Belief in God - Dawkins Spectrum of Probabilities

[WIP]

If it was God's decision to have me born, more the worse. So it was his idea to bring us into a world of damnation..

And Captain Canada has elsewhere stated that he is part of the group that believes the vast majority of people will be damned, and since his God is omniscient, the creator knew all events that would happen before he created this world and deliberately created a world where the vast majority of his special creation would fall into sin and spend eternity roasting in hell.

Looking at the whole picture, it is an unjust, immoral story and that's why most Christians don't want to talk about it, except for these few who are looking forward to the time when they have received their heavenly reward and have the opportunity to enjoy watching the eternal barbecue going on down in hell.......and that's why this whole drama is ludicrous and requires complicated, convoluted arguments by fundamentalist biblical apologists to make it even sound sensible. The only sensible Christians are the modernists that the fundamentalists despise, who realize that the hell doctrine is totally immoral and re-interpret or allegorize the story.

[WIP]

Perhaps, but that wasn't what I was getting at. I am pretty sure that the Bible is holistically a pretty left-winged document

That is correct, especially in the Old Testament books of the Prophets who saw the suffering of the people of Israel as being caused by the wealthy, who were oppressing their own people and not following the Law correctly.

[LesterDC]

That is correct, especially in the Old Testament books of the Prophets who saw the suffering of the people of Israel as being caused by the wealthy, who were oppressing their own people and not following the Law correctly.

Yeah, that makes me think about the authenticity of the Bible though.. Think about it, how can we be so sure that the message is at its original state? Think especially of how the Romans got hold of the Bible and Christianity, they could have twisted the text in any way they wanted and it wouldn't have been a very hard task to do..

[eyeball]

The rightous fury and harsh punishment doled out in the Old Testament gives me the impression God really enjoyed gettin' tough and crackin' down on sinners, just like conservatives today do.

[WIP]

Good point..

Another thing that strikes me is how underestimate the notion of living forever. I don't even believe that according to Christianity, the dilemma ends when you go up to heaven. I believe in fallen angels, look at what happened to Lucifer for example. He was struck with the dilemma and he was sent to hell. So living for an eternity with this dilemma must be tiresome would it not?

Heaven used to be a real place in Hebrew cosmology. It was supported by a metal firmament that had stars suspended from it to light up the night sky. Heaven was a perfect place where everything was eternal, so even in the middle ages when the picture of the solar system was being updated, the Church authorities were offended that Galileo found tiny moons revolving around Mars, a thin ring around Saturn, and even worse, dark blemishes on the Sun that appeared and disappeared at random. That was the real uproar over Galileo's blasphemy, not so much the debate about whether the Sun or the Earth was the center of the cosmos. Galileo was saying that heaven wasn't any more perfect than the Earth was, and up till then the only disruptions in the heavens were moving planets that wandered the lower heaven, and the occasional comet that got cast down from heaven as a sign from above.

So heaven had to be relocated so that the souls of the saved could go to a perfect place and live forever. But as our understanding of the universe has increased, heaven keeps moving further and further away. Some fundamentalists move it outside of our universe entirely, into multidimensional physics, where it can't be proven to exist or not exist. They have no choice now, because the discovery that the expansion of the Universe is increasing means that our entire Universe has a finite lifespan and is itself mortal and will die a heat-death or disintegrate some time a hundred billion years from now.

But what will the believers do anyway, in a perfect, eternal heaven? After a trillion years or so, do you start running out of things to do and start looking for heavenly cyanide tablets? Maybe that's why Lucifer rebelled, after a few billion years, he started getting bored up there.

[WIP]

Yeah, that makes me think about the authenticity of the Bible though.. Think about it, how can we be so sure that the message is at its original state?

The truth is we can't, because the people in Judea at the time of Jesus were speaking Aramaic (that's one thing Mel Gibson got right!), but the first copies of the New Testament and most of the Old Testament books are written in Greek, and they were hand-copied for generations until Gutenberg invented the printing press. There are loads of additions and omissions to copies of books of the Bible -- most of them are minor variations that scribes felt were needed to clarify the understanding of the texts, but where there are significant disputes on issues such as keeping the Law, the requirements for salvation, the events of the Gospels, the nature of the Messiah (a man, God or man and god together) -- it seems logical that different groups of early Christians were putting their own stamp on the scriptures that they considered sacred. So Jewish Christians would make the messiah very human - like the Gospel of Mark, and gentiles who came in and didn't value Jewish tradition, preferred a divine messiah (Luke and John). Some biblical scholars, such as Bart Ehrman (Misquoting Jesus) believe that the difficult to rationalize orthodox interpretation we now have that Jesus is both 100% human and 100% divine, was a compromise position between two extreme views of Jewish and Gentile Christians.....who knows, but that's as good as any other explanation for the way things unfolded.

Think especially of how the Romans got hold of the Bible and Christianity, they could have twisted the text in any way they wanted and it wouldn't have been a very hard task to do..

The most Roman-friendly gospel - Luke - where Jesus says "render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar," would be a good candidate for the Romanizing of Christianity, since one of the key reasons why the majority of Jews refused to accept that Jesus could be the promised messiah was all of the Old Testament prophecies that the messiah would lead Israel to victory and vanquish foreign oppressors -- like the Romans.

[Mr.Canada]

Yeah, that makes me think about the authenticity of the Bible though.. Think about it, how can we be so sure that the message is at its original state? Think especially of how the Romans got hold of the Bible and Christianity, they could have twisted the text in any way they wanted and it wouldn't have been a very hard task to do..

How do you mean, " the Romans got hold of the Bible and Christianity"?

[eyeball]

How do you mean, " the Romans got hold of the Bible and Christianity"?

I think Christianity actually got hold of the Romans. Once a belief has you you're pretty much at its mercy and more than a few historians believe this is what caused the collapse of their empire. I guess the hereafter became more important to the Romans than the here and now, something that's always struck me as being particularily suicidal and ill-suited for long-term survival in a evolutionary sense. Now that the belief and others like it has some 90% or more of humanity in its stupid grip or grip of stupidity as the case may be...

Ever read Issac Asimov's Foundation series?

Edited January 3, 2009 by eyeball

[Ontario Loyalist]

Yeah, I saw this twit on the tube today, something about a sign on a bus, and he's standing there telling his followers to no believe in God and to think for themselves. HILARIOUS.

[Mr.Canada]

Yeah, I saw this twit on the tube today, something about a sign on a bus, and he's standing there telling his followers to no believe in God and to think for themselves. HILARIOUS.

'

Secular socialists want people to think for themselves as long as it's the same thing they think. Otherwise the SS's will start the name calling and mud slinging.

[scorpio]

At the same token i'd find it hard to believe that Jesus would like gay marriage as he preached directly against these things. Sodom and Gomorrah.

Please quote chapter and verse where Jesus said anything "specific" about homosexuality and gay marriage.

[ToadBrother]

'

Secular socialists want people to think for themselves as long as it's the same thing they think. Otherwise the SS's will start the name calling and mud slinging.

Secularism is not socialism. YOu have been corrected enough times now that I now can declare that you're a liar. Either that, or you're just a deaf moron.

[Mr.Canada]

Secularism is not socialism. YOu have been corrected enough times now that I now can declare that you're a liar. Either that, or you're just a deaf moron.

They go hand in hand more times than not.

[gc1765]

They go hand in hand more times than not.

Jesus was a socialist. I guess you're not a real Christian?

[Topaz]

Here's a question... in the Bible it tells of certain people God talked to and then that person told of what was said.....why hasn't God talked to any lately? The Bible hasn't been expanded for a very longer time, why no more messages?

[bush_cheney2004]

.....why hasn't God talked to any lately? The Bible hasn't been expanded for a very longer time, why no more messages?

"God" has spoken recently....he said, "Invade Iraq"....and so it was done....and "God" was pleased.

[ToadBrother]

They go hand in hand more times than not.

Which, even if it were true, is not the same thing. Tell me, was John Locke a socialist? How about Thomas Jefferson?

[Chris in KW]

You don't know the bible?

Whoever shall believe in me shall not suffer but have eternal life.

You don't know it? It's a basic premise of Christianity. Perhaps you should learn what it's about before disagreeing with it smallc.

Ok, I don't know if it's just me, but in the context of everything else Jesus said, this sentence: Whoever shall believe in me shall not suffer but have eternal life does NOT sound like "follow me or go to hell".

I guess I lack that bloodthirsty edge that a lot of Christians enjoy (relishing all those bad people burning in hell), but I've always thought that this is more of an offer than a threat. Jesus did a lot to relieve peoples' suffering -- physically, emotionally, etc. I don't think he spent a lot of time telling people they were going to hell. I certainly don't see that a lot in his words.

It was other people who were busy religion-building that added all this hell stuff to Christianity.

[Rue]

Stephen Hawking has suggested if the universe is completely self-contained it would have neither beginning nor end-it would simply be. So some then argue, if the universe simply is then it was never created and there w ould be no creator.

Now for me all Hawking is doing with his theories on quantum phsyics is to try use the laws of physics to explain and so he looks for balance and harmony to emerge for him to then be able to describe the law that describes the process of that balance and harmony. I would argue he is neutral he is neither an atheist or theologian, just some guy trying to do what scientists do, use logic to try define that which appears but may not be.

I tend myself to lean towards a definition of God Baruch Spinoza worked with and heavily influenced Einstein and could be the same phenomena Hawking describes as the self-contained universe that just is-and hat is a concept of God that refers to a phenomena that is absolutely infinite and what ever "it" is it has infinite possibilities and attributes and so we humans can not figure it out because any theory of relativity or time can only approximate part of its infinite expression-i would say it is a phenomena that we canot perceive because of our limitations and can only appriximate and will never be able to properly define but we can define some of its infinitely expanding expressions.

I believe the infinite process which spewed us all out like particles from a sneeze as we free float each one of us a God and universe unto ourselves with the infinite ability to evolve and expand if we create positivitely but also the infinite ability to devolve and shrink if we pursue negativity-we are all particles with negative and positive components that clash and that clash is what fuels the will to be, the search for meaning-I do believe the eternal process that started this series of never ending adventures of pursuing meaning can not interfere with the free choice of all the particles in the infinite process otherwise it would extinguish them all like a blackhole does matter.

Or in layman's term-I believe God is a nostril that sneezes and expels me and you-germs and we just move along contaminating things. I mean on one level it appears like we are simply spreading germs, and so that is why some people say God is mad or an sob for letting it all happen as it does, but then me I say-well maybe you are not just a germ or a gloob of snot flinging in the air, maybe there is something else-maybe we are not just mucus but some organic ooze that shapes a vision you and I can not see cause we are blinded by our individuality and dettachment from the whole, to be able to see it.

I like to call it my cosmic theory of 'snot.

Edited February 6, 2009 by Rue

[cybercoma]

God is the perfect designer and the universe is his perfect creation. He does not interfere in his creation because that would imply that it was never perfect in the first place; but God is perfect, so everything he creates must be perfect. God set everything in motion, then walked away because it is not necessary for him to involve himself in the process of existence because it is a perfect design. If that's the idea you're trying to explain, then it's a very old one. It's deism, rather than theism.

[Sir Bandelot]

"Belief in Dawkins - God's Spectrum of Probabilities"

Some say, Dawkins does not really exist. And indeed, according to modern theories of cosmology, he would be inclined to agree

Edited February 7, 2009 by Sir Bandelot

[WIP]

Stephen Hawking has suggested if the universe is completely self-contained it would have neither beginning nor end-it would simply be. So some then argue, if the universe simply is then it was never created and there w ould be no creator.

In his first general audience physics book: A Brief History Of Time, Stephen Hawking explained that the problem physicists had when trying to wind the clock back to the beginning of the Universe, was that the mathematics of General Relativity would break down before reaching the point of the Singularity -- when the Universe was extremely hot and so small. Without a unifying theory to work with Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, there was no way of determining the conditions at the Big Bang, or what happened before the Big Bang.

Hawking's method of trying to solve the problem was to develop a concept first proposed by Richard Feynman, that there was a 2nd time dimension moving on a vertical axis to the one we consider "real" time, and so what Feynman called "imaginary time" would be outside of our awareness. In real time, the Universe has a beginning and an end, but in imaginary time, the Universe has no boundary conditions -- no edge and it would be a closed system that has no beginning or end (although in recent years, Neil Turok, who is one of the developers of multi-universe models based on Supersymmetry String Theory, declares that Hawking's No Boundary Conditions can also work with an open universe):

In A Brief History of Time Hawking writes:

One could say: "The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary." The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE.

............This might suggest that the so-called imaginary time is really the real time, and that what we call real time is just a figment of our imaginations. In real time, the universe has a beginning and an end at singularities that form a boundary to space-time and at which the laws of science break down. But in imaginary time, there are no singularities or boundaries. So maybe what we call imaginary time is really more basic, and what we call real is just an idea that we invent to help us describe what we think the universe is like.

Using Imaginary Time as the reference, the no boundary conditions of the universe make it self contained and leave no room for an outside creator to be needed in making the universe.

Now for me all Hawking is doing with his theories on quantum phsyics is to try use the laws of physics to explain and so he looks for balance and harmony to emerge for him to then be able to describe the law that describes the process of that balance and harmony. I would argue he is neutral he is neither an atheist or theologian, just some guy trying to do what scientists do, use logic to try define that which appears but may not be.

And as a scientist, Hawking doesn't see religion as a method of answering the questions he has about the Universe. In the simplest form, if someone answers the question of how the universe came to be by saying God did it, it is an attempt to change the terms of the question from how it was made, to who made it; and that is not a question that Stephen Hawking finds to be useful or relevant.

I tend myself to lean towards a definition of God Baruch Spinoza worked with and heavily influenced Einstein and could be the same phenomena Hawking describes as the self-contained universe that just is-and hat is a concept of God that refers to a phenomena that is absolutely infinite and what ever "it" is it has infinite possibilities and attributes and so we humans can not figure it out because any theory of relativity or time can only approximate part of its infinite expression-i would say it is a phenomena that we canot perceive because of our limitations and can only appriximate and will never be able to properly define but we can define some of its infinitely expanding expressions.

Spinoza was a deist, and Einstein seems to have had a similar belief. The god of deism is an absent father, who creates worlds and then abandons them, having no further contact with his creation. There is not a lot to prove or disprove about deism, but I would ask if this sort of god is really needed. There may be a lot of things about the world which are not completely explained by naturalistic theories, but for deism to be essential, someone will have to prove that there are problems with naturalism that will never be resolved and make a supernatural explanation necessary.