The Faith & Religion mega Thread

oh , please dont do that ... as there wont be anything interesting left for me to shoot and i'm not going to live in a faith based well managed(to a screeching fault) theme park either ...

really , what so difficult in believing and having faiths in god/s ... i dont understand ...



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The difficulty, alred, is that there is no evidence of gods... Rather, there is as much evidence for a god as there is for Russell's Celestial Teapot.

Because there is no evidence, many people find the very idea of a benevolent celestial dictator to be completely preposterous.

that kind of thing is well expected from the people anyway ...



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Originally Posted by alred really , what so difficult in believing and having faiths in god/s ... i dont understand ... .

Would you believe smthing just coz I told you so?

as long as you are not too damn "sure" about what you want to tell me , i will believe you ... if not then i am very sure that you are going to be very wrong in what you are telling me ...

thats my default anyway ...


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Alred, no disrespect, but It's painful to try to follow you. I'm guessing Mandarin is your native language. You simply cannot directly translate what you would say in Mandarin into English. You have to adjust to the idioms of the language you are using. Translating Chinese idioms into English makes no sense at all...
You sure have a harder time than people who speak other Germanic languages, but we too can't just translate it word for word.

In English you might say "That ship has sailed", or "You're beating a dead horse"... those phrases are rarely meant to be taken literally. When you translate them into Chinese or German, they make no sense at all in the context that they were used in. You are doing exactly that with Chinese idioms. We have no means to understand them.

Same goes for the way of saying things. When someone says "I could care less", we know what he really means is "I couldn't care less". It only makes sense in the language in which the phrase has established itself. Try to pay attention to things like that.

OOOPS. Thanks for correction, I thought it was Voltaire, but I was wrong - it is Nietzsche indeed. So should we give them another 150 years then.

You're wrong about more than the date alone. You should read Nietzsche to understand what he really meant by writing "God is dead - we killed Him". What he really meant was that faith in God is dead, not God.

Originally Posted by alred as long as you are not too damn "sure" about what you want to tell me , i will believe you ... if not then i am very sure that you are going to be very wrong in what you are telling me ... thats my default anyway ... .

In most religions, why is God endowed with such lowly human emotions like revenge, anger, an insatiable ego and an extreme liking for sycophants?
God sure comes across as a dictator, but is actually democratically elected.
PEOPLE, make Gods.

Not to say that i do not come across as religious. I am socially religious. I go to places of worship and follow the customs. Its just that I KNOW that I have to take care of my own shit, I have no God to pray and depend upon.
The advantage, I am not bound in eternal slavery to some grandmother story, and I am a free thinker ( and doer, as much is permisible by law).

In most religions, why is God endowed with such lowly human emotions like revenge, anger, an insatiable ego and an extreme liking for sycophants? God sure comes across as a dictator, but is actually democratically elected. PEOPLE, make Gods.

Because abstraction doesn't make for good marketing. I think many christians would be awfully put off if they read what angels and God really are according to the early christian theologians. Heaven, hell, purgatory, God, the Angels, the Mary figure - as we know them - are all later constructions that were created because the real thing wasn't attractive enough. Think of the Christmas tree that can be found everywhere in (former) christian countries these days. Where did that come from? Easy, the early christian missionaries found that Germanic pagans were easy to convert if one adopted their symbols and rituals so they did. They sure have lost a lot of their pragmatism.

And someone like Luther would more or less agree when you say that people make gods. People don't make gods, they maintain them. If they don't, then God passes from our perception, like old words that no-one uses anymore.

Originally Posted by jay73 And someone like Luther would more or less agree when you say that people make gods. People don't make gods, they maintain them. If they don't, then God passes from our perception, like old words that no-one uses anymore.

Well said jay.
Thats what I meant when I said gods were democratically elected. What happened to the greek and roman gods. Poor Odin, Osiris, Ra, Aphrodite.....May their souls rest in peace..

So people dont make Gods, they interpreted something as god, and are now maintaining that concept.

On another note, christianity has EVOLVED under selection pressure from a single poor man hanging on a cross, to a following of a billion( dont know figures really..). Still they challenge evolution......ha ha

Hello,

Originally Posted by oskar Mind to share it with us?

Originally Posted by Tinkster This thread has been all over the place ... personally I wouldn't worry too much about what's appropriate to post here or not. ;} Cheers, Tink

This will be necessarily brief and incomplete, more of a summary than a completed work. Most of the explanations are lacking or non-existent here. I can direct you to another forum where we can really get into these ideas in depth.

Now allow me to take of my apophatic/mysticism hat and put on the thomistic/systematic hat.


First is the knowledge that there is a God. There is a higher being, a prime mover, a divine watchmaker (however you want to view it) and to this being we give the name God.

Then, I can see that this God is one, that the true faith must be monotheistic.

The true faith must be Christian - Jesus as God (the Second Person of the Trinity).

The true faith must be apostolic (that is a direct link to the Apostles through ordination) - this narrows it down to Oriental Orthodoxy, Eastern Orthodoxy, or Catholicism.

Looking at the teachings of all three, the field is narrowed to one - Catholicism.



I know most of you are going - explain, explain more! If you want to discuss these thoughts (and many others) in much more detail, you can go to one of these forums for complete discussions:


Catholic Answers Forums


Orthodox Christianity Forums


P.S. - if you go to one of those forums, please let me know so I can reply to your threads (especially on the Catholic Answers Forums, since it is a sizable place and I can't wade through all the threads, unless I know what I am looking for).

Hello,

Originally Posted by rsashok "God is dead" - that was declared about 300 years ago, but we still can't bury our dead. Something akin of "Psycho": keeping skeleton in the basement, while getting orders to kill by his/her name.

Nietzsche: God is dead.

God: Nietzsche is dead.

http://www.simongrant.org/web/eco.html
Some (long) time ago, Umberto Echo mused that the Mac was Catholi and that PC's were protestant... in those days PCs ran MS-DOS by default.

Presumably we are seeing a proliferation of protestant cults...

DOS is what? C of E? Or, would that be Windows (as it deliberately emulated the Catholics)? This would make DOS more Lutherian or Calvinist...

Whence Linux? Maybe its a reformist church?
"It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can reach salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: a long way from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment."
... could almost describe early experiences with Linux - was actually penned for DOS.

And would there be an OS equivalent to Orthodoxy? OS Pagans?

Originally Posted by Simon Bridge http://www.simongrant.org/web/eco.html Some (long) time ago, Umberto Echo mused that the Mac was Catholi and that PC's were protestant... in those days PCs ran MS-DOS by default. Presumably we are seeing a proliferation of protestant cults... DOS is what? C of E? Or, would that be Windows (as it deliberately emulated the Catholics)? This would make DOS more Lutherian or Calvinist... Whence Linux? Maybe its a reformist church? "It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can reach salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: a long way from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment." ... could almost describe early experiences with Linux - was actually penned for DOS. And would there be an OS equivalent to Orthodoxy? OS Pagans?

Perhaps the Mac.

Originally Posted by JMJ_coder The true faith must be apostolic (that is a direct link to the Apostles through ordination) - this narrows it down to Oriental Orthodoxy, Eastern Orthodoxy, or Catholicism.

Where's the biblical backing for that? Faith can't be ordained.
Paul himself (and he is undoubtedly the one who did the most to
proselytise the nations) was not an ordained apostle.


As for the offer to visit those forums - I think I'll give that
a miss :} ... that would be much like a Windows-aficionado coming
to LQ to argue about the virtues of his OS. Having a talk about
this on "neutral ground" (here on LQ) is fine, going to a dedicated
forum to argue would be a declaration of war - and of those we've
had quite enough in the history of Christendom.




Cheers,
Tink