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Tao_Equus
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The original OP cannot be approached from a scientific/investigative perspective?
Tao
Tao
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Tao... I think what I personally would use to prove a creator.... Let it sink in as it may seem insane 
Life can only come from life.... Life cannot come from nothing, that is impossible... So to me... The fact that we are all here having a debate is proof enough for me.
Psalm 36:9
For with you is the source of life....
Life can only come from life.... Life cannot come from nothing, that is impossible... So to me... The fact that we are all here having a debate is proof enough for me.
Psalm 36:9
For with you is the source of life....
T
Tao_Equus
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Tao... I think what I personally would use to prove a creator.... Let it sink in as it may seem insane
Life can only come from life.... Life cannot come from nothing, that is impossible... So to me... The fact that we are all here having a debate is proof enough for me.
Psalm 36:9
For with you is the source of life....
I have thought on this. And I will state again what I have stated before, I do not discount the possibility that the Universe itself is a living thing. Even if it is I still do not believe it a God to be worshipped, feared, loved and paid for via men wearing decidedly funny clothes.
Tao
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I agree down to the letter.... But, others wouldn't agree, that is totally cool and totally their choice. I was just giving you my personal opinion to why I believe their is a Creator.. To some degree what I believe will mix well with others here and some of what I believe doesn't have a connection at all to their belife... I have no interest in changing your mind or converting you or anything (or any other), just answering your question on what is evidence enough personally for me to believe in a Creator.
Yippyeeio Kiyay.
Namaste Tao,
G!d is quite simply, quite extraordinarily a name of the undescribable!!
I'm a dancing in agreement!
Dondi
Well-Known Member
Boy, there are so many things wrong with this where do I begin? Assuming for the moment that Santa is real:
God requires us to believe in Him. I agree with this to a certain extent. However, the devils believe and tremble.
Santa does not. I disagree with this. How are we going to get the goods if we don't sit on his lap or write him a letter?
God's existence is important to His believers. True. Else we wouldn't be believers now, would we?
Santa doesn't have to exist to be real. But he is real in that he is a veil for the parents. Who else is going to put the gifts under the tree. It's a masquarade, to be sure, but in this sense he does exist. He surely convinces those kids who visit the malls that he's exists.
God requires us to do what He says. You are confusing love with the demand for obedience. A parent will love a child unconditionally even if they are disobedient.
Santa's love is unconditional. Tell that to the Muslim and Jewish kids.
God teaches us to love by punishing us if we don't. I prefer the word 'discipline'. God conditions our hearts through conviction of our conscience the sense of right and wrong.
Santa teaches us to love by loving us without expectation. Well, what message is Santa sending to those who receive coal in their stocking. Wasn't quite what the kid was expecting. BTW, I've never encountered a child who got coal or didn't get what they wanted because they were naughty. Was that whole list thing a bluff?
A child who is taught the birth of Jesus on Christmas learns duty. I fail to see the correlation. What duty is the child to perform? Should he expected to play Joseph in the Christmas pageant?
A child who is taught about Santa on Christmas learns to love and give. No, he learns to get. He learns to beg his parents for the Wii. Then his parents out of obligation stand outside of Wal-mart at 4 am in the morning before the mad rush on Black Friday.
When my twin daughters reached 18, mum and I sat them down.
"You know the tooth fairy isn't true?"
"Yes, we know that. Mum's got all our teeth anyway"
(yes, she has, in fact she's got everything from their birth on, except the placenta)
"You know you weren't found under a gooseberry bush?"
"Yes we know that. You said (each refers to the other) was found in a rubbish skip."
"You know Santa doesn't exist?"
(long pause) "That depends."
"On what?"
"On whether if we say yes, we stop getting santa presents at Christmas."
"You know the tooth fairy isn't true?"
"Yes, we know that. Mum's got all our teeth anyway"
(yes, she has, in fact she's got everything from their birth on, except the placenta)
"You know you weren't found under a gooseberry bush?"
"Yes we know that. You said (each refers to the other) was found in a rubbish skip."
"You know Santa doesn't exist?"
(long pause) "That depends."
"On what?"
"On whether if we say yes, we stop getting santa presents at Christmas."
Dondi
Well-Known Member
You had them waiting until 18 to tell them there's no Santa Claus or Tooth Fairy?
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I think the question is, do you really believe that at the age of 18 you didn't think they knew better anyway lol....
gotta wait till the wisdom teeth are removed?
This has not just been a stimulating but a highly rigorous debate from everyone. Hence I'm surprised and disappointed at the sudden sloppiness here. Lugal-Shag-Egur, Urukagina, Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, Christ, Mohammed and Bahá’u’lláh would all be exceedingly startled to find out that they are "patently corrupt churches" rather than individuals -- and countercultural ones at that. To be brutally candid, next time we have anyone sling "facts" around here, how about getting them straight first? IF God exists at all, IF, then s/he much more likely communicated with these individuals first. Any "patently corrupt churches" come later in the process when the claims for direct communication from God become infinitely more dubious.
Sincerely,
Operacast
seattlegal
Mercuræn Buddhist
In a repeatable manner in which God can be proved or disproved?
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Tao_Equus
Guest
Interesting. The first on the list I have never heard of and neither has google.
The 2nd is a Babylonian King who is cited as introducing the first judicial system but according to wiki " Although the actual text has not been discovered yet, much of its content may be surmised from other references to it that have been found. " Yet this is cited : "Urukagina's code limited the power of the preisthood" Wiki makes no reference to any claim of divine revelation, in fact it seems he was sceptical of religion.
Buddha, Confucius and Socrates all notably do not claim to have been given a divine message from God.
Who Christ was and what he said or did not say are all conjecture. The scripts we have closest to the time all share the common thread that they are other people interpreting what Christ is said to have said but none of them heard him say it. And certainly Christ himself left nothing to indicate the authenticity of any word attributed to him.
Muhammad the warlord and the council of regional power that came after him, and gave us the Q'uran we know today, most definitely fall into the 'corrupt religion' brackets.
Bahá’u’lláh, he founded the all things to all men religion and made a nice dynastic living out of it. I am as cynical about its founding as I am Scientology.
Going through the list we can see that it is only the last two names that can truly have claimed to have started religions. I see this as no coincidence but as evidence of the evolution of religion in society. And those two were inspired by the man who started modern Christianity. The pagan Emperor Constantine who introduced it as the European 'state' religion for the purpose of controlling both the priesthood and the people. Muhammad and his group copied this example as did Vladimir the Great in making Russian orthodoxy the state religion. Though Bahá’u’lláh was no state leader I believe he was acutely aware of what I illustrate and he attempted to create an evolution of the same principle. To unify and standardise the way people think makes controlling them, taxing them and spotting the tell tale signs of the trouble maker much easier. As a leader you only have to control one church head, not a dozen or more. In summary, it is about power, not belief. Mass religion was not given to us by God nor by individuals with a hotline to God, but by powerful state leaders who recognised the immense value of being in control of peoples beliefs.
Tao
T
Tao_Equus
Guest
Well you can repeatably look at all the evidence and from the different perspectives then draw conclusion from them. Is there more evidence that the idea of God was born of the human condition and evolution or because there is something outwith man that gives us this idea. For me the evidence for the former is compelling.
Tao
He initiated the worship of Ningirsu in Lagash as the deity who inspired a peace treaty between Lagash and Umma.
Urukagina established new temples free of the corrupt priesthood of the time and designed to replace the temples then in "business" and was actually mourned by a reform priest in an extant lament upon Urukagina's being slain in battle. Urukagina claimed that his god Ningirsu mandated his looking out for the "widow and orphan" (the earliest written use of this expression) instead of the well-heeled whom the priesthood of the time had been befriending.
That may be true of Confucius. But Buddha, in one of the earliest extant sermons of the earliest sermon collection, Digha-Nikaya 13, provides a virtual autobiography of his own odyssey of attaining enlightenment:
"(from time to time) a Tath¤gata is born into the world, an Arahat, a fully awakened one, abounding, in wisdom and goodness, happy, with knowledge of the worlds, unsurpassed as a guide to mortals willing to be led, a teacher of gods and men, a Blessed One, a Buddha. He, by himself, thoroughly understands, and sees, as it were, face to face this universe -- including the worlds above with the gods, the M¤ras, and the Brahm¤s; and the world below with its Sama¼as and Brahmans, its princes and peoples; -- and he then makes his knowledge known to others."
And Socrates in one of the earliest-written Plato Dialogues, Apology, describes his visceral experience of deity this way:
"Some one may wonder why I go about in private giving
advice and busying myself with the concerns of others, but do not venture to come forward in public and advise the state. I will tell you why. You have heard me speak at sundry times
31d
and in divers places of an oracle or sign which comes to me, and is the divinity which Meletus ridicules in the indictment. This sign, which is a kind of voice, first began to come to me when I was a child; it always forbids but never commands me to do anything which I am going to do. This is what deters me from being a politician."
And the same is true of plenty of other texts concerning plenty of other figures of the B.C.E. Do we throw all of them out as well? If we only throw out the Jesus accounts, then we're not being scientific or consistent. We're only doing an unscrupulous and arbitrary airbrushing of history. If we throw out the other figures whose documentation is even further away from the time they lived and even sparser than that for Christ, then we throw out well over three fourths of all history before 50 C.E. Which is it going to be? Pleast list all the figures of the B.C.E. that are better documented than Christ and cite the specific source texts and the presumed date of each and every text.
You're being inconsistent. You didn't say "corrupt religion" before. You said "patently corrupt churches". Answer me: Is Mohammed a church or an individual?
Same question.
But in your first offhand remark about deity giving out messages, you didn't address the matter of those who started religions. Instead, you addressed strictly the matter of those to whom deity gave a message, pure and simple. After all, even Christ didn't start a religion. Paul and Constantine did.
Sincerely,
Operacast
T
Tao_Equus
Guest
Opera,
I see it as materially irrelevant who claimed what, such schizophrenic hallucination today would get you heavily medicated (or the Presidency of the US). To base whole religions on what people hallucinated or made metaphors of 100s or even 1000s of years ago is to put it mildly a bit daft. All you have to go on is your faith that there were people who were somehow specially selected to get a message. I cannot believe that. Its just not a credible.
Tao
I see it as materially irrelevant who claimed what, such schizophrenic hallucination today would get you heavily medicated (or the Presidency of the US). To base whole religions on what people hallucinated or made metaphors of 100s or even 1000s of years ago is to put it mildly a bit daft. All you have to go on is your faith that there were people who were somehow specially selected to get a message. I cannot believe that. Its just not a credible.
Tao
You asked
"If God wants me to believe then why wont he tell me[?] Why did he only give this message to patently corrupt churches?"
Whether the early accounts of individual seekers having personally encountered deity are daft or not, there are at least those accounts. We're all perfectly free to scoff at them.
There are, however, NO early accounts of such encounters concerning churches as a whole, and you've made a big rhetorical gesture here dependent precisely on the misconception that there are. But that's what it is: a misconception, yours. There are an average of half a dozen accounts each for each of the six or seven figures for whom personal encounters are claimed. There is only ONE "account" that assumes that some church or other had a similar encounter. That one "account" comes from some 5000 years after Shag-Egur lived, some 4500 after Urukagina, 2600 after Buddha, 2400 after Socrates, 2000 after Christ, 1500 after Mohammed and 200 after Baha'ullah. That one "account" is in a twenty-first century forum on the Internet entitled Interfaith Forums at http://www.comparative-religion.com/forum
It comes from a poster called Tao_Equus.
If the early accounts of individual encounters are bogus, then any twenty-first century "account" that assumes a similar claim for such an encounter between deity in any form and some church is a hundred times as bogus.
You made a mistake in assuming such a claim. Admit it.
Operacast
China Cat Sunflower
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I gotta do this.
Here's the Merriam Webster entry for god:
Please specify which God you mean. I flat don't believe in 1a. I'm more flexible as you head south.
Chris
Here's the Merriam Webster entry for god:
Please specify which God you mean. I flat don't believe in 1a. I'm more flexible as you head south.
Chris
Netti-Netti
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Some would say that miracle healings constitute evidence. Would they meet your "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard of evidence?
Namaste CCS
I'd say 1b is close to my understanding sans the 'ruling over' (unless a law like gravity rules), but I'll just leave it as 1 as the closest, no a.
I'd say 1b is close to my understanding sans the 'ruling over' (unless a law like gravity rules), but I'll just leave it as 1 as the closest, no a.