fluffy wrote:Is God the empty space inside an atom?
I think Salinger said it best in his short story
Teddy: "I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all that" Teddy Said. "It was on a Sunday, I remember. My sister was only a very tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of the sudden I saw that
she was God and the
milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean."
fluffy wrote:Personally, I'm an atheist who is open to the notion that religion is useful as a moral framework for people who can't see a bigger picture and so don't see why it's important to not hurt other people, and that God is just a different interpretation to the laws of physics.
I'm gonna refer you to the same book I referred Sober to: Joseph Campbell's
The Hero with a Thousand Faces. You seem like you're probably smarter than me, so I bet you'll have an easier time of it than I did. It's hard to get through, but he really makes it clear the value of religion/mythology in any society, and it's so much more than what you think. You can probably also get away with watching his "Power of Myth" videos, but the book is full of "holy shit, that's what it's about" moments.
fluffy wrote:It seems like religion's only intended purposes are to try to explain the universe and to set up an implied reward/punishment system to tell people not to be a dick to each other, and it primarily does the first part to justify the second part (and IMO, science does a much better job of trying to figure out how the universe works for the purpose of sheer knowledge).
If there's some other reason to believe in God(s) that I'm missing, then feel free to enlighten me.
I believe in God first because of Occam's Razor. But that's not enough. I think true faith isn't a shallow "I believe in something." I think if you're serious about it, sooner or later, you'll feel it for sure, like Teddy. And at that point it stops making sense to argue about it, just like it doesn't make sense to argue about the existence of say, Iowa. You can say you don't believe in Iowa, but that doesn't keep it from being there, and it doesn't change the fact that you eat corn once in a while. I feel like I'm on the cusp of it myself. I spent (and spend) a lot of time wondering, "what's it all about?" You know, why are we here? Is there a point to being alive? and from that, what the fuck am I
doing here -- what am I
supposed to be doing? And one day, I was like, "I feel like the Greatest American Hero. I stuck here with these powers (life), and I don't know what to do with them. I wish there was an instruction book." And I realised -- duh. That's what the Bible is. That's what the Sutras are. for (i=yourReligion; i<totalReligions; i++); But not only that, that's what the
world is. The thing that really drove that home was the book "Siddartha." That's another must-read, and it's a very easy read. You could do it in a day. The world is the instruction book to life, and religious texts are guides, you could say.
The thing is, there's no language to describe what's going on behind the scenes. There's no way to tell someone what the point of existence is, because the telling would fall short. So religious texts have to do it in an oblique way. That they sometimes contradict themselves is unimportant -- maybe even necessary. But of course, with Judaism and Christianity being one with the State for at least a long while, social laws got mixed up with religious ones. So it's not easy to know what to keep and what to ignore. But I think if you have a sense of what you're looking for, texts like the Bible (especially the teachings of Christ) do a great job of pointing you in the right direction. The problem is, most Christians think the finger that is being pointed is the end, and they pay no attention to what it's pointing at.
I realised not too long ago: the Bible doesn't say "don't kill" because it's bad for the other guy -- it says "don't kill" because it's bad for you. Hell is not a place of punishment, and sins aren't bad in the empirical good/bad sense of the word. When it says if you kill someone you'll go to Hell, it means it in the same manner as "if you drive down 84 you'll get to Connecticut." Sins are things that keep you from achieving a spiritual state. That's why Christ said "it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for the rich man to get into heaven." He's not saying it's bad to have money, but that money brings attachment to earthly things. And you can't become enlightened -- see for sure that God is in everything -- if you have attachments dragging you down.
But those are just my reasons. Take 'em or leave 'em, as you will. And feel free to tell me I'm believing in old tales told by scam artists. It won't offend me, because I'm as full of doubt as you are. But I just don't think it makes any sense at all that there's nothing behind the curtain, that there's no one tending the light at the end of the tunnel. No matter how much I entertain the idea, it doesn't make any sense to me.
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