Do you believe in God and why

[giddyup]

57 minutes ago, mauGR1 said:

I spent the best years of my life travelling in India, your words have re-opened a window on a world of memories, that would be difficult to describe.

Not everything was wonderful, of course but i have seen things who defy most people's notion of reality.

When I asked the guru the meaning of life, he said, "get all the kicks you can baby, you only make this scene once".

[Sunmaster]

4 minutes ago, giddyup said:

When I asked the guru the meaning of life, he said, "get all the kicks you can baby, you only make this scene once".

....you only make this scene once, ....but then there are many plays. ????

[VincentRJ]

I thought INDIA was an acronym for the phrase 'I'll Never Do It Again'. ????

[pineapple01]

2 hours ago, mauGR1 said:

That's just a bit crude description of the law of karma, or law of cause and effect.

Gets rid of the Human Trash better then forgiveness. Thus protecting the weak.

[Sunmaster]

Just now, pineapple01 said:

Gets rid of the Human Trash better then forgiveness. Thus protecting the weak.

Who exactly is the "human trash"?

[fredwiggy]

To me it's crooked politicians, policemen, and lawyers, child molesters, rapists, cheaters, those who rape the earth for profit, doctors who over prescribe narcotics, millionaires and billionaires who over develop land, fishery over-harvesters, child and human traffickers, and those who don't care about others and break the rules to spread diseases.

[mauGR1]

58 minutes ago, Sunmaster said:

Who exactly is the "human trash"?

Fair question, who is to decide what is trash and what is gold ?

But @pineapple01 seems to know the right answer

[pineapple01]

47 minutes ago, mauGR1 said:

Fair question, who is to decide what is trash and what is gold ?

But @pineapple01 seems to know the right answer

Fredwiggy has enlightened the Dim rather well.

[mauGR1]

21 minutes ago, pineapple01 said:

Fredwiggy has enlightened the Dim rather well.

The 10 commandments seem ok to me too, but things are never completely black or white.

[Sunmaster]

I was thinking about what we said regarding effectively sharing subjective realities between people. Then I thought about how symbols have been used since time immemorial to convey concepts that are not possible to put into words. I then remembered some drawings I made many years ago, when I was trying to make sense of things I had seen/experienced. Art seemed a great way to somehow 'materialize' the experience.

Here are some of those drawings. Maybe they can make sense to some of you too...

 

 

[teatime101]

Stunning artwork, Sunmaster. 

[thaibeachlovers]

On 5/5/2020 at 3:55 PM, Logosone said:

Many of the moral positions in the bible are reprehensible by modern standards.

I don't give much credence to the Bible, but that is ridiculous. The Bible is millennia old and can't be judged by today's PC wimp culture

[thaibeachlovers]

15 hours ago, Sunmaster said:

Who exactly is the "human trash"?

Anyone they don't like.

[thaibeachlovers]

9 hours ago, Sunmaster said:

Here are some of those drawings. Maybe they can make sense to some of you too...

Some great works there. Were you friends with Lucy at the time you did them?

[Peter Denis]

9 hours ago, Sunmaster said:

 

 

 

Thanks, you are a real artist!

Especially like the one above, is it a painting or an ink-drawing?

[thaibeachlovers]

15 hours ago, fredwiggy said:

To me it's crooked politicians, policemen, and lawyers, child molesters, rapists, cheaters, those who rape the earth for profit, doctors who over prescribe narcotics, millionaires and billionaires who over develop land, fishery over-harvesters, child and human traffickers, and those who don't care about others and break the rules to spread diseases.

I'd add bullies, bad bosses, back stabbing "friends", people who use sex to advance themselves, anyone that worships money and power, and people that make PC movies and tv shows.

Edited May 7, 2020 by thaibeachlovers

[pineapple01]

I clicked this Topic out of curiosity. Remembering the Words of Billy Connoly. The only thing Religion did for me was to feel Guilty when enjoying something. Thats about right, a control freaks factory.

[Peter Denis]

18 minutes ago, pineapple01 said:

I clicked this Topic out of curiosity. Remembering the Words of Billy Connoly. The only thing Religion did for me was to feel Guilty when enjoying something. Thats about right, a control freaks factory.

The title of this thread is 'Do you believe in God and why?'

It is not whether you believe in or belong to a specific religious faction.

When discussing this let's make a difference between spirituality and religion.

 

[Logosone]

On 5/5/2020 at 11:10 AM, Walker88 said:

Rather than violate the guidelines of which I have been reminded, I simply will answer the OP:

 

No, I do not believe. Here is why.

 

The belief systems to which many adhere have a sum total of zero evidence supporting them. None whatsoever. Each is a function of and representative of the time its founders made it up.

 

The greatest critic of Christianity that has ever lived, Friedrich Nietzsche, himself had to admit that you can not cut your own head off and see what remains. In other words, you can not disprove the existence of God. As Nietzsche also said:

 

"The assumption that only that is true which can be evidenced is an assumption devoid of evidence."

 

So the lack of evidence is not conclusive proof, not certainty, there is no God.

 

However, on the balance of probabilities one can certainly say that it is almost certain that there is no God.

[pineapple01]

26 minutes ago, Peter Denis said:

The title of this thread is 'Do you believe in God and why?'

It is not whether you believe in or belong to a specific religious faction.

When discussing this let's make a difference between spirituality and religion.

 

The living proof, It breeds intolerance!. Q.E.D. Thank You so much.

[ivor bigun]

59 minutes ago, pineapple01 said:

I clicked this Topic out of curiosity. Remembering the Words of Billy Connoly. The only thing Religion did for me was to feel Guilty when enjoying something. Thats about right, a control freaks factory.

A great way to make lots of money ,ever seen a poor religion?

[Sunmaster]

1 hour ago, Peter Denis said:

 

Thanks, you are a real artist!

Especially like the one above, is it a painting or an ink-drawing?

Well thank you very much, appreciate it.

I think I am creative enough, but I lack the skills to really express it fully. Never had any kind of training. Ask me to draw a body and I'll give you a stickman. ????

 

This (and many others) are ink on paper.

[mauGR1]

6 minutes ago, pineapple01 said:

The living proof, It breeds intolerance!. Q.E.D. Thank You so much.

There is nothing in Peter's post which suggests intolerance, except in your imagination.

Methinks you are a little bit biased.

 

[Logosone]

On 5/5/2020 at 2:02 PM, Sunmaster said:

The way I see it, spirituality is what you do when you're attracted to and in pursuit of matters that concern the human spirit. 
My subjective experience may not be the same as yours, but it certainly has similarities which allow us to communicate and discuss the common ground. If that weren't so, there would be no teacher - student relationship. How could anyone pass on his knowledge and wisdom, if his subjective experience were totally alien to the student? No, there are rules and laws of cause and effect in the spiritual practice, just like in other scientific fields. Experiences are repeatable and can be verified by peers, just like in other scientific fields. 
Am I saying spirituality is science? No. Well, not in a strict sense of course. We're not dealing with hard data of numbers. You can not expect to fit the round block in a square hole, so to speak.
What you can do, is to get familiar with spirituality's own laws and rules. To do that, it is not enough to read a couple of books or watch some YouTube videos. The only way to really know and understand (not to blindly believe!) is to practice a meditative or introspective technique every day, even for only 20 minutes. 
God's door can not be opened by fancy intellectual discourses, nor by precise scientific scrutiny.

Only daily work on yourself will allow you to take some glimpses behind the curtain.
Know thyself...and you will know God.

 

Daily meditation for 20 minutes is something I have done for a long time. One day I had one very unusual experience. Most days meditation gives you a pleasant feeling, sometimes not. But this day was very different. As I sat in meditation I was overcome by inexplicable joy that broke forth like an unstoppable volcano eruption, I actually had to laugh out loud. I've never experienced such joy before or since then. It was extraordinary. 

 

Since the age of 12 I read books on Zen Buddhism because my father was a Kendoka and we had those books in our library, so I knew it would be foolish to ignore such an experience. I saw that there was a Japanese Zen master of the Soto school in Bavaria who had a monastery. So I drove the 6 hours down to the monastery for a sit-in. I paid the fees and was granted an audience with the Japanese Zen master. I explained to him what happened.

 

He said that I had started to get an initial breakthrough and that I should persevere. That those experiences would keep coming but I should ignore them. He was known to accompany the dying in hospitals, which I imagined to be a very draining experience. He had told me his account of how he came to be in Germany and I could tell it was not easy for him to be there. So I asked him 'Where do you get the strength to help strangers to die, to run a monastery?". He replied "I am but a tool of God".

 

This I found strange, since he was a Buddhist. I had read Buddhist literature all my life and I knew that Buddha did not teach a deity of the kind this Japanese Buddhist had mentioned. Perhaps he just used cultural shorthand. 

 

In any event, it would seem to me that such meditation experiences can be explained without recourse to God. Neuroscience would do equally well.

 

Meditation is very laudable, useful and working on one's inner mind is bound to be a good thing. To argue, however, that it offers a glimpse of God, would be another matter altogether. It seems that we use God as shorthand for what we can not explain.

 

Witness that letter by Einstein where he expresses belief in God, mostly because he realises he can not explain anything. 

 

To say our very ignorance is proof of God would be funny in the extreme. The more I meditate and read about Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism and Islam the more I realise assumptions prove false.

 

I had assumed the Bible was a book of wisdom. Much wisdom is to be found there, but also moral positions that are totally unacceptable today. The same with Buddhism, we can not forget how the Dalai Lama got into trouble because he declared homosexual sex unacceptable because of course Buddhism teaches that sexuality has to conform with accepted morality. Equally Buddhism too has spirits and angels and devils and afterworlds, things Buddha himself most likely never would have approved himself.

 

So yes, there is wisdom in religion, but also a lot of things that have to be cast aside.

 

 

[Sunmaster]

33 minutes ago, Logosone said:

In any event, it would seem to me that such meditation experiences can be explained without recourse to God. Neuroscience would do equally well.

 

Interesting post and I agree with most of it.

This line however stick out like a sore thumb. Neuroscience concerns itself with the structure and function of the nervous system. It is an 'outer' science field that deals with the material aspect of the brain. How do you expect this to explain the 'inner' fields, of which your experience of bliss and joy was but the first step? And why hasn't it explained spiritual experiences already? As far as I know, they haven't....and I think they never will.

It's like opening a computer case, examining the components and expecting to find the internet in there. 

Edited May 7, 2020 by Sunmaster

[mauGR1]

49 minutes ago, Logosone said:

Equally Buddhism too has spirits and angels and devils and afterworlds, things Buddha himself most likely never would have approved himself.

How do you know ?

In my opinion God, gods, angels spirits forces of various kind etc. are largely omitted in Buddha's teachings, for the simple reason that in his specific philosophy of self-realisation are not necessary.

I'll go further, and repeating myself, apparently Buddha was disappointed by the organised religion, in fact he was foreseeing how humankind would have evolved both materially and spiritually,

What He did, is to free mankind from some ideological chains. But people love and hate chains, don't they.

The "moral atheists", the ones who don't believe in God, but are proud of their humanistic set of morals, owe a lot of their "free thinking" to innovators like Jesus or Buddha.

As for organised religion, they are like any other human association, it needs a hierarchy, and it becomes a clash of egos, in the best of the cases, and down goes the divine inspiration, and the ugly head of materialism takes charge.

 

[teatime101]

3 hours ago, Sunmaster said:

I think I am creative enough, but I lack the skills to really express it fully. Never had any kind of training. Ask me to draw a body and I'll give you a stickman.

My art experience is not spiritual, but it feels good.

 

The Harvest by Van Gogh - my 'interpretation' aka amateurish copy... (colour rendition is not quite right - thanks Apple)

 

 

Mont Sainte-Victoire by Cezanne - also a copy of mine.

 

 

Both done with acrylic for convenience, but acrylics are such a pain to work with, because it's often thin and dries quickly. I know there are thinners and retarders, but I tend to do 15 minutes spurts of activity, trying to improve on what's already there. If it's not quick to do, I won't do it.

 

I'm with Vincent. Nature is the teacher. What it cannot teach, cannot be learned.

Edited May 7, 2020 by teatime101

[mauGR1]

Here's my abstract thoughts.

[CMNightRider]

On 5/6/2020 at 12:11 PM, Sunmaster said:

No, it's no shock to me at all. I know the bible is full of such stories. The shock comes rather from the fact that you can not see past the obvious allegories and metaphors, and perceive God as limited by vengeance and as head of some sort of exclusive membership club. 

God is there for all of us, all of the time, whether you believe in him or not, whether you believe in one religion or the other, whether you are an atheist or a pious monk or the worst of the criminals.

God's love is not bound by anything but your own heart.

Jesus is the only way to heaven. Such an exclusive statement may confuse, surprise, or even offend, but it is true nonetheless. The Bible teaches that there is no other way to salvation than through Jesus Christ. Jesus Himself says in John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” He is not away, as in one of many; He is the way, as in the one and only. No one, regardless of reputation, achievement, special knowledge, or personal holiness, can come to God the Father except through Jesus.
 

[Sunmaster]

Just now, CMNightRider said:

Jesus is the only way to heaven. Such an exclusive statement may confuse, surprise, or even offend, but it is true nonetheless. The Bible teaches that there is no other way to salvation than through Jesus Christ. Jesus Himself says in John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” He is not away, as in one of many; He is the way, as in the one and only. No one, regardless of reputation, achievement, special knowledge, or personal holiness, can come to God the Father except through Jesus.
 

Ok, I'm happy you've found your way.  ????