Do you believe in God?

Zealotry and certainty are always a sign of repressed doubt and ignorance ... a simple truth that explains so much religious behavior.

Is there any cause for pause upon realizing that drinking blood for eternal life is vampire stuff, and that a sacrament based on eating someone's body is cannibalism, and that these practices and beliefs arose in a culture of primitive ignorance and extreme superstition in which such bizarre rituals were not recognized for what they are?

Is there any problem there? Or is just like, "They believed it thousands of years ago, and that's good enough for me."

Is the fact that its sacraments are based on vampirism and cannibalism any indication that the religion might be the workings of superstitious minds, and not so much from an omniscient source?

When there was lightning, man fashioned a sky god.
When there was a tsunami, man fashioned a god of the sea.
When eros struck, man fashioned a god of love.
When immorality was apparent, man fashioned a savior god.
When there was fire, wind, death, music, sun, healing, wisdom, war, chaos, fate ... primitive, ignorant, superstious man fashioned gods for it.

The question becomes: "What are we prepared to believe?" in all this.

Does mankind have a tendency to manufacture gods where they don't exist?

Yes.

Have they done this over and over and over and over?

Yes.

Is there any convincing evidence that any of those gods are anything but manufactured just like the rest?

No.

If one is no longer seeking from within god myths and legends, does that mean he isn't seeking?

No.

If he is seeking it within nature and within human nature -- instead of in gods and supernature -- does that mean he is on a wayward path?

No.

If one presumes that someone else, since they don't buy into his own god story is obviously not seeking, does that mean that person doing the presuming is blindly indoctrinated without realizing it?

Yes.

If a supposed omniscient god figure is clearly ignorant of many, many things, does that mean the god story around them is dubious.

Obviously yes.

Identifying with the truth seeker isn’t sufficient. 99% of the truth seeker doesn’t want to find, doesn’t want to navigate through the hero’s journey. You have to identify with the one who finds.

You have bounded off your truth seeking and excluded the metaphysical. This is the behavior of the seeker who doesn’t want to find. The one who finds has no such boundaries.

Navigating through the story of the soul is too difficult.

The only way you can do it is to become spirit and make it easy.

I reveal the mysteries of the kingdom in obscurity, in the shadows, because I am not the child in the light. I am the child in the dark.

The child in the light will soon be coming. He will be glorified and many will think I am him, but I am not. I am the unsung servant.

Still, ultimately, anyone who becomes one with their soul is a child of the light.

You really believe all this bollocks?

It becomes pretty obvious (When you're tripping balls on mushrooms and acid) that we lifeforms originated in the quantum realm, and as a result, after we die, we return to being quantized in steadfast of our next adventures.

Even for me, it’s still hard to believe sometimes.

Marvel and wonder are part of the journey.

Actually metaphysics is a specialty of mine, but you can't see that, and worse, ignorantly presume it to be true simply because I don't subscribe to your so-called metaphysics (which is really just a magic claim). You need to up your game in that area, and basing it on things believed in the 1st Century is not a good place to start.

Can't you see how locked in you are, Craig, and how myopic? As in: "If you aren't in my metaphysics club, you obviously aren't doing metaphysics." That's actually your unwitting presumption. Whoops.

Approximately 90% of the human race that has ever existed has been illiterate, and if you go back 200 or 2000 years, it starts approaching 99%. That seems to relegate all this sophistry about god and religion to being meaningless and ridiculous. Like: "I'm god almighty, and I know you can't read, but I am going to send my messengers with millions of words of arcane and intricate doctrine so that you can find the way to me."

Bullshyt. It has to be bullshyt. Same as it ever was: the god messengers by the millions are self-deluded, and are merely solving identity formation with wildly grandiose ideas such as: "When I speak, it's the way god thinks."

Meh. Super meh. With approaching 100% certainty. As history clearly demonstrates.

From my standpoint ....

God = creation = nature = truth = everything.

By that definition, I'm part of God and so is everyone else.

I imagine that the expanding 13.8 billion year old universe is just God exhaling. Eventually God inhales and brings us back to the state prior to the Big Bang and we start all over again.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

Put the word "Source" in there instead of God and I'm pretty much all for it. "God" just means nothing there, is a non-sequitur, a presumption, a poisoning of the well, introduces huge bias, radically changes the meaning of the word, etc. But if you just mean it like Einstein and Spinoza did, more or less, right on.

The doubling down strategy seems to be endemic to the Trumpians, to the religious, to the sanctimonious, to the cocksure, to the "I knew the metaphysics of the universe right from Sunday School/Kindergarten so don't bother me with other ideas, and if you think I'm going to update any of that you must be from the devil" types.

If instead one can see their own religion as an attempt to understand and cope -- just like all the other ones are -- then a more harmonious, inclusive, and far less ridiculous dogmatic stubborness about it all is on the table.

I've seen things that require an original intelligence. I don't know how else to explain that to atheists/agnostics, etc... I had things happen with Jesus Christ, after doing the sinner's prayer, that I could never explain away. And other coincidences, that couldn't be coincidences. And Church history, and the Bible being responsible for every book, and everything else. It simply just isn't: Oh, I believe! LA LA LA!... lol

I certainly can go along with the first part of that ... that there is an intelligence, even teleology, inherent in nature. That's a beautiful and supported idea. There are certainly "coincidences that can't be coincidences" that we can call synchronicity, on which there are many books written (two of which are mine). Some of the hundred or so synchronicities I list from my life, from fairly mundane all the way to reality radicalizing -- "I don't believe it. It can't happen like that" type of reactions -- do in fact hint at an underlying order such as Bohm's "implicate and explicate" order. I have quite a collection of books on the Jungian subject of synchronicity, I'd say 25 or so. Fascinating subject.

But since all the religions report the kinds of experiences you attribute to Christ, one thing you don't get to do is say, "This is what happened in my religion, and therefore mine is true and the other ones aren't." That's 100% irrational, myopic, egocentric, self-obsessed bullshyt.

Again, the answer is: "I had what I consider a religious experience. There are lots of these (a good place to start is William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience, and I can take this as evidence that there might be an unknown component to reality." You don't get to just say, "Well, I was raised in a particular religion. It seems to work sometimes. Therefore IT IS THE METAPHYSICS of the universe because it feels like it to me."

That is not to disparage the role of feeling in life or in reality, even the role of feeling as the origins of intelligence. Before life forms were thinking their way through existence, they were feeling their way through it. Intelligence arose from sensation, is an elaboration on sensation. Mark Solms is great on this (The Hidden Spring).

Exactly.

Yes there are great coincidences that occur in the practice of any religion, and also in the practice of non-theism. It is part of the fabric of reality, not of the religion specifically. If these uncanny synchronicities occur in all the religions and in non-religions, then the phenomenon is not endemic to the religion (or the god), but to reality itself.

Within the practice of a specific religion, the things believed start taking form in the mind, and that, along with indoctrination, explains all the religions.

So if all the religions are drawing from archetypal content (patterns and motifs common to human experience), then it is that archetypal fare which is the fundamental truth of the situation, not any of the religions it produces.

Pre-scientific ages were attempting to understand the natural world via supernatural beliefs, understandable in their blind ignorance of actual natural laws ... attributing it all to gods. That is clearly demonstrated in spades in history and not to be overlooked when in some kind of "Which one of these supernatural stories should I believe?" search.

I think I'm getting ready to do a David Bohm ... I mean David Bowman. Whoops a bit of a slip, for real.

All of you who believe in this bullshit need to go die and be mothe****ing surprised.

Cool, anyways I do yeah. Not the Jesus you got in america though but the one from the bible 😀