So you don't so much believe in a Christian God, just a creator?

( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:19, archived)

well "Christian" is a difficult word for me,
I don't believe in a lot of things that are generally associated with christians, such as immortal souls, for instance, and Hell, and the Trinity. But as for how I understand the term "God", I think Abraham had the right idea, as well as many who took his lead.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:21, archived)

So you're a jew?

( BraynDedd Natasha Kaplinsky's labia majora, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:23, archived)

well sadly not, perhaps,
because to be a Jew you have to have Jewish parents. Well you can convert, if you really want to, but they don't like it much. To be Jewish is more than just to believe in that particular God, but to be under that particular covenant from that particular God. Or to dispel a certain common misunderstanding I seem to hear a lot, Jews don't believe that non-Jews go to Hell. It's perhaps a defining paradox of Judaism, that they believe in a Universal God but not a Universal religion.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:27, archived)

Jews don't believe in the afterlife, do they?
And I thought it was only orthodox jews that got uppity about conversion?
( BraynDedd Natasha Kaplinsky's labia majora, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:29, archived)

Jews believe in "the World to Come,"
that is one of the pillars of their faith. This isn't necessarily the same thing as having immortal souls, although they have also come to believe in this, it isn't original. It gets complex.

I don't know what the Liberal stance is on conversion but even from my own perspective it's unnecessary. It's their tradition and their culture, it would seem like butting in. It's only the theology and metaphysics that has truth value, not the customs.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:37, archived)

Why do you believe in a certain God but disregard all other God's that humanity has created?
Is your religion due to your initial exposure to the idea of a God, that is to say the first you were taught, or have you sort of whittled down your choices to arrive at your current belief?
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:32, archived)

My parents weren't really religious, if that's what you mean.
They were married in a church and got me Christened but that's about the extent of their church-going, these were just the done things. My dad was more into theories about aliens, my mum didn't much care about anything that didn't help with the housework.

I've investigated a lot of things. There's a certain amount of truth all over the place, the Buddha said some sensible things but Buddhism is properly agnostic although it has absorbed a lot of Hindu metaphysics. There's a lot of interesting Hindu philosophy as well, in fact my own view of the Universe has something in common with the Hindu cosmology lately. But Hinduism is still at root naive polytheism that has developed more towards monism through intellectual speculation. Judaism is interesting almost for being the other way around.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:45, archived)

Sikhism is interesting in that it expresses a fundamental physical truth in spiritual terms.
Their higher power is not a named deity but an intangible, universal force of light, truth, order, etc. - and it has since been deduced that the very presence of stuctured matter from atoms to life itself resulted from the prevalence of order against entropy.
( The Mock TurtIe ™ --- Thinks you are a cunt, on, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:58, archived)

I don't know where you intend to go with this.
The Sikhs call God "Waheguru" but note that it is only one name amongst any number of possible names. They meditate upon the "naam" or "name".
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:04, archived)

So do you pray to anyone?
What is the extent of your religion, beyond believing someone created the universe?
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:26, archived)

Yes,
and I'm very strongly moral. I don't believe myself to be the centre of the Universe. God's will, not mine, be done. I have come to despair of humanism, which seems to be mankind self-congratulating and self-exalting. The value of humanity is entirely contingent on the will of God.

I go to church because I believe I have a duty not to "go it alone", community is important, as is ritual, although ritual is to some degree arbitrary but serves as an exercise in mindfulness. If our lives are entirely secular, we can easily forget God completely. Ritual serves as a reminder and is habit-forming.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:33, archived)

So when God allows a tidal wave to kill thousands of people or a guilty man to go free, it is purely part of a grander plan?
I too believe a sense of community is important but the whole ritual thing with regards to religion seems a bit self-congratulatory on the part of God.
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:37, archived)

Isaiah 45:7
Well that depends on the rituals. I'm currently developing my understanding of "the humility of God," it exists in Judaism already, another one of its many paradoxes.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:39, archived)

A religion is full of paradoxes and self-contradiction?
HEAVEN FORBID!
( BraynDedd Natasha Kaplinsky's labia majora, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:42, archived)

I said paradoxes,
I didn't say self-contradiction. Maths is full of paradoxes.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:48, archived)

Why is your God the right God?
I only believe in one God less than you do, how do you know you've picked the right one?
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:47, archived)

This deserves attention,
but a /talk user can post more questions than a wise man can answer.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:10, archived)

Are you the 'wise man' in this discussion then, for believing something without a shred of proof?

( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:17, archived)

No I'm just being a little flippant,
apologies.

What do you regard as "proof" exactly? Given that empirical science only falsifies its theories, while proof in the absolute sense only exists in mathematics.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:25, archived)

Proof as in evidence beyond a simple belief.

( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:27, archived)

What counts as evidence, then?
I take it you mean empirical evidence? But all empirical evidence of the senses has to be interpreted to draw any conclusions from it, by use of our powers of logical reasoning. In practice we also tend to employ a great many assumptions. What I am saying to you is that the existence of physical material substance as the basis for all phenomena is such an assumption that we owe to times far past but we still cling to even after science has rendered it untenable, because, as you say, modern atheists reject the alternative a-priori as "irrational" despite the fact that it is the only explanation that remains that makes any sense.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:40, archived)

The belief in the existence of an ultimate creator who we can't see, hear, touch or feel; who is everywhere and nowhere all at once; who knows what we're thinking and can judge us for it is an explanation that makes sense?
Would it not be more reasonable to just admit that we don't know some things and perhaps never will?
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:44, archived)

all that's needed is a nice pub.
you have your community and your rituals, job done
( real i'm not happy 'til you're not happy, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 3:00, archived)

Fair enough, each to their own.
Personally, things are always a shit load more mundane than anything quite so magnificent as a God.

I always thought a belief in the almighty was a way of sticking ones head in the sand or shouting LALALALALALA to the possibility that this is all just a random existence, there is no point and your life is essentially completely futile and you might just as well climb back up a tree and groom a chimp.

Mind you, what the fuck would I know, I work in finance.
( mark morrisons prison shoes I love Willie, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:38, archived)

Not believing in God is not a synonym for seeing no purpose to life.
Keats argued that Newton had destroyed the beauty of a rainbow by explaining it's colours. I believe it just makes it that bit more wondrous. I suppose it comes down to which side of the fence you sit on with regards science and belief.
( mike woz ere 7442200 & 7696970 getter, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:45, archived)

I'm with Feynman on this,
but Newton was no atheist. He only explained phenomena in terms of more fundamental phenomena, but we still need a source for phenomena as such.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:49, archived)

Belief is pointless I'd say.
Things either exist or they don't. If you squeeze your eyes shut and tell yourself cars don't exist, won't stop you getting fucked up walking across a motorway. God as a concept or ideal I can accept to a degree but as a physical being? Not at all.

It does all boil down to belief at the end of the day, after the full 90 mins etc... but faith means dick really, it's just telling yourself something over and over again for the sake of it, regardless of it being true or not. There is as much evidence for the existence of Batman as there is for a God.

Mankind has looked at a deity for answers to tough questions many many thousands of years before the deity of Judaism/Christianity/Islam. I personally think we might just not need the crutch anymore.

Again, I live in Glasgow, what the fuck would I know.
( mark morrisons prison shoes I love Willie, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 0:57, archived)

You're the first one to mention "faith",
and you have defined it peculiarly, from my perspective.

I believe only what makes sense to me, knowing that we do not have direct experience of reality, but only have access to sense impressions from which the truth must be deduced as best we can.
( Moon Girl Technologies horrendous beanbag, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:13, archived)

Faith is to believe in something despite a complete lack of evidence, or indeed evidence to the contrary.
Religion is built on faith. Essentially you either have it or you don't and I don't.

May father is a priest in the Scottish Episcopal church and this is essentially how he'd define it. You're with it or you're out, you accept all the stupid hocus pocus stuff and just ride with it or you don't.

Getting hooked up on "what is reality" is essentially self defeating.
( mark morrisons prison shoes I love Willie, Thu 6 Oct 2011, 1:27, archived)