@Janus:
First, I would like to apologize. If this thread offends anyone, I am truly sorry. While your belief in God makes you completely wrong, you have a right to wallow in your own ignorance. Second, I have so much to say on the subject, that I am most likely not going to have organized thoughts, and anything I do say will be immensely incomplete. Third, everything I am saying is coming straight from my head. I have no reference material, I am not quoting anything, and I am not being fed lines. Fourth and finally, I will try to pose questions about the very existence of God. I will make efforts not to ask the same, tired questions, (what is the meaning of life, why do bad things happen to good people, etc) I am not trying to win an argument simply by posing rudimentary questions that cannot be cogently answered, and therefore convey a sense of victory upon me, I am posing actual questions I have, which I am curious as to the religious opinion on the subject. If I think the question is not the kind you could realistically answer, I will say so.
How can anyone belief in so foolish a concept as a divine being? The very thought that there could be one omnipotent creature is absurd. Before I challenge the existence though, let me submit two possibilities for the existence of this “God”. First, the Big Bang (prevailing theory about the creation of the Universe) created all that is, and ever was. Our galaxy and everything in it, along with all other cosmic entities. Perhaps “God” is no more than some entity created by the Big Bang, which is greater in some way than we. Either it is much larger, or has superior traits, etc. Surely, to some insect or microorganism, Humans must appear as “gods”, we have the ability to rule their entire lives. Second, “God” is a being more advanced than ourselves in some way, but is then one of a race of “gods” who are the “humans” to an even higher group of “gods”, something like the theory that we are all just part of a much larger universe. These are only two possible theories, and there are many, many more.
The very nature of “god” as it is described seems fundamentally flawed. I doubt highly that anything could just “be”. that is to say, how could there be one omnipotent being that always was, always will be, and that created everything? What created it? or where did it originate from? How could it just exist? and if it created everything, what was there before it created everything? Was it just there? These are some pretty deep questions mind you, I dont expect any real answers, I am simply postulating questions. Mind you, the Big Bang theory postulates a singulartity being present before existence as well, but the idea of energy existing before existence is more agreeable to me than some tangible, omnipotent being.
Religion is where I find the greatest flaws in the belief in a divine being. The plethora of dogmas in existence leave me dumbfounded and sometimes speechless when I really think about them. For example, you have christianity. Within that, there is Catholocism, Orthodox, and Protestant. Under protestant, there are too many denominations to go into. All of these denominations of Christianity all believe in the divinity of Christ, but disagree on the finer points. Some are legitametly different denominations, but others, like Episcopalian to Catholic are basically identical. In cases like these, the difference is more political than over the dogma.
I think almost all of us have heard an argument over religion and the existence of God, where the different religions are brought up, and existence is challenged over differences. Many times, this is counterpointed by a statement something like “God is universal, we believe differently in the same being” or something like that. Now i have a problem with that. That is first of all, too easy. That seems to be oversimplfying things, and is way too conveniant. That would suggest automatically a monotheism. What about polytheistic believers? Does that include them? What about theories of the afterlife? Each religion has its own belief about life (or lackthereof) after death, be it a purgatory-esque existence, heaven, hell, reincarnation, etc. How could it be the same God, if christians believe in Heaven and Hell, and Hindus believe in reincarnation?
Thats all for now, I will post more later
I’m a Jew, it’s from my religion that Xianity and Islam developed. The existence of G-d is rational and is based on mathematical probability. The more complex something becomes and the more original that thing is, the less likely it is to have formed from random chance. For example, if I told you that a perfect Shakespearian sonnet was re-written by rain drops that fell on a typewriter and by animals running over that typewriter, would you believe me? You’d have to be pretty dense to believe some story like that, because the sonnet is just too complex and too original for it to have come from something so random. So, what about the universe? It is even more complex than a sonnet and even more original. Can you honestly say to yourself that it came from a series of random events that if one of them would not have occurred, the whole thing would not have happened? The more likely situation is that these events that created the universe were forced to happen. The probability of all the events occurring just the way the scientists describe until the modern day are so low that mathematically it is considered impossible. I’ll post more on the subject later.
