by still thinking 778 Replies latest jw friends
Well, it isn't how I know Christ and God... but I can discuss the likelihood of a creator, imo, using the universe and world and people as we know it/them. This would have less bearing on the nature of that creator though, other than a being/entity of some sort that brings forth life.
I don't know if you're also interested in that kind of a discussion on this thread or not. (and perhaps you'd like to wait until after your glass or two... I know one glass does it for me, lol)
Peace,
tammy
For various reasons, I prefer to read these threads and not post on them. But Still-baby has done a lovely job of keeping it respectful.
I believe I was led out of the JW's by certain "revelations" (I don't call them that) and I continue to have "revelations". They are accompanied by the calm, peaceful feeling that others have described, but I think of as more a "wave" of calm, peaceful, warmth.
I don't really "doubt" myself, per se......but when I am trying to figure something out, I do feel "pulled" in certain directions and I weigh things for a long time. For me, it seems I don't have a "voice" whispering the answer in my ear or an internal "voice". It always feels more like being coaxed down a path, one small revelation building on another, until I have the answer. Then the "wave".
tec....if discussing the likelihood of a creator is part of why/how you KNOW...feel free to discuss....I think it may attract some evolutionary theories though....if you're ok with that...be my guest...
I love reading all this and appreciate xtians discussing their faith and think Tec's offer to discuss the existence (likelihood of) a creator is a good idea --- do tell, any and all, what you base your reasoning on.
Application of God's/Jesus' word in my dealings day to day w/individuals in a difficult world makes him real to me. His admonition to love our enemy and be good to them is so contrary to what's in my own heart (unless they're easy to love and have not been evil toward me) or most people. I can name maybe three people in the entire world who really consider the other person's needs, cares, ahead of their own or that individual more important than themselves. This one makes me sideways at times determining and pondering about their needs/desires --- it's tough. It's certainly difficult to love others like we're told but it does work out in the long run if one can trust him in this situation.
Palmtree...thank you for joining us...lovely to hear from you. It was in fact you that inspired the thread. With a comment you made on another thread...it bothered me that you felt that way and it reminded me of how it initially felt to really doubt.
So thank you for giving me the inspiration to ask the question.
You're experience is certainly an interesting one...I am going to mull over what you have said.
Tomorrow then, on the likelihood of a creator :). I need to go to bed now.
I liked hearing both Palm's and LV's e x perience. I understand 'the wave', and also the application and truth in Christ's teachings made him real to me as well, long before I ever realized I might be able to hear in spirit. Or might ever have the spirit within me.
Peace all,
Tammy
@ Still Thinking.......... you have a PM
Palmtree but when I am trying to figure something out, I do feel "pulled" in certain directions and I weigh things for a long time. For me, it seems I don't have a "voice" whispering the answer in my ear or an internal "voice". It always feels more like being coaxed down a path, one small revelation building on another, until I have the answer. Then the "wave".
Yes I definitely identify with you here Palm.
Loz x
For those that look around them and see the animals, the plants, the earth and the sky, for those that look up and see the stars and the galaxies.... we ALL see those things!
Why do some people see those things and yet not see God? If you believe in god you may convince yourself that the people that dont see him choose not to. But that would be unfair and very, very presumptuous. So what do they know that you dont, or what do you know that they dont?
I can only speak for myself. I was once a believer in God, I was told the evidence, I was shown the reasoning. I have also taken many years to look at the evidence where god is not required in the equation. Some of you already know the final conclusion, but for me it was a no brainer that an intelligent being is not required for life to exist on this planet. As for the formation of the universe, all but its initiation is well understood. As for its formation, this is not a black hole (pardon the pun) in our knowledge either. Many theories and experiments abound.The Large Hadron Collider where all the cool experiments take place, have taken the formation of the universe all the way back to within a second of the big bang, thats how far back our understanding goes!
The god of the gaps theory is very important to recognise. For every time a human did not understand a very natural occurence they attributed it to a god. The Aurora Borealis may just be photons and a magnetic field, but I am sure it evokes emotion when you see it. It doesnt take much empathy to realise why people attributed this beauty to a god. Rainbows, they come when it rains! Also god once flooded the earth with rain (story of Gilgamesh is very different to the biblical account and older) therefore its a message from god ! No, sadly not, its just photons again, passing through water. Also rainbows exist throughout the universe, everywhere light passes through water/ice etc and have done so BEFORE the rainbow account in Genesis.
So in the same light, to say because we dont today in 2012 have a confirmed explination for the formation of out universe..therefore god made it! Would be a little presumptuous once again. Going back to the evidence for the evolution of life, if you dont believe in evolution then ask yourself honestly how much evidence have you looked at for evolution? I dont mean the bias toilet paper any religious org may have printed. How many textbooks have you read on the subject? How many museums have you visited? How many evolutionary scientists have you spoken to, asked questions to? In comparison to the number of religious books you have read, ministers you have spoken to and religious metings you have attended?! Are you gving the alernative opinion a chance? Did you know we watch evolution take place right now, it happens every day, you can witness it in life, you can even watch it happen in a lab! Do you choose to read evolutionary progress in the science journals? The evidence is undeniable you can even do the experiments yourself! If you dont do these things, then perhaps wondering why some people look at life, plants, the sky and the stars and dont see god, makes a little more sense. Maybe they have seen something you have not ? Maybe......
The idea of god is man made, it is as old as time, the first gods being women for they could create babies, children, humans from their insides. Later we made gods of all the elements around us that were important to us, water, earth, the sun etc. Over thousands of years, gods became animals, creatures, specific to the region and the culture. Eventually gods became man like but were worshipped as groups not individuals. Then in Egypt hundreds of thousands of years later the FIRST monotheistic god was imagined (it wasnt Yaweh folks). A god we would recognise today as false, pagan and obviously made up. Over hundreds and hundreds of years, this god over time became more human and more caring, more loving and more what we wanted in a god. However he still did awful things as people in power do, he was of course by now male, he became all powerful, he became demanding of worship, jealous and wrathful.. but at the same time a loving father. If this WAS a human we would say he was psychologically broken for these attributes do not complement each other. For those that still like to reject hell, remember the options are 'a paradise earth/ heaven' or 'a lake of fire and sulphur'. The fact that all of these rewards and punishments predate the monotheistic gods, made me think quite a bit about their origin AND the psychological make up of the god potrayed. Of course if you allow yourself to imagine why men in power i.e. the priesthood would give a god these attributes, it makes perfect sense. He loves you when you obey and all your desires will be rewarded, no death, a ressurection of your loved ones, no pain, no illness, a secure home, plenty of food etc etc... against when you disobey, you and your family will be killed, forever, in a hell where you will be punished by satan forever and even in JW land, your fate is a lake of burning fire and sulphur. Wonderful! Would you as an imperfect human EVER imagine up such a punishment? Would you ever be able to enforce it ? Would you ever want a human, paticularly a child to hear of such a thing and fear it ? Would a loving god? Would a human seeking power....... ?
So what are we left with if we can explain the formation of the earth in detail, the formation of early life in detail AND replicate it in a lab... did you know that in the 50's !!! a science student decided to see what would happen if he re-created earths early enviroment ? He replicated the atmosphere, the temperature, the electrical fields etc etc all in glass flasks and vials in a lab etc... and he waited.......do you know what he found at the bottom of the vials? How about the building blocks for DNA, over 20 amino acids!!!! From thin air ! This is called theMiller Experiment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment
(For those that know the miller experiment... an experiment published last week shows that we did not need ribosomes to make the first proteins! http://www.rdmag.com/News/2012/03/Life-Sciences-Evolution-Study-Of-Ribosome-Evolution-Challenges-RNA-World-Hypothesis/ )
As much as the uneducated religious groups would like you to believe that particles, atoms, molecules of life are dead objects almost like lego. They are not, they interact on their own accord, they join together, they work together, they grow, they trial various combinations naturally all you need is time for progress in a positive direction to take place (our perspective makes it positive, in reality it is neither positive or negative). The best and easiest way to understand it is that everything is made of atoms, atoms can have (+) or (-) charges, we know that they can accumilate and molecules can also form (+) and (-) charges, or regions of charge. This is how the basic building blocks interact and by multiple interactions over billions of years became more advanced. The amino acids that Miller found, can join together to make proteins, everything we are is made of proteins. Bone, skin, hair, blood ..everything. The experiments and evidence of the formation, interaction, evolution of all these molecules is immense. New evidence is presented daily! It is undeniable.
But this is just about forming structures..... is this the same as forming life? A living thing?
DNA in a specific pattern is unique to every individual living organism. This DNA is then read by a molecule (a ribosome) as DNA is a code for making proteins from amino acids. These proteins form the living thing. Remember we are all just made of proteins!
What would happen if we made DNA from scratch, what if we just copied an existing organisms DNA such as a simple bacteria? We could feed it the building blocks, let it form the organism and see if it becomes....alive!
Ok so we create the DNA of a bacteria from the raw materials that miller proved can form in air, and put it in an empty cell. We feed it the raw materials so that the DNA can make use of these ingrdiants to make the structure of the bacteria. Will it come alive or does god need to breathe life into it ?.... What do you think would happen? Would it spontaneously come to life once the structure was complete?.....
Guess what, we have done this experiment already....
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/may/20/craig-venter-synthetic-life-form
It came alive !
So knowing that life's building blocks can form by themselves in the conditions of early earth and over billions of years of progression and random interaction can become complex and therefore as we saw above 'alive' , do you believe it is possible to go from such simple cells to a living organism such as a human over billions of years? Can you comprehend that in your mind? It doesn't seem right does it? This is why science is never about the gut feeling or what feels right...
A simple cell to a human being in billions of years.....hmmmm....Take a second glance at the next pregnant woman you see, for in just 9 months, a simple single cell becomes a living, breathing, functioning human being!
This point is just to prove that the mechanisms for developmen exist, of course it didnt take 9 months of adapation or natural selection, it took billions of years. Also note that scientists have mapped out this progression, it is all there for you to read about and examine, as I said, how much time have you given to this evidence?
The further down in the ground we dig the simpler the organisms we find. Yet the DNA of these organisms are present in our DNA, yet in early DNA our late DNA is not present. The logic and conclusion is simple! Life has progressed in complexity. We know the mechanism of that too. Simple mutation of DNA, it happens billions of times a second in each one of us. Some mutations (e.g. mistakes in reading the DNA) when forming a new living thing may become beneficial to that organism for the enviroment they are in. The living things with genes more suited to their enviroment are more likely to procreate and therefore this new gene dominates the region. Over time (billions of years) these changes in an organism can eventually alter their whole appearance, make up or even species.... welcome to Natural Selection. Evolution!
A good example is sickle cell anemia. Caused by a mutation in the formation of a protein that helps shape the red blood cell. Malaria cant attach itself so well when the blood cells are this shape. In areas of africa where malaria is rife.... you guessed it..... sickle cell anemia is also rife as it is beneficial! The longer you live and the healthier you are, the more likely you are to procreate. So if i said to you what shape is a human red blood cell, right now you would say on average it is spherical. If the world was to undergo a worldwide epidemic of potnt malaria, who would survive? What would be the shape of the human red blood cell then? EXACTLY... the normal shape (by numbers) woud become sickle shaped. This is evolution, adaptation to the enviroment by natural means. No design, no intelligence, no forethought.
This simple, if not so brief (sorry) explination is an easy indicator for how knowledge can change your perspective. If you look hard enough, the Miller experiment is mentioned even in the JW literature... yet how many of us learned about it from their books? I never did. They argue that nobody knows for sure the precise conditions of early earth... as if the fact that the ingrediants for life forming from the air is not significant! I know something for sure, those self admitted anti-education brooklyn factory staff dont have a clue what they are talking about. But his gives you an idea as to why scientists just shake their heads at such ignorance, it also goes to show what little ammunition religious men have against science.
Moving on... (sorry)....We can also explain MOST of what is around us, I say most because we have only had about 150 years to do everything we have recently achieved in science. Not only do we have all this informaton, but the evidence we can dig from the ground and hold in our hands DIRECTLY contradicts the religious accounts such as the bible and the Quran. Dinosaurs dissprove genesis instantly. As do billions of years old, precambrian organisms. YOU can visit, see and touch this evidence in a museum....
So....what are we left with ?
Feelings?
We are a unique group on earth today. Not many people exit a powerful and cognitive adjusting cult and tell their story. We know first hand where feelings can get you, how un-trustworthy feelings are and how easy they are to SELF manipulate and be manipulatED. All religions claim ineraction with a god and all religions have in the past. Do you really believe Zeus was interacting with the Greeks? Do you really believe Ra was interacting and 'leading' the egyptians? Was Yaweh really leading his people in genocidal attacks? Was Apollo really guiding and showing the way to the Romans? Is Allah really guiding such acts as 9/11 or Saladin in the eary crusades? Alternatively was Yaweh leading the crusades as they all were willing to die to defend such belief? Was God really guiding Bush or Tony Blair? No you shout ! Well they really FELT that he was.....
Were the early gods based on the stars really influencing people? Does it really alter our life is Jupiter is passing Uranus (tee hee) ? Were those earliest forms of god known to man, yes those beautiful pregnant women, were they REALLY telling their followers how to live...prehaps...prehaps these yes!
Is the god of the universe that happens to be believed in, in our time, (Allah or Yaweh as opposed to Thor or Venus) really directing your life... what house to choose, what man to marry, what decision to make ? Have you not noticed other people in life including non believers and people of alternate faiths getting by just fine and achieving as much if not more without a supposed guiding hand from god!?
Do you not think that the alternate faith believers ALSO think their god is guiding them? When you see a nun that has given her life to the church it is easy to assume that she is misguided and self deluded, yet she would protest and claim to FEEL gods guidance and presence in her life. As do the followers of Vishnu in Hinduism and any other follower of any other god...hence they are believers! Can you conceive their self delusion? Is it at least POSSIBLE that you too are vulnerable to such self formed and manipulated FEELINGS? Have you researched the psychology of such interactions?
I eventually had to be honest with myself, I could see the evidence for evolution before my eyes and at the same time hear religious people claim that it was non existant all the while claiming it was futile to examine the evidence for themselves as they knew there was a god, I could go to a museum and see life existing at a time when the bible claims nothing was formed. I saw life that predated man, contradicting the bible, I could see life that lived off other life predating man, again contradicting the eden accout. Only 2 weeks ago they found a dinosaur with another dinosaurs meat in its innards. Animals DID consume other animals, there is a reason tigers and lions and dinosaurs and crocodiles have sharp, meat eating teeth and enzymes that can digest meats. I could see death and disease in animals that predate man. I could see death and disease in early humans that predated Adam. These early humans contradict the whole of the Biblical, Quranic and other religious accounts. Is it a coincidence that we only found this evidence in the last 200 years and therefore there is not a single mention of it in the bible? What about the crazy explinations for such things as race and language in the bible ... the tower of babel! What utter nonsence... ! Remember we dont see a signature for "God" written in a tree, we only have this modern concept i.e. Yaweh, Allah etc from religious texts. After rejecting so much of these books with todays EVIDENCE... what is left to hold onto in regards to believing in this deity? ..............The more and more I saw, the less the bible added up and the more the science did ! It also made more and more sense why education is so feared and why all the statistics show that the more educated you are the less likely you are to have a faith. Call us childish "know it all, big headed, smart arse, think you are better than everyone else!" if it makes you feel better, but its not about being better than anyone, its about being better informed.
So yes, I had to be honest with myself, I can see the evidence for life forming with no god, really it exists, it isnt about not wanting to believe in living forever in heaven and no death, who doesnt want that!!! I can also see all the evidence proving the bible scientifically, historically and morally wrong.... what was left?
I had to ask myself.... Have I REALLY ever seen god................. no.
Can I say with 100% confidence that things I ascribed to him could 100% NOT have been through coincidence or my self determination to believe............no.
Is my life VERY obviously different to a non-believers, in that it is self evident I have a god assissting me.............no.
All the feeling I have, all the praying I have done... is it even possible that these have come from within........ Yes.
Does the god I percieve in my mind, the loving, fatherly figure, even match the description of god as potrayed in his own book?.................No.................. AHH!!!........ so where is this perception of him coming from? Maybe the 20 years of indoctrination? .......Yes.
DO I fear this person....Yes..... Do I need to.... No! Why not? ....... Maybe he doesnt exist! Shall we find out?................. Yes !!!! ...................
See the above!
Snare&Racket xxx
p.s. sorry its so long.
Today for example:
It's warmed up enough that my neighbor has his 2 blue macaws outside again. I can hear them screeching. There's butterflies all over my backyard and I go outside to enjoy it.
While I sit outside in grateful solitude, I feel more spiritual on this Sunday morning than I ever did sitting inside a windowless Kindgom Hall, listening to a mindless repetition of general Bible doctrine.
