Without God...

It might also be that your fear of accountability is at the foundation of your denial. But I agree with you about the frauds.

 

Actually, religious wars and the Inquisition, they were defining their ideas in opposition to religious rule.

 

Then why do they contradict one another?

 

The foundation for what you call my denial is there is no empirical evidence for the claim. Thats it.

 

If there is any empirical evidence for spiritual claims or religious claims involving the supernatural I would certainly like to study the evidence. This is the study I recommend.

 

Buddha, another religious con, hardly gets a pass from having to prove his claims anymore than any other religion. There is no proof of any claimed elightenment, Nirvana, or any of that [expletive], rebirth, karma, etc. -- where is the empirical evidence. Pure buddhism, without the added mumbo jumbo just seems like a denial of life and a waste of one's life sitting around contemplating one's navel. Might as well do drugs, have sex, ride a motorcycle and feel good. If the purpose is to get rid of all desires than a bullet to the brain would achieve that result. Of course like all religions Buddhism has it's share of parasites, who don't work for a living and are supported by people who do work, e.g., the Deli Llama and the like.

 

What contradiction are you talking about?

 

Even just within Christianity there is no methodology for determining which of two variants is the better.

 

OIC, you're pointing out that everything we are has come through evolution.

So for another example, the attachment to the supernatural that has unified societies, developing into religion was a clear cohesive force for survival, brought to us by evolution.

 

If it is all a single thing, and we have sentience, then the entire thing is sentient. Otherwise you are implying that we are not all a single thing, which was what I was describing. I think the universe is fractal in nature, every piece of it containing information of the entire thing. atoms are entire universes, and our universe is but a tiny particle of another universe, and so on, infinitely. If that is the case, then if their is any sentience, the whole thing would have to have sentience, as it is all fractal in nature. At least in my opinion.

 

I'm not a democrat and have never voted anything but republican. I consider myself independent.

I didn't say we were all gods. I said nothing exists except god. The illusion of being separate is just that, an illusion. It's purpose is to allow god/creation to have a sense of itself. Ultimate love and goodness means nothing without contrast, which is the purpose of this illusion we call existence, or life.

 

Are you really going to dispute that there are many myths being followed today?

 

The bible is certainly NOT the only source of philosophy ... or law.

 

Secular law comes from humans. Religious law comes from humans pretending their law came from a supernatural source. So it all comes from humans.

 

I'm sure you believe that.

 

Do you think that a holy God should live here?

 

Freedom of religion, for starters. A pinnacle of secular principles, punishable by death in the Bible.

 

If you are going to claim he lives somewhere else, then provide the evidence for this claim. It doesn't matter if the claim is God lives here or somewhere else. Either way, what empirical evidence supports the claim?

 

I certainly don't believe laws are coming from an invisible supernatural man. If that is your belief, what is your evidence.

 

I would agree that religion has provided a needed cohesive force in the past. The problem now is with the advent of science, the scientific method, and a great increase in human knowledge, thinking people don't blindly except claims without empirical evidence.

 

This makes no sense. How can you competing to do right by yourself (and in what way do you mean that?) help you in a future life? Die rich and leave some obscure kid known only to you all of your money?

At any rate, I have it on really, really good authority that reincarnation is real, it's not just a human thing, it's not just an Earth thing, and it's not even just in this Universe. The Source of all that exists is seeking love, by sending out us, little, tiny, infinitesimal pieces of itself (not HIMself) to live all sorts of different lives. Some right here as you and I are now, some as a dog, some even as a tree. Wherever there is life, it comes from that Source, and wherever life can exist, it either does, used to, or eventually will. That may include places we puny humans think of as inhospitable. We think a planet needs liquid water to support life, but I don't think we're thinking big enough... There could be strange incomprehensible life forms in the clouds of Jupiter for all we know.

That authority, by the way, is the, well, I don't know what to call him/her/it, but something/one communicated to me when I temporarily died a few years back, and reincarnation was the top question on my list. They confirmed it's a "thing", and even, I think, showed me some snippets of past lives of my own.

However, if you think of "god" not as a large consciousness of which we are tiny parts, but rather a separate (male) being of some sort, who likes to pick up puny humans and dip them in boiling oil for the offense of believing the wrong thing, or being naughty with their genitals, or anything else this or that church decides are "sins", that's where we part company.

In fact, if the creator of all that exists happens to be that big of a dick, I don't want anything to do with him in the first place, as he's a crueler tyrant even than that prick from 1930s Germany was.

There is no judgement, there is no "hell", and the Buddhists are pretty darn close when they say the whole point is to achieve "enlightenment". And we try, try again and again, thousands, millions of times or more, here and elsewhere, until we get there. But it's not a race.

Anyway, you got my attention by bringing up reincarnation, especially in such a silly way, so I figured I'd share what it was I was taught during by very brief visit to the other side.

I can hear your brain turning, "But what about murderers, surely they go to hell, don't they?". No. Killing another consciousness isn't exactly up there on the "love" scale, but you can't kill something that's eternal, so you get a do over. As many as it takes. Some have suggested even a sort of spiritual "time out" for the really bad folks, like that German guy, but I wasn't told anything about that.

Lastly, if you think Earth is the only place with life, even intelligent life like us, you're nuts. We may not even be the most intelligent species here, something we might learn if they ever figure out how to translate dolphin to human. That will be a very cool thing.

 

True. And each will use the same Bible to prove their own beliefs which differ from one another. It's like there is no God but the Bible. In it, Jesus flat out told the Jews that there is no salvation in the scriptures. Nevertheless, modern Christians claim authority and salvation from the scriptures. If you ask them what their belief is, it will sound like a scripture. If you ask them how they know their belief is true, they'll quote scripture. They do this because they know scriptures, but they don't know God. The Bible is their God. It's weird and superstitious to me. I'm not saying they are bad people....just spiritually retarded.

 

Certainly not in the New Testament, to Christ. And, I am a Christian remember.

 

Which, unless you are a Marcionite, means you still think that the laws of the OT were justified. In the NT, Jesus praised those laws. But even if you want to argue that the God of the OT was an evil dictator and that Jesus managed to correct his mistakes, the freedom of religion appears nowhere in the NT. At best, secularists taught you guys that principle.

 

My evidence is God's revelations. "This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, saith the Lord, I will put my laws into their hearts, and in their minds will I write them." That's evidence I'm sure you have no respect for, yet it's there.