Do you believe in gods?

[Pacific]

I grew up with a very conservative religious mentality and used to be judgmental and miserable, until I accepted myself as gay(at which point I no longer was a believer either). I have often wondered if it weren't for being gay, if I still would be religious. I am glad I am not--I feel I've expanded my mind and lived a more interesting life and learned more about people than I ever would have otherwise.

[Beaux]

Lol I have neither the time, nor energy to sufficiently answer the OP's question truthfully....however, I will say this:

If there is "A God", then I know how he punishes the bad people-- He lets them live.

~Beaux

[JohnSomebody]

Not only do I believe..
I am living proof of what will happen if you don't believe...
You'll get darker and darker..
Then more and more bitter...
Its just awful!!

I am in total agreement with you Anocxu...

I have been through some difficult moments in my life and for me to come through them ...I know it was nothing but the power and the faith that I have in the Almighty God who pulled me through those rough, dark times. I recall that there was a time when I was rushed to the hospital this particular time and my kidneys and lungs had collapsed at the same time. I was not able to talk or swallow once I entered the emergency ward, but I was advised by the doctor that my condition was so severe that he was really certain that I would not live through the operation. He had a nurse contact my immediate family members to say goodbye to me. After this surgery, I was in a coma for quite some time...but to make a long story short...although I did wake up from the coma which was surprising to the doctors because as I've mentioned...this was no supposed to happen especially since they were ready to pull the plug on me. After several surgeries, intense physical therapy, etc. I did make a remarkable recovery and to this day...doctors are still in awe of me...In fact, you would not be able to tell that I've endured all of that by looking at me and I've accomplished so much in my life that I was told by doctors not to pursue and yet I did and the results were so much better than I could had imagined. To say the least...YES...God is a very important factor in my life and I am nothing without him...JS

[RUoutthere]

Incredible JohnSomebody. Great to know you knew it was more than science that helped you.

I am not sure why so many have this idea that God is up there controlling what we do and "punishing" people. If you were a father of many kids, you would want the best for all of them and you would do what you could to help them. However, out of love, if they were rebellious, didn't want to listen to your advice about how to live, and rejected you, and you didn't do anything to cause this, all you would have left is to just love them and hope they change. As a good father who loves your children, you would always be ready to accept them back when they were ready and sorry for how they treated you. God is no different. He does not force his will upon us and He still loves us no matter what we do with our free will. In the end, there is an accounting for how we lived. I think that is fair. How He deals with us then is His choice. After all, He made us. I am shooting for His mercy because I certainly haven't lived a perfect life. Only one person who ever walked this earth has. We all categorize how bad each bad thing we all do is. To God, its all just bad so He needs to look at our heart to determine who we really are. For those who see this transition in our lives when we die as energy changing its form, then the scientific fact needs to be applied that nothing happens without something causing it to happen. So who is cause of controlling the change in energy form. And let's not forget that quantum physic scientists believe the universe is made up equally of positive energy and negative energy. I think I would like whoever is controlling the energy to keep me in the positive side. Loving negative people is hard enough. I certainly don't want to end up 100% negative.

[Anocxu]

I am in total agreement with you Anocxu...

I have been through some difficult moments in my life and for me to come through them ...I know it was nothing but the power and the faith that I have in the Almighty God who pulled me through those rough, dark times. I recall that there was a time when I was rushed to the hospital this particular time and my kidneys and lungs had collapsed at the same time. I was not able to talk or swallow once I entered the emergency ward, but I was advised by the doctor that my condition was so severe that he was really certain that I would not live through the operation. He had a nurse contact my immediate family members to say goodbye to me. After this surgery, I was in a coma for quite some time...but to make a long story short...although I did wake up from the coma which was surprising to the doctors because as I've mentioned...this was no supposed to happen especially since they were ready to pull the plug on me. After several surgeries, intense physical therapy, etc. I did make a remarkable recovery and to this day...doctors are still in awe of me...In fact, you would not be able to tell that I've endured all of that by looking at me and I've accomplished so much in my life that I was told by doctors not to pursue and yet I did and the results were so much better than I could had imagined. To say the least...YES...God is a very important factor in my life and I am nothing without him...JS

Remarkable John...
We almost lost you huh?

I have personal experiences that have led me to believe there are no coincidences in this life...
Most of us if not already will come to recognize it..
Thanks for sharing...
A reminder not to take things for granted.

BTW

I know our initial interaction was rough..this was my strategy...

A man who questions the simplest action on the basis of virtue is striving to be not just a good person, but an exceptional exceptional human being...

Apologies for rattling you up if I did...

In a state of constant enlightenment thanks to you guys... :-P

[MikeW]

Everyone has an opinion.

No one has defined what "gods" means.

What we do know is this:

NONE of us experience the world directly. All experience, in fact our entire perception of the universe and ourselves in it, is a creation that takes place within the brain/body/mind matrix. You're looking at some sort of device right now that displays light pixels and dark pixels; the dark ones are organized in little shapes and you are READING these shapes to make meaning. The meaning is not IN THE SHAPES -- it is within you.

It's even stranger than that... you "think" you are "looking at" the screen on the device and "seeing" it; but that's not entirely accurate. The little dark shapes are areas of pixels where light is not being transmitted; well and good. But even in the areas where light is being emitted, that light does not enter your brain. Those photons get no further than your retina where they excite certain cells that send electromagnetic signals into the brain which are recognized AS areas of light and dark (and every shade of gray and color you see). BUT again, that is all a CREATION within your neural network.

Given this, we can all safely assume (I think) that NONE of us see or experience exactly the same "world" or "universe". There are so many different influences that shape our perceptions of self/world (what I call "the self/world bubble" understanding that the "/" is not a separator but just the opposite, a connector -- the perceptual experience of self and world are interconnected), that although our experiences of being share commonalities, each is unique.

I bring this all up in the context of this discussion because it relates back to the whole "where did the universe come from?" kind of question... chickens and eggs and all that. My understanding is its WAY more complicated than simple direct cause and effect. The universe WE experience is coming into being WITHIN us.

What we're dealing with here are DIMENSIONS OF POTENTIAL EXPERIENCE. That is to say, even if you "believe" the big-bang hypothesis (I do not), the pre-bang "universe" is one not only without matter but without either space or time. Try to understand what that means.... "In the beginning..." ASSUMES A TEMPORAL DIMENSION OF DURATION. I’ll return to this further on.

Using our imaginations we can fairly accurately say that living things have "ranges of perception". What do you think an amoeba perceives? Does it "know" anything? For sure it reacts to stimuli but its reactive possibilities are constrained to a very narrow range of possibilities. As we go up the ladder to increasingly complex organisms what we find is that their range of dimensional experience increases. Thus, "evolution" isn't just about filling a particular ecological niche. Yes, it is that, but it is also about increasing one's adaptive response by increasingly becoming aware of dimensional possibilities.

Our experience of TIME is largely conditional. We think we know who, what, where and when we are. But that kind of temporal "thinking" (perception) is actually nothing more than a kind of map; an acculturated set of temporal coordinates. Right now it is July 15th, 2015; 5:00 PM Pacific Time. This puts my experience of being here now in this moment in a particular historical/temporal coordinate as defined by the culture I’m apart of.

But who says the universe itself is CONSTRAINED by such coordinates? They can be handy, no doubt, for making sure you get to work on time -- or for calculating how to land a space-craft on a comet -- but all this calculative activity is taking place within a framework that is governed by observed celestial mechanics. And these observations are taking place within an extremely narrow ‘slit’ in time/space.

It sees to us that we understand the universe... but WE... our existence as measured on a scale of the cosmic dimension of time -- WE hardly exist at all. Our "picture" of what IS... is extremely slanted; an extremely thin slice. And this is true of the whole of human history (the first three quarters or more of which is utterly lost to us, except for the fragments archaeologists and paleontologists have pieced together, and perhaps often wrongly).

We do not actually know who, what, where... even WHEN we are. All that is supposition based on an acculturated and INDIRECT experience of being.

Author Arthur C. Clarke once said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." If we don't understand how something works, the principals behind it... to us it is "magic".



I would like to suggest this is a potential way of thinking about "gods."

"Any sufficiently advanced being (beyond our experience of fellow humans) is indistinguishable from a "god". Imagine coming into contact with beings who have life-spans that, to us, are eternal; who have “perceptions” and "thoughts" that are incomprehensible to our own... as incomprehensible to us as ours are to ants. TO US... these beings would be indistinguishable from "gods" in that they would be able to know and do things that, for us, are "miraculous".

I put forward the idea that such beings MUST exist; that to believe that we humans are somehow "IT" (the pinnacle of conscious evolution) is a form of chauvinism at best – a simple absence of imagination. Moreover there's no reason to assume that such "beings" have any "human" qualities what so ever... hell they may not even have physical bodies as we understand that concept. They may exist as IDEAS (a nod to Plato) that CALL TO US to grow, change, evolve, and expand our dimensional potentiality. They may be the ATTRACTOR that draws the whole of humanity toward something we can barely even claim as a "real" possibility ... a direct experience of being itself.

This is what all the great religious teachers have been pointing to so far as I can tell. They speak of it in metaphor and myth because that was the language available to them at their particular historical coordinates. We're somewhere else all together which is why it is so difficult for us to understand what the fuck they're talking about.

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God." Ok, so today most so-called Christian theologians have designated fairly straight-on equivalents for how "the Word" is to be understood. What those words represent. But do they really KNOW? Isn't it just their GUESS based on whatever stream of cultural ideas they've swum in?

What IS a "Word"? At the very least I think we can agree it is an IDEA; moreover it has analogies with A VIBRATION. ... And perhaps we can understand that "the beginning" here is not AT THE ORIGIN OF TIME... The "beginning" is THE FOUNDATION OF ALL BEING – not “when” but “where” it all originates. Thus in this sense "the beginning" didn't happen long, long ago. It is the foundation of all experience (consciousness) at the base of everything that we are experiencing RIGHT NOW as our self/world matrix.

I'm sure what I've just said makes no sense to most... and not because no one has the ability to grasp what I'm getting at, but because I lack the ability to put it into words properly for you. All I'm really saying is that our awareness of what is, moment to moment, the whole of that awareness including our sense of self within it, IS A CONSTRUCT: A construct that defines itself in dimensional terms (space time; I am 'here' 'now'). The truly remarkable thing about THIS AWARENESS is that it stands in stark contrast to the immensity of the mechanical universe. I would go so far as to say that it has an existentially INDEPENDENT existence from that mechanical universe. Or, at least, it has that potential. We are all “gods” in the making.

If I'm right, THIS is what is calling us; and this is what underscores the very meaning of meaning... the very possibility OF meaning.

And, no, I'm not stoned on anything except a glass of iced coffee, TYVM.

[RUoutthere]

Very nice deep thinking MikeW.

It still begs the question, who (or what) created this complex universe you described?

Your detailed accounting crosses virtually every form of science and yet all well accredited scientists believe for anything to happen, there must be a cause for it to happen. Who or what is the cause?

Short answer, God. Of course that is a name us tiny little human beings in the universe came up with. For those who believe in the one Creator, His response to Moses when asked was "I am". Meaning He is everything. Of course he had to use the language and the words of the time that us humans came up with so we would understand. So in some sense of your explanation, we are a part of God.

[mrex]

If you start asking who created, you already have an anwser.

[East]

One thing is certain...no one has THE definitive answer...

[Cobalt]

I believe in God, yes.