Belief in God: What were the difficult aspects and questions you had.

by designs 81 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

  • sabastious
    sabastious
    So if your 15 month is about to stick a fork into an electrical socket, same logic applies? How about if he is about to run in front of a bus? How about if he is about to drink down some ammonia? How about put his hand in a wood chipper? Sit back and let him learn from the pain?

    The same logic does not apply for me as a human father, no.

    When dealing with a God concept we get the neat logical tool of the supernatural. Many people abuse this tool and use it to mislead, I will not do that. You must concede that in any God concept a measure of the supernatural is going to be used in the argument. You may challenge the reasoning at any time.

    What I will use is God's perspective before and after our finite lives: his supernatural age. I don't see why he would not just be able to reassemble us or bring us back from some sort of memory storage (like a hard drive with an Operating System on it). Death becomes very different logically when it isn't forever. A dead man can't learn, no, but the people who continue on can and that's worth mentioning.

    From what I have seen, all human problems can be solved with our minds and it is when we abandon reason and our thinking ability that life's terrors can wash us away. We are stronger than we think. It's important for each human to grow mentally with each passing day because we have to be equiped for the next day which could bring anything.

    In this framework it would be understandable for God to let things play out, even tragically. Maybe to give us something to remember before he takes us to the Next Step. There are patterns in history that we all see repeated. This community are refugees from a tragedy that came from an organization that ignored the past as a whole and more importantly ignored their past.

    God could very well be waiting for the time when we stop repeating our mistakes. If the universe is supposed to be traveled about then maybe we aren't ready for that yet, maybe right now we don't make the cut. Maybe we need a few more stove burns to stop wanting to touch the stove. Philosophers for thousands of years have had the answers to a peaceful society, but it requires the empowerment of the individual, but where is the individual in our day?

    They are content with their life as people are tortured in Syria, among other places, for wanting basic freedom. We can't do anything about it right? We're the victims and God is just watching us be victims? I don't buy that at all. That sounds like an excuse not to help.

    If anything hope in God has power and should not be discouraged. Faith can move mountains, but that also means that faith, in the hands of evil, is very powerful.

    -Sab

  • Paralipomenon
    Paralipomenon

    Sab: You have been trying to poke alot of holes in the Atheist viewpoint which is no different than your own. People have looked at the given evidence and decided for themselves that a God figure does not exist. You've looked at the given evidence and decided for yourself that a God figure does exist.

    I'd like to turn the tables and ask your explanation as to why your view is so much stronger than that of an Atheist?

    If you're looking at the historical track records, scientific progress has been key in refuting religious thinking. The more we learn, the less we attribute to god(s). I'm hard pressed to think of a single example where religous progress has been intrumental in striking down science.

    Given this track record, do you have any evidence, beyond personal belief, to suggest that this trend will reverse and prove the existance of some form of diety?

  • Velour
    Velour

    When I was a child and believed in god with all of my young heart I felt frustrated that no matter how much I tried to reach him with tears all over my face, he never answered my prayers. My mother abandoned me, my cousins abused me, I was alone.

    When I got older and was introduced to jehovah I did everything I needed to finally be close to him. I prayed and studied and pioneered and made new disciples. Yet, while everyone around me was feeling close to god and having an intimate relationship with him, I was not. I didn't feel him in my life. I didn't sense any closeness to him. I left believing god didn't want me. I couldn't deny that others felt his presence but I did not.

    I had lost my childhood, my innocence, and dignity all the while praying to god for help.

    I feel terrible for people who's lives were worse off than mine. I was molested but I never had to watch my family starve to death. I was abandoned and neglected by my parents but I wasn't born in a war torn land, worried about land mines blasting my body to pieces. etc... Sure I could sit here in the USofA and still pretend that god blesses his creation but I'd have to ignore the rest of the world.

    These things I had trouble reconciling with my belief in god.

    ...but that was when I believed in god.

  • unshackled
    unshackled

    I guess what I am trying to say in a nutshell is that I think the atheist position is a weak position to take and I am genuinely baffled by anyone's choice to settle in that philosophy on life. – Sab


    Again, to reiterate...belief that we are here because a god did it is an ADD-ON. We don't know how we're here. God is an invention of humans to answer the unknowns. Atheism is not a philosophy on life...it is a non-position, it is the state you are in before choosing to belief in a god. And choosing to believe in a god is based on wanting to believe because it comforts the mind from the unknown. Believers have a hard time understanding the non-believers because they don't need to believe to gain comfort, and are okay with waiting until all the evidence is in.
  • GOrwell
    GOrwell

    Can you have free will without suffering?

  • JonathanH
    JonathanH

    Can you have free will without suffering? Sure, just get rid of the parts of the brain that register suffering. That was one of the things that got me when I was thinking critically about a theistic god. If god created man, he created him purposefully to suffer if we disobey him. Our mental states are not just some axiom of the universe. Anger is biological, pain is biological, suffering is biological. During the very ugly mid period of psychology a doctor went around performing frontal lobe lobotomies on people through their nose. When it "worked" the result was bizarre and disturbing. The people were still able to function normally, lead regular lives, but their emotional state was different. It was a bit more muted, they said they didn't really feel angry anymore, or hatred. They just felt comfortably content. And went on with their lives (of course most of the victims of this insanity were not success stories).

    Our emotions, even the negative ones are a result of our neuro biology. Certain regions of the brain operate in such a way to create the feeling of anger, or hatred, or sadness, or suffering. Which meant that god would've had to have made humans with the capacity to hate each other, even though he did not intend for them to do so. It was a time bomb planted in humanity that if anyone should disobey they would suffer for it. Suffering is not a pre-requisite for free will to exist. But if there was a god, he made suffering a pre-requisite to use free will. We could've just not had the capacity for those things and have been comfortably content, not harbering anger or animosity for others. What would society have looked like after thousands of years if we just didn't have the capacity for hatred?

    Or is there some theological mumbo jumbo answer to say why we must have the capacity hatred, and how that is necessary for us, and god was gracious for programming us to hate?

  • sabastious
    sabastious
    Sab: You have been trying to poke alot of holes in the Atheist viewpoint which is no different than your own.

    My viewpoint has more "gut feeling" or instict in it. I'm not sure whether that strengthens it or weakens it, but I think there is a case for both.

    -Sab

  • sabastious
    sabastious
    If god created man, he created him purposefully to suffer if we disobey him.

    That doesn't follow does it?

    Before we can make that kind of conclusion we first have to figure out the purpose of creator, correct?

    -Sab

  • sabastious
    sabastious
    Our emotions, even the negative ones are a result of our neuro biology. Certain regions of the brain operate in such a way to create the feeling of anger, or hatred, or sadness, or suffering.

    Neurotransmitters are chemicals within the brain of which we have no way of testing them without opening the skull. Do not for one instant purport that we understand how these chemicals actually work other than they cause perceivable mood changes.

    The fact is that our conscious mind actually has control of the production and transmission of those chemicals and we really don't know how. We are making leaps and bounds and I am excited to see the future of neuroscience, but we have a long road ahead of us. Until we can reliably measure the activity of neurotransmitters we will never understand more than the raw basics of their nature and true designation.

    -Sab

  • sabastious
    sabastious
    Again, to reiterate...belief that we are here because a god did it is an ADD-ON.

    Add on to what? By what means are you able to quantify existence?

    -Sab

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