My opinion comes from a Christian point of view. Life is actually much simpler than many people think and much simpler than Satan wants us to believe.

In the beginning a great question was raised by Satan. The question was "Can man rule over himself without God." This question was raised by Satan for humans and for all the heavenly creations of God called Angels. Because of free will and his love for us he had to allow the question to be raised and for us to prove to ourselves that without God as our leader man sucks big time in ruling over man.

It has taken many years for certain prohecies to come like the cleaning out of heaven of all the Angels/Demons that decided to turn their back on God and it has taken many years of separating the Goats from the Sheep here on earth.

When we die we are remembered by our creator, death is like sleeping, there is no activity. After Armageddon all the Sheep that have been remembered shall be resurrected.

So since the time of the great question by Satan and humans turning their backs on God, there has been a separating of people that follow Satan and those that follow God.

Life is actually very simple.

Double post!

Wonderful.

Applause and more applause (wish I could give ATS applause).

Nicely written. I just don't know what more to say, except I support you 100% in this quest. Might I suggest something? One way to reach "Him/Her" would be perhaps to embrace at least one aspect of the spiritual: meditation. Perhaps you can meditate your way onto his/her plane and either: find out what went wrong, or demand that things be set right. Hopefully he/she won't fry your brain

But really, I'm being serious. I loved this thread.

Dear Poster,

An excellent post, and yet, you say so much here...often contradictory, and truths littered with misunderstandings, and awe mixed with pain. Let me tell you this: Life was never meant to be a prison. It is one thing to understanding the mechanics of how things work, but you are leaving out fundamental spiritual truths and this is what has led you to your conclusions. You have more reading to do----you are on your way to understanding something important, but you are only halfway there.

Let me start by saying that only love is real. I know that sounds like a bunch of hocus pocus and such a truth is often over used and misquoted, but it is true in a fundamental way. The opposit of love is FEAR---which can be seen as False Evidence Appearing Real. Humanity believes they are separate from one another and from Spirit (or God or divine energy or whatever you'd like to call it) and this is the basis of our problem. Humanity operates completely in fear mode. Take for example the belief "There is not enough..." (food, love, money). This belief causes us to horde resources, to seek power and become greedy. It allows us to watch as people starve, even while our own cupboards are full. Humanity operates on a set of false beliefs and premises, and until we understand that WE ARE CREATING OUR OWN REALITY, the insanity is not going to stop.

I invite you--and the rest of the world--to create the world of your grandest dreams--but to do this, we have to change the construct of the nightmare we've created and to discover the tools in which to do that. The world is more ready for this now than it has ever been. We just have to admit that the way we've been doing things up until now no longer works. If the world is going to change, we have to change our beliefs.

The deepest secret is that life is not a process of "discovery"--life is a process of creation. We are in each moment creating our reality---by the choices we make, the words we choose, the way we live in each moment. Since you, too, are a creator, seek to create the life in which you'd like by believing it is possible. God does not demand anything of us---the responsibility for happiness and sadness, poverty and wealth, pollution or sustainability—in short: heaven and hell—rests firmly where it belongs: with us. If God wants nothing from us, then it really is up to us to take on those responsibilities. How? It is high time we reinvented ourselves and to do that we have to change our beliefs. The secret of all the masters who have ever lived is this: Keep choosing the same thing over and over again. The Universe is like a giant copying machine---it gives you exactly what you want. Our problem is that humanity keeps changing its mind! If we want success, then we have to choose it everyday and with every fiber of our being. We, as a whole, have to want peace, harmony, love.....and we have to want it badly enough to choose it in every waking moment. When you ‘make up in your mind’ about something, you set the universe into motion. Forces beyond your ability to comprehend – far more subtle and complex than you could imagine – are engaged in a process, the intricate dynamics of which you are only just now beginning to understand. These forces and this process are all part of the extraordinary web of interactive energies which comprise the entirety of existence which you call life itself. They are, in essence, God.

Choose happiness, my friend. Choose peace. Choose a better world. It starts with you.

Never underestimate the power of one well-intentioned person.

Be the change you want to see.

Originally posted by schuyler
You’re locking a paper bag on our heads, making us forget everything we’ve ever endured, then sending us down here to “do good.” Nonsense. How can You justify this torture?

You aren't some spiritual pawn, you know. God didn't send you down here with a paper bag over your head. You pulled the bag over your own head and eagerly jumped in. You knew the experience would be beneficial and that you would learn from it. God gave us free will, and doesn't really interfere unless you ask him to.

I have a feeling that if all the NDE'ers are right, when you die you will realize that instead of bickering with God about your own choice to be human, you could've spent that time doing what you came here to do: helping people and growing spiritually.

Besides, the scenario you described in your OP was a pretty nice one anyway. Christians get Jesus, muslims get 72 virgins, and everyone else gets exactly what they think they get too, and in the end we all get to heaven.

duh

I find it pretty silly if all we're here to learn is love. Couldn't an all-powerful being instantly transmit it to us so we understood?

I see it more as a possibility that we place boundaries and limitations to challenge ourselves. Maybe it's boring or not always satisfying to be connected to a reservoir of knowledge and potential, so we place limitations on ourselves as a kind of game. Or that perhaps this world is not meant to be a good place to live in in the first place.

Originally posted by ShnogTrip
it seems like we're dealing with a being that is using and abusing his creation.

Or it seems like we're dealing with a creation thats abusing itself. Geez, you guys are acting like God makes people rape eachother. What ever happened to good old personal responsibility

I think reincarnation exists,I think the belief of it is conditioned out of us to get us to lead good productive lives so we can be farmed like livestock.

Like,if you knew you would be coming back,would you be concerned with answering to a higher power,and burning in a fiery hell for eternity for refusing to follow a path laid before you?.

Certain segments of society profit from our fear of the unknown,that fear goes all the way down to the guy in his car,looking down on the guy riding his bicycle wearing a backpack (jealousy).

In short,we are not free,and we are afraid of being free,so we lash out at those who are more free than us without even realizing it,helpless animals for instance.

One realizes how silly things are when there is no one left for them to look upon as being lower than themselves.

Misery loves company,but in truth,everything is meaningless.

I don't expect many of you to truly relate to this because of how most of you live your lives.

Fearfully.

You want to really scare yourself (at least it does me)?

Consider the possibility that, assuming such mystical architecture and functionality is the actual truth of our existence (reincarnation, a higher self, etc.), there is no sentience or even consciousness of any kind responsible for it. Consider the possibility that even the "higher self" being hypothesized to exist is in actuality merely a process or a system which simply exists, naturally and not at all anthropomorphically. That our very consciousness and self-awareness are merely emergent behaviors arising from the interaction of naturally occurring processes, both here, and at the "higher level."

What if all of it really is, ultimately, meaningless? What if the very notions of meaning, purpose, and even thought itself are merely contrivances of our minds, which might in turn merely be emergent properties of an otherwise completely meaningless and naturally occurring super-structure or system?

What horrifies me is that although the human ego abhors such thoughts and seeks through cognitive dissonance to explain them away and minimize them... they really are at least possible. Because, objectively speaking, we just don't know. It really is at least possible that we have no free will, that there is no higher consciousness, and that we are just minute aspects of a vast, but ultimately meaningless (in the sense of meaning that we hope so desperately exists,) naturally occuring system of dimensional and energetic interplay.

Sweet dreams.

Originally posted by BobbinHood

Originally posted by ShnogTrip
it seems like we're dealing with a being that is using and abusing his creation.

Or it seems like we're dealing with a creation thats abusing itself. Geez, you guys are acting like God makes people rape eachother. What ever happened to good old personal responsibility

That's the whole problem, people don't seem to want to take responibility for their actions and the state of the world.
It's always somebody else his or her fault.
It's the Chinese, it's the Muslims, It's the democrates, it's always somebody else.
Personal responsibility has moved to the realm of fabel and legend. Something that used to excist a long, long time ago on a planet far, far away.

Excellent thread and OP, thank you for sharing your insights. As a Christian, my perspective has (seemingly) always been that the way that we live our lives is a test, graded upon death on how we treated others, and whether we helped build them up, or whether we were indifferent or went out of our way to hurt them.

But I've also struggled a bit with that, because it seems... futile. If it was successful, if everyone bought in, and everyone lived by Christ's teachings of love God, love each other, the world would be a wonderful place, but it seems unfathomably unlikely. At the time the Christian Church was at its apex, the corruption of men caused the church to do horrendous things.

I recently read a book by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, who wrote that perhaps life is less of a test, and more of a learning experience, and that death comes once you have experienced what you need to learn. Not for something else to experience things through us, but for us to grow in some necessary fashion. In the book, which she wrote as she was dying, Kubler-Ross said that, in her case, she'd been a care giver all her life (she was the founder of the modern hospice movement,) and she'd live until she'd experienced someone else taking care of her, as she had done.

I kind of like that notion, but the problem that I have with it is how our necessary experiences are determined. My wife passed away in March at the age of 46, and one of the things that makes me sad is the things that she will never experience. Seeing our daughter graduate from university (assuming that she does, lol) the traveling that we planned, retirement, grandkids, and so on. But I'm also kind of happy that she won't have to experience the ills of life, menopause, protracted illness, getting old, putting up with me :-)

So, was living a long life not an experience that she needed? I have, as one can imagine, suffered immense grief over the past seven months, continue to do so, and will likely for the rest of my life. Did I need to experience such a deep loss at such an early age? Did my wife not need to suffer such grief? (though C.S. Lewis speculated that the dead do experience the grief of loss.) In part, I think that I did... my grandparents passed away, and two friends of mine died at a fairly early age, and beyond the shock, it didn't affect me, it took the death of my wife to drive in the hammer of grief.

Reincarnation kind of accounts for the differences in needful experiences, but without accumulated memory, that just doesn't make much sense and, like you, I see too much of life, even a blessed life like I have led, to be rooted in pain and negativity to want to live on this earth over and over again.

Thanks again for the OP and thread, excellent food for thought.

Good thread.
But.
I totally disagree that we are entrapped here in life on earth reincarnation and so on - we cannot escape and all that bull#.
The purpose of our existence is quiet simple. We are one - we are one being. No one can free ourselves but us.We need to live, to grow so in the end we can be one again. And that would probably happen if all of us lost their egos. Why did we split from one being in to many? Well imagine yourself in position of you, of us. One being - one in universe. Bored. Then you go crazy. Go totally schizo. And then you split in to billion personalities. And by doing that life becomes more interesting. Whats interesting about one divine, unique being that exist in emptiness. Would you be more happy if you just existed? With no purpose at all. Just be somewhere in universe and do absolutely nothing - maybe. But until you/we go back to that state which I believe is the real purpose of existence. You need to grow - live happy life, enjoy it as long you have it!
Cheers!