Don’t take this personally… the Old Testament is proof the infallible Christian god needed a do over. Every christian I know, stretches the “meaning” of what is written down. If you wanna meet god, take some mushrooms. Verify. All else is zionism. I’ve personally gone from christian to atheist to being comfortable and unafraid of the unknown. Try it.
Discussion
I have done mushrooms quite a few times. I was an atheist for ~13 years, & I am perfectly comfortable with the unknown, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't seek to understand all that we can.
What makes sense to me is that reality is the body of God. It may be impossible to say for sure whether there is any sort of consciousness attached to it, but I know that on some level I tend to act like there is.
I think the divide between good & evil is between the pursuit of truth & the pursuit of status. So it makes since to hold up the story of a man who was killed for helping someone in defiance of arbitrary authority as the guiding light for who to be, & as a warning against the sort of authority worshipping group think we should avoid. Either we honestly seek & worship what is true & right & good, or we will end up worshipping authority. And those who worship authority will always eventually work to kill God & all that is true.
These same patterns just play out over & over.
I don’t believe an all powerful creator of everything would be a persona that would require worship. We as humans have a hard time thinking outside our filters, and good and evil are uniquely human concepts that don’t seem to be present in nature anyplace else. Makes me think those concepts are a social construct for control. They are extremely divisive because of the subjectivity. I try to get out into nature with the family. It all the church we need.
We naturally hold something up as "most important," if I were say we should worship God or truth & reality, all I mean is that we should recognize that being grounded in what is real & true is most important. It's important for accomplishing our own desires & for having some way to ensure that the relationships we build are stable & sustainable rather than just some form of service to someone's delusions.
Otherwise I don't think there is anything I have said to suggest we have to worship some persona. I don't believe I have ever claimed God has any sort of persona at all. Maybe get out of what you think I believe & reread what I said...?
Claiming there is no such thing as good & evil is going to be an extremely difficult position to defend. Are you the sort who thinks it's okay to fuck kids so long as you're nice about it & you convince them they want it? That is actually how most pedophiles operate. If you don't believe kid fucking is okay, then why not?
If you really don't think evil exists I would suggest that you read Gulag Archipelago (abridged is better organized & easier to follow). Atlas Shrugged is also a decent illustration of the divide between good & evil.
Good & evil or right & wrong exist within the context of a goal. And all of life is biologically programmed to want to live & to seek better conditions. In a general sense, "good" is what allows people to survive & prosper & improve their own lives. "Evil" is destructive to those ends.
Defining good and evil outside the context of God comes down to opinion. We can say this and that about prosperity and flourishing, but that is just an opinion if God doesn’t exist.
Also many people leave christianity because the people that taught them about the bible and God were incapable of answering their questions in a satisfactory manner, or because they did not want to accept God’s commandments/morality. Many parallels to people not understanding bitcoin and reveling against it or rejecting it because they don’t like the rules.
The funny/ironic thing is that there are so many stories in the bible of people doing that over and over again. But so many people (including Christians) don’t read the bible so the cycle repeats. We live in a fallen world, which is why we needed Jesus to come down and save us.
Defining good & evil outside of any connection to reality is just delusion.
It doesn't really sound like you & I mean the same thing when we say "God."
The Bible is an extremely difficult book. It was written before any clear distinction between the subjective & the objective really existed. And it is full of metaphors & idioms from dead languages that just do not translate well. And I think some of the results of the story (or stories) have been confused into the telling itself.
As CS Lewis would say, when the writer comes back on stage it's the end of the show. Be careful what you wish for.
This life is the gift, there is nothing better to escape to. It is our responsibility to bring heaven to earth. No one is coming to save you, the events of the past have already given us all the stories we need to educate ourselves & others in order to avoid making the same mistakes.
I don’t know what defining good and evil outside of reality means. I should have clarified that defining OBJECTIVE good and evil can only be done by someone (God) outside our system (time space). Subjective definitions are just opinions, which is fine but also not helpful since there can be millions of conflicting opinions each one just as valid as the next.
God is the unmoved mover. The being that created time and space and everything inside it.
It is complex indeed, which is why we build on the work of others so we can understand the word of God.
CS Lewis was a prolific Christian. And indeed when Jesus comes back it will be the end of the show 😅 I don’t know if that is what you were alluding to, but it works haha
Life is a gift, but there is certainly something better to aspire to in heaven (being in God’s presence). Jesus did in fact come to save us. And the beautiful thing is that the gift of salvation he afforded us has to be accepted (free will). God will not force you into his presence.
“Stealing from God” by Frank Turek unpacks much of what we discussed in case you’re interested in the logic behind my arguments. You can find a free epub on Libgen.rs
I think God IS time & space & everything within it.
A map or a computer cannot contain all the information in the world. The amount of information that exists in any particular area is infinite when compared to what can be contained in a map or a model or an image. The movement of leaves & grains of sand & living things & all energy & matter simply cannot be capured or stored.
So for God to truly be ALL KNOWING & all powerful & ultimately in control of everything (without the control being arbitrary), God has to actually be the system itself. And so in order to get closer to God we need to better understand the world around us.
There are objective & discoverable laws of morality, but they are dictated by the nature of existence. Old books have very little to do with it, aside from being past efforts of people to write down & explain what they previously discovered.
Odds are high that you’ll appreciate this book (and Hagen) as much as I do.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/777.Buddhism_Is_Not_What_You_Think
My favorite short story...
Goddamn that's perfect
🥲
Azimov. Wow. His buddy Heinlein must have hated this story haha. Too good. lotsa Foundation vibes to it too
responded in wrong spt. nostrlexic.
https://primal.net/e/note12455al0g6g3k3hrs7xys3mu7v0jtzu4dku973x49papyr2szhf6q8zt7qa
I am that which I am
It is what it is
Existence exists
A is A
To my mind, the religious mindset at its best is the same as the scientific mindset at its best - allowing the world to be what it is, rather than thinking one's own ego shall shape it
Religion is just a habit of virtue that inclines the will to render God what he deserves.
Most people have a wrong understanding of what religion isa
God can’t be time and space. By definition he has to exist outside of it. Time and space had a beginning, so something outside of it had to cause it. The objective laws of morality come from God, which humans of course can come to know through reason because we are made in God’s image.
So then God isn't all knowing...? How does all of the information relating to all of existence exist outside of existence? If time & space has to have a beginning then why doesn't God have to have a beginning?
Everything is a result of the shape of existence & reality. Life probably exists as a result of some combo of oil & water, energy differentials, & a myriad of complex cyclical physical phenomena. Economic & moral laws emerge from the logic of life & beings with desires interacting with physical reality & each other.
I just think God is reality & we are made IN in the image of God.
'The miracle is that the universe created a part of itself, to study itself, and that this part in studying itself finds the rest of the universe in its own natural inner realities'
John C. Lilly
The full revelation of the God of the universe is realized in the 2nd person of the trinity, Jesus Christ. The Holy Scriptures point to and help unravel this revelation, but Christianity is not a "religion" of the book (like rabbinic judaism and Islam both are) rather is fully realized and experienced in the body of Christ, the continuation of the incarnation, the Church.
Saint Matthew covers the ways in which humanity can experience the God of the universe starting in chapter 5 of his gospel (the beatitudes).
These conversations are tough via the internet and I am not blessed to apologize for Christianity, but objective truth does exist and truth is a person-truth is God incarnate, truth is Jesus Christ.
Yeah, none of than language has ever made much sense to me & no one can ever explain it in a way that actually connects to anything.
The closest I have gotten is that as a result of evolution we have a triune brain, so it might make sense for us to feel that there is a trinity of sorts within us.
I see how the story of Jesus is incredibly important in understanding the nature of man & the divide between good & evil. And that awareness of our own nature leads to more intelligent & desirable behaviors. But most of the rhetoric around the whole thing just seems like parroted ritualistic nonsense that lots of people spout but no one actually understands.
Evolution is absurd at face but, like most everything we have been fed, has been accepted and has led to the deep atheism the world holds to in this post modern age.
Everything the world teaches has, at its root, the goal of denying both the incarnation and resurrection of the God-Man. That is why, 2000 years into the church, we have SO many absurdities around us. Denying Logos creates chaos.
I mean, farmers have been selectively breeding desired traits into animals to the point of producing livestock that is completely unlike their wild counterparts. People have stressed simple organisms in labs & used selective reproduction to create things that survive in completely different conditions & consume completely different substances for fuel, so it makes perfect sense to me that changing conditions & sexual selection would produce similar results across millions or billions of years.
I think the idea that some imaginary sky personality exists & designed & made everything with the snap of imaginary fingers is ridiculous, but I am not an athiest. I just think God is far more complex than the cartoon nonsense we were taught as kids. God is in the laws & the structure of the universe that set evolution & the creation of all that is into motion.
I dont think any reasonable person would deny the reality of species adaptation (foxes having particular ear sizes, birds having different beaks, humans having diffetent colored skin, etc) but species moving from one form to another is absurd.
I really don't think it is, it's just hard for people to grasp because it takes such an incredibly long time, and because everything as it exists now is equally evolved & adapted to fit its environmental niche. We didn't evolve from any of the monkeys that exist today, we evolved from something that came before both monkeys & humans.
Look at how dramatically different domesticated dogs are from any sort of wild dog. Bears are basically just a big dog. Life does crazy things in response to natural forces.
That theory hinges on the fact, more like the assumption, that everything came out of a primordial soup. If you examine the odds of that happening it’s infinitesimally small. Might be as small as guessing a private key honestly. Imo it takes more faith to believe that life came out of some primordial soup than it being the result of a creator.
I think it's the idea that there is some creator that created life in some way that violates all the rules of existence that really makes no sense. The wildly unlikely events that accomplish amazing things is how God appears to work in the here & now. How likely is it for some anonymous guy to create a new monetary protocol that solves all of our problems without taking any credit for it?
Highly unlikely things are at least plausibly possible, magical ressurections & people made from dirt & ribs are not possible. It's just magical thinking in an effort to wave away all the complexity of life. Make the stories real, take the magic out of them, & they become much more meanigful & they make a lot more sense.
Is it more meaningful for Superman to take a bullet for you, or for your dad? The more you deify Jesus the less meaningful the story becomes. But of course kings & normies all want him deified, because kings don't want normies to believe they can stand up to authority & change things, & normies don't want the responsibility or burden of having to stand against authorities for what is right. "Yes but he was God, who are you?" "Yes but he was God, who am I?" And obviously when we hold people up for doing great things they just naturally tend to become larger than life.
Well said, and the questions and curiosity as opposed to superstition should drive us all.
Try this on - trinity is three realms or dimensions of being; heavenly god is pure energy, realm of heavens, undiscernable by man. Beyond the physical universe we can observe. Jesus (in christian myths) represents the physical realm, the physical observable universe of matter, time and space. The "holy spirit" is the interface or intersection between the two, think field energy. It is also boundary region between the two realms, neither fully energy or matter.
Although triune brain theory is interesting too, but probably itself a product of natural thinking in threes, three-dimensional, and many more concepts with two poles and a boundary region between them. Good and evil are often seen this way, with some gray area between. I think they are just as artificial as any triune or trinity, just a product of man's conceptualization of his own reality.
Monkey is
Monkey see
Monkey do
I’m making assumptions about your concept of God based on your use of and support for Jesus. Doesn’t the bible say jesus hung out with prostitutes? It is highly unlikely that he didn’t fuck any of them. But, I am sure he only fucked the ones of legal age. Whether or not something is wrong or right comes down to the social moray present in time. What is evil today was socially acceptable some other time in history. Many Christians seem to practice selective outrage. Lot fucked his daughters. The way the story is written in the bible, was that his daughters got him drunk and fucked him. This is the guy… the one god saved in a cave fucking his daughters. So, out of the two of us, only one is a Christian who thinks god favors child fuckers.
You should stop assuming things... like I said, most Christians disagree with my views.
Take all the magic out of the story. Make Jesus a carpenter who was born in total povery to a mom that whored herself to some rich "wise men" behind Joseph's back. Jesus grows up poor & has to fix everything to have anything. Then being a builder & someone who had to figure out how things really work, went around teaching people how to live better lives & how to better cultivate crops & catch fish & to heal ailments that people thought couldn't be healed (carnivores are doing similar things today, it doesn't have to be magic). And his popularity & unconventional thinking were eventually seen as a threat to people in power so he was tortured & killed by govt & religious authorities for disobeying the law by helping someone on the wrong day. But his execution ultimately backfires & dramatically shifts popular opinion about the nature of govt & established religious authorities. So much so that our dates are built around him, people deified him & still worship him thousands of years later.
Compress the stories, play the telephone game, translate & re-translate, realize that govts don't want normies to follow the example set by Jesus & normies don't want the responsibility of having to stand up for anything, so everyone want him to be larger than life so they can say but "who am I to do what he did" or "but who are you." Twist the story to incorporate some previously held religious beliefs that were over taken by Christianity. And I think you get roughly the mess we have today.
But when you take all the magic out of the story does it become more or less meaningful? I think it becomes more meaningful. Much like Julian Assange, or Snowden, or Ulbrict, a man tried to show people reality in defiance of authority & he was killed for it. If we place that story in the position of highest importance and remember that we don't want to be on the side that kills or persecutes innocent people, then the world is more likely to become a better place.
What if I told you the story of Jesus is not unique to Christianity? Our dates are not built around him, he was infused into pre-existing dates to give that religion relevance in the face of paganism. This is where reading history and other religions gives you a broader perspective and context. Saying that you believe Jesus was a real person who lived but Christians don’t agree with your views, is like saying your belief in the easter bunny really pisses off the establishment. You are really close by wanting to take the magic out, now realize, there is 0 historical record outside of the fake texts of the bible that make mention of Jesus. 0.
Well, govts & authorities tend to twist & coopt significant popular figures more often than they create them. And I mentioned the parts being added in from the religions that christianity consumed.
But if it's all completely fake & there was no Jesus at all, then who manufactured the story & to what end?
That is a great search for you. Wonderful question. Find that out for yourself as I or any other folks have. The history is there. Start with the translation, than missing books of the bible and the authorities who hold those, then get into Martin Luther, then the crusades, paganism, etc. It’s all there.
Here’s an abstract thought, if you’re capable of believing that god has always existed and didn’t need a creator, then you are capable of accepting no creator was needed.
I don't think a creator was needed, I think the structure of reality is what created everything. It doesn't even seem like we are in the same conversation. You don't seem to understand a single thing that I say. Like the fact that I use the word God (event though I have defined it multiple times) flips some irrational angry switch in your brain.
It's also weird to me that you think the random details of the bible are trustworthy, I think the details are the least trustworthy things. You think someone lived for like 300 years?
Let me add one less thing. I appreciate your opinion and in know way do I wish this conversation to be antagonistic. I do want to be challenging and direct and I don’t expect or desire to convert you to my way of thinking. I am all good living in our disagreement. We don’t have to agree on god to agree on sound money or morality being a good thing. 🤝🫂