Am I the only one who finds "God" to be baffling?

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*DISCLAIMER: The following thread is made purely to express the opinion of its author. If you are or will be offended at any direct criticism towards Christianity and the aforementioned 'God' then please turn away; you are not the target audience for this thread. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!*

Am I the only who finds the idea of a single, supposedly 'all powerful' god to be baffling, ridiculous and ludicrous? I mean I would have better luck believing that a mutilate of Gods were the ones who built this very earth that we live in rather than one "all powerful" god whose very concept sound more like impossibility than a possibility.

As far as the development of many human civilizations has shown us, it is not the leader of which makes the 'world' rather it's the people who were willing to work together under the influence of their leader who truly built the 'world' over time.

Claiming that god created the world is like claiming that the queen/king created the kingdom. it's just plain stupid on both the physical and intellectual level!

Honestly I was thinking about being a Pagan. Again, I'd rather believe that a multitude of gods created the world instead of a single, nonsensical god.

Am I the only one who thinks like this?

No you are not the only one who finds god to be baffling. I find it baffling that so many people think that an 80-foot tall bearded man is sitting on a cloud somewhere watching us. I find it baffling that they think the lord will save them if they have a terminal illness or are trapped inside a mine with people dying all around them because if he loved and cared about them he wouldn't have allowed it to happen in the first place. I find it baffling that a being that is supposed to love everyone unconditionally "hates f**s" and wants them to burn in hell, according to the homophobic hate groups.

The Ancient Greeks believed that there were many gods and to say they weren't very nice was something of an understatement. But now most people call that mythology and would think you were crazy if you believed they actually existed. And yet we're all supposed to believe that there's this one god who created all life on earth and anyone who believes in "big bang" or evolution is an evil Satan-worshiper.

Umm...No.

Various branches of Hinduism (the most prominent being Samkhya) are more or less explicitly atheist.

As for Buddhism.... In one story involving Siddhārtha Gautama (Buddha), he famously couldn't care less about metaphysical questions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_o ... oned_Arrow

In other words: Buddha found that God wasn't necessary long before Stephen Hawking did...

And Jainism is perhaps the only somewhat clearly defined religion which has the explicit rejection of a creator deity as a fundamental tenet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_in_Jainism

(There are Gods in Jainism, but they are of very limited importance to its doctrines).

As such, the concept of an all-powerful God is mostly a product of the Abrahamic religions, which tend to emphasize:

- A single creator deity
- A single religious text (or text corpus)
- A single religious message

The Dharmic religions do not - in general - operate under such rigid assumptions...

But unlike Buddha, Stephen is trying to answer some of the 14 unanswered questions or at least contributing to that knowledge.

No you are not the only one who is baffled.

I seek to understand more.
There are 66 books I read and study that help my path.

This journey started again 28 years ago. A previous journey started 3 years earlier.
Those were after early searches in my 20's that took me from the Red Path to Zen, Tai Chi to Don Juan & Carlos Castenada and Jewish Mysticism to Melodie Beaty.
May your answers give you what you seek or to other questions.

Life is wonderful and as baffling as my brain.
I love studying and researching laughter and absurdity in interesting places on and off line.
62 days 5 hours and 40 minutes post diagnosis. Some of my favorite gigs have been at Buddhist retreats, temples and churches.

I tend to wonder often why people get so tangled up on the mainstream Christian, Jewish, and Muslim conception. I get that a lot of people find it dumb and a lot of barbarism has happened by that format, where they lose me is then assuming that's all there is to it or that its popularity means that it's the gold-standard; that last suggestion in particular would convey no sense of history. It's one thing make fun of it, another to get so distracted by it to lose the plot entirely.

There are a lot of traditions, both east and west, where a sort of unified prima materia, azoth, umanifest, etc. exists as the central substance of reality from which forms of consciousness we'd more commonly as gods or goddesses emerge as aspects of. It's something of a polytheistic emanationism within a larger shell but it can be difficult to choose what to call that container - ie. is it a very abstract theism, more of a deism, or more of an atheism? It can be a difficult choice as to whether one would call that THE God, no God, No Thing, etc.. Any which way it's behavior, it's interest in us, it's sort of disposition bears no likeness to a literal read of the OT and if its conscious it would be so in such a way that we'd have quite a difficult time recognizing it as such.

Also my apologies if I got the spirit of the thread wrong from the title and OP. If this is a low-hanging fruit grab I'll keep quiet and find a different thread. I consider myself a draftsman of incredibly non-shiny things for a reason.

Just in response to the title alone:

If there is a supreme being, wouldn't just that concept alone be baffling enough to fathom?

Yeah but that's not all I find baffling about it. It's the idea that one devine being is capable of:

- Communicating with millions of sapient beings each witb their own personalities, problems and qualities.

- Manipulating the weather, events, fates of people, animals, ect. all at once. Boy that's a lot to take in at once!

^ All od these things are just impossible for a single being do even do, devine or not. Unless...

Unless It's done through, oh I don't know...



Which is why, being a spiritual person myself, would rather believe in the teamwork many devine beings altogether!

The attempt at any God is basically an establishment of a paternal relationship. God is the all father/Mother we are all the children. When we raise our children, we let them go forth. We do not control. We help when asked. We let them choose the path they seek.

By the limitations on the established premise, it is impossible to fathom many things beyond the simple concept of something greater.

But, think of some of these points and counterpoints:
"- Communicating with millions of sapient beings each witb their own personalities, problems and qualities."
You are in near instant communications with literally trillions of cells in your body. Who says God is having a conversation with all of them? We don't 'talk' to our spleen. But we are in communication with it.

"- Manipulating the weather, events, fates of people, animals, ect. all at once. Boy that's a lot to take in at once! "
What makes you think God does that?

"^ All od these things are just impossible for a single being do even do, devine or not. Unless..."
Best comment ever because it just acknowledges that it is beyond your grasp at the moment.

And, that is a good thing. Keep questioning. Keep searching. Find what's comfortable and then never try to inflict it.

Favorite quote on the subject is from a TV show. A person found that another was jewish and was asked if it was a problem. The guy answered, "No. I'll worship my way, you worship Yahweh."

Nice play on words and just live and let live.....

No. Atheism in the U.S. is at about ten percent of the population and growing. There are millions in the U.S who share your doubts.

There is not a shred of substantial empirical evidence to support the existence of a creator-god.

There wasn't a substantial thread of evidence for atoms for thousands of years, but people believed in them.

If you need proof, you will not get it. If that is all you can want, you will not understand it.

The difference is that I choose to understand without being required to believe.

Worse, they are becoming as militant as the evangelicals. Their approach is actually evangelical in nature.

That is true. However in the 19 th century chemistry grew more accurate and it was noticed that the elements seemed to combine in definite proportions (ratios of integers). That suggested that elements occurred in basic unit amounts which further bolstered the atomic hypothesis. However not all physicists believed in the literal existence of atoms. At most they regarded the atomic hypothesis as a handy-dandy computational procedure they helped them to balance their equations. It was not until Einstein published his paper on Brownian Motion (in 1905) that the atomic hypothesis was soundly established in theory. Then with the discovery of the electron by Thompson it was clear that all material stuff is made of itty-bitty pieces. Ernst Mach, a leading physicist and one who opposed Boltzmann who took atoms and molecules serious, refused to accept the literal existence of atoms up to his dying day in 1915. After Thompson and Einstein no one doubted the literal existence of atoms any more. So the final acceptance of the atomic hypothesis did not occur until the 20 th century and then it was accepted on the basis of very sound evidence.

Yer kinda skipping the part about the thousands of years of just blind acceptance because it made sense.

Hell, until the invention of the mechanical engine capable of going more than 40 miles an hour, people thought it would not be possible for people to survive. They would not be able to breathe.

Using many ideas of things being proven is a false equivalency. Until that point, it is faith in the idea.

And, many times, within the scientific community, they have to shove past the dogma of the elite or those who presume power over arbitration of fact.

My amusement is that I see both sides as pretty much the same. Blind obedience to what they want to put their faith in.

There was some philosophical support for the idea of atoms, but belief in the absence of evidence would not have been rational until relatively recently. I guess you are trying to justify belief in the absence of evidence because one idea with no evidence to support it turned out to be true.


What's wrong with being evangelical?

Evangelicals of any nature are closed off from differing opinions and try anything to prove a point without regard to uncertainty.

Being evangelical only means you want to spread a message. Atheists generally but not necessarily subscribe to scientific standards of doubt and evidence.