Re: God
again, please no offense to anything that I say; this is a friendly discussion:
[quote=asdf_admin;537456]the beauty of religion is that it is indeed a choice. You do not have to believe if you do not want to. It is your own free will that will believe.[/quote]
correct
[quote]...Frankly, I do not understand how you could not believe in some God. As a photographer I am shocked by the beauty that is held in life, the complexity of our bodies and this eco-system we live in....[/quote]what does god have to do with our transient, incoherent and learned perceptions of beauty? why does god need to exist because we deem something complex? at what point does something cease to be simple and become complex?
[quote]...I do choose to believe in God. Does that make me a strong person, perhaps because I have an external source I can reach out to, versus the[B] doomsday physical world.[/B][/quote]this is an outright misconception. why must the physical world (and all that is considered to be "known") be insufficient to supply meaning? there is something wrong with the belief that the universe is somehow "dead" when we eliminate god from the picture- it's this thought which adds fuel to the desires of people to believe in things they can't see. instead of hope for hope's sake, or good will for good will's sake, it must be in the name of god or because there is something else to give it some kind of external meaning? ridiculous, sorry.
[quote=BeachBum;537540]To say you don't believe in God is like saying that [B]for every action there really isn't an opposite and equal reaction[/B]. [/quote]
one of the most common and sadly mistaken equivocations on Newton's third law
[quote]By this I mean we can definitely see the presense of evil all around us. Look at society. People are losing the minds.[B] If you believe that evil exists in this world you Must believe that a higher being exists.[/B][/quote]why? at some point, things people do become evil. it is relative, yes, but this doesn't prevent us from saying it is true. evil is just a blanket term to describe the actions of people that are strongly anti-social or anti-humanitarian. god doesn't enter into it
[quote] When you state that science has proven we have been around far longer than 2,000 years, well lets see. You can only rationalize a day or a year in the terms of fatality because that is the one thing you can be certain of. In this I mean man writes of God's existence for 2,000+ years and puts those years in terms that he understands which is a daily or yearly calender.
God is an all knowing everbeing presence who has always been and always will be. In this rationalization it is to difficult to for the human brain to truly understand eternity. We only know things in the terms of years. So what if in the terms of our eternal God, 1,000 years equaled one day and a year was 360,000 years because he knew he had to help us understand his time scale. Taking this is to consideration, can you rationaly say there is no God just because science has proven man has existed for 1000's of years, NO. We do not know god's time table and do not have all the answers. If we had all the answers, why would we need to have faith in a higher being? We would be God.
Secondly, who's to say that the 2000 years isn't really the truth as we understand it to day. If there is a higher power that is righteous and almighty, you must believe in the higher power of evil and gloom. I mean come on one of the brightest scientist of our times said to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This being the case, whose to say that he is not filling the earth with deceit and mockery of our lord to win a few souls his way.[/quote]i would not say that god is argued for or against with any reference to time- this seems like an answer to a weak argument made in reference to the Bible like "science proves god's not real because we can prove the existence of man before the Bible was written".
the fact remains that if scientists discovered that, if indeed humans were not around for as long as we thought we were, or on the other hand found that we were around [I]far longer[/I] than we thought we were, said scientists would change their descriptions of the world to accommodate these new facts. whereas with religion there is no change, no matter what proof is offered up. it can be reduced to blind opposition to truth