I can see that there is potential for a philosophical (not religious) debate about the existence of a small ‘c’ creator. There is the remote possibility that another intelligent being had a hand in either seeding life to this planet and/or guiding our evolution with occasional nudges. Panspermia is becoming a more and more supported theory, though there’s still no evidence it was deliberate. For example, humans regularly alter the evolution of virtually all the creatures around us, whether by design as with domestication, or by accident as with antibiotic resistance.
by estherase
The objection I have with all organized religion is that their answer to philosophical questions about our origin and purpose is, in each case, a very specific, institutionally convenient, and exclusive answer. I can see that there may be a debate about how life came to emerge, but Christianity doesn’t seem to offer a reason that’s any more valid than Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Confucianism, or Sikhism.
None of them seem any more likely to reflect reality than any other. And those are just contemporary religions, that doesn’t even include any ancient polytheistic beliefs or indigenous religions.
by carf
If no religion can offer any more evidence of its authenticity than its competitors, then how can you believe in any of them? To make a choice at that point would mean that you are essentially just picking a philosophy based on your personal preferences, existing prejudices, and cultural influences. This is not an objective way to determine who we are, where we are going, and why we are in this handbasket.
by Max (Tj)
To me this says that not only are religions mutually exclusive, but also that they are mutually disproved. If any religion offered substantive answers as to our origins and ultimate destination it would be almost universally accepted. The very fact that this many exist, and have existed, offers a great deal of evidence to support the allegation that none of them have any idea what they are talking about, and a small amount evidence that there is no purpose or destination at all.
by Auntie P
If none of them can offer me real answers about the things I don’t know, then they are just convientent philosphies telling me to do things I’m already aware I should do. I already know I should play nice. I don’t need an global institution to tell me that.
Man has a sin nature and due to this sin nature [which causes man to want to run away from God] even if man is confronted with a definite proof that there is a creator, he wouldn’t accept it. The Bible’s purpose isn’t to tell man where they came from and why God created man. It’s main purpose is to show man that we are indeed sinners that need a savior that can save us from our sin and reunite us with the God who created us and what we need to do to accept our savior’s gift to us.
Quote: “…then they are just convientent philosphies telling me to do things I’m already aware I should do.”
How do you know that the way that society tells us to live is the right way if there is no creator who is able to set the standard? Without a creator, morals are arbitrary and it would be wrong for me to tell someone that it is wrong to have multiple sexual partners, father then abandon children, etc.
By: Tom on May 17, 2008
at 11:28 am
Everything you said comes from a single religion which you have not proven is any more valid than any other. I’m not attacking your religion, I’m saying that they are equally arbitrary and therefore equally invalid.
My central point is:
“If no religion can offer any more evidence of its authenticity than its competitors, then how can you believe in any of them? To make a choice at that point would mean that you are essentially just picking a philosophy based on your personal preferences, existing prejudices, and cultural influences. This is not an objective way to determine who we are, where we are going”
By: laconicreply on May 17, 2008
at 11:37 am
I picked my religion based on the free stuff I could get. Man, Christians love to throw dinner parties…
By: poppies on May 18, 2008
at 1:51 am
While it is true that Christianity doesn’t lay out a step by step way of how God created everything doesn’t make it invalid. God wants us to simply accept that he created it. Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning God created…” That’s all He wants us to know. The purpose of any religion, including Christianity, isn’t so much to explain every single minute detail about creation. Rather, the purpose of a religion is to tell us what we need to do to experience paradise once we die [no matter how flawed a particular religions soteriology may be].
Have you ever studied the Bible? I bet that if you were to sit down and study the Bible from a non-biased point of view, you would see that Christianity does offer much evidence that it isn’t as invalid as other religions. When you think about it Christianity is pretty unique in the realm of religion in that in every other belief system, people have to work their way into heaven, while in Christianity, the Creator of the Universe came to His creation in order to save it without them having to lift a finger.
A thought that I just has is that evolutionism is a religion too in that you have to accept the theory of evolution on the basis of faith because evolution can’t be proven nor disproven just like the idea of a creator God, therefore, theoretical science, like traditional religions, is invalid because it can’t prove itself anymore than Hinduism, Buddhism, or Animisim.
@poppies: It’s a shame that all you get from Christianity is dinner parties because it offers you heaven for free!
By: Tom on May 18, 2008
at 1:15 pm
I was a Christian for a good 17 years. I was Christian by choice. I studied the bible, I went to youth group, I identified with it.
But I have to side with Eric on this one.
If maybe for slightly different reasons.
It’s just boring for me to subscribe to one thing. How can you truly hear every opinion if it is inherent in your religion to believe other opinions are false?
That doesn’t work for me.
I still identify with a lot of Christian values (God loves everybody = everybody deserves to be loved, forgiveness and love are the shit) but I definitely no longer identify as a Christian.
By: Ethan on May 20, 2008
at 6:48 pm
1. “religion” is wired into our animal brains,
so ANY objectivity requires strong integrity-work-intent-action.
Belonging/herd/us-versus-them/culture is so fundamental to our wiring that stepping outside of it to
See What Is
takes spectacularly unconforming work.
2. Just because most go with muddle,
doesn’t mean muddle defines Universe.
Years ago the exceedingly few westerners who persued ninjutsu commented that
nearly no one was SO committed to absolute evolution,
that they push themselves *that* far.
Why would it be any different in spiritual path, than from body path?
What’s wrong with the universal scale of “god” and “creation”?
Giver of living dimension, imager of phenomena,
created what we perceive as a mind-time-space,
allowing living to be,
allowing living to experience,
allowing living to be able to realize its essence-truth.
Simple,
leaves out “church” nonsense,
& has implications…
souls can “return home”,
to use the biblical prodical son rendition…
Vivekananda talked about how Raja Yoga can get one there,
shedding one’s gross mind,
one’s subtle mind,
becoming one’s soul,
making it awake,
gaining union with god-itself.
( some terms I’ve stolen from a buddhism which is the science/engineering of mind-realization )
Others have described the same journey, too.
For something to be scientific it has to be falsifiable, right?
Well, that makes yoga scientific.
Anyone wants to do correct yoga, not To Prove something,
but to See What Is
( scientific motivation, rather than political motivation )
can, but isn’t guaranteed to,
gain significant changes in their substance of mind, in a specific direction.
( increasing subtlety, increasing extravagance )
Recently a study discovered that meditation on “god” created
significantly better results than athiest/agnostic meditation.
Some would hold that
There Must Be A Valid Reason For That,
but some would just use the Magic Dismissal “mere coincidence”,
suggesting that dismissal invalidates reality…
One of the funniest things about “christianity” is that it rejects the religion of its godhead!
“Jesus” was Jewish,
but show me a “christian” who accepts Jewishness as being valid with god!
They don’t exist, do they…
But just because civilized ( economically/culturally herded ) humans insist
on bogus “reasoning” does NOT mean that universe is bogus/insane.
Try this idea:
there are 2 “winds”, 1 expressing as “living” and 1 expressing as “obliteration”.
1 we call Spirit, Healing, Evolution, Growth, Gnosis, Light, Essence, Realization, & NegEntropy
& the other we call Matter, Death, Devolution, Atrophy, Ignorance, Gloom, Convention/Form-only, Murder, Entropy.
All phenomena, throughout universe, express between these 2 winds
( a kind of phenomena-dance, quantum-level, where time *doesn’t* have only one direction )
No church necessary,
no universe/god centered-on-”man” nonsense.
Say, also, that multiple instances of people-who-realized-their-souls occur on each planet-that-has-people,
and they ALL say
“I am the light & the way: i am the only way”
and from outside-of-time’s perspective,
there isn’t any first/second/third about ‘em” they’re *all simultaneous*.
What would the “people” who reject infinity’s infiniteness do/say about that?
Why, murder the “other” instances, of course,
claiming that “their own” instance was
The Only Valid Instance,
instead of seeing that they’re all expressing one single spiritual-unity through different languages/cultures…
simple things, much simpler than what the “religions” allow…
yes, some of us do hold that creator expresses through elegance-of-reality.
http://www.ramakrishnavivekananda.info/vivekananda/volume_1/vol_1_frame.htm
( javascript required, skip the “introduction” which was written by some man who felt that Vivekananda’s words were unable to stand on their own, and needed some Importance manufactured on ‘em )
“If any religion offered substantive answers as to our origins and ultimate destination it would be almost universally accepted. The very fact that this many exist, and have existed, offers a great deal of evidence to support the allegation that none of them have any idea what they are talking about, and a small amount evidence that there is no purpose or destination at all.”
is based on a couple of bizarre assumptions:
that truth must become easily universally accepted
ignores our animal preference for animal belonging.
it ignores our animal preference for establishment/comfort instead of independent truth.
The fact that this many exist, and have existed, offers evidence primarily
that human-animals prefer own-herd, own-tribe, to
trying what independently is, and deciding
*when one has independent perceiving*.
The fact that “religions” contradict says more about
the limitation of cultured “knowledge” that puts itself above Universe’s reality
( which is laughable, at best ),
than it does about Universe’s having direction or purpose.
yoga offers answers to questions we don’t know,
but it means doing the work, discovering the answers within us, each individually.
That is why so few accept that there can be any validity in it:
it’s more comfortable to attack it, to assert one’s herd-authority on others,
than it is to try its spiritual exercise/training to *discover* what it shows us of our own essence.
How many have the honesty/guts to try it enough to discover, objectively, if it’s true?
( one full season of doing real yoga, carefully recording health-tests before and after, recording video of oneself before and after to see if there’s any objective change in one’s being/entity/mode/mind, etc. )
By: Who on May 22, 2008
at 7:54 pm
“Amen”
By: Big R on May 31, 2008
at 11:09 am
From birth, man is blinded by the sin of the world that the devil roams upon. Until he accepts the gift that God has to offer, he will always be blinded in his sin. He will ALWAYS follow the world and what it believes. The Bible says “Wide is the path to destruction, and many go through it, but narrow is the path of rightousness, and few will pass through it.” Is this not a perfect picture of where we are today? So many people are influenced by worldly desires and theories that they don’t know what to believe anymore. In the beginning, man was owned by God; man was a perfect being. Because of the influence of Satan, Adam was left to make a choice and he chose sin. Because of this action, we are no longer perfect beings. We are no longer “owned” by God. Sin has seperated us from him and we all deserve to suffer for in eternal HELL! But, that gift I mentioned was bought with a price. And that purchase was the second time God bought us back. And he did so by sending his one and only son, Jesus, to die for EVERYONE who is blinded by sin.
God threw our sins upon Jesus when he died on the cross. Think about this: You have a son, you watch him being tortured and beaten, and hated by men. Then he is nailed brutally to a cross; a spear thrushed into his side; and then mocked as a king. Then picture you yourself, after watching these things, dumping the nastiest, awefullest, most polluted things on the planet onto his trembling body and then turn your back on him while he suffers and dies (could you do that to your son?). And you did this to save the people that did those aweful things to your son? Guess what, those people are us! That my friends, is the love and compassion that God has for you. But Jesus is not dead anymore! He is very alive today. And you can except his gift of eternal life, and REPENT from the sin in your life that has blinded you. Then put your FAITH in the Jesus Christ, for he is worthy of all things. Please, don’t waste your time in the worldly things, Jesus is coming quickly. Don’t let it be to late for you.
By: Phil on February 3, 2009
at 9:23 am