by AK - Jeff 29 Replies latest jw friends
God usually talks to us in a very 'still small voice'. Tradition has it, that that when you awake at night (with me around 3 am nightly) just be still in the quietness and carefully listen. He is the great communicator, so ask him whatever you want during the day and see what happens.
Outaservice
Yes, but rather than making one feel insignificant and unimportant in the cosmic scheme of things I think it makes life all the more precious.
When you look at the night sky everything you see, all the unimaginable amounts of matter out there cannot hope, dream, love, laugh. The sun will be around long after we are gone, but all it is is a sphere of gas bound by gravity and held up by fusion, it can't thumb it's nose at the cosmos, or wonder about its place in the universe. It may be a crapshoot, but everyone of us here have won the cosmic lottery even if only for the briefest instant.
Carl Sagan always had a way with words
I may not be the brightest, richest, bravest, most beautiful, most powerful, or most confident person in the world, but right now *I am*, and *we are*, and that's pretty significant. :)
It could be about that. Nice pic and great song. I'm reading the comments on it, now.
S
Ahhh, Dust in the Wind, one of my all time favorites..
It's all in how you look at it Jeff. You can chose the fatalistic "it's all acrapshoot" route, or you can see life as all the more precious because it is all we ever get.
The choice is yours.
Perspective, as they say, is everthing.
changeling
I am in the same stage Jeff.
here is one of the ideas i have right now: maybe God created everything but he/she died in the process, and we are now orphans
It, including each and every one of us, is all undeniably connected.
Anyone who know exactly where we came from has to have been there. Now how could that have happened?
So why wrack your brain over something that will never EVER have an answer? Speculation is ok, but just don't be a "know it all".
I'm convinced there is a creator, evolution for me takes an even bigger leap of faith to believe in.
What I can't reconcile is the idea of a loving heavenly father. What possible reason can there be for the amount of suffering that has gone on and still continues. I have a horrible feeling our individual suffering is not that important to him.
The example of Job is a good one to look at, God obviously thought is was worth the argument to let Job's daughters be killed to prove a point.
Maybe it's a perspective thing, we don't care when we squash a bug do we?
I'm at the point in my life(and don't see this changing anytime soon) where I really don't care how we came to be or where we are going. Did "God" create us? Did we evolve from monkeys via a "Big Bang?" If SOLID proof existed, the entire world would have to believe one way or another. There would be no alternative choices in the matter. It's one or the other. For every "proof" that theocrats offer, the evolutionists break it apart. For every "proof" that evolutionists offer, the theocrats tear it apart.
We're born, we live together in an eff'd up world for roughly 80 years, and then we die. Personally, and I mean personally, I would rather not waste time trying to figure out where we came from or what is waiting for us after we die. In my view, it has no bearing whatsoever in my life or the people around me. You can go on a finding God binge for years and never come to a conclusion as to who God is, where he lives, where he came from or whatever else our puny little brain can conjure up. Does it really matter in the end? What if Allah is the one and only true God? What about Jehovah? The Trinity? Just because you're raised to believe in one or the other doesn't make that particular deity the correct one. There's over a billion Muslims who truly believe that Allah is the true God. There's roughly the same(maybe even less) amount of Christians who believe that Yahweh, Jehovah, Jesus, or a combo is the true one. This fact alone raises many questions on both sides(actually, it is very multi-faceted if you look at world religion in general). What if the bible is just a book not inspired of "God?" What if the Koran is not inspired of "Allah?" How do we know one way or the other? We don't.
There seem to be three reasons why people believe in a god. Indoctrination, ignorance of facts and/or wanting to believe.
This topic seems to have brought out the last two in people.
People want to have a purpose, they want to have a meaning to life, so they want to believe in a god. Most of the time, they want to believe in the Biblical god (due to indoctrination), which means their purpose is to give praise to a being who has killed billions, in the hope that they will avoid his wrath upon dying. This is the meaning of their lives.
My personal 'purpose' is to be happy and help others. The religious can claim that is their purpose too, but they conveniently have to ignore or try to justify certain rules in the Bible which go against that. Others can be moral for the simple reason that it's beneficial to us all to be moral- not in order to reach a celestial realm where God is to be worshipped for eternity.
I believe making our own meanings is better than having our choice stifled by a first century book. If we choose the first option, our personal purpose is limited only by our imagination (and possibly the laws of physics). If we choose the second, our purpose is to see the world through the lens of a book that talks about a talking donkey, a man living in the belly of a whale and magical hair that gives strength as real historical events. The desire for a life after this one seems to be so strong in some that they will accept these things actually happened (simply because they are written in a book), yet ignore all the evidence for the Big Bang and evolution, which can be seen in museums throughout the developed world.
It may be a little scary to think of ourselves as incredibly lucky to be here. An asteroid could wipe us all out any day, a disease could kill us all. Our own death may be scary, or we may think that the time we have isn't long enough. I prefer to see life as precious because there was more chance of us not being here to experience it. Every sperm that doesn't make it to an egg is a life that will never happen, every miscarriage is a person who wasn't lucky enough to make it. We should not be bitching about the shortness of life we have. For every one of us that is born, billions, trillions, probably more, are not born. They experience nothing.
To want more after this life, and to feel short changed if such an afterlife seems improbable, is really pushing our selfish tendencies to new heights. Not only that, but people wouldn't even be satisfied with an extra ten years, fifty years, 500 years even. They want to live forever, and may even take offense it people try to take away their selfish hope of an eternal life.
If we accept the standard Christian teaching, we live in a universe in which God has set things up so that we suffer from time to time and where most of the humans on Earth will burn forever for worshipping the wrong god, or the right god but in the wrong way, even though there is no more reason to believe in one over the other. This is supposed to be comforting?
On the topic of being ignorant of facts, many people think things such as evolution couldn't have happened because they have the wrong idea about evolution. The debate has been settled, and was settled long ago. Evolution is a fact. People don't accept it is a fact because it goes against their book, or they accept the distorted view of what evolution is from creationists with an agenda (we didn't evolve from monkeys!), or they don't know how to buy a ticket to a museum where countless fossils are on display showing how species have changed over time.
The proof exists, but due to indoctrination and wanting to believe in a god, such proof is ignored. We do not need a god to have a purpose, we should be happy that we get the amount of time to be alive that we do get (most animals live much shorter than us) and we shouldn't deny ourselves reality because it may be hard to face at times.
