Do you believe in God?

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I wouldn't have expected a comment like that from someone your age.

Just out of curiosity, were you ever, or did you ever consider yourself a Christian at some point in your life?

I'm Jewish.

Are you sarcastically joking, or are you meaning a Jewish by lineage. I'm really having a hard time determining.

Me too.

Ah, what a cruel paradox.

Hehe, no I wasn't being sarcastic this time. I was just genuinely curious. Not trying to launch into further debate or anything right now.

Many people I have known who say they are Jewish are what I call social Jewish. Sort of like those called Chreasters. They go to church on Christmas Easter and Chili Pot lucks.
I was a Hebrew School drop out.

The above is not sarcastic. Just my experience.

Another thought is
Yes there are hypocrites in religious circles. Yes if you let them get between you and God, guess whose closer.


Another thought
Your God and my God might not be the same but I bet they are friends.

Of all the above I believe the last one the least.

I'm not bragging, Buddhism is for idiots. I was reading a book by Alan Watts when I realized this. It wasn't so much the text, but the blankness when I turned to the next page, and there was no more text. I started laughing at my own foolishness, my efforts had all been futile. I drove to the mall and walked around aimlessly, feeling like I was floating an inch off the ground. I couldn't explain it to my friends. But it's like this. You have a mind, and you have an image in your mind of a controlling mind, and you call that controlling mind you. But it's not the real you. That bigger mind is the real you. It needs to be more than slightly out of control to function smoothly. The sensation is like your mind disappearing. Or like when the air conditioner turns off, and there is an eerie silence, and you didn't realize it was on all that time.

Maybe religion is when people mistake this inner mind for another personality. It's not your ego, so it must be someone else. Not realizing that they were never real in the first place.

Alan understands the same truth I do. If you consider yourself an atheist and an Alan Watts lover, then you need to go back and listen to him again. Alan is one of the my greatest spiritual teachers. All he does is talk about God. If you cannot see that then you completely miss the point.

My dad was Jewish, my mom is Catholic. I consider myself a Christian of Jewish heritage. From what I understand, Reform Judaism allows its members to not believe in God.

@AspE, are you against Jewish rituals? Do you oppose any in particular?

Roger Penrose estimated that the chances of the universe's fine tuning to cultivate any STARS, and GALAXIES, and ultimately and LIFE is 1/10^10^123. Much higher then my estimate, and his calculation was done nearly a decade after Stenger's paper was released.

Atheist Physicists, Bernard Carr and Steven Weinberg both are clear on this issue: "If you discovered a really impressive fine-tuning ... I think you'd really be left with only two explanations: a benevolent designer or a multiverse."

Thank you, marcb0t. I've been a very Traditional Christian, and I've been a highly skeptic atheist (and much in between and to the sides). Funny thing - there's a gravitation in both toward trying to feel more secure by knowing something with absolute certainty. If only they'd both be content to focus on the realms of which they are each best suited, the world might be a better place.

Currently though, I'm...disappointed with many religious practices compared to their stated values and primary document(s). To me it feels like so many belief systems / religions recently are being Shanghai'd for personal/political power and wealth gains. Enough so that I feel the need to point out the inconsistencies in their implementation, if you will. There's not much implementation to question with atheism, since in it's purest form it is simply the lack of one belief (that's not to say people don't screw it up all the time, too).

I think I agree with most of your post here. Yeah, there are a lot of inconsistencies out there. It's not like people are blind to those kinds of things. I really despise politics in particular, and am more burnt out than ever about that issue. And how you describe people using religion for personal gain and power; those are actually examples of things that originally encouraged me to become antitheist for awhile. Although those weren't the only things. (There indeed are some really ignorant people out there abusing others in the name of religion, and giving faith a bad rep.)

Later on, God got through to me, and I started to follow Jesus. And I was determined not to live like the hypocrites and to seek to live out the core of my new found faith.

It really had nothing to do with science or logical arguments in terms of how I came to believe. I guess I was just fortunate to find genuine, loving belivers who cared enough to help and nurture a weird, twitchy, little rob0t like me. They taught me so much about the faith and without their help, I would not have gained the self discipline to even hold down a normal job and be independent in life.

That is my story in a nutshell... a really small hyper condensed nut shell.

But I understand where you are coming from now. It took me a little while, though, hehe. I respect you and will keep you in prayer. I hope you have a restful night and a great rest of the week.

I think my ADHD and Tourettes would not allow me to succeed at being a Buddhist. With all the meditation required.

Personally, this is the primary reason I believe in God. The only thing we know exists is our own Mind. Therefore Mind is a fundamental property of reality. To boil my (and Alan's) philosophy down into a one liner... I believe that we are all God pretending that we are not. This is why I am so big into Hinduism and Buddhism as well as Christianity. Those ideologies combined, and operating according to the metaphysical principle of Tao, yield an extremely systematic, comprehensive, grand, beautiful, open-ended explanation of our existence.

Last edited by NoahYates on 10 Mar 2016, 11:56 am, edited 1 time in total.