Here's an interesting article, from a pastor who was brave enough to put his
beliefs to the test. He wrote a "Year Without God" blog, and is now explaining
some of the conclusions he came to. From the article (color highlighting
mine):Q: This weekend you told NPR: “I don’t think that God exists.” Can you
elaborate?
A: I think the best way I can explain the conclusion I’ve come to — and
conclusion is too strong a word for the provisional place I now stand and work
from — is that the intellectual and emotional energy it takes to figure out how
God fits into everything is far greater than dealing with reality as it
presents itself to us.
That probably sounds very nonrational, and I want people to know that I have
read several dozen books and understand a good many of the arguments. I’d just
say that the existence of God seems like an extra layer of complexity that
isn’t necessary. The world makes more sense to me as it is, without postulating
a divine being who is somehow in charge of things.
Pastor Who Spent A Year Living Without God No Longer Believes
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| Pastor Who Spent A Year Living Without God No Longer...(RNS) Ryan Bell — the
former Seventh-day Adventist pastor who spent 2014 living as an atheist — is
ready for his big reveal. After chronicling the last 12 months on... |
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| View on www.huffingtonpost... | Preview by Yahoo |
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From: "TurquoiseBee turquoi...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife]"
<FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com>
To: "FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, January 5, 2015 8:39 AM
Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] 10 reasons why FFL is better, and the_peak sucks
From: "anartax...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com>
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote :
Hear hear. I will bet there are few takers. It is so much easier for believers
in a God to just act offended and say, "Hey, that's not what I believe...I
don't believe in "the invisible man in the sky."
But really, if anyone actually *does* step up to the plate and try to define
what their concept of God is, please deal with two questions. The first is,
"Does this concept of God you believe in have *sentience*, in that it is aware
of your existence?" The second is, "If you answer Yes to that first question,
does it have the ability to actually *affect* your life by changing things in
it?"
My feeling is that no matter how else you characterize your concept of "God,"
if your answer to these two questions is "Yes" then you're talking about a
variant of "the invisible man in the sky." If someone can prove me wrong on
this, I look forward to them doing so.
Buried in all this is a basic conundrum, related to ideas of god and ideas of
consciousness: How does something that is alleged to be transcendent and not
physical interact with the physical world or can direct the functioning of the
physical world; how can it have anything to do with the concept of will? And in
addition were these things considered to be physical, the whole mystical aspect
of gods and awareness goes down the toilet; the mystique as it were, is flushed
out.
Yup, thanks for getting it. That's the issue I perceive -- belief in the
descriptions of God most of us heard growing up as omniscient and omnipotent
tend to fall apart if you examine them.
It may be OK to theorize that there is some basic "ground state" to existence
-- call it consciousness or whatever you want -- but it is quite another to
claim that it is *conscious*. Yet almost all of the historical representations
present Him/Her/It with near Santa-like magical powers ("He knows when you've
been sleeping, He knows when you're awake, He knows when you've been bad or
good, so be good for goodness' sake.") HOW exactly is this God-state supposed
to *perceive* the world? I've yet to hear a decent explanation, even a Woo Woo
one.
Even more challenging is the claim of omnipotence. HOW is this omnipresent God
supposed to *interact* with the world to create miracles and mitigate karmas
and perform all the wonderful miracles that have been attributed to Him?
It seems to me that a similar set of questions plague those who believe in a
God but do *not* claim that He/She/It is omniscient and omnipotent. Such people
still talk in terms of "God's will," as if the being they imagine is 1) capable
of HAVING a will, 2) capable of being so attached to the Relative as to care
whether that will is achieved or not, and 3) capable of having some sort of
mechanism for propagating this supposed will in the first place. Could someone
who believes that God has a will please explain to me HOW they believe this
works?
The invisible man in the sky is an attempt to create that mystique of
ineffability while preserving the sense that this phantasm can interact with
the world just as we seem to be able to do. It is an attempt to bridge two
supposedly distinct modes of existence that have nothing in common using
characteristics of our own personalities to mentally meld the concepts together
in our minds, however illogical that may be, but it tends to work because human
thought and memory is intimately tied in with human emotive responses to
situations, and emotions often easily ride herd over logic and common sense
reasoning.
We take a concept of infinitely rarefied being which is essentially the
equivalent of nothing, divide it from the world and place it in a metaphysical
space and imbue it with our human characteristics so we can pretend it is
something and can do things as a magnified version of our persona. Then we
forget we were playing 'let's pretend'.
We create something that is logically isolated and out of reach, but that does
not satisfy the emotions or the mind, because we like to connect emotively and
intellectually, we like things to fit together. This is the myth that drives
religious longings and the desire for enlightenment, to connect it all back
together, whatever we have set apart from ourselves.
The job of the guru, the priest, the shaman, the rabbi, etc., is to infect us
with the myth, and then tell us how to knit it all back into a single fabric.
This is the confidence game. We are the chumps. The problem is the middle man
in this transaction doesn't have a job if the infected mind gets wind of the
truth of the situation. The supplier of the poison and the antidote are found
in the same person. In a religion, the antidote is indefinitely delayed. In a
spiritual path the gap between illness and cure might fall within the span of a
human lifetime. If it does not, there are other stories that have been made up
to keep you happy when you die a failure.
The real purpose of 'a path of enlightenment' is to reset the mind so that it
sees clearly that all such scenarios are untrue, that the disintegration of
reality into separate modes of existence is a false understanding, and when the
mind settles into this understanding with sufficient rigour, it will not again
fall into the same and similar traps. This is called liberation or freedom, but
it is not really, because nothing is changed other than a mental delusion has
been righted.
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