardest part for any self-reliant, independent person is to trust in something that they can't prove. We do that in small things without thinking about it, but in terms of coming to grips with a divine being, it's the hardest thing of all to concede that maybe we're not the ones behind the wheel.

Anyway, sorry for the novel length posts, but I enjoy these kinds of threads where people can talk about something that almost all of us think about and have opinions on, without it being used to personally beat people down.

Final thought, then I'll shut up. The hardest thing about being a Christian and actually having people know that is that there are so many people that watch you and just wait for the inevitable slip. The bad day; using profanity, having a moment of selfishness, getting angry- the list could go on and on. Then these kinds of people swoop in and use whatever area you've screwed up on to invalidate everything you claim to believe in. If I could change one thing it would be to have people realize that whatever your beliefs, you will occasionally fall short and screw up. It doesn't mean you're not sincere, and it doesn't invalidate your faith, but it does remind you that you're human and that you don't have any chariots of fire on their way to pick you up just yet.

[Kachiko]

Originally Posted by Mori

Hmm, I think this kinda turned into a decent post..

heh, only because I haven't jumped in yet!

I have a hard time staying out of religion based threads.
I am into Christian Apologetics. Currently, I'm digging more into historical and archeological evidences.
Although the threads might start out decent, they usually degrades pretty fast into "I dont believe you *finger in ears* lalalala".
And then, a lot of the good info, as well as people with an honest question gets lost in the mess.

I do have some stories though.
But unless someone has the courage to experience it for themselves, they become just more stories.

[thez]

Exellen1 -- you make a great point about the people looking to accuse. I've always found that to be particularly offensive, as it happens across a variety of different things. This may not be the most "serious" of comparisons, but I always think of the movie "40 days and 40 nights" when this sort of thing comes up. If you don't know it, the main character is a sex-addict who tries to gives up sex for lent (not because he's particularly religious, but because he started getting bored with sex). His friends center around trying to find out every detail of his life to make sure that he isn't cheating their bet on when he'll lose, or trying to see if he's masturbating on the side, or something.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that when it comes to that sort of attempt, or that sort of promise...it's not the events of failure, it's the genuine desire to succeed that is amazing.

[Hostagecs]

soon we will all know.

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNew...ub=CTVNewsAt11

It was on cnn also its pose to happen soon, the testing anyways.

[thez]

That...is a little scary.

[lubedacheat]

If that works will we have another little universe inside a tunnel? /boggle