Fogbuster

God is more real than we are. The universe confirms it by the total symmetry and balance and harmony of all creation, not to mention the boundless beauty, truth, and goodness that pours out from every corner of the world and the cosmos. Even Hubble shows this in more and more detail; every time it gets an upgrade it shows more clearly the beauty and divine principle within and behind all creation.

Behold!!!

And most of all there is God's love for each and every person living today, who lived in the past, and who will live in the future!!! Limitless joy and beauty is there and here within!!


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"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good to do nothing."

tanked_as_usual

uhhhhhhhhh............what?

tanked_as_usual

religion and politics are pretty much one and the same.........

they both spend an incredible amount of time trying to justify how much we need them and that you're an idiot and are going to either rot in hell or your own bile if you believe them instead of us

they are also both doing their best to ruin a notion that was originally honorable..........and succeeding

Fogbuster

Pray about it.


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"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good to do nothing."

wistahpatsfan

Jesus, the human, said the only thing that I follow "religiously":
"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."...I try my best to live by these words. Being a human and an occasional prick, I sometimes come up short, just like everyone who tries like I do but also has to participate in rituals and self-denial that are a complete waste of time - and that includes prayer.

I don't need a mythology to explain things I don't understand. I'm perfectly comfortable going through life accepting the FACT that my species is not yet finished with its quest for complete understanding of everything there is to know. In the last 200 years, we have advanced our understanding of Nature further than we had in the 60,000 years prior to that. It'll take a while, but I am confident that we will know how everything works relatively soon.

That is, if we don't kill ourselves first. With the support of one religion or tribe teaching their people that they are better than the other religion or tribe we continue to destroy our environment and wage war on each other. Tribalism and God-speak provide even the most evil people with the irrational hope of salvation, reincarnation, and the "after life", and that provides the license to continue on our course toward self-destruction. This is it, folks. We all have one shot. Accept it and behave accordingly.

So, not only is the belief in superstition not worthwhile (or even fun), but it may well be the cause of our self-destruction.

No thanks.

Fogbuster

Well, you believe and follow what one man, Jesus, taught and lived 2000 years ago, yet as we both know it's not always so easy to do. For millions -- if not billions -- on earth today the purpose of religion is to help us to fulfill the great mandate you highlight; how to cut down and even eliminate any and all occasions of "prick"ishness. So often a good person is cut down by one mistake. Some people lead exemplary lives but then one day they make a foolish mistake and all those good efforts are thrown into the dumpster. So, by having a deeper and better understanding of our entire life course -- our core purpose, all of the ideals, along with the lessons learned from mistakes made in the past -- we have a more solid foundation to actualize the great ideal that Jesus taught.

As they say on the football field: "What you do in practice you'll do in the game." By training and training and then training again, we can learn how to perfect our life without making stupid and regrettable mistakes. God wants us to live without any regrets, not just with some false self-justification for sins committed, but a genuinely truly lived life.

Jesus also said: "You, therefore, must be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect." Mt 5:48


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__________________
"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good to do nothing."

wistahpatsfan

I don't believe everything Jesus is alleged to have said. The Golden Rule might not even belong to him originally. Maybe he was stealing someone else's material - I don't know and neither does anyone else. I just attach his name to the Rule because that's my cultural basis. Some guy in Bhutan might live by the same rule but thinks it was from a Bhuddist monk from the 14th century. Doesn't matter.

Besides, as you know, I'm already perfect.

Fogbuster

You (inadvertantly?) raise a critical point: though Jesus said many words of unsurpassed wisdom in his day, he may not have been the only one to have uttered such ideas. And, furthermore, when we think about his mandate: "... You, therefore, must be perfect...", it is clear that the wisdom he had 2000 years ago was never meant to be the sole possession of him or even a few, but rather for all humankind. That's great hope for us, right there. Even for those who are "perfect" ().


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"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good to do nothing."

wistahpatsfan

Humanity has a common heritage in Africa. These common truths have been carried out of Africa and spread to the continents over tens of thousands of years of oral and written tradition. "Do unto others..." is a common sense approach to survival for any social animal. To not do so would endanger the survival of individuals or even the whole group. It's an evolutionary development that Jesus knew about from Joseph. My father and mother taught it to me. It was not given to men by God and more than our ability to add 2+2....IMO.

This touches on our perception of what morality is. Some believe it was given by God as if before Jesus "gave us" the Golden Rule the concept of it was unknown in society. Same goes for the Ten Commandments. The ones that outline basic conduct- like "Thou shalt not kill" -are common throughout the world. Same goes for "honor thy father and mother" and "bear false witness". These are all things that are necessary for social function in almost all human societies.

Just because I have a different belief about the origins of human wisdom doesn't make them any less useful. I don't necessarily discard everything that's written in the Judeo-Muslim-Christian Bible because of how religous people have used them for their own power and prifit. I just happen to reject a divine origin for all codes that guide our behavior. I know that humans are capable of taking care of themselves in the long run. Whether they do or don't has nothing to do with where our values come from. For me, I think we are part of a continuum of learning about ourselves and our universe. The "god" you speak of is seen by me to be our collective experiences and subsequent codification of our rules of conduct, which is always in flux and subject to the discovery of new things. None of that process is dependent on Jesus, Mohammed, Bhudda, Moon, or even Santa Clause.

Fogbuster

Yes, it's true we don't "need" someone to tell us what's what. Even Paul acknowledged that in Romans 1:20, when he said, "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse." Nature, the world that God created, shows us in ample detail and frequency all we need to know about life.

The world, the universe, and all the lies outside our scope of view are all following the same laws, and thus come from a common origin. Whether we look at the universality of positivity and negativity (plus/minus) in the polarity of a magnet, a man and a woman, a proton and an electron, or whatever else, the universal law of "positive/negative" is there in all things. Likewise, the universal law of internal character and external form is found in everything, from the smallest particles to the largest galactic assemblies to humans: all things of creation have an internal "mind" (inherent directive nature) and an external form or body.

From these we can see how we should live as a human being. Adam and Eve even learned as youngsters about sex by observing the animals. So, no mysteries at all, really.

But there can be no mistaking the reality that humans do not follow their original purpose, but instead follow a selfish purpose, one that puts them at odds with all the rest of creation. This "discovery" of human failure has been called "religion", a word that is taken from the Latin: re (again) + legio (connect), or "religion", to "re-connect" us back to our original selves, not the sinful fallen selves we became way back when.


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__________________
"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good to do nothing."