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I posed this to another poster in another thread and got nothing but a sarcastic "what do you want,Jesus to come hold your hand?Sounds like a personal problem to me" response.Hopefully an adult will do better.
This isn't about bashing God.I am not an atheist.I am simply asking,if we are required to believe in and worship God,why doesn't He make His presence undeniable?Seems like a reasonable proposition.You require worship and belief,make your presence beyond doubt.
I'll deal with 2 possible answers and get them out of the way now so we can deal with the others and not waste time on ones that don't answer the question.
First,He is not beyond doubt,and the atheists just stubbornly refuse to admit it.Nobody doubts obvious things.Nobody denies the existence of the Sun,the moon,gravity,inertia,etc.Obvious things are.......obvious.Since many people don't believe in God on the basis there is no proof,to claim that He is obvious beyond doubt is silly.
Second,the appeal to nature.The "just look at a flowers or the stars" argument.Evolution has shown that these things evolved into being.Whether or not God is the spark at the very beginning is irrelevant to this question,since the question is the obviousness of God.God starting the spark that created the universe billions of years ago is not making Himself obvious today.
So,any better answers than the one I got from the other poster?Why need faith that God exists?Why not solid evidence that precludes needing faith in things unseen?
I posed this to another poster in another thread and got nothing but a sarcastic "what do you want,Jesus to come hold your hand?Sounds like a personal problem to me" response.Hopefully an adult will do better.
This isn't about bashing God.I am not an atheist.I am simply asking,if we are required to believe in and worship God,why doesn't He make His presence undeniable?Seems like a reasonable proposition.You require worship and belief,make your presence beyond doubt.
I'll deal with 2 possible answers and get them out of the way now so we can deal with the others and not waste time on ones that don't answer the question.
First,He is not beyond doubt,and the atheists just stubbornly refuse to admit it.Nobody doubts obvious things.Nobody denies the existence of the Sun,the moon,gravity,inertia,etc.Obvious things are.......obvious.Since many people don't believe in God on the basis there is no proof,to claim that He is obvious beyond doubt is silly.
Second,the appeal to nature.The "just look at a flower or the stars" argument.Evolution has shown that these things evolved into being.Whether or not God is the spark at the very beginning is irrelevant to this question,since the question is the obviousness of God.God starting the spark that created the universe billions of years ago is not making Himself obvious today.
So,any better answers than the one I got from the other poster?Why need faith that God exists?Why not solid evidence that precludes needing faith in things unseen?
I posed this to another poster in another thread and got nothing but a sarcastic "what do you want,Jesus to come hold your hand?Sounds like a personal problem to me" response.Hopefully an adult will do better.
This isn't about bashing God.I am not an atheist.I am simply asking,if we are required to believe in and worship God,why doesn't He make His presence undeniable?Seems like a reasonable proposition.You require worship and belief,make your presence beyond doubt.
I'll deal with 2 possible answers and get them out of the way now so we can deal with the others and not waste time on ones that don't answer the question.
First,He is not beyond doubt,and the atheists just stubbornly refuse to admit it.Nobody doubts obvious things.Nobody denies the existence of the Sun,the moon,gravity,inertia,etc.Obvious things are.......obvious.Since many people don't believe in God on the basis there is no proof,to claim that He is obvious beyond doubt is silly.
Second,the appeal to nature.The "just look at a flowers or the stars" argument.Evolution has shown that these things evolved into being.Whether or not God is the spark at the very beginning is irrelevant to this question,since the question is the obviousness of God.God starting the spark that created the universe billions of years ago is not making Himself obvious today.
So,any better answers than the one I got from the other poster?Why need faith that God exists?Why not solid evidence that precludes needing faith in things unseen?
The only answer I have come across in my studies that provided any morsel of rational argument:
God's greatest gift to man personally is freedom of choice and if God presented himself to man in a way that left no doubt, for many, freedom of choice would only be an illusion...... God tells you to build an ark, you ask what is my other choice, and then God asks how long can you tread water.
I posed this to another poster in another thread and got nothing but a sarcastic "what do you want,Jesus to come hold your hand?Sounds like a personal problem to me" response.Hopefully an adult will do better.
This isn't about bashing God.I am not an atheist.I am simply asking,if we are required to believe in and worship God,why doesn't He make His presence undeniable?Seems like a reasonable proposition.You require worship and belief,make your presence beyond doubt.
I'll deal with 2 possible answers and get them out of the way now so we can deal with the others and not waste time on ones that don't answer the question.
First,He is not beyond doubt,and the atheists just stubbornly refuse to admit it.Nobody doubts obvious things.Nobody denies the existence of the Sun,the moon,gravity,inertia,etc.Obvious things are.......obvious.Since many people don't believe in God on the basis there is no proof,to claim that He is obvious beyond doubt is silly.
Second,the appeal to nature.The "just look at a flowers or the stars" argument.Evolution has shown that these things evolved into being.Whether or not God is the spark at the very beginning is irrelevant to this question,since the question is the obviousness of God.God starting the spark that created the universe billions of years ago is not making Himself obvious today.
So,any better answers than the one I got from the other poster?Why need faith that God exists?Why not solid evidence that precludes needing faith in things unseen?
You are not a believer either or you would not be asking these questions.
I posed this to another poster in another thread and got nothing but a sarcastic "what do you want,Jesus to come hold your hand?Sounds like a personal problem to me" response.Hopefully an adult will do better.
This isn't about bashing God.I am not an atheist.I am simply asking,if we are required to believe in and worship God,why doesn't He make His presence undeniable?Seems like a reasonable proposition.You require worship and belief,make your presence beyond doubt.
I'll deal with 2 possible answers and get them out of the way now so we can deal with the others and not waste time on ones that don't answer the question.
First,He is not beyond doubt,and the atheists just stubbornly refuse to admit it.Nobody doubts obvious things.Nobody denies the existence of the Sun,the moon,gravity,inertia,etc.Obvious things are.......obvious.Since many people don't believe in God on the basis there is no proof,to claim that He is obvious beyond doubt is silly.
Second,the appeal to nature.The "just look at a flowers or the stars" argument.Evolution has shown that these things evolved into being.Whether or not God is the spark at the very beginning is irrelevant to this question,since the question is the obviousness of God.God starting the spark that created the universe billions of years ago is not making Himself obvious today.
So,any better answers than the one I got from the other poster?Why need faith that God exists?Why not solid evidence that precludes needing faith in things unseen?
The best answer I know of requires many old notions of Christian/Jewish/Muslim Orthodoxy to be discarded, but here we go.
We are the same species as God, but infinitely less "grown up." In fact we are his offspring in a very literal sense. One of the significant purposes of this life is to learn to exercise faith. Faith is the same well-spring of power or muscle (in effect) that makes God all-powerful, all-knowing, etc. We have to start somewhere so we start with having faith in our Creator and Father. We cannot see him and this is 100% intentional on His part. By forcing us to exercise faith he is helping us. It's just like an infant who learns to use muscles that will one day enable him to walk, talk, type, etc. You don't teach a baby to walk by carrying him and never putting him down.
You are not a believer either or you would not be asking these questions.
How do you figure that? I was a believer when I asked the very same question. Why "blind faith"? What would God intend to achieve by making that necessary? Why hide from his creation? Never really got an answer that made sense to me, nor found one of my own. Maybe you'll have better luck Lifer.
God has always been presented, packaged, and sold as a being of some sort that lives "above" or beyond the Earth. Current mainstream religions present God as male and is described with all of the accouterments of being human-like.
Before monotheism came into vogue, polytheism helped explain why all the diverse energies and activities of this God. We kind of see this in the Hindu religion, whereby there is only one God but subdivided and compartmentalized into various concerns of life. If one is having marital problems, let's say, then one only needs to concern that part of God that is dedicated to marital problems, rather then the whole God as a whole.
In the olden days, it is interesting to note that people prayed that God (or the gods) would completely ignore them. The Chinese, of note, were very afraid that the gods would notice them and make their lives very "interesting," meaning negative. Even the Greeks and the Romans were of the mind that the gods were not around to help people: people were their sport and fun.
Now that we have had the opportunity to get around the galactic neighborhood a bit, coupled with a greater understanding of how and why certain scriptures were constructed and not deserving of the "holy, holy, holy" utterances of a particular god, most people (I feel) have come to the conclusion that there is no God "outside of things" that is apparently running the show (or not running the show, according to some).
In my thinking and contemplation--maybe with a lot of constipation in-between--Aristotle added a fifth element to the basic makeup of the world: aether.
This fifth element is basically "out of this world," and yet, it is a part of this world in conjuntion with the operations and relationships of the other four elements.
Since most of us here are familiar with the Judeo-Christian scriptures, a fundamentalistic look at most of the stories and poems contained within are representative of these five elements. The Gods of the OT were never representations of a real God; they were the aether of the stories. [One of the underlying themes of the OT is that the real God is not only Unknown but Unknowable.]
In our more meditative religions, such as Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism, God is indeed representative in the external world (e.g., flowers, insects, birds, etc.) but more importantly much more representative in the internal world.
One of my beloved theologians in school made this comment: "We are the eyes and ears of God; the arms, legs, and everything that gives locomotion and action to God; we are the lips and speak the words of God."
As I contemplate some story ideas regarding how God would manifest Itself in a more demonstrative way or manner, my most recent concept has nothing to do with a extraterrestrial type being (although our ancient ancestors certainly ascribed Godhood to ET-like beings) landing in force and spanking our collective rearends for being such horrible children; nor do I like the 2012 scenario where the Earth turns itself inside out in an attempt to rid itself of the infestation called humankind.
Rather, it would be a kind of rebellion of the aether that connects every single human being with and to every other human being.
Naturally, that brings up a kind of conundrum: perhaps this God who is tied to all of us so closely cannot be changed or cause change.
When two or three people get together, God is certainly there, but so, too, is chaos. People naturally butt heads together to see who is going to be number one and then a subsequent pecking order. Number one is not necessarily the brauniest or the smartest or the best looking or the most talented, since each situation has to be ajudged on its own merits and the needs of the people to survive each particular situation.
Much of Greek theatre concerned itself with this kind of human particulars and the evasive solution to prevent problems or at least be a tool to invent effective resolutions. IN the end, the Greeks had to invent a deus ex machina, whereby a god would finally tire of the stupid relationship game that we humans muddy up like nothing else, cut the Gordion knot that binds us all to our inextricable follies, and "makes the hills and valleys flat."
Then, too, we can fall back to the "Good Book" and read what our ancient philosophers had to say on the subject as well. Elijah hears and feels the Earth tremble as in an earthquake; he hears and sees the power wind storms, like tornadoes, wreak havoc over the landscape; he quakes at the sight of lightening striking trees and cracking them and shakes with the resulting sound of the thunder. But God is not in any one of these: God is in the still, small voice that speaks within the mind.
Perhaps it is just the needed recognition by each individual that God is speaking to every single one of us. Not by a single voice, however. Therein may lie the problem: religion (and by inference religious people) appear to demand that whatever God they wish to promulgate has to be the same God for everyone, speak the same to everyone, and demand that everyone act, think, speak, and literally be the same as everyone else.
If we can get past this singular bias on our part, what might we see or even perceive?
The only answer I have come across in my studies that provided any morsel of rational argument:
God's greatest gift to man personally is freedom of choice and if God presented himself to man in a way that left no doubt, for many, freedom of choice would only be an illusion...... God tells you to build an ark, you ask what is my other choice, and then God asks how long can you tread water.
The problem with that is, belief is not chosen, it is built by discerning experiences.
And your example is a choice of action, not belief.
God has always been presented, packaged, and sold as a being of some sort that lives "above" or beyond the Earth. Current mainstream religions present God as male and is described with all of the accouterments of being human-like.
Before monotheism came into vogue, polytheism helped explain why all the diverse energies and activities of this God. We kind of see this in the Hindu religion, whereby there is only one God but subdivided and compartmentalized into various concerns of life. If one is having marital problems, let's say, then one only needs to concern that part of God that is dedicated to marital problems, rather then the whole God as a whole.
In the olden days, it is interesting to note that people prayed that God (or the gods) would completely ignore them. The Chinese, of note, were very afraid that the gods would notice them and make their lives very "interesting," meaning negative. Even the Greeks and the Romans were of the mind that the gods were not around to help people: people were their sport and fun.
Now that we have had the opportunity to get around the galactic neighborhood a bit, coupled with a greater understanding of how and why certain scriptures were constructed and not deserving of the "holy, holy, holy" utterances of a particular god, most people (I feel) have come to the conclusion that there is no God "outside of things" that is apparently running the show (or not running the show, according to some).
In my thinking and contemplation--maybe with a lot of constipation in-between--Aristotle added a fifth element to the basic makeup of the world: aether.
This fifth element is basically "out of this world," and yet, it is a part of this world in conjuntion with the operations and relationships of the other four elements.
Since most of us here are familiar with the Judeo-Christian scriptures, a fundamentalistic look at most of the stories and poems contained within are representative of these five elements. The Gods of the OT were never representations of a real God; they were the aether of the stories. [One of the underlying themes of the OT is that the real God is not only Unknown but Unknowable.]
In our more meditative religions, such as Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism, God is indeed representative in the external world (e.g., flowers, insects, birds, etc.) but more importantly much more representative in the internal world.
One of my beloved theologians in school made this comment: "We are the eyes and ears of God; the arms, legs, and everything that gives locomotion and action to God; we are the lips and speak the words of God."
As I contemplate some story ideas regarding how God would manifest Itself in a more demonstrative way or manner, my most recent concept has nothing to do with a extraterrestrial type being (although our ancient ancestors certainly ascribed Godhood to ET-like beings) landing in force and spanking our collective rearends for being such horrible children; nor do I like the 2012 scenario where the Earth turns itself inside out in an attempt to rid itself of the infestation called humankind.
Rather, it would be a kind of rebellion of the aether that connects every single human being with and to every other human being.
Naturally, that brings up a kind of conundrum: perhaps this God who is tied to all of us so closely cannot be changed or cause change.
When two or three people get together, God is certainly there, but so, too, is chaos. People naturally butt heads together to see who is going to be number one and then a subsequent pecking order. Number one is not necessarily the brauniest or the smartest or the best looking or the most talented, since each situation has to be ajudged on its own merits and the needs of the people to survive each particular situation.
Much of Greek theatre concerned itself with this kind of human particulars and the evasive solution to prevent problems or at least be a tool to invent effective resolutions. IN the end, the Greeks had to invent a deus ex machina, whereby a god would finally tire of the stupid relationship game that we humans muddy up like nothing else, cut the Gordion knot that binds us all to our inextricable follies, and "makes the hills and valleys flat."
Then, too, we can fall back to the "Good Book" and read what our ancient philosophers had to say on the subject as well. Elijah hears and feels the Earth tremble as in an earthquake; he hears and sees the power wind storms, like tornadoes, wreak havoc over the landscape; he quakes at the sight of lightening striking trees and cracking them and shakes with the resulting sound of the thunder. But God is not in any one of these: God is in the still, small voice that speaks within the mind.
Perhaps it is just the needed recognition by each individual that God is speaking to every single one of us. Not by a single voice, however. Therein may lie the problem: religion (and by inference religious people) appear to demand that whatever God they wish to promulgate has to be the same God for everyone, speak the same to everyone, and demand that everyone act, think, speak, and literally be the same as everyone else.
If we can get past this singular bias on our part, what might we see or even perceive?
If God is in all of us, does that mean if there were no people, there would be no God? Does His existance require ours?
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