by jgnat 153 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
I invite King Solomon and anyone else that is interested, to discuss if believing in God may be helpful. I am not restricting the discussion to the biblical God. I'm ready to look if this belief may be helpful both from a societal and from an individual point of view.
Is it possible that there is a part of us that reaches beyond our base natures, to reach for that which is bigger than ourselves?
I'm not looking for "proof" of God's existence, so let's carve that out of the discussion right off.
Yes, I do believe transcending ourself, the physical, and the here-and-now can activate our superconsciousness allowing us to tap into hidden, inspiring, healing and awesome powers.
Conversely materialism and self-centredness can be enormously deleterious.
I can see some basic benefits of god belief:
1 - Without the tools with which to inquire about the world around them and with limited food resources it was of low survival benefit to contemplate the unknown methodically but of high survival benefit to believe in supernatural forces, to conceptualise those forces as other living things and to delegate the evidential requirements for belief to a faith based heuristic that stood in for teh unknown or the feared.
2 - Socially, religion provides a shared conceptual space in which to perform exchanges. Just like money acts as a means of exchange and a store of value, religion and belief in a God can act as a means to create relationships, pass on information and to engender action.
3 - Evolution required us to go through most of our development keenly hooked to our adrenal systems alert to the need to fight or flee at the merest hint of danger. As civilisation took over our brains are not well dapted to relatively benign environments. To adapt our evolutionary fear of the physical world while allowing us to pragmatically live within a safe society the concept of God can be seen as an excellent compromise (an external threat requiring constant vigilence) to channel our instinctual overreactions into more civilised social behaviour.
4 - Belief in a supernatural being can be a source of great hope in a condition of despair (such as lonliness, slavery, addiction etc.) and also as a great aid in hiding the inherant lack of justice in a natural world.
Fernando, have we seen modern evidence of this?
How about authors such as James Arthur Ray who advocated a concept of "Harmonic Wealth"? That is, spiritually in tune and wealthy too?
http://www.personal-development-coach.net/harmonic-wealth.html
Qcmbr:
Boy, you’ve loaded a lot of thoughts into a single sentence! I will break each one down to their component parts so I can address it. Hope this is OK
1 - Without the tools with which to inquire about the world ….
By the looks of the world today, it seems that a believe in a higher power is bad for mankind.
I was thinking how I could have timed this thread better, bobld. If you are referring to the riots regarding the insult of the prophet, Mohamed.
My gut tells me that this boiling over of violence has a lot more to do than religious sentiment.
A world in which jgnat doesn't believe in God no longer makes any sense.
My local newspaper Under "your view".
Religious fanatics; Re:" (Duarte group (my neighboring city)
tied to anti-Islam effort", SEPT 14: a few years have passed
since the late British journalist Christopher Hitchens wrote
that "Religion poisons everything".
I disagree (said David). The poison is not religion, it is religious
fanaticism (I guess he never read the OT). A solution to
religous violence lies in one short passage within the Bible.
Micah 4:5 Micah doesn,t condemn other people's gods, nor
does he call those people evil because they don,t worship
his God.(But the Bible does my friend)
Micah,s vision is a beacon of universal love and reason.
If only we would listen to his voice-not only with our ears,
but also with our hearts.)
David that sounds good, but that will never happen if we
use the Bible as a guide.
No worries, SBF. The verdict is still out. 
