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Valiantman posted:Jesus called God the Father, so that term is kinda non-negotiable but to have a gender, you would need to have more than one of the being in question. There's only one God (and He's actually described in both masculine and feminine qualities). I thought there were a bunch of gods but people in Abrahamic religions are only supposed to worship the God of Abraham (or YHWH or Allah just God, or whatever people call it). There's a lot of stories in the Bible about various prophets' interactions with followers of Baal, Marduk or Asheroth. It doesn't necessarily mean that these gods don't exist, just that the Abrahamic God is the best one. GAINING WEIGHT... posted:Please, I'm not looking for an echo chamber of responses along the lines of "because religious people are dumb!!!" That's not helpful. I'm looking for any insight into why people trust this gut-feeling-esque method of understanding God if it is so clearly unreliable. Am I wrong in any of my assumptions? Are there no true disagreements among Christians? Are there ways of verifying revelation that I'm not seeing? I was raised Christian too, in a very liberal Church of Scotland parish, then converted to Buddhism when I was about 22. When I prayed to God, I often felt like I was getting some kind of divine insight into whatever I was praying about, and that's why I was a Christian long after I struggled to believe in the theology and history behind it. But I still get those same feelings and insights when I do secular meditation or Buddhist prayer, and I find it's more focused the more I practise it and learn how to do it. I think just the act of taking some time out of your day to think about issues outside of yourself and to contemplate the world is healthy, rather than just blindly going about your daily business without ever thinking about how your behaviour affects other people. Very often I already know the answer on some level but I don't want to accept it because the right thing to do in some situations is difficult or takes effort, and sitting in silence without my mind conjuring up any excuses reveals that to me. Maybe someone is listening, I'm agnostic or weak atheist on that one, but I almost think it doesn't matter as long as the end result leads me to help other people instead of harm them. quote:My question is more within just one religion: how can there be disagreement if the information is coming from the same divine source? Don't you have to kind of believe that you, alone, are infallible in interpreting the Holy Spirit to really believe you are right about your entire belief structure? I mean, if someone has to have made a mistake, couldn't it have been you? If you could be wrong, why aren't you in this case? Absolutely, everyone has their own unconscious biases and we're all wrong about something. Pretty much all religions agree that no human is perfect, and we know we have limitations. And if there is a god that was capable of creating the universe and having a plan for us all, it must be so intelligent that we could only hope to interpret what it wants on a very basic level. People spend their whole lives studying theology and trying to find out how to please God. I suppose you just have to be careful not to be so prideful and arrogant as to say "I got this divine wisdom and this is what God said so do this", you have to always consider that you could be wrong and be open to defending your viewpoint and entertaining other ones. quote:How does this happen? Is the Holy Spirit giving different advice, or are people simply making mistakes in interpreting it? Second, how does one figure out who is actually correct in their revelations? And lastly, if what I'm referring to as "personal revelation" is such a poor and inaccurate method of obtaining information, why does anyone rely on it? I suppose because it's the best we have, and for theists, it's a way of building a personal relationship with God, even if you don't always interpret it correctly or understand it perfectly, you still get a spiritual benefit from it in some way. Like how babies love to make noise and have a go at talking to their parents: they can only do very simple language if anything, and they can't understand the parent talking back yet, but they're making contact with them and showing that they care about each other. As for figuring out who has the right interpretation, I'm not sure, I suppose I would choose whichever one's view was consistent with other maxims like "love your neighbour" or "put oneself in the place of another" or did the least harm, but then again, that's difficult to define. quote:Would God have different rules for different people, and if so, why write the Bible and fill it with so many seemingly universal laws? It might have. It has a lot of strict rules in Leviticus for all the tribes in the desert, and a lot of them seem trivial or the punishments really excessive, but it relaxes them later on when Jesus says the disciples didn't have to keep all the dietary laws and rituals when eating. A lot of Muslims say that God gradually reveals more and more over time when it thinks humanity can deal with some new teaching. The Bible itself grew over time and was added to by lots of different authors - it's as much a history of itself as anything. But it's difficult to tell whether or not different people's interpretations are down to having different things revealed to them, or just different cultural biases. When I was Christian, I used to read the Bible and pick and choose the bits I believed were divinely inspired based on what ethics I already had from being raised in a particular time and place. I thought "love your neighbour" was divinely inspired, but "kill your kids if they're naughty" wasn't, because that fit with what I already believe about how to treat people. I suppose we just have to keep trying to be aware of what biases we have and try to act out of kindness and focus on treating the world nicely while we live in it, learn as much as we can in our lifetimes and hope we find out more after we die. We might never get it right, but that doesn't mean we can't keep trying to be good. Stottie Kyek fucked around with this message at 20:09 on Nov 23, 2014 |
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Nov 23, 2014 20:03
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Like a kind of predeterminist/Calvinist idea in a roundabout sort of way? If you're destined for heaven, God will make sure you're born in the right religion or experience the right sort of things to get you to convert to it?
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Nov 25, 2014 17:18
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Night10194 posted:Henotheism, or the worship of one God above all others, developed before Judaic monotheism, yes. You see it in many of Yahweh's contendings with the Gods of other peoples in the earlier books of the Old Testament, just how he fucks up Dagon in Dagon's temple after the Ark of the Covenant is captured by the Philistines. The idea of God as the one true God rather than the best God ever comes mostly as a result of theological innovations from the Babylonian Exile, as a way to explain how Yahweh was not actually defeated by Marduk (Common near eastern theological explanation for losing a war was that your Gods also did battle and the enemy God defeated yours, much as his or her people beat yours on earth) but had rather used the Babylonians as the instrument of his wrath for the sins of Judah. That's really cool, I did not know that about the history of it. Thanks!
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Nov 30, 2014 15:59
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If God exists and created us and is truly good and it truly loves us, would it ever send anyone to Hell? In Matthew 7:11 Jesus even says that if we flawed humans can love our children and treat them kindly, a higher being like God would certainly be kind to its creations. If even we humans can work out that "sending someone to Hell because they happened to be born into a culture with the 'wrong' religion is cruel" then God will have thought of that. If it's happy to send people to Hell because they couldn't see the true religion or be divinely inspired because of their human limitations (that it created them with), it's not a god I want to follow anyway.
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Dec 2, 2014 17:38
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