Tuesday: please, that's so old school

Tuesday: You know, I would love to believe in God. In my opinion, believers have, in general, a better life than non-believers. But I just can't lie to myself when I know that people created their Gods for the very purpose to make their lives happier. I can't give you the proof of non-existence, obviously, but the proof of existence should be much simpler and easier to do, right? The fact that nobody has come up with such proof makes my assumptions more probable.

Pedro Martínez: Being delusional probably also helps one get through a hostage crisis, I suppose it has its advantages in getting through life


"ignorance is bliss"

Tuesday: Why? There is no reason why…

Tuesday: I paid Fencer

Tuesday: I believe we can live hell on earth, within the confines of our brain

Jim Dandy: I agree. It has enormous advantages, and as I said, I would love to believe. From the point of view of an individual, religious beliefs are very helpful.

Pedro Martínez: call it a placebo, but I do agree that for some it really doesn't matter if "God" exists.The comfort the belief provides is beneficial for them to get through the day

Jim Dandy: Yup, we're on the same page there.

Pedro Martínez: what kinds of proof would you expect to find?

Artful Dodger: Oh I don't expect to find any proofs.
:)

edit: The above sentence is probably gramatically incorrect, but I hope my intentions are clear enough. lol

Pedro Martínez: in what way?

Artful Dodger: In what way? Well, the proof of existence of anything is generally easier than the proof of non-existence, don't you think so?

Pedro Martínez: Not so. It's impossible to prove the non-existence of anything.

Artful Dodger: Well, sometimes it is possible, but I don't want to be a nitpicker. The important thing is we agree on the essence.

Pedro Martínez: I'm not sure we fully agree. I say that proof of the existence of something can take many forms. In the case of God, the kalam cosmological argument comes to mind. We know from science that this universe had a beginning in time. We can trace events back to the singularity. We can't go farther back than that. And we know that the universe is expanding. To expand, it must have necessarily come from a starting point. (scientists can back up the process mathematically and they come up to a single point - the singularity). That singularity contained in it all the matter and energy that is now contained in our universe. Before the "Big Bang" there was likely nothing. We can't know. But something set off the Big Bang. You don't get an effect without a cause. God is that Uncaused Cause.

Artful Dodger: I meant that we clearly agree that proving existence is easier than proving non-existence.

As for cosmological arguments, I'm not a big fan of them. First of all, even though I view the Big Bang theory as the most likely scenario, it still is only a theory. And there is a vast unexplained area in the theory, too. I have already found out that I will never fully understand what made the universe look the way it looks and how it actually looks. And nobody will ever understand that – it's simply beyond our limited thinking. Secondly and (maybe) more importantly, my problem with cosmological arguments is that I don't think there had to be a cause. I know that our experience tells us that every action brings reaction and that effect must have a cause, but how do we know this was also the case under as exteme conditions as at the time of the creation of time and space?

Pedro Martínez: And, in addition to that, if I admitted for a moment that God indeed was the cause we're talking about, there would still remain a question to be answered: what was the cause of God's creation and existence?

Tuesday: Do believe that. You will never figure out that the Bible, as well as any other “holy book“, is a hoax and you will find comfort in the belief that God exists and will take you to his kingdom after you die.

Tuesday:

There are many things about the Interpretations of the Bible that really bother me. If God created EVERYTHING, did he create Adolf Hitler too, and Osam Bin Laden and Ted Bundy, etc. Then people quote the Devil. Lucifer strayed and became the root of all Evil, but then, who created Lucifer?

Of all things that people interpret from the Bible these are what bothers me the most:

> The Bible tells us that God's ultimate purpose for the universe is to reveal His glory.

God's glory is revealed in nuclear bombs, and gas chambers, and the terrible things that human beings do? After all, if God made people in his own image and we are a reflection of His own glory. I think we are arrogant to think God made us in His image and that His glory is expressed through mankind.

> The Bible tells us that God's ultimate purpose for mankind is to reveal His love.

Every day there are floods, earthquakes, wars, etc. Is that God's love? Then we come to the old "He will reveal His glory and his love on the Day of Judgement". It sounds to me like an excuse. If God loves all of humanity, then why give a child cancer, or let a child be raped in a war? If God loves us, he is sure taking His time showing it.

> In a nutshell, God created mankind for His pleasure. He didn't need to create us, but
> He chose to create us for His own pure enjoyment. God is a loving Father and we
> were created to be His children.

I doubt that God enjoys war and suffering. So we tell ourselves that God aches for us, that he suffers as much as we do when he sees how bad we are. so we keep making excuses for God neglecting us and we keep telling ourselves that some day, somewhere, somehow, God will come and set things straight.

A long time ago I was a child and I understood as a child, and when I became a man I put away childish things, then I understood that God stopped caring about humanity a long time ago, because we have done nothing but disappoint him all along. He sent us prophets, wise men and even His own Son, and we still turned our backs on God. So God stopped loving humanity. Now we make excuses for ourselves and for why God never shows Himself to us.

Thus I developed a simple theory. God created life, and with life He created evolution so that some day an intelligent being would arise. That was Homo sapiens sapiens, the creature that was supposed to be the pinnacle of evolution on this planet and the true expression of God's creative power. But then something went wrong. Homo sapiens sapiens was defective. It started preying on everything, even itself. It destroyed everything it touched. It polluted every river and every lake. It slowly took over and destroyed every corner of the planet. Homo sapiens sapiens was God's evolutionary mistake. God wanted to erase that mistake, but he did not have the heart to destroy intelligent beings, so he left Homo sapiens sapiens to itself, so that it would slowly destroy itself in its own cruelty and arrogance. And so we are slowly killing ourselves. We try our best to get better, to be better, but our basic design flaw rears its ugly head. We keep preying on each other, exploiting each other, using each other for our own pursuit of wealth and power. Now we have the tools to destroy every living being on this planet, and it is only a matter of time before we do. Our own nuclear bombs will soon enough erase God's mistake. Then God can be perfect again, without that mistake hanging over Him. I think the reason why we never found intelligent life in the universe other than our own is because God did not wat to make the same mistake twice, so he never created another Homo sapiens sapiens. Making that mistake once was enough.

Tuesday:

> Name one problem in the word that wasn't man made.

That's exactly my point. A perfect God makes NO mistakes. If God had made even the slightest mistake, then he would not be perfect. Humanity is imperfect. The only way God can be perfect again is to erase his mistakes, but He is a creator and not a destroyer, so He left us to erase our own mistakes. I might be able to become a better person as an individual, but humanity is iincapable of becoming better as a whole. Eventually, our mistake will be fatal and we will completely destroy ourselves and everything in this planet. Then God's mistake will be erased and God will be perfect again. The only way we could save ourselves would be to get rid of every weapon, stop every war, stop every bit of environmental destruction, stop releasing cancer-causing chemicals, stop being greedy, stop being selfish, eliminate all poverty, etc. etc. But we are unable to, and given our history for the last 10,000 years, we never will. Thus it is a matter of time before some insane moron triggers Armageddon. All it takes is a nuclear bomb and the push of a button. That is the ultimate price of free will. It is in free will that God made his mistake. But we are arrogant, and want to see ourselves as more than we are. We want to be God's preferred children, rather than a mere evolutionary mistake.

Übergeek 바둑이: The devil is just a word describing our animal side out of control. As for natural disasters.. we live on a living planet. Yes thousands even millions might get killed in such an event but that is just life. Neither good or evil.. just life.

In a universe filled with billions of galaxies containing billions of stars... in the end.. If the Earth got hit and all life exterminated.... the universe wouldn't even blink. Yet at the same time Jupiter has by it's influence given us time to evolve rather than get hit by asteroids every few thousand years.. that again is life.

Maybe we should adopt the Origen way of thinking that God is an energy. not some bad tempered deity, an energy that is everywhere and in everything.

Tuesday: Trying to describe God as a elderly white man was just an offshoot from the Roman and Greek Gods.

Tuesday: They were a way of describing mankind's moods and emotions.

Pedro Martínez: God couldn't be "created" because you end up with the problem of infinite regress. An infinite temporal regress of causes cannot exist.

Artful Dodger: An infinite temporal regress of causes cannot exist.

But that's a philosophical premise. Based only on our extremely limited experience. I believe in the matter of creation of universe, it's not right to rule out a possibility just because it looks impossible to us. :)

Artful Dodger: And by the way, by saying that an infinite temporal regress is not possible, you say that the original uncaused action “just happened“.

Pedro Martínez: Ummmmmmm....I always thought we were decendants of the mighty ape....OH, of course...that is only AD.

Bernice: who me?

Artful Dodger:

Pedro Martínez: every effect that we can study we can identify that it had a cause. We know of no uncaused effect. It's more reasonable to believed the Big Bang was caused than it "just happened." That "just happened" scenario takes a huge leap of faith.

Here's something else we're certain of: Time had a beginning. Time is not infinate and in fact, it's an impossibility.

Even the language you use gives it away. You say "creation" of time and space. In my view, an all knowing all powerful First Cause created. In your view, it created itself.

Artful Dodger: I can live with the fact that I don't know how come that time and space and everything in it exists and that I will never know it either. It doesn't bother me. I do agree that the Big Bang theory is the most reasonable of all the theories out there, but there still are too many grey areas.

The problem with our view of the time as finite or unfinite is this: we cannot imagine either of these possibilities. Can you imagine the creation of time? To me, it seems exactly as impossible as infinity of time.

I also fail to imagine how anything can create itself. :)

Pedro Martínez: I can imagine it to some extent. But Einstein certainly understood it. We know that time is relative to the observer. And we certainly know that time is not infinite.

Jim Dandy: then likely religion is not the root of the problem but something else is.

Artful Dodger: non evangelical religions generally avoid world conflict.Judaism of course is an exception due to the issues it has faced since the inception of Israel, but it's not due to any crusade to convert

Jim Dandy: It's impossible to engage in the world of ideas without engaging in some sort of conflict from time to time. Take religion out of it and you would still have conflicts.

Artful Dodger: I would never state that religon is the root of all conflict