Are youa believer

Was watching some religous thing earlier about all the different types of religions and how they originated.

Got me thinking, i dont personaly believe in god but i would like to believe there is something out there. i would like to believe in god but i just cant see how it would be possible. Science has revealed how the world works and how we came to be so science has effectively ruined the religion. But still so many people believe and devote there lives to it.

I know a lot of the members of this forum may well be very religous and i am not trying to offend anyone with this post. Everybody is entitled to there beliefs. Like i say i would love to believe in something and deep down i think i do but theres just too many questions.

I sort of believe in ghosts so i am being slightly hippocrytical because if i take my reasoning of god and religion and put it to ghosts then it is impossible for them to exist either. Maybe theres some scientific reason why we see ghosts (morphic fields suggest that anything and everything has a feld around it, even when it no longer exists, i wont go into this as i do not know enough about it).

And then theres people like my late aunt. she was a very trusting, hoest person who i never heard tell a lie in her life. during a big life threatening opperation she saw herself being opperated on from above, then proceeded to watch the doctors pannic as they lost here. she recalled how she went down a long dark tunnel with light at the end and when she got there she saw her mother who told her it wasnt her time yet.

This may well be a thing of the subconcious bringing your beliefs of what happens to (virtual) reality, but when she told the awoke she told the doctors and they said they had lost her at a point, she even recalled of one of the nurses falling into one of them silver trolleys in the panic and numerous other things that happened during the opperation. She was out cold so had no possible way of being awake or knowing this stuff.

I suppose we will never know and it will always be one of lifes great mysteries.

What are your viwes on this subject?

 

There's definitely something "sacred" and "that which cannot be seen" out there. I'm agnostic i can say

i won't write much on my own views cuz it goes in total contradiction to anything our religious DP members believe in so...ehm...great topic

 

Im not trying to offend anyone with this post and i sincerly hope i dont.

I too believe there has got to be something or some force behind it all, i just dont know what.

Im very sorry if i have offended anyone

 

I didn't think Gogs thought such deep thoughts

Seriously, to each his own. I think it is more important how you treat others than what you believe in. I know many people who live terrible lives and go to church. Those same people frown at me because I dare to have an opinion, and question how things ae done.

As Ghandi said, if you want to change the world first you must change youself. And as for science v God, well there really isn't a competition is there? People say the world was built in a day, but the calendar we are using was only created a couple of hundred years ago, and a day last 6 months in the arctic circle, so what exactly IS a day? The scriptures were also written a few thousand years ago whe science was not what it is today, so again, room for error.

I don't see the bible and science as at odds, I think you can actually tally up quite a lot if you sit back and look at it. But again, all of that is meaningless if you drink, beat your wife and kids, lie cheat and covert your neighbours ass

 

I wish everybody whould think like that...seriously!!!!

 

I believe there is a God, but I do not think any religion comes close to identifying or describing God. Religion merely assigns god human attributes so we can identify with the unidentifiable. God is beyond our capacity to understand. Assigning any form of human attributes to god places severe limitiations to god and takes us further away from what god really is. God explains it best, I Am. God is beyond sex, beyond good and evil. Despite our superior intelect, we are no closer to god then the monkey's in the zoo. I do believe God is love. I think agonostics are closer to the truth then religions who pretend to have all the anwsers, however, for many people, relgion is the only way. I agree with the late great Joseph Campbell who described religion as merely signs pointing to god, and not very good signs at that

 

I agree with your ides Old Welsh Guy that people should treat each other good before or while being religeous. Being religous and being bad to people is not the way to go.
And yes I do beleive in God, I don't think science has answered all questions, it has answered some of the questions but not all of them.
In addition, as you said Izzy, it is something you feel it deep inside and no one will be able to prove it because I beleive this is something beyond science.
And also there are some things that happen (pretty much like the thing you mentioned with your aunt) that would make you beleive that there is something out there... I do dream about some things sometimes only to discover later that what I dreamt came true and understand it...

 

If I could still remember it clearly from the movie Stigmata. There's a line there that says, God does not exist on walls of churches and on religion itself. I am not sure if this was exactly the line there but it does eliminate the essence of existence of the Church as a mediating entity between human and God.

 

The gospel of St Thomas is a very powerful document. I have studied this, and it is the ONLY document that is carbon dated to the exact time of occurrence of the birth of Christianity, is written in the right style and syntax as it would have been had it been written by Doubting Thomas.

The problem with the document though is that it flies in the face of modern day religion (huge buildings and great ritches in the name of God etc) and goes back to what we would have expected such a man to say. I truly believe it to be a genuine document although the church renounced it (then again anything that says don't build grand buildings in my name' never really stood a chance with them )