[Edit for typo]

[edit on 7/1/2009 by yeahright]

A good father allows suffering in his child's life, this is how the child learns and it develops character.

A father will expect you to work to help the family, cutting the lawn, helping on the farm, painting the house, learning the family business. These things are not easy...we suffer through them. You are rewarded with Fortitude!

A good father will expect us to do our own school work, read the assigned books, write our own papers, do our own math problems...it is not easy but we suffer through it. You are rewarded with Knowledge!

A good father will send us out on our own and expect us to make our own way, pay our own rent, payback our own loans, make our own savings. This is not easy...but we suffer through. You are rewarded with Tenacity and Wisdom!

As it is with God...without suffering of illness, heartbreak, injustice and oppression...we know not what we are made of at our very core. We are not designed to live an easy happy life. We are put here on this earth to learn how to love and realize after everything else falls away...our possessions, our youth, our health and our social contacts- we are basically souls who need only FAITH, HOPE, LOVE and CHARITY. Suffer through and you will be rewarded with HEAVEN!

Love is the desire for others to be close to God. This is our HOPE.
Hope is the theological virtue of wanting heaven for yourself and those you love.FAITH knowing God and believing what God has revealed. CHARITY is loving God above all things and loving your neighbor as yourself for God.

With God- like any good father- life is like a bear hunt, you can't go over it. you can't go around it-you have to go through it. Suffer through and your rewards will BE GREAT!!!!

Just another lifeform checking in....

It really helped me to lose the dogma. I focus on a power that is greater than myself. A universal power. Any attempts, whether written or verbal to communicate the will or power of a universal being or power force would certainly be limited by our ability to relate or comprehend them. Thus, you will always find discrepencies in someone else's description of this power.

I do believe that the form I am in was 'engineered.' within that framework, evolution has taken place.

With my child, I can tell her what I expect from her, tell her how I would look at a certain problem, but the choice is ultimately always hers. The reason I know pain is that I have made decisions which resulted in that pain. I burned my hand on the stove enough times to know that I need to be careful around the stove.

I owe it to her to allow her to make many, many decisions about her own life and to allow her to experience the pain that brings understanding and hopefully wisdom.

The core belief I have adopted today is that my God does not 'allow' me to suffer. My suffering is based on the choices I make. In an overly simplistic view, I choose whether or not to suffer.

My greatest indicator of my spiritual fitness is whether or not I can remain grateful and humble, despite external circumstances.

Needless to say, I almost always fall short.

Originally posted by dgtempe
Thank you for your replies.

I have respect for the God i grew up beileiving in, but now, i say, why, why is he not here when we need him? I cant believe that fairy tale of Eve and the apple. Sorry.

We are flawed. Which means God is flawed. A huge big book called the bible, full of threats, is that a compassionate God???

We either worship him or we have a horrible end?????

I'm seriously confused.

DG - You mentioned that you were raised catholic. I was also raised catholic. Catholics and Christians are completely different in their beliefs. To doubt a religion is wise. Most religions are about power and make their own rules and laws (catechisms) to scare their "flocks" into pouring more money into the cult for remissions of sins...but I'm getting off track here, this is a different topic.

Adam & Eve may very well be a parable. The Bible is full of them. Besides, Moses had a ton to write about already. Why burden him with the explanation (that we still don't understand today) of how life was created. Cells, DNA, etc. would be far too much for him to grasp, let alone write down in an already large book.

Anyway, to oversimplify, God did create us fairly perfect. We chose to be imperfect. The parable is about eating from the tree of knowledge, but it was likely more complicated than that. The point is, we broke one simple rule of staying perfect. God is here when we need him. Someone earlier made the comparison of a child getting medicine. That seems like a somewhat accurate comparison from our mortal point of view. We see our selfish prayers going unanswered as God being mean to us, when the reality is that we are just spiritual "babies" who couldn't possibly understand why we are "forced" to go through something.

The "threats" of the bible are choices made scarier by intentional misinterpretation by the above mentioned religions/cults. "Hell" and the concept of eternal human torment is nowhere in the original languages of the Bible. The words translated into "Hell" are more accurately translated into "grave" or "the grave". At the end of everything, you live eternally with God or go to the "second death", which is - you cease to exist...but again a different topic.

Remember that God is infinite in wisdom and love. In order to try and explain my opinion on why God lets the world go on like this, you must remember that we will never be able to comprehend why God acts the way he does. He has no timeline like we do, and has infinite wisdom, therefore see's things we don't.

To make it real simple, imagine Satan rebelling against the universal laws God has in place in the Heavens. If God simply destroys Satan, it turns Heaven into a "police state" if you will, giving all the other Angels no other reason to follow God's law other than from fear of being destroyed if they rebel. In that very act of intervening in rebellion, the free will to love and follow God is gone and replaced with fear of punishment if you don't.

Satan was cast down to the Earth with all the fallen angels who rebelled with him, and allowed to have control over this very small portion of the Universe. It's not too difficult for anyone to see that Satans way if flawed. Look at the evil this world is experiencing. We have huge governments run by corrupt politicians that are making life worse and worse and taking any freedom we have away little by little so they can gain whatever evil agenda's they may have. We go to war and people die because corrupt and evil minds can't get along due to their own selfish desires. NOTHING mankind has done on this planet overall has been good. It is totally necssary for all these things to come and be allowed to happen so that God shows the Heavens why you do not want to rebel against his laws, but at the same time will let the evil doers detroy themselves. If you choose not to be like God, this plaet is the proof you will ultimately be responsible for your own death.

How does one see or even know light without the darkness that it shines through?

Could we know the preciousness of love....without experiences of hate?

Could we know the preciousness of life (awareness) without knowing there is a end to physical life? I also think something we are to work with and accept is the process of cycle and order. Nature follows cycles and order...is it to teach us something?

Physical realms come with the cause and effect law....this is not a supernatural realm. For many, they find comfort in thinking God will intervene and fix it all one day...instead of swallowing the fact that it is what it is meant to be.

We need both to learn/knowledge....it teaches us differences in physical nature and spiritual nature....well for me, that is what the bad and good has taught me.

wow...no one has yet to answer my question regarding why we need to be tested and/or why we suffer.

if theres no suffering in heaven, then all of it here on earth was in vain.

please someone try to give me a reasonable answer and not just an answer that is basically a religious fortune cookie fortune.

for example, that long "A good father..." one.

a good father would not lock his child in the basement and let a psychopath torture the child for all eternity for not loving the father enough.

Originally posted by ELECTRICkoolaidZOMBIEtest
wow...no one has yet to answer my question regarding why we need to be tested and/or why we suffer.

if theres no suffering in heaven, then all of it here on earth was in vain.

please someone try to give me a reasonable answer and not just an answer that is basically a religious fortune cookie fortune.

for example, that long "A good father..." one.

a good father would not lock his child in the basement and let a psychopath torture the child for all eternity for not loving the father enough.

You suffer because you choose to suffer.

If you want an end to your suffering, give up all your desire and attachments, even your self-identity. There is no other way.

Originally posted by ELECTRICkoolaidZOMBIEtest
what do you learn by experiencing the pain though?
if you go to heaven the pain and suffering is gone. its like going through 70 years of school then having your memory wiped of all the most important lessons.

"You" do not exist, therefore all that is to be learned about pain is that it is not real. It is nothing but energy. Therefore what you truly are is not affected by pain.

Suffering never ends until the mind is gone, because it is your mind that believes it suffers; the mind believes it is the body, or a person, that is in pain.

Mind is suffering.

Originally posted by marg6043
Remember that the god that people worship in this earth was created in the image of man not the other way around., that is why it seems imperfect.

Yes.

Also, yeahright has ideas I agree with.

I like to think that we are God, not in the egotistical sense, but in the sense that "God" is like the big pile of yeast bread dough, from which we are bits that contain the yeast to grow into our own loaf.
We have to remember that, on this plain of existence, man does horrible things to man, it is not God doing things to man. We have that free will thing going on here. Man must learn, sometimes by hard lessons; God doesn't need to learn.
Oh, I don't believe that "God" is "someone" "up in Heaven". "God" is some One.

And, dg, I got proof that God is a woman. When people get mad at each other and fight, it's like the time my two nephews couldn't stop bothering each other, so my sister, tired of it, produced two of her best knives from the kitchen and told them, "Here! You might as well just go at it right now, since you hate each other so much!" That shut them up.

Originally posted by desert
Oh, I don't believe that "God" is "someone" "up in Heaven". "God" is some One.

This is somewhat correct. But both camps (religious believers, atheists) are wrong.

There is no God. Yet "it" is all there is.

The divine, infinite ground of being cannot be understood by the mind nor summed up by a verbal description, because language and mind are limited, and both are part of this reflection (that we understand to be reality) that stems from the divine and eternal nothingness that simply is.

What you (the mind) perceives to be reality is not reality.

Originally posted by dgtempe
I never post about religion. I grew up Catholic but i dont know much about religion.

I am wondering, instead of sending us fire and brimstone, why doesnt a compassionate God intervene in a way that will not kill, men women and children, a planet that will hit and blow us out of orbit, and horrible things like that???

He made us, damn it. Why did he make us FLAWED. Its HIS fault.

There's nothing compassionate here that i can see.

God didn't make us flawed, He made us perfect. Remember Adam and Eve? They were perfect and lived in a perfect paradise. There was no sin and therefore no suffering. And God gave them free will. As soon as they disobeyed God, everything fell into sin. We have suffering because of sin, not because God made us "flawed". In fact, in God's eyes we're STILL perfect.

God doesn't send people to Hell, people go there because they choose to reject God. God doesn't want people to go to Hell.

[edit on 1-7-2009 by Totakeke]

Originally posted by Totakeke
God doesn't send people to Hell, people go there because they choose to reject God. God doesn't want people to go to Hell.

"God" doesn't want anything. It has no desire nor ego. You are just parroting what you've been told by others.

If you want to know the truth, experience it for yourself. There is no other way. All beliefs will always be wrong.

He is the father of humanity. Not the father of just a few billion people. When you reprimand a child for watching too much television and make him read a book do you think he likes it? No, but its also better for him in the long run. So whatever suffering we endure now is probably better for future generations.

I dont believe in the catholic god or such, but I do believe in an endless existence of everything. I also believe that the purpose of life can be anything, even death and suffering. So things dont always seem perfect, but they dont have to be because perfect is the opinion of a single individual.

[edit on 1-7-2009 by stevedel0]