by DS211 243 Replies latest jw friends
Her god could not be more different from Einstein's.-cofty
I agree, as individual free thinkers we all define God in our own unique terms. There cannot be any rigid definition we are all unique and in control of our own free thinking.
Well said cofty, Love Kate xx
Uh yeah, Tammy's personal Christ is incredibly personal and intricately involved in her daily life.
I would like to see a thread locked down to four posters.
adam, tec, QC, and unstop
The topics are 1. I hear Jesus in my head. 2. The bible can't be inspired and literal. 3. Evolution vs Creation
Now that would be a Good Friday evening of entertainment.
coma,
How many pages do you reckon? My guess 100
Kate xx
still cannot evade the feeling of something else
DS211, I think this statement of yours says it all - you're going on a feeling. I get the impression that you already understand much of the logic against the probability that a God exists but you still won't allow yourself to fully accept the likelihood of his non-existence because of your emotions.
I think you need to understand why you feel the way you do - why you have that feeling of something else. And you need to understand that you can't trust all feelings. You need to understand that feelings often mislead. I believe that this is fundamentally what separates atheists from theists. Theists tend to trust in feelings, emotions and intuitions. Atheists tend to trust in evidence, reason and logic.
To consider why feelings can't be trusted think of the following: Think of Einstein's theories about time, space and gravity and how they relate. His ideas were completely counter-intuitive in his time. Yet, more and more his predictions based on his ideas and more modern experiments, show his counter-intuitive ideas to be mostly, if not totally correct. Einstein thought out of the box of his natual feelings about how things should be. When you examine his theories you get a feeling that they're strange, that they're couldn't possibly be correct. But math and science confirm that they're actually true. By contrast, ancient scientists before the development of the scientific method, had strange ideas about how the world worked. They were essentially going off their own feelings or intuitions. Their feelings no doubt felt very rational and plausible to them - based on their manner of thinking which was shaped by the observable world around them and everyday human experience. Do you see how feelings can mislead, DS211?
Our deep-seated subconscious sense of what feels true or reasonable is shaped - and more specifically, limited - by our life-experiences, our environment. A person that has been exposed to the idea of God and the fallacious reasonings used to support that idea, for any considerable period of time, especially from childhood on, has his brain wired to take God's existence as a given - and at a very deep subconscious level. That wiring of the brain can have the effect of someone still having a feeling that God exists even after being presented with weighty evidence and sound reasoning highlighting the high improbability of God. You have to confront the question of why you feel the way you feel by having a knowledge of how the brain works, recognizing that your subconscious has been shaped by religious indoctrination.
It would also help to remember that an inability to explain the origin or mechanics of some natural phenomenon does not constitue a sound, logical reason to insert God as the solution. Our not knowing the origin of the energy or singularity that caused the big bang does not equal God being the inescapable explanation; nor does it make the existence of God any more probable as there could be any myriad of explanations that we cannot even conceive of. Remember when you were a very young child: how did you rationalize the wonder of technology - Television, radio? Did you think there must be little people living in the TV and radio? Did you think that it was some kind of magic? If you did, you now know you were so very wrong. Don't make the similar mistake with regard to our ignorance of the origin of the universe and life. Bu maybe your young mind didn't buy the magic explanation and the idea of young people living in the TV and radio didn't fly. Even though you couldn't explain it, you knew there must be some real, non-magical explanation. Also, Some isolated tribes of people, when confronted with modern technology for the first time, concluded that it was magic and that the modern bearers of such technology were gods. Why? Because they did not understand how modern technology works. They had limited or no scientific knowledge. This is the same mistake theists make when they say: "Well how do you explain the origin of life? You can't can you? Therefore it must have been God." Always remember: A lack of explanation does not logically equate to the God explanation. In fact, the God explanation is not really an explanation at all. It is only a compounding of the problem. It's substituting one unexplanable for another far greater unexplanable.
I liken the explanation of an uncreated, without origin, complex, infinite God for the origin of our universe and life; with a man paying off a ten thousand dollar debt by borrowing a billion dollars and then feeling satisfied and at ease that he no longer owes the ten thousand dollars while being seemingly blind to the fact that he now owes someone else a billion dollars.
It is likely that with time and research you would eventually shake those feelings of something else. It takes you brain a while to rewire itself after years of indoctrination. Being aware of why you have your feelings would help you.
I liken the explanation of an uncreated, without origin, complex, infinite God for the origin of our universe and life; with a man paying off a ten thousand dollar debt by borrowing a billion dollars
Genius!
When I use this I will try to remember to credit you Island Man
QC, have you ever read anything about Einstein's beliefs on religion? Einstein repeatedly said he believed in "Spinoza's God". Are you familar with Spinoza, and his views on God?
Let me answer that, since it's a rhetorical question: clearly NOT, for you wouldn't have posted what you did, if you WERE familiar with Einstein's views on God (and, assuming you possess intellectual honesty, of course).
Xians are especially fond of cherry-picking quotes from Einstein, since he was almost begging for them to distort his intended meanings (after his words were detached from their original environment and placed into a vacuum, and exposed to strong linguistic interpretative distortion fields that are stronger than the force of gravity associated with a black hole)! Maybe he did it on purpose, to avoid flak from religious types: who knows?
Regardless, Einstein was begging to be "cherry-picked" by waxing poetic on 'cosmic religion', which is a danger when the path of abstract thinkers crosses those of concrete thinkers. JWs constantly do it, since they're trained to look for pre-provided answers found within other words and extract them as if they're ALWAYS the correct answer (and they ARE, since the WTBTS provided them)!
Fortunately for Albert, though, there's no reason to GUESS what he meant, since he even wrote a book in 1950's containing a compilation of his views on religion (which believers are likely to ignore altogethr, since it doesn't feed their confirmation biases; why waste time digging into facts, when it's likely not going to allow confirmation of one's pre-existing biases? Isn't that the point, the very mandate, of protecting one's faith?).
Nutshell: Einstein was referring to 'religion' as a scientist would, referring to the mystery and sense of awe that even modern-day physicists have when engaged in studying the cosmos; for Einstein, the Cern lab would be like a "church". He spoke of 'cosmic religion'.
Here's Einstein's writings which ran in the NY Times (and I'll insert MY words, since many won't be able to follow his thoughts):
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
The following article by Albert Einstein appeared in the New York Times Magazine on November 9, 1930 pp 1-4. It has been reprinted in Ideas and Opinions, Crown Publishers, Inc. 1954, pp 36 - 40. It also appears in Einstein's book The World as I See It, Philosophical Library, New York, 1949, pp. 24 - 28.
Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with the satisfaction of deeply felt needs and the assuagement of pain. One has to keep this constantly in mind if one wishes to understand spiritual movements and their development. Feeling and longing are the motive force behind all human endeavor and human creation, in however exalted a guise the latter may present themselves to us. Now what are the feelings and needs that have led men to religious thought and belief in the widest sense of the words? A little consideration will suffice to show us that the most varying emotions preside over the birth of religious thought and experience. With primitive man it is above all fear that evokes religious notions - fear of hunger, wild beasts, sickness, death. Since at this stage of existence understanding of causal connections is usually poorly developed, the human mind creates illusory beings more or less analogous to itself on whose wills and actions these fearful happenings depend. Thus one tries to secure the favor of these beings by carrying out actions and offering sacrifices which, according to the tradition handed down from generation to generation, propitiate them or make them well disposed toward a mortal. In this sense I am speaking of a religion of fear.
Einstein is saying a belief in Gods and religious rituals arose spontaneously in the human mind, driven out of human emotions. That is NOT God in Heaven who sent his son, but MY belief in where religions stems: the minds of men, who create Gods in their image. He continues:
This, though not created, is in an important degree stabilized by the formation of a special priestly caste which sets itself up as a mediator between the people and the beings they fear, and erects a hegemony on this basis. In many cases a leader or ruler or a privileged class whose position rests on other factors combines priestly functions with its secular authority in order to make the latter more secure; or the political rulers and the priestly caste make common cause in their own interests.
Einstein is reinforcing the concept that belief in deities served a useful purpose by allowing rulers to claim authority granted by the deity, in order to justify their own power and control (as in the Bible, where the command is to obey secular authorities, since God has granted them their power, as his servants).
The social impulses are another source of the crystallization of religion. Fathers and mothers and the leaders of larger human communities are mortal and fallible. The desire for guidance, love, and support prompts men to form the social or moral conception of God. This is the God of Providence, who protects, disposes, rewards, and punishes; the God who, according to the limits of the believer's outlook, loves and cherishes the life of the tribe or of the human race, or even or life itself; the comforter in sorrow and unsatisfied longing; he who preserves the souls of the dead. This is the social or moral conception of God.
Einstein is speaking as if a cultural anthropologst, someone who studies the function a certain practice or belief provides to the society under study (eg the Cargo Cults, or even the Mayans, etc. If you've not taken a course in cultural anthropology before, what are you waiting for?)
The Jewish scriptures admirably illustrate the development from the religion of fear to moral religion, a development continued in the New Testament. The religions of all civilized peoples, especially the peoples of the Orient, are primarily moral religions. The development from a religion of fear to moral religion is a great step in peoples' lives. And yet, that primitive religions are based entirely on fear and the religions of civilized peoples purely on morality is a prejudice against which we must be on our guard. The truth is that all religions are a varying blend of both types, with this differentiation: that on the higher levels of social life the religion of morality predominates.
Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. In general, only individuals of exceptional endowments, and exceptionally high-minded communities, rise to any considerable extent above this level. But there is a third stage of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form: I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.
Note that Einstein started from saying how deities are made in the imaginations of men, and these beliefs coalesce into a religion based on the imaginary anthropomorphic (human-like) deity. Einstein is saying to take the religious EXPERIENCE (not the REALITY, since he didn't BELIEVE in a God) to the next step, a 'cosmic religious feeling'. What's that, you ask?
It's the feeling of being connected to the World of nature by better understanding one's place in it:
The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear at an early stage of development, e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learned especially from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer, contains a much stronger element of this.
The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.
How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.
There it is: for Einstein, this cosmic religious feeling involved no notion of a personal God, and no theology (AKA Xianity), since both were anathemia to Einstein. In Einstein's words, it was the role of the ARTS and SCEINCES to awaken the feeling of this cosmic religion and foster this feeling of wonderment and awe in individuals receptive to it.
Heck, Einstein was not describing anything new: its called curiosity, those who are driven to find the answers for how things work, and aren't content to accept "God Dun It!" as an answer.
While Einstein bristled at the name 'atheist' (and specifically rejected it), he was likely doing so to avoid the hatred the name elicits from believers, but Einstein was just as much of an atheist as I am, since I agree on his cultural anthropological-based thinking on development of all religions (he's more like a deist, unless one accepts Einstein's little parlor game trick; I ALSO believe in Spinoza's and Einstein's God, if I'm trying to be obtuse).
Adam
My honest feelings. I WANT there to be a higher power that created us. I want to know im not alone. I want to know death isnt the end and i just cease to be....i cant imagine myself NOT existing. I dont want there to be no god because i feel as though morality would falter. After all if we are accountable to no one then really men are capable of anything....What terrible things can happen. I still fear satan and fear that i will somehow lose my morality and have less excuse to have self control.
I know to the ibserver these fears seem irrational, childish even. howver i do take comfort in the fact hat we dont know everything yet...and so i can still hope but still keep an open mind.
So is this just a certain hormone release? My amygdala utilizing its emotional components? Am i just lights and clockwork? what part of the vrain is it we have thats has a higher sense of awareness...the abulity to think outside the box....perhaps that is where i should start...i have a bachelors in psychology....my 3 years in thw WT have caused me to forget and discard much that i knew of myself. thats my biggest regret
DS211
I still fear satan and fear that i will somehow lose my morality and have less excuse to have self control.
Trust your humanity.
TEC, the next time you're chatting with Jesus, could you ask him what the word 'defilement' (Greek: κοινοῖ) meant to him?
Oh, and ask him how that word compares to the Greek word, 'miasma', too.
Kate said-
The washing hands tradition is just that. We were tought it as a tradition. We only every did it ceremonially at weddings and Bar-Mitvah's and functions. Men first, then women, then kids. There was a jug of water and a bowl. We had to pour the COLD! water down from our elbows to our fingertips. Then we sat down to eat. It was a load of nonsense if you ask me, had nothing to do with eating with clean hand or hygiene, I think the same water was used for everyone and poured back into the jug for the next in line.
Is this from the same Kate who repeatedly misspells a common suffix used in last names of German Jews, (-Stein)? Lemme guess: your family was reform Jews?
Hate to break it to you, but if you washed your hands in the manner you just described, you were doing it wrong: the rules for ritual handwashing before eating a meal containing bread is pretty specific (and is still followed to this day by orthodox and conservative Jews). Your mistake should be be obvious to anyone who knows what the Hebrew phrase 'netilat yadaim' means.
Here's a video explaining the proper way:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAAlzSZU-Rw
Adam
DS211 said-
I dont want there to be no god because i feel as though morality would falter. After all if we are accountable to no one then really men are capable of anything....What terrible things can happen. I still fear satan and fear that i will somehow lose my morality and have less excuse to have self control.
"Lose your morality?" You think you can do much worse than Jehovah, the God who wiped the face of the Earth of almost all of humanity, plant, and animal life, instituted the practice of slavery right after the Flood (by delegating authority to Noah, who's ONLY recorded act in an 'official' capacity was the 'curse of Ham'), commanded racial genocide against Canaanites, stipulated marriage of the rapist and their victim, looked the other way for Lot's drunken incest (TWICE), commanded Abraham to kill his son as a sacrifice, etc, etc?
The 'morality bar' as found in the Bible is set pretty-darn low, LOL....
