Skepticism About God

[brag]

What is often most interesting about skepticism about God is that it sounds good, and it serves to rally many who are satisfied with their lives while the going is good. However, when the going gets tough, the first cry is "oh my God, where are you, please help me."

Often God skepticism is appealing for those who believe they can spend their time in more productive activities, but in Church and around religious people. But when we examine what we do with our time, when not in religious activities, the answer is not much other than mostly self centered activities.

When the same skeptics of religion are asked how much time they are willing to spend in mentoring troubled children or volunteer some time in a soup kitchen or a nursing home for the elderly, the answer is most likely a resounding "we don't have the time."

To the ears of the skeptic, criticism of religion is a nice band wagon on which to jump. It is easy to condemn religion, because of the lack of tools to measure psychological and spiritual growth and development in the context of religious activities, as well. So the culprit in always religion, when few are ever willing to look closely at religion, and tell us how to measure life's successes without the universal human values that religion promotes.

Can anyone begin to imagine what the world would look like without the teaching of the love of our fellow man and God, fear of sin and morality in society? Even with all the religion we have, we are most often bombarded with crime and corruption of every kind in some of the highest places and among some of most educated people in many societies.

We can go on crying foul about religion, but where is the offer of a solution for the uplift of man and society from the degradation of man's inhumanity to man? What would the world look like without religion? We saw what happened in Russia, and thank God religion is back again in Russia. But we know that religion is not the only answer, but it is the best we have, until someone can prove to us there is a better solution for man's inhumanity to man.

How do we know if the reduction of crime is not related to the teaching of the value of religion? More and more we see children unaware if the consequences of the simple lesson behind the telling of untruths, as if they were never told about the consequences. And how do we know if the crime rate is not due to the failure to educate people about the value of religion?

The God skeptics sound like the skeptics of preventative social programs. It costs too much the skeptics say, and corrective measures and programs are always better, easier, and more measurable. Government is never willing to spend money on preventative programs or even try a pilot program to see if there is something they can learn from prevention programs, yet they are willing to spend millions on corrective programs where crime and corruption continue without abate.

So we are all satisfied to sit back and rely on religion to do the major work of Government in controlling crime and corruption, without spending a dime in preventative programs because religion picks up the major slack where Government and concerned citizens fail. Yet, many are more than ready to say that religion is the cause for all the miseries of the world.

When we think about God, we do not think about religion, but when we think about the same God by name as Jesus, Allah, Rama, Krishna, Brahma Vishnu, Shiva, etc., we think about religion. Yet we know that the concept of God is beyond religion, so why do we limit the name God to a particular religion.

Yet it is impossible to mention the name God without conjuring up some image of what the name God means, and we are told that all images of God constitute idolatry, hence the beginning of competition and the establishment of conflicts about God. We live by concepts because the entire world is only concepts, yet someone can tell us to conceptual God is wrong or idolatry.

Below is a link on Youtube video presentation of the reasons for God by Tim Keller.

http://www.dipity.com/timetube/YouTube_ ... God_Keller (http://www.dipity.com/timetube/YouTube_Reasons_God_Keller)

Balgrim Ragoonanan

[letric]

David Hume (1711-76) born in Edinburgh, studied law, though did not graduate. He wrote while in his mid-twenties, A Treatise in Human Nature, his masterpiece. For Hume, the self is not an entity for it is not an object of perception since there is no specific impression of corresponding to 'I'. He somewhat similarly denies cause as usually considered, on the grounds that there are no logical connections between events. In the Treatise (Book 1, Part iv, Sec.6) he writes: For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat, or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at anytime without a perception, and can never observe anything but the perception. Hume's graded distinction between impression and ideas is fundamental in his philosophy. He writes:
There is no object, which implies the existence of any other, if we consider these objects in themselves, and never look beyond the ideas which we from of them. He thus argues that cause is not a logical relation, and also that we do not experience casual relation, though we may perceive events and objects. He concluded this by suggesting that knowledge can only be gained by putting up and testing (by match and mismatch against the observed world) hypotheses, which must be framed as to be testable.

Ayers, A.J. (1980) Hume, Oxford.

[brag]

David Hume must have been an advaitin or monist=Deva du=God is=all is=nothing more can be said=live with it=stop whining.

[letric]

David Hume must have been an advaitin or monist=Deva du=God is=all is=nothing more can be said=live with it=stop whining.

Brag, All I know of David Hume apart from being a philosopher are his writings.

This leads to his treatment of belief (in Part iii): the 'force and liveliness of perception' is belief- and not inference, or the conclusion of inference. He speaks this mainly from the example of casual beliefs in perceptions of objects, as absolutely certain. This is indeed a feature of all empiricists, for perceptions are taken as the the basis of all knowledge. and some knowledge is supposed to be unquestionably true in order to give a basis for certain knowledge-although empiricist philosophers seldom agree as to what knowledge is certain. He writes:
There is no object, which implies, the existence of any other, if we consider these objects in themselves, and never look beyond the ideas which we form of them.

Res ipsa loquitor.

[brag]

Does God exist? Here are six straight-forward reasons to believe that God is really there.

http://www.everystudent.com/features/isthere.html

"Just once wouldn't you love for someone to simply show you the evidence for God's existence? No arm-twisting. No statements of, "You just have to believe." Well, here is an attempt to candidly offer some of the reasons which suggest that God exists.

But first consider this. If a person opposes even the possibility of there being a God, then any evidence can be rationalized or explained away. It is like if someone refuses to believe that people have walked on the moon, then no amount of information is going to change their thinking. Photographs of astronauts walking on the moon, interviews with the astronauts, moon rocks...all the evidence would be worthless, because the person has already concluded that people cannot go to the moon.

When it comes to the possibility of God's existence, the Bible says that there are people who have seen sufficient evidence, but they have suppressed the truth about God.1 On the other hand, for those who want to know God if he is there, he says, "You will seek me and find me; when you seek me with all your heart, I will be found by you."2 Before you look at the facts surrounding God's existence, ask yourself, If God does exist...

[Sirius]

brag, I was going to respond to EveryStudent.com's "Does God Exist" article point by point, but then I discovered there is no point to it. Even just reading the first points - those about the conditions here on Earth pointing to intelligent design - suggests that the author is either ignorant of scientific fact or conveniently ignoring it.

For instance, I do not think the author knows a thing about the conditions necessary to harbor life, habitable zones, the commonality of water, evolution, and the sheer probability of the right things happening given billions of years in which to do so. I am not surprised however, for the site is not a neutral one by a longshot. Even the article's sources at the very end present a glaring bias.

The author needs to understand that she cannot prove a theist point to an atheist by using theist-centric sources.

There is one bit that made me decide to write this reply though; this bit right here: "What is it about atheists that we would spend so much time, attention, and energy refuting something that we don't believe even exists?!"

I know exactly what it is. It is the same thing that makes theists spend so much time, attention and energy trying to prove their beliefs to everyone else. That thing is the human desire to prove a held view as true. To try twisting that to use it as proof of God's existence is frankly disingenuous at best.


I am not a member of the theist or atheist camps. While I believe there may be something out there, I do not know if is what we call God. I must say though that articles such as the one in question is the sort that makes one bang one's head against the wall. Slanted and filled with half truths.

[brag]

Sirius, I really don't think that something to which you refer is "out there" but rather "in here,' meaning in the human mind.

I do believe it is in the human capacity where the complexities we call God lie, and which cannot be proven. Who knows what the performances of miracles mean? Miracles seem to happen all the time and whether man has a capacity for performing them routinely, we don't know, but we do know that some people do perform things we do not understand.

When we see sufficient miracles beyond the realm of ordinary possibilities, we call the performer some kind of God, and then we believe they come and go in our midst and they must be alive in some place where we cannot find them. Some of them put it that way to us, like in the case of Jesus, and others tell us we have the capacity to do what they do as we are also God, as in the case of Sai Baba whom many call a charlatan and many more call God.

For example, I read of a person in Thailand who can make you see a whole forest in a split second and as fast as you see the forest, it disapears. Some say we have the capacity to delude others into believing what they want us to believe.

Some say miracle performers are fakes and charlatons, and what they do is learned. I say it is not as simple as that, for there is a capacity in human beings to do more than we can comprehend with the naked eye.

If it is true that we only use a small percentage of the brain, then we can assume that there is much more to the brain than we know, and some people slip in and out of the capacity of the brain to do things we cannot understand.

[brag]

Many people who appear to be religious are really not always as they seem. They may have an unquenchable thirst for exploring a better understanding of the meaning of the concept of God, and some may vow to pursue their quest for a proper understanding for peace and happiness. It is in the transformation of the heart that peace can be found.

Finding a proper understanding of God may also involve knowing oneself, that is, exploring the belief that we came from somewhere and are going somewhere. The in-between is where we all get mixed up and lose our way back. Understanding the in-between is called self inquiry in which we are fulfilled.

Some believe it is from God we came and to God in Heaven or Paradise we must return. Others believe the human being is like a cell in a cosmic body that never fully merges with the cosmic body, but returns as a cell in the same cosmic body from where it came. They say it is God's journey from each individual heart to the universal heart of God where we rightfully belong or from God's immanence to God's transcendence.

I believe that everyone understands the concept of God with a variety of shades of differences, and over time, we emerge with a new understanding of what God personally means to us. No one can prove that a concept of God manifest itself, but many of us believe that faith, reason and experience can bring us closer to a better understanding of who or what God may be.

I truly believe that the mind shapes God according to our spiritual needs, faith in an ideal of functioning and an identification with that ideal. That is how psychotherapy works, as well, and it is how we grow to identify with the ideal of our parent (first God) and teachers or gurus (second God).

The patient grows to identify with the values (virtues) of the therapist, and becomes exactly like the therapist (transference). But before he grows in identification with the therapist, he first has to struggle with the therapist as a kind of test of unconditional love, and another test of the true concerns of the therapist. The same is true between the student and teacher and the parent and child, where unconditional love helps the transformation of the child into a loving adult (ideal).

The concept of God becomes our therapist. We identify with the ideals of the therapist to become healed and to function like the very therapist (God). We call it the shaping of our functioning towards the ideal (God). Religion helps to shape that identification in a variety of ways through discipline (religion).

I also firmly believe that inherent in every form of functioning is a creative, built-in or innate set of rules (Brahma) for the continuation (Vishnu) and dissolution (Shiva) of each unit of functioning over time. That functioning is also called God (conscience) in man.

We sometimes have experiences we cannot explain, and we call them mystical which takes us to new dimensions in life. Sometimes these experiences lead us into a search for the source of our mysticism. Sometimes we call the source God, but we have no idea what that source looks like.

The ideals we carry in our heads about God is what many of us live by, and that ideal may grow according to our needs. It may expand our depth of thinking and bring about new faith in ourselves as we continue to identify with our ideal. They are there for everyone of us, but many of us fail to understand them, and sometimes we abandon them in frustration.

The more I think I understand God from other people's theories, faith and beliefs, the less I feel confident about my faith in God, and so I go about searching for my own understanding on which I depend for my transformation.

The one thing I am certain about in life, is that no one has to remain unchanged or deteriorate in behavior. There is definitely transformation of hearts that can be achieved, and which can make life more meaningful, only if we have the discipline to endure the tasks involved. That is where religion comes in.

For me, God is most meaningful when it involves personal experiences and transformation of the heart that takes us from one state of functioning to new levels beyond our wildest dreams.

Before we know it, we become less attached to the material world, and we begin to experience what is behind the material world. We call it the Spirit that holds the world together. It provides a new taste of life in another dimension we call our Spiritual World which can distance us from others who do not understand what is happening with us. I call it living in God, before which God was living in us as our prompting towards the unfolding of all our past unfinished business.

Living in God means total surrendering to God as a cell in God's cosmic and spiritual body.

Balgrim Ragoonanan

[letric]

One possibility is to view the OBE as an altered state of consciousness in which an imagined model or representation of the world replaces the normal perceptual model. If this model is more convincing than the degraded perceptual model, it may take over and seem real. Imagined models are often constructed in bird's eye view as though from above. So if a model like this takes over the an OBE will have occurred. The theories obviously in their implications for survival after death. Some researchers have seen the OBE as one method of investigating 'survival', and to this end have tried to confirm that there is an objective double which leaves the body and is capable of independent thought and action. But this in no way implied by the occurrence of the experience itself. Even if it is under stress the physical body is still alive, often quite well, and there is no reason to suppose that it is not responsible for the organised thought and consciousness involved. What is needed is better understanding of subjective experience.
R. L. Morris, S. B. Janis, J., Hartwell, J., and Roll, W. G. (1978). Studies of communication during out-of-body experiences. Journal of the American Society for Physical Research.

[brag]

Perhaps out of body experiences are meant to give us periodic glimpses of who we really are. We are universal consciousness temporarily encased in physical bodies made up of consciousness itself for the purpose of differentiating the real from the unreal.

An ancient Hindu Prayer goes like this:
Oh Lord,
please lead me from the unreal to the real
from shades of darkness to pure light
and from death to immoratlity

[letric]

Egyptian concepts of mind, whereas the people of other ancient civilisations believed that they were created by gods from matter, the Ancient Egyptians saw themselves as created directly out of nothing by the gods who created the universe. They saw themselves as a divine nation, and their king as a god, though with a mortal body. They were uniquely religious. They had far more gods than any other country or civilisation, their many gods reflecting their extremely animalistic way of looking at nature - the heavens and everything on earth being seen as under the control of as great variety of often hostile beings. The most hostile spirits were often represented by dangerous animals, wolves, crocodiles, and venomous snakes, which overran Egypt in pre-dynastic times. Perhaps this is why science was less developed in Egypt than in contemporary Babylonia. Egyptian science lacked imagination and was essentially practical. The gods of both Egypt and Babylonia credited with speech, and at least human intelligence, and human passions, and morality. For the Egyptians, the brain (being bloodless in death) was not important and was generally ignored, the heart was the power of life, and the source of good and evil. Thus, in their funerary literature, the Book of the Dead, the heart was weighed, against feathers, to determine the balance of good and ill at death. According to the Egyptologist Sir Wallace Budge (1895, in a most lucid account of the complicated psychology of gods and men, p. lxiii)

E. A. Wallace Budge (1895, reprinted 1967).The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Papyrus of Ani. London

[brag]

However we understand and look at God and ancient beliefs in God, we must give the ancient people and all people today credit for believing in an inner or outer concept of something that can be credited for what we think, say and do. That is the humility needed in man that is always being sought, and is always in question. Some people call it a higher power, but some say there is no power higher than man since man and God are one.

[brag]

All that one sees in the entire universe is a manifestation of Brahman (Godhead). Some people ask: "How can we petty human beings be equal to the all encompassing Brahman?" This is not correct. You are that omnipotent, all-pervading Brahman. Due to your worldly attitude, you are not recognising the Reality. You are separating yourself from the Divine. All that you see is Brahman. To search for God as something different from you is a mistake. But this truth is not easily recognised by man. When you look at the ocean, its endless series of waves and the frothing foam on the waves, they all appear separate from each other. But the truth is they are all one. The water in the waves and in the foam comes from the same ocean and has the same qualities as the ocean.
-BABA

[letric]

How does humanism connect with humanity? The Renaissance humanist (for example, Petrarch, and Erasmus) were so called because because they felt that Christianity should be as much concerned with human affairs here on earth as with the afterlife in heaven and hell, and also because they were learned in the newly discovered literature of classical Greece and Rome, which was rated as 'the humanities' because it was the secular work of man whereas the Bible and the patristic commentaries were treated as the divine inspired work of God. The essence of this modern humanism is summed up in the following quotation from Vico, who was an eighteenth-century Italian, though he wrote in the manner of the Renaissance humanists: '{it is} a truth beyond all question that the world of civil society has certainly been made by man and that its principles are therefore to be rediscovered with the modifications of our own human mind'. Let us be more specific. Humanity is that which differentiates man from other animals. The individual is created by a whole social milieu into which he was born: my consciousness of myself is coloured by my class consciousness, when it comes to morality, humanists reject the idea that there can be any absolute criteria for making such distinctions they are led to put an unusually high valuation on the virtue of tolerance. In this context the unique feature of humanism is that not only does it proclaim the virtue of tolerance but the same time it denounces all forms of religious zeal. In short, humanism is an intellectual attitude rather than a creed of a religious sect, it provides us with a sceptical base from which to criticise the prejudiced certainties with which other people are prepared to proclaim the Will of God and the Destiny of Mankind, but it is not in itself a guidebook to any new kind of Utopia.

[brag]

The slaves of the Americas were promised a paradise in Heaven in exchange for their conditions on earth and whips on their backs.

[brag]

When we accept God as intrinsic to man's being, then there is no problem about God or man, but only the establishment of mutual love between man and God.

[letric]

Most of us have had glimpses of diverse societies - the urban kingship of the Yoruba, the pastoral simplicity life among Nuer, the green menace of Pygmy forest life, the great cattle-rearing society of the Zulu - which provide a sample of thousands of societies and religions. Have also noted some themes from the dimensions of classical religion. Even though there is some talk of revival of these ancient ways of today, it is likely that their future lies within some larger synthesis, not only between differing African societies and conceptions, but also between them and the forces which have been crowding into Africa from outside. African religion is deeply important facet of human history up to the modern period. It will remain a resource of Black Africans, and more widely for humans. But it have never been a single system, or even approximated to the sense of a single tradition which has marked some of the historical world religions. If there is now a sense of African unity, it due to the reaction against colonialism. It is to the history of this colonial epoch in the world's affairs that we now turn.

[letric]

The same principles which at first lead to scepticism, pursued to a certain point bring men back to common sense.

Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1734)
Dialogue 3

[brag]

The Qumran study as discussed in the link below supports my belief in God as a principle for living, as I discussed it in my post of 8/11/09 in this thread. Whether God is historical or not is irrelevant to religion and the results are the same whether God takes human form or is a personification of God as in many references in Hinduism and in many other ancient religions. This article would continue to support the Christian belief in Jesus as a principle of God also, and may have little or no impact whether God is real or unreal. It also brings into focus the question of Jesus as described in the Quran.

http://www.burningcross.net/crusades/dead-sea ...

3. Message of the Dead Sea Scrolls
Dead Sea Scrolls research is an involved subject, but its central message may be summarized as follows. The contents of the Dead Sea Scrolls challenge the two most fundamenlal beliefs of Christianity: the uniqueness of Jesus Christ, and Christianity as the embodiment of the message of Christ. Both these are put in jeopardy by the Qumran material. First, they show that the message of Jesus did not originate with him, and he was also not unique; he was at most one of several known as 'Teachers of Righteousness' that were part of an ultra-conservative messianic Jewish movement based in Qumran going back at least a hundred years before the birth of Jesus. Many of the practices that we now regard as Christian innovations - like the Lord's Prayer and the Lord's Supper - can be traced to the Qumranians, also going back to a century before the birth of Christ. And secondly, Christianity as we know today is really a creation of St Paul, having little to do with Jesus or his message. In many ways, the two versions - early Christianity of Jerusalem and Pauline Christianity that followed it - stand in opposition to each other.

It is well known and widely recognized that the real founder of Christianity as a world religion was Saul of Tarsus later known as St Paul. It is the position of the Church that Paul took the message of Jesus and carried it far and wide. According to this, Paul was no more than the emissary of Jesus - the only Son of God. The new twist introduced by the Dead Sea Scrolls is that Jesus had little to do with what passes for his teachings. The main conclusion that follows from the Dead Sea Scrolls is: Christianity as we know it today is rooted not in the message of Jesus Christ, but in the expansionist ideology of St Paul who laid the foundations of Christian imperialism while invoking the name of Jesus. Seen in this light, Pauline Christianity was but a theocracy modelled on the Roman Empire; its foundations were laid by Paul, the influential Roman citizen and not Jesus the orthodox Jew.

According to some scholars, even the existence of Jesus, as a historical figure, is brought into question by the Scrolls. John Allegro, who, as a member of the International Team had examined the Scrolls in the original wrote:[8]

My own opinion is that the scrolls prompt us increasingly to seek an eschatological meaning for most of Jesus' reported sayings: more and more become intelligible when viewed in the light of the imminent cataclysms of Qumran expectations, and the inner conflicts in men's hearts as the time grew near.

As far as details in the New Testament record of Jesus' life are concerned, I would suggest that the scrolls give added ground for believing that many incidents are merely projections into Jesus' own history of what was expected of the Messiah.

In other words, the Qumran texts leave ground for believing that Jesus was no more than the personification of the messianic expectations of the era and of the sect in question. This does not necessarily mean that Jesus Christ never existed as a historical person, but only that he came to be given the attributes of the Messiah who was expected to appear. That is to say, Jesus the Messiah was nothing like the Historical Jesus.[9]

[letric]

Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.