by ashitaka 17 Replies latest jw friends
Can science answer many questions? Yes. In fact, people may make the revelation that you say. But, not being a fundie myself, I think that people will always embrace a God of some sort, some type of magical or supernatural being that they laud, or fear. It's been thousands of years of Gods and their followers. Men will always tell myths, and base them on fact to give their myth weight.
God will never die, even if he never existed in the first place.
ashi
I think we've seen a huge change in the percentage of "believers" in the last 50 yrs. I wish someone had some kind of data on that one. That would be interesting.
I do agree that there will always be a superstitious kind of belief in god. Will that belief have credibility or influence of society like it does now? I don't think so.
TimB
JoelBear writes:
A wise man once said:Everything is beautiful in its own way.
wasnt that a Tom Jones song??
Love, Scully
JoelBear writes:
A wise man once said:Everything is beautiful in its own way.
wasnt that a Tom Jones song??
Love, Scully
It is not persecution for an informed person to expose a certain religion as being false. - WT 11/15/63
I have to agree with Tim. I think that we have always confused our big questions with inherent spirituality. When you throw the amazing and little understood connections between all life on the planet into the mix, we have a real attraction for supernatural thought. But that doesn't mean it will always be super-natural to us. It might be so, but it seems less and less so as time goes on.
As some may have noted from my comments on other threads, I really hate myth. I see no value in them, and while I think it is kinda sweet when others try to assign them value, as if trying to think the best in the people of the past or the present, it seems to me that one can always see a seemy underbelly in almost all myths: Control.
And if not control, then usually a self-centered explanation for a supernatural event.
I personally don't see ANY love in ANY of the bibles prophecies. Maybe love of one race for itself, love of one religious man for other religious men who ascribe exactly to his way explaining the unknown. But not love as I know it. And it's not that I want to think the worst of those old middle eastern story tellers, I understand that it is just what they knew, and that aint much.
I'm not, btw, talking about stories presented as stories. I'm talking about stories presented as truth. I hate that, and I don't understand how anyone can find value in an outright lie. I'm talking about stories made up to convince others that the writer has a direct line to God, stories that try so hard to make the reader think the writer has some font of wisdom, when what they have is a good imagination and a disdain for truth.
Reality is where beauty is found for me. Perhaps with a touch of herbal alteration at times.
I agree six, trust me, I'm not a bible thumper, but many many people still are highly influenced by a belief structure, and it will be many many years before superstitions are truly rooted out.
In the end though, you're right about reality; the same, I think goes for humanity. We all distrust one another, but trust and tolerence are the only two things we haven't mastered, and that may be the fault of religion.
I'm very young, and still asking questions myself.
ashi
I think it's only fair to make a distinction between God and Religion. They are not one and the same although they are often blurred into one. Religious intolerance has produced some great atrocities and men have done some terrible things in the name of God.
That, in itself, cannot be an indictment against God. Here is an understatement: God is greatly misunderstood.
For something that does not exist He certainly does cause quite a stir!
There are people who believe in God who do not have a concept of God as an "old man in the sky." I heard a Jewish theologian on a radio program who stated that it had long been acceptable in Judaism to think of God as "Being itself" instead of "a being."
To me, God is necessary, not as a Big Guy watching what we all do in our bedrooms but as a higher authority, the underpinning of all principles. After all, every religion seems to agree on most points of what is right and wrong.
Seize the day, and put the least possible trust in tomorrow. - Horace
I have learned to live each day as it comes and not to borrow trouble by dreading tomorrow. - Dorothy Dix
