The existence of God

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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rg-4fmbpZ-M[/youtube]

The most arse-kicking concept ever developed.

Are you simply carelessly using metaphores here or are you actually an Animist?

He's a bit wacky. I eat chocolate bars on occasion and they never scream when I chomp down.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. teleological(noun): Belief in or the perception of purposeful development toward an end, as in nature or history.

Most commonly applied to supernatural ideas, but it need not be. It can be applied in any situation where human intent is applied to natural phenomena. You might be having a relationship with that pebble, but its not having one with you.



A purposeful development (man learns to respect nature or is punished) requires intent from both parties(a relationship). Either you think nature is capable of that (which is teleology/anthropomorphism) or you dont (which is naturalism/atheism).

Good news: you get to choose.



In my posts I have neither kicked your dog, disparaged your intellect nor peppered your walls with dung. I was no less civil than honesty warrants. If you felt stung it was purely my rebuttal of your ideas. You take certain ethical stances(nature is gonna getcha!) and then talk like its all defined by imagination - "all it takes is one person to believe in what they're sensing, thinking or feeling and that world is made corporeal" - but it isnt.

After all, you arent going to fall into that swimming pool that I am imagining beneath you, are you?

You show massive internal inconsistencies in your ideas and around PPR, you will get negative attention for that. Its pretty standard occurrence. Someone new comes here and they have their ideas challenged. They either think things through a little better, or they bugger off. Staying here probably wont change your beliefs, but it will refine them. You will become a better person as you define it.

As AngelRho said, we can dish it out in PPR, but we can take it too. Welcome to PPR. Dont go away mad.

I know fully well what it means, I used it once in response to your use of it, and no I do not mean to use it to describe the feelings that I'm trying to get over to you. They're not supernatural, they're completely natural; nothing mystical, arcane or esoteric. The Earth has no beginning, middle or end beyond it's own life span, there's no mystical "being" who created in order to fulfill some goal, it just "is". Basically if it's purpose your after then it serves none besides housing us during our individual journeys.

I understand that you're looking for my "god" in my arguments when you mention the whole punishment/response idea but I can quite safely say that there is no "god" beyond the "self", tying in my theory we all create our realities but most of us are obviously tied in by a common "collective" (the way we view earth, the air we breath, water, ect,) I don't know how it came to be, but it "is" or we wouldn't be sitting here typing on these keyboards now. No, I may not fall in your swimming pool (in my mind) but if you really "knew" that I was then in your mind I would. That's as basic as I can put it really.

My theory relies heavily upon a symbiosis between the seen and "unseen" existances, I really have no proof beyond my own experiences which obviously I cannot communicate to you so I suppose if you hope to take it seriously it's just something you've got to experience (It's like the posters outside a church, you may think they're complete B/S but the congregation clearly believes in it and has been touched by it some way and would probably think your ideology was too.)

I'm not leaving feeling pissed or angry, I just felt you could have been a little more considerate; I don't accuse you of lies or half-truths, I know what you feel is real through your own eyes but I'm afraid I don't share your sentiments; does that make me a freak or weirdo? Isn't that the same attitude that has fractured, and is fracturing, human society so many times before?

MP= You could call me an Animist, yes. Although I don't, for the moment, belong to any traditions.

why should my faith depend on proving God, that alone is doubting God. The will of the universe guides us like a parent wanting their child to be self-reliant. It's nothing complicated really. Sure we all question now and again, but shouldn't we this meaning we think for ourselves.
I have a rather odd perspective about it and I go to church

I'd tend to agree, if you get caught up in trying to prove what you already know then you miss out on simply enjoying it; without conflict . I do doubt, I've followed many religions in the past, and I feel my own views will continue to evolve but that doesn't mean they're false.

Something cannot be both true and false at the same time, and with the existence of God the truth or falsity would have such far-reaching implications that the veracity of God's existence is of extreme importance. I consider God to be shown by His handiwork, His omnipotence in the sheer energy required to form the mass-energy of the physical universe, His omniscience shown in the intricacies of the workings of the laws of physics, chemistry, and the designs in biological organisms, and His identity revealed by historical revelation, namely the Bible, and the Bible shown to be valid due to historicity and fulfilled prophecy. Is it wrong to desire to have some rational basis for one's belief system?

I do have rational basis for my belief system, but it is also backed up by a set of spiritual beliefs.

Consider a dream, or a hallucinogen induced experience. To the person experiencing it the sights, sounds, tastes, smells and feelings are all very much real, or if they didn't have the foresight to know (much like in a dream) that they would eventually come "down" they would be real, like an unending dream. Consider - All we sense could be a dream; all we sense is a dream but a waking dream of our own creation. You'd have to redefine what you consider to be real and unreal, and real/unreal to each individual because not everyone has the same dreams, do they?

Not everything we can perceive is real, even if something seems realistic it does not entail that it is actual. Consider the criteria in the Bible that, for legal cases at least, you need at least two witnesses of a capital crime for the matter to be established:

Hi, Amber! I've been committing myself more to actual work rather than wasting energy on fighting the the heathen atheists on here. But your post really caught my attention. It's really noble, I think, what you're trying to say and in the sense that there are "seen" and "unseen" aspects of reality I completely agree with you.

I placed a snippet of your quote in BOLD because it is something you really ought to reconsider. Objective, hard reality DOES exist and, for the MOST part, our senses are quite reliable in detecting it.

I say "for the most part" because I do accept the fact that our senses can be flawed. For example, I'm dependent on glasses to see properly. Without my glasses, everything from a distance of 3 feet and beyond looks like something out of a Renoir painting. My reality does not exist as I see it, but it still exists, and I get a pretty clear view with corrective lenses.

But suppose if I were blind--it wouldn't change a thing. The world around me would still be there, and I would still have the responsibility to interact with it despite any hindrances to my perception of it.

What YOU are saying, basically, is that your perception of your reality is what creates reality. That means there are billions of realities all just floating around "out there" and, by chance, they all tend to bump into each other from time to time. If that is true, then what you are saying is there are no absolute realities and no absolute truths. But to make such a statement is to rely on something that you believe IS absolutely real or absolutely true, which is that nothing is. Do you see why this is contradictory?

The atheists in here will grill me about believing in "fairy tales" and "invisible puppeteers" while I'll point out their abhorrent closed-mindedness and lack of imagination. But something we'll all likely agree on is that a self-refuting statement isn't just a little bit false--it is COMPLETELY false. Belief in God/gods and souls/spirits/demons/angels/fairies have more to do with faith in the unseen and total reliance upon it. These are things that either exist or they don't. I can't "prove" scientifically that God exists because God does not exist on a plane of reality governed by the scientific method (which is based on HUMAN observation, understanding, and ability and has NOTHING to do with any spiritual or otherwise unseen realm. You can't scientifically quantify "love," for example). The atheist can't "prove" that God DOESN'T exist, either. You might call that the "proving a negative" fallacy, but proving a negative CAN be done--for example, it's possible for me to say "I have no coffee." If you ask me to prove it, I can bring you an empty coffee can and show you that there is no coffee. But because we BOTH end up empty-handed, acceptance/rejection of God is simply a matter of faith and religion.

There ARE, of course, logical proofs in favor of God that have been set forth throughout the ages. Thomas Aquinas, I believe, had five of them, and that's just one example.

The main point I'm trying to make is that you seem to indicate that nothing is ultimately real beyond the self and that our perception is our determinant of reality. The plain fact is that your statements ARE a part of reality beyond yourself and shared with us; we DO exist beyond your perception. In order to make that statement, to share "your" reality with us, you have to rely on something that is real, and even within your own statements to suggest that there IS something that is shared within a "common 'collective'" is contradictory to your first statement.

You really should reconsider. We may not all be perfectly matched in our senses, but just because someone is colorblind does not mean that we ought to rethink the existence of colors. Our senses help us gather information about the ONE and ONLY ONE physical reality that there is. Without such a hard and fast reality, there would be nothing to sense. We as human beings do NOT have the luxury of making up reality as we go.

Hello Rho, I've considered what you said.

Again, I suppose this is a matter of faith and/or reasoning, yes on face value it does seem contradictory and yes there is ONE reality, an energy source, the vital spark, God if you will. But it is upon this reality that we craft our own realities. For example, a child born deaf or blind (or both, horrifyingly enough) wouldn't have any notion of sight or sound, you couldn't describe to it what is is like to "see" so you could say that the "sight" aspect of reality which is common to everyone else is a null element to that child; basically, through that child's understanding sight is unreal. It is only through a shared collective bank of sensations (And again, I repeat I do not yet have a theory as to how this collective occurred) or the bumping together of realities as you described that we can see, hear, touch, and taste what the other consciousnesses also in the energy "ocean" are seeing, hearing, touching and tasting.

Again, as you said, it's not really something you can quantify but something outside the collective consciousness spectrum (like being able to see in four dimensions for example) so how do you expect to be able to quantify it enough for someone outside your understanding to be able to take in? If you really want to see results, if you really want to get inside my theory (or any religious theory for that matter), you have to
live it, it cannot be "summarized with a couple of paragraphs".

And thus the god argument will go on eternally until someone gets bored and decides to live and shape their life instead of analyzing it's sum parts.

But if you have no foresight, no idea of any other reality besides the one your currently living (a horrific prospect if you ask me) then how can you possibly prove to yourself that it's anything BUT reality.

Amber_Miasma, can you explain your idea in more depth? It sounds a bit like a variant of solipsism or idealism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism

As it stands, I don't follow how blindness or differences in some perception are critical issues in this situation. To me, I would simply say: "materialism is much more parsimonious than idealism or even solipsist idealism". I make no assumption that we do create our own reality, just that all realities are interpreted through us, as this makes more sense of our agreement, and still allows for strong variations due to background, or even due to what we usually call insanity.

It's probably closer Solipsism than idealism and it's certainly not materialism but they still fail to satisfy my theory.

I cannot guide you towards a source (that I have discovered) that would accurately describe what I'm trying to pen down. As I said in previous posts it's a matter of having your head in the theory. If you really want a sense of where we fit into it then basically there are two distinguishable absolutes = Consciousness (us, and when I say "us" I mean EVERY consciousness out there, detectable through human senses or otherwise) and Matter (spirit, void, spark, god). "we" and "existence" are a projection of our Consciousness and a fabrication produced from Matter. Consciousness the hammer and Matter the steel, from this we craft everything we see around about ourselves.

Are you also a panpsychist - in the sense that you believe every piece of matter in the universe has consciousness?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism