Christian, Jew, muslim or hindu can we have a minute?

Okay, so I know this may come off as a little racy, or perhaps even be distasteful for some of you. I am not trying to single any one of you out, or bring you down or insult you. This is kind of in appliance to anyone who believes in god. We've all heard of heaven, and when you get to go there, and if you are bad that we will go to hell, or perhaps different levels of many hells.

How do we know we aren't in hell? How do we know we didn't do something wrong soo long ago we just can't remember it, and no we are being punished for it. Think about life as we know it. Now, it seems through out our time here we have been getting, slightly more advanced but still making the same mistakes of the previous years. Only, now we both hear about everything that happens, and read study and go to school to learn about every thing that happened before. This endless circle of making the same mistakes, then learning about the mistakes you had made before, to make a mistake and know soon you will make another increasingly obvious mistake. Isn't it a little obvious ? Am I just crazy ? Perhaps, but why would a god or any god... or supreme deity allow such horrible things to happen to those he so lovingly adored if in fact they had already done something with which the God, or deity can not forgive. Then as the gods or deities so said man would basically suffer for all eternity and be forever forced to learn his mistakes and continue making them until so man suffers eternally for all time forever and ever. Doesn't this not seem obvious ? So I don't get it. The only reason we are to care is if we are forever grateful to said creator, no matter how horrible the torment forever and ever proving that your faith to him is true unconditionally and are truly sorry for the sins you've done and still relish your love to the god, gods or deity. Just think about that for a minute....

reply to post by Ilyich


Karma... Forgiveness breaks the karmic cycle!
I've actually had similar thoughts before, like maybe we're already living in hell, and part of living in hell is thinking you have a chance to make it to heaven... Not that I'm religious or anything, just mind candy

all life is suffering.

one must look beyond the veils of illusion when on the path to enlightenment.

I guess we will find out where we are when we are no longer here. I suppose for that reason I believe in both Heaven and Hell. that way when I am no longer here, I can be assured of a good view, based on how I have lived.
The last thing I hope for is that when I finally discover exactly where I am, that I will not be assured of warmth.
DH

reply to post by Ilyich

. . .and still relish your love to the god, gods or deity. Just think about that for a minute....

I don't think God does things to get thanks.
I don't think God ultimately craves and desires love and has that for motivation.
I do think God does things out of love, something in His own nature.
And when I say, He, I say that because it is conventional and not that I think of God as having a particular gender.
I think the universe is a screwed up place, not that it was intentionally made that way, but a universe is not something easy to make, and if you can make one, then you go with it despite its faults. Probably the only reason we would know there is a god is because of the screwed up nature of the universe and how we would not normally even be able to survive in it without some sort of help from a higher power. Just like yesterday I was compelled to give my dog a flea bath because she was continually scratching which was a good sign of an infestation. She had no way to give herself a flea bath and what was at her disposal was self-destructive, so it was time for an intervention. So the idea of there being a god to help is not unnatural but is very natural and we should not come away with the idea that God does what He does for any reason other than a genuine caring.

Originally posted by Ilyich
Okay, so I know this may come off as a little racy, or perhaps even be distasteful for some of you. I am not trying to single any one of you out, or bring you down or insult you. This is kind of in appliance to anyone who believes in god. We've all heard of heaven, and when you get to go there, and if you are bad that we will go to hell, or perhaps different levels of many hells.

How do we know we aren't in hell? How do we know we didn't do something wrong soo long ago we just can't remember it, and no we are being punished for it. Think about life as we know it. Now, it seems through out our time here we have been getting, slightly more advanced but still making the same mistakes of the previous years. Only, now we both hear about everything that happens, and read study and go to school to learn about every thing that happened before. This endless circle of making the same mistakes, then learning about the mistakes you had made before, to make a mistake and know soon you will make another increasingly obvious mistake. Isn't it a little obvious ? Am I just crazy ? Perhaps, but why would a god or any god... or supreme deity allow such horrible things to happen to those he so lovingly adored if in fact they had already done something with which the God, or deity can not forgive. Then as the gods or deities so said man would basically suffer for all eternity and be forever forced to learn his mistakes and continue making them until so man suffers eternally for all time forever and ever. Doesn't this not seem obvious ? So I don't get it. The only reason we are to care is if we are forever grateful to said creator, no matter how horrible the torment forever and ever proving that your faith to him is true unconditionally and are truly sorry for the sins you've done and still relish your love to the god, gods or deity. Just think about that for a minute....

Can we see that some are deserving hell from their choices? Hitler? Can we see that some are hard to judge? Child in Africa? Can we see that some are overly deserving of heaven? On our best day, even overly deserving in our own eyes, we are filthy rags in God's sight. Yet, he loves us all. No matter how close to him or far away, we are loved. His realization is both that we are inferior to the goal and that we are worth the effort. Evil has no love from God. We choose this for ourselves and these examples are seen from history. True evil is a minority. True righteousness is a minority. Then there are all the ones on the statistical curve between.

The first realization is one of what we are. In the grand scheme of creation, we are artificial life. We are created from the Eternal God. God is Eternal, the Son is Immortal (Cosmos) and we are mortal (man). The lowest rung is the degrees between the mortal and nonexistent. On a good day, the evil man and the good man on earth are far apart by degrees. By comparison to the Eternal God, they are both so far below, they are without distinction. We are all degrees of the same. One higher and one lower. Yet, God sees us in a different way. We are all equally loved if we are also loving.

We are loved enough to possess free will. Free will demands choice and for choice there must be the possibility of evil. Reality is an image. Genesis 1:27. An image is not the reality, but an image of the reality. It is a place where light reflects the education we need to develop sentience. This involves harsh lessons as well as easy and pleasant lessons. Apart form the extremes of infinity, we would ever value one over the other? A point on the scale cannot value the entire scale. The entire scale of degrees needs to be experienced.

Confucius said, "I hear and I forget. I see and I learn. I do and I understand." Mortals are in motion in reality. We move and we think. That's it. The rest is done for us. God's part is providing the garden. How we express our free will determines the weeds or flowers. For our will to be free, we must have a place to express it. Sadly, we are not worthy of the gift. Like I said, God loves us anyway. He hates evil.

In the end, we separate ourselves by choice. Jesus said, "you must be born again." John 3 gives the mystery away. Water baptism is our incarnation in the material world at birth. When we find love for God and others, we gain union with his spirit and escape the hell of reality or the heaven we experience early. Our choices express our residence, either here in the water or when we finally learn the lessons we are here to learn. We transcend to the spirit from which we came and we are reunited with true reality. The journey provides the experience.

Will you be a more caring person for experiencing the harshness of war? Yes. You value heaven much more by experiencing hell. A loving Father allows us to be free, yet is always there to help. If we become a prodigal son, we can always return.

I'd ask you to ponder this saying:

"One man's heaven is another's hell."

Think about that for a minute, then try and see that the ideas behind both heaven and hell are a matter of perception. Personally, I believe that karma best represents Heaven and Hell for man, meaning that both are present here on earth, and are born out of our actions in life, not judgement of our past actions upon death.

You cannot blame God for the evils in the world because there is free will.
Many advanced scientists today who regulate the world view are militant materialists. The "mind of God" is no better than the idea of a white haired old man up in the clouds.

It is the same mistake that primitive tribes and children make when they assume God must be like them - the anthropomorphic fallacy.Even if we allowed the God might conceivably exist, they say why on earth should he be like us? Why should "his" mind be in any way similar to ours?

Fact is they are right. Of course there is no reason at all... unless its the other way around.
In other words the only reason why God mind might be like ours is if ours was made to be like his, that is if God made us in his image.


try to think of reality in a mind before matter universe kind of way. Not only did matter emerge from the mind of God, but it was created in order to provide the conditions in which the human mind would be possible.


In 1935 Austrian Physicist Erwin Schrodinger formulated his famous theoretical experiment, Schrodinger's cat, to describe how events change when they are observed. He essentially took what secret societies teachings about everyday experience and applied it to the sub atomic realm.

In the experiment a cat sits in a box with radioactive material that has a 50 percent chance of killing the cat. both the cat's being dead and its being alive remain 50 percent probabilities suspended in time, as it were, until we open the box to see whats inside, and only then does the actual event take place (the death or survival of the cat)
You could say that by looking at the cat you kill it or save it.
there is lots more to talk about but I dont want to get too far off topic. I have been a christian my whole life and believe in the coming of Christ through the human species, not that Jesus is going to come down with a big "heeeeeey" but we are achieving the same conscious understanding that Jesus had. I have come to believe this researching the many different paths.

reply to post by Ilyich


If you did a little research you would find that hell does not exist according to the bible...

Its a creation of the church to scare people into converting...

Though if you believe in such a place, you might just end up there because of the fear that exists within you of said non existant place

reply to post by knightsofcydonia

You cannot blame God for the evils in the world because there is free will.

. . . assume God must be like them - the anthropomorphic fallacy.Even if we allowed the God might conceivably exist, they say why on earth should he be like us?

Of course there is no reason at all... unless its the other way around.
In other words the only reason why God mind might be like ours is if ours was made to be like his, that is if God made us in his image.

try to think of reality in a mind before matter universe kind of way. Not only did matter emerge from the mind of God, but it was created in order to provide the conditions in which the human mind would be possible.

What if God has no more free will than we do?

If God exists, it would be that God is a creature of the universe just like we are and so is from the get-go like us at least in one respect, and once you get over that hurdle, it is not to far to come to the conclusion that God is very much like us.

It may be that God did not create us at all and did not create us any more than he created Himself, and that the fallacy is in thinking He did.

Try to think of matter as just something which always existed and was useless in any practical way without it being set in to motion and dispersed about. If matter was dead somehow, you could take all of it and hold it in your hand probably, I'm not sure of the quantity exactly but if it could somehow just lie there in a lifeless state it would be like a wheelbarrow full or something, I would guess but the point is that there was this stuff but it was useless without something setting it in motion and once you do that, then watch out and things get very tricky from that point forward. The universe is not going to settle down into a stable condition since if it did, it would be just going back to before creation, meaning of the universe, not of that wheelbarrow full of stuff.

We don't know why the universe was created or by what, or even if it was created by any sort of mind. It could be that for this pile of mass to be anything but an inert substance, then there was only one option, and we did not determine what that was nor can we know if we were the reason for it or if there was any reason. There is a something that is a driver and its activity spins things off, including us and the gods and we don't have to necessarily understand all that other than to know that there is a universe we live in and that we can't fight it, nor can we find someone to blame for what it is. We should know that part of our existence involves entities beyond our normal comprehension who are here to help us, and that we should think about that and make it a way of life and to use it to guide what we do and what our roles are and what we are able to influence through our actions and to use that to be like the gods we know are good.

reply to post by jmdewey60
Libertarian freedom means that there are no antecedent causes or conditions which determine the acts of the will. When the will acts freely, it acts independently from any antecedent conditions. That means no desire, motivation, inclination or anything compells the will to act. Now granted these things can have an influence on the will, but they don't determine the will.

Some people seem to have this understanding of free will. I often hear people say that free will is destroyed by the threat of hell. If we are being threatened with something so gastly as hell, then our decision to accept Christ was not a free will decision. The reason is because the threat of hell creates a motive in us so strong that the will is unable to resist it. The motive determines the act of the will.

By the compatibalist definition of free will, everybody has free will. Some people have less of it than others, of course. People with nervous ticks, muscle spasms, etc., don't excercise free will when having spasms or ticks, but every intentional act is a free will act. God acts out of perfect freedom when he does good, because it's his nature to always do good. We act out of perfect freedom when we sin, because it's in our nature to sin.

reply to post by knightsofcydonia
I wasn't trying to get into that so much as to get into this thing about what the role of God is.
I would say that the universe is a big thing, and not only that, but is a very complex thing. I don't think that it should be automatic to assume that God created the universe. Even if who or whatever we call God did, this person or thing called God does not stop or put on hold, the universe to deal with everyday trivialities in the lives of each and every person living within this universe. Not only does this not happen, in my opinion, but can not happen. It is also not God's fault that this is the way things are.
We have two choices for possible hypothetical situations: One, we can exist in this universe, or Two, we can not exist. Existing, in my opinion is preferable to not existing, but this assessment can only be made once someone exists and by then, we are kind of stuck with the current situation. There may or not be the choice at this point to not exist. This is where the concept of hell comes into play. If one finds himself a universal (citizen of the universe) entity, can they at this point choose not to be, or if given the impossibility of opting out, can they choose to not be in a position of responsibility for their actions? I think so, and the alternative option is hell. What this would be is an idyllic environment where the only choices one makes have no moral implications, such as: Will I stand up and walk around a bit? Will I sit down in this chair in the shade, or will I sit down in this chair in the sun?
To some people such a life, or lack of life in any meaningful manner, would be intolerable, while to others, who do not want any additional burden on their souls for having possibly done something wrong, it would be a tolerable way to spend their existence, since exist they must.

reply to post by FugitiveSoul


Wouldn't it make more sense that consciousness itself is hell. I mean we don't necessarily have to experience all the terrors of this Earth to be affected by them. Does it not torment you to see the suffering on the faces of your friends and family ? Why is it not any different to see the suffering on the faces of any man, be they not your brother ?


Knightsofcydonia, I like the name... Were we not created in his image ? Is that not one of the most important lines in many of the holy books. We were earth taken up in his hands and with his will and undying love were, were molded like clay by his hands in his image ??? So why then would it be so out there to think that his mind isn't any different ?

There are more of you i would like to respond to i just don't have the time right now. I will come back and reply to the rest i jumped a few as well. sorry ...

reply to post by knightsofcydonia



schrodingers cat has more to that experiment but i got the idea....
lol

reply to post by Akragon


I used to think very similar to you. How can anything written by man, be anything other than of man.

second line

reply to post by Ilyich


It's all relevant. I guess that's why they say "Ignorance is bliss". Those who are consumed with their own day to day lives, not seeing the torment and anguish in the world, truly would be in bliss. Those of us willing to see these things are subject to the hell that they create, which leads me to another saying "Stay out of the kitchen, unless you want to get burned."
Personally, I'd rather experience the burn than I would being in a protected blissful bubble.