Religion, surely a delicate subject. Fulfills a lot of people but makes most of them intolerant. Over the history has done more harm than good. Today, we have access to information easier. We know all the horror that religion has caused in past and the wars it causes until now. We have acquired the scientific rationale that demands that everything should be proved. We know books are written by men. And along with all these facts comes a difficult question. To believe or not to believe in God? Please understand that I'm referring to God in a wider way, not the judeo-christian. Why so? Because there are thousands of religions and thousands^thousands ways of defining God, since even when people are in the same religion sometimes they think differently. So I'd rather not take sides of anyone and when I say God please read any kind of deity you wish.
Starting off with the why not, there are several reasons. Sometimes life sucks, a 9 year old sweet little girl was raped and murdered, where was God when that happened? Men are killing each other for 5 bucks and other idiotic reasons. The other day one guy shoot the other 5 times because he refused to open the window of the bus. Where was Him? Was that meant to be? If so, why? It's unknown. There are also so many different Gods according to a lot of religions that all can't be true but it's possible that all are wrong. There is no direct evidence of the existance of God. Any evidence gathered until now fails by using circular logic, like people that use the bible to prove the bible itself. Even though, suposing we believe in Him, how could we define God? And if our definition is wrong and the right one got lost over time? Even if we are really opened to accept something we can never be certain. So how can we believe in something that we are not even sure of what it's about?
On the other hand, observing exactly how mysterious life is, we actually figure that is so unlikely that there is nothing out there. How can one give birth, or receive your son on your arms after your wife gave birth and not think life is so miraculous? Look at a non-animated object. It's there, it exists, yet the list stops here. Now look at an animal, a dog for example. It has options, it can go right or left, it can interact with other dogs and other animals, its decisions affect its life, it has feelings and countless other items could be added to this. I don't see how that could not be considered wonderful. Another thing that could make us figure this out is how some strange "coincidences" happen and how some stuff on nature seem oddly precise. Have you ever met a friend you didn't see for ages by accident exactly you really needed someone? Have you ever watched a sunset on the beach? Or smelled the wet grass or earth after rain? Heard a joke on the right time? Got a ride when you were late? All those things seem small and we don't usually pay attention to it. But when we do it makes all the difference, not only on our beliefs but also on our mood. We usually complain about the stuff we lose but do not pay attention to what we gain. Try dedicating 5 minutes every night to analyze what happened on your day. In short-term that could make the difference between being happy or unhappy. In long term it maybe could lead to your answer to the first question I made here.
5 comments:
This may sound strange, but as an atheist (who believe that though there are being more powerful then myself, that alone does not denote that they should be worshiped), I have actually put a great deal of thought into the nature of the divine. Two q questions continue to haunt me. First, are we better believing that morality is something imposed by a divine agent, and second, if there is a divine agent, why do we think we have understood its intentions?
The first is very complex, so I will leave it till later. The second is best described in parable. Let us for a moment assume that there are beings in the universe with understanding and awareness supirior to our own (IE divine agents), or at least significantly different from us. We will, for the time being, make no assumptions as to their motives or moral status in relation to us. Let us also assume that many animals, for instance dogs, have understanding and awareness inferior to us, or at least significantly different from us. Thus, we will assume that as dogs are to us, we are at least that different from God(s).
The parable of the dog and the ball.
If I tell my dog “Run into the yard, and from the two balls there select the green one, not the red one, and fetch it to me.”, my dog is going to understand “run, ball fetch.” He might even understand the concept of “yard”. However, there is no possible way my dog, being color blind, will understand the concept of “green” and “red”, and his ability to count being negligible, “two” is probably not going to get much attention either. Thus, it is equally likely that my do will bring me the green ball, the red ball, or the purple ball under the porch that is did not even know was there.
The idea that humans, with limited understanding of the divine, could correctly interpret the intentions of beings with infinite understanding of the divine is as silly as the idea of the dog correctly identifying the green and red balls. It is almost certain that concepts contained in any wishes divine agents might have expressed to humans where misinterpreted, simply because humans did not have the awareness to understand the concepts, or even conceive of the concepts existence. Given that, I wonder if it is not distinctly possible that the majority of religious texts are not completely miss written, bearing little to no resemblance to what the divine agent actually intended.
Thank you for such a clear comment. Yes, it's true, understanding the divine is really not under our control. This is exactly why believing or not on the existance of something greater than us should be part of the choices of each individual. And this depends on how we experience and interpret life. Dictating it to masses through a religion is of no use for the reasons you stated above
Oh man, this is a huge topic. Could last forever, heh.
First of all, I liked the text written here, Althea, but still I find it lacks opinion. I mean, it's ok if you wanted to this topic up for discussion, but I assume you have an opinion about it that you didn't quite well express in the text. In other words: you believe in God or not?
About the two questions Irellok raised: those are two very good and pertinent questions.
I agree completely with you. When humans, us, alone try to understand the concepts or the intentions of God (or The Divine Agents, as you say), we fail at it. Instead, we understand those concepts and ideas in our own way, and that's why, as Althea said, there are so many wars and deaths in God's name. Because the idea of God from those people are not the same, so they kill each other to make their idea stronger.
That's what makes me think that the Bible is the right way to go when trying to understand God.
Unlike you (I would say opposite of you heh), im a Christian. In other words: I believe that the Bible was inspired by God and Jesus is God's son (His first creation), that came to earth to save us. It's good to note I'm not Catholic. Im a Christian. So I don't agree and will never agree with any war driven by religious motivations, like catholicism has done.
The reason why I believe the Bible is reliable is that, first, you (irellok) admitted that the Divine Agents could have tried to express something to us, in any given moment in time, and we just can't understand it clearly. As Althea said, of course that books are written by humans. That's what makes the bible beautiful: God knew that there was no better way to express what He wanted to show us but showing it to a human being, so they could write it to others. Instead of giving us a book written by Him, he made people, normal and mortal people, live what He wanted to show us, so they could write it down.
Like that, Jesus came to us in the form of a Human because that was the only way he could know how to help us. By becoming a human being, he could understand the way we feel and see things, so he could help us in a better way, and make himself understandable.
About the first question: I don't believe it's so complex as you say. Nothing that is imposed to us is good. Human beings are , in general, averse to imposed things. So a imposed morality would be contradictory, since imposing a morality is amoral per se.
But, if the Divine Agents know exatly what we need to do in order to live a better life, and they show this to us, it's not imposing. It's just saying: "Hey, I know this is the best way to go. You choose if you wanna go the other way".
Think about your dog. Dogs are dumb sometimes, at least for us. But we know exatly what's good for them: don't walk along a movemented road, don't eat that old rotten food, make your biological need here... so we try to tell them those are the best things to do.
Same thing with God: I don't believe God imposes us anything. He just says: "Hey, if you do what I'm asking you to do, you'll be a better person, a happier person, and a healthier person". The choice is ours.
I was letting my own opinions for another post. I wanted to let people think about it first. I'll be talking more about what I think later but since you called attention for the bible i'll tell what I think about that.
It's not that I don't believe that some divine agent could inspire human beings to write something good and valuable for mankind. But when the christan dogmas were organized and the choice of which scriptures would be part of the gospel was decided a lot more of things was taken into consideration, like enforcing the existance of the roman empire claiming it had dinive approval, for example.
So, if divine ever inspired people to write the bible, centuries of continuous misreadings and translation mistakes ruined it. That includes the deliberate alterations made to make it suit the political needs (which was consolidating the empire), like omitting books that referred to Jesus as an incredible good man but not the son of God (having a son of God to symbolize a group is much more likely to gain people to trust them) and the bible considering itself the ONLY source to reach God so it would help converting people and they would also avoid searching for other sources affraid of going to hell. If someone was trying to convert you to christianism and you were pagan during your whole life and you really loved deeply your Gods and they told you "You can become a christian but being pagan is also okay" would you like to be converted? No.
So my opnion is that not everything in bible is a lie, but the way we know it today is a mere market ploy to easily control herds.
Yeah it's so hard to talk about the bible when it was used so many times to opress the masses instead of doing good.
The bible was changed many times, yes. But the originals are still there, most of them, and some very old copies too, almost the same age as the original scriptures themselves. And there are still people nowadays, scholars mostly, translating it directly from the original scriptures. The translation I use, for example, called New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures (Tradução do Novo Mundo das Escrituras Sagradas), is a very accurate one, maybe you should check it out later on how was it translated and such.
Well, besides all of that, I believe in one thing that I didn't say on my other post: Faith.
It's ok I ended up using Irellok's "dog example" to base one of my own statements, but looking at it now, I disagree with him (or her? hehehe). We can't make such comparison, simply because we don't know the difference between the Divine and us. He assumes that the abyss between our understanding and their understanding is like the abyss between us and the dogs. But how do we know that? Maybe our knowledge of the world is closer to the Divine Beigns, or God, then we know. The Bible says that God created us to be like Him...
So, Faith. A dog can't have Faith. A dog can't make questions. We can.
But it doesn't matter how many questions we make, we will always end up in something we don't understand. May it be "Why are we here", or "how humanity came to be" or "What is the beggining of everything", we always end up in some question we can't answer. So using human logic won't lead us anywhere, because, as I said, we may be close to the understanding of the Divine, but we are still not like them, so we can't know everything. So in the end, it always end up in faith.
Faith is believing in something you can't prove, or demonstrate. You just believe in it. Physicists do it all the time when trying to explain the universe.
I'm talking about Faith because (and now this is me talking, a conclusion I took by myself) I believe that there are things in the world we can't simply even try to comprehend, so we HAVE to direct our beliefs in things we can't understand. The supernatural, the inexplicable. So I believe in the bible. Because that book was written thousands of years ago, and still have good words applicable for us today, and you don't see that in any book. No book survived as much as the bible. The bible says that things were going to happen nowadays, and those things are happening. And many other things. So if I have to believe in something I can't understand, at least no completely, I believe in the bible.
That's Faith. Not a blind Faith, because I make researches, because I actually read the bible (not like many people that call themselves Christians but never read the bible), because I think about it and try to understand it.
That's my Faith.
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