prove to me that god is real

If there is no evidence that god exists you have to examine the claims of persons who say that god exists and locate exactly what they are perceiving.

For instance if I see a rope and scream "A snake!" you can pick it up and say "No its just a rope" and reveal the illusory nature of the claim.
In the same way you have to latch on to what all these saints, philosophers and artists are perceiving in the name of transcendence (despite barriers of culture, geography and time) and reveal how they have been illusioned.

the point about illustrating how there are many religions everywhere was meant to indicate that it suggests a response to an objective phenomena as opposed to a concocted idea - if the source of religion is imagination you wouldn't expect to see our culture and history so highly saturated with religious imagery, despite all the barriers of geography, language, time and cultural ideology.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

original scripts were written almost entirely (if not entirely) by male monks, prophets, and that sort. Human corruption is always going to find its way to ebb into anything it touches (an example would be nuclear power, first ideally created to provide electricity, then used to make a bomb). Not to say everything in the bible is corrupt, but some of it is a result of the times they were in (Such as pork being unclean). I moreso think of god as an It, transcending gender.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Some religions have a wider definition of gender that finds itself above the sexuality that we are oh-so familiar with in this world, they don't actually use the words "she" and "he" but use words that are indicative of gender - you don't find this in the english language but you find in french and a few other european languages I think

to be masculine is to be the "enjoyer" and to be female is to be the "enjoyed" - so god is called "he" because he is the enjoyer and nobody's servant

But the living entity (distinct from god) is referred to as female because she is enjoyed by god - but when the living entity is in conditioned life she takes on the charcateristics of god under the influence of illusion (tries to become an enjoyer of this world - and fails miserably). So in scripture where there are references to the living entity as a "she" you know it indicates the living entity in pure consciousness and when they refer to a "he" you know they are refering to a living entity in illusion.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Using the male pronoun is just proper English when you are reffering to one of ambigous gender or to a faceless example. It has nothing to do with giving gender to God as god would be completely indiscribably as far as gender. He, Him, Lord, and Father just give God a face we can comprehend. it could just as easily be She, Her, or Goddess. However It is to faceless. Just imagine replacing all the He, Him, Father, and Lord in the Bible with It. It makes God seem alien.

As for Pork being unclean, that was a Mosiac Law thing, as was draining the blood from animal. In both cases this was to prevent disease, and at the time it was written people knew that, but later generations forgot this simple truth. They figured it was God's will. In reality God had little to do with that one.

And your assumption about Nuclear energy is wrong. It came the other way around. First was Nuclear weapon then there was nuclear power.

 

Light,

That simply doesn’t follow. Take the reverse, if the source of religion was a one true god that influenced all peoples then you’d expect to see similar imagery in every group, but that is not the case. What we see is far reaching differences of imagery because there was no common source. But the common factor everywhere has been death, and largely the unacceptability of death, and that in turn leads to the idea of something beyond. From there the imagination in each culture generates its own creative storyline, from reincarnation, to pantheism, to personal gods, etc. The commonality is a powerful human desire to explain the unexplainable and when facts are absent the imagination takes over.

The god concept is entirely an imaginative and fictional construct.

 

If it was entirely fictional you would expect to see it in some places and absent in others - but instead you see it everywhere at all times - and the very fact that you can catergorise the ""phenomena" as "religion" indicates that, despite the variety, it does have some very central themes - just consider how we have managed to discuss religion so far without even mentioning a particular type of faith or denomination.

Compare a photorealist painting of a tree with an aboriginal cave painting of a tree - one is made up of a multitude of blended colours and shapes andthe other is made up of 5 lines - do these varieties of interpretations make photorealist and cave paintings of trees so unique that they can not be both catergorised as the response to perceiving a tree?

Similarly some religions may say we go back to heaven in one life time or a thousand or that the universe was created by the god or gods in a 7 days or 7 million years - just as some depictions of trees are more accurate than others wouldn't you also expect a variety of responses to the perception of the phenomena of god - if cultures cannot produce something uniform in response to something as basic as a tree why should they be bound to produce something uniform in their perception of god?

 

Light,

Why? The same levels of ignorance existed everywhere. The same defective reasoning was the same everywhere. There was no objective scientific method; there was no real concept of formal logical reasoning. Instead everyone was surrounded by mysteries they couldn’t explain. Most natural events would seem like magic and from those common observations and ignorance were born the superstitions and memes that led to the religions of world.

Yes indeed, the phenomena is born from the imagination.

But that doesn’t support the idea that the objects of religious belief are real only that people react similarly to seemingly magical and mystical events that they can’t explain.

The commonality here is the same widespread ignorance of how the natural world operated not that their imaginary concepts had any real basis.

 

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

Chris

So you are saying that religion is an abstraction from the social circumstances of a primary human need - and the abstraction, idealisation, is actually abstracted from a social structure that is very corporeal in nature.


.[/QUOTE]Yes indeed, the phenomena is born from the imagination..[/QUOTE]

You are saying that this is evident to you (perhaps not to others)

.[/QUOTE]But that doesn’t support the idea that the objects of religious belief are real only that people react similarly to seemingly magical and mystical events that they can’t explain.



The commonality here is the same widespread ignorance of how the natural world operated not that their imaginary concepts had any real basis.[/QUOTE]

So my question to you is what are the principles by which one social system (lets take it out of religious terms and call it social structure A and social structure B - since you must obviously be applying a general principle) is held to be an abstraction of the other?



Frankly I must add that I am not sure what those english words mean "How one social structure can be an abstraction of another" - perhaps it is a new term in sociology?

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

So I am asking you to discuss what the general principles are that one can ascertain that one social structure is clearly an abstraction of another?

 

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

Chris (apologies for messing up the quotes )

So you are saying that religion is an abstraction from the social circumstances of a primary human need - and the abstraction, idealisation, is actually abstracted from a social structure that is very corporeal in nature.

You are saying that this is evident to you (perhaps not to others)

So my question to you is what are the principles by which one social system (lets take it out of religious terms and call it social structure A and social structure B - since you must obviously be applying a general principle) is held to be an abstraction of the other?



Frankly I must add that I am not sure what those english words mean "How one social structure can be an abstraction of another" - perhaps it is a new term in sociology?

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

So I am asking you to discuss what the general principles are that one can ascertain that one social structure is clearly an abstraction of another?

 

How is it possible to possess something that doesn't appear in God?

 

Why?
The idea of God is not new - but was most likely conceived when the first people began to question death. This would have occurred in most, if not all, societies. And it would have been pushed to the multitudes by those who saw it as a means to control the masses.
Add to that the migratory nature of ideas, especially such a strong idea as God, and it would now be utterly astounding if every society did NOT have a concept of God.

Of course it does. Death is a very central theme of all religions - because it is a central theme of everyone's passage through time. EVERYONE who lives, dies!

Do you really find it surprising that many people question the same thing (death) and come up with the same ideas (God / afterlife etc)?

Irrelevant.

Right - so in summary you think that there must be a root cause, an "objective phenomena" behind the concept of God?
There is....

DEATH.

God / religion is, on the whole, a comfort blanket against the reality of death.
People see death, they question it, ask why, see nothing. Nothing is not good enough for them, so they create an afterlife. Who controls the afterlife? God. The same one who created our lovely planet that fits us so ideally, and who obviously therefore created us. But surely not everyone goes to the afterlife? What about all the nasty people? Ah - they can still get there IF THEY REPENT (hence it can help cut down crime). And what of those that don't believe? Everyone must believe or our system will crumble - so go and convert everyone. Blah blah blah.

God is an undeniably powerful idea / concept.
But, once again, the popularity or power of an idea does not give ANY credence to the actual claims of that idea.

Popularity and Power are NOT EVIDENCE.

 

If someone is going to make a claim, they need to show the basis for that claim - what validity that claim has. If someone keeps shouting "snake" when there isn't a snake, (or a rope), or anything even remotely snake-like around, then there's nothing for me to examine - other than that persons state of mind.

Not really, no. What it indicates is ignorance of early man - that created stories to provide, (albeit false), answers for their existence, the universe and everything in it. It is no surprise that if you look back to ancient beliefs you will see that they have merely adapted what is there and elevated it to supreme status.

Indian gods look like elephants, (yes, India has elephants)

South American gods were snake-like, (yes, South America has some serious snakes)

Red Indians had eagle and buffalo spirits, (yes, they lived in a place with eagles and buffalo)

England doesn't really have anything in the way of gods because there's nothing here except rats, hedgehogs and badgers.

The more destructive gods are found in places where there's a lot of natural disaster - earthquakes, volcanoes etc. Again, England lacks such gods, and indeed destructive gods because nothing happens here - apart from a spot of rain and only three days of summer.

Then you have fertility godesses, (usually represented by rabbits and the like - the basis of easter), because.. believe it or not, rabbits bonk like rabbits.

These are early answers for early man - they see a rabbit bonking like a rabbit and it becomes a symbol of fertility. They see a huge burning ball in the sky and it gets elevated to godly status because there's no way of knowing what it actually is. And then because they associate fire with being dangerous, that god too becomes quite dangerous - and they must appease it by sacrifice.

It's no wonder really that the OT gods general way of killing people was by plagues - because plagues were prevalent and there's no other explanation for plagues. Take for instance when the nile 'turned red with blood'. Could any of those people alive then have diagnosed pfisteria? Of course not.

As time progresses, the 'god excuse' becomes all the more meaningless. By the time of the bubonic plague nobody blamed gods anymore, but rats - because knowledge had increased a little. What was once god's doing, is now given it's rightful explanation. god's don't cause earthquakes, tectonic plate movement does. god's don't cause plagues, disease does etc.

Apart from the serious fundamentalists, nobody says the recent tsunami and Katrina were caused by gods but by natural causes.

The only use left for gods now are for those that can't accept the fact that they're going to die and never see their family again.

Yes you would. If mankind all started off with phd's then you wouldn't expect to see our culture and history so saturated with religious imagery, but as it stands you wouldn't expect anything else - given that their lack of knowledge meant they really had nothing but imagination to work by.

 

IMO, this is a huge part of it.

 

The origins of gods is in our minds.

Primitive men had different consciousness than what we do today, their gods were their own imagination at work, the inner voice of counsciousness was in essence their god, this they thought to be a seperate entity, this is the concept of "the bicameral mentality"

In evolution the mind was not fully evolved, untill when man became fully aware of itself, before then his mind worked in autosugestive mode, by the authority of the tribe, those who's god were Marduc, zeus, etc..These were actual authorative figures believed to be gods.

click

What drove men to create cousciousness as we know it today, was chaos between the voices in their heads "gods" and them becoming further evolved in the capacity of their mind. Do to exchange between different cultures and ideas, in order to advance the human mind evolved to perceive self awarness. This brought the voices in their head silent, though they still longed for the confort of their gods, these are only remnants of the bicameral mentality. Which unfortunately still exist today.

Today we know, that if one talks to god, one is praying, if god talks to you, your a schizophrenic.

*If you talk to God, you are praying;
If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.

If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist;
If God talks to you, you are a schizophrenic.

click

Godless

 

that's kinda funny, cause not a single "non-believer" has been able produce proof against

 

Neither has a single "non believer" been able to produce evidence against the invisible floating banana of planet thwogglepop.

Your statement is exceptionally naive. Further to which, "proof" is for alcohol and mathematicians - let's stick to evidence - of which none can ever be produced for something that does not exist.

 

This is utter bollocks. Just because religions all share similar superstitious notions doesn't mean it deserves any merit and is probably therefor correct in it's central themes.

That means any other branch of superstitious bullshit has merit simply because it is popular. Astrology, palm reading and crystal balls all are telling you pretty much the same thing, and they are popular, but we all know that it is a fantasy.

Eejit's like you, lightgigantic, think that religion is different to all other forms of human stupidity - It's not.

 

my hat goes of to you man, these are wonderful statements, love them. might quote them if that alright.

 

Your statement is exceptionally naive. Further to which, "proof" is for alcohol and mathematicians - let's stick to evidence - of which none can ever be produced for something that does not exist.[/QUOTE]

your right, i have no evidence for god, and i don't believe there will ever be any actual physical evidence for god. if i did have evidence, would you believe? if so, then that defeats the purpose of belief. like it says in the bible, it's better to believe by faith then by proof. u think i'm stupid for my belief. in your eyes i'm naive, in my eyes u are.

truth of the matter is i can't prove his existance anymore then u can prove his non existance. it's a matter of opinion or choice. u probably think everything has a natural explanation. i think natural ( depending on the situation ) is just a fancy way of saying fluke or miracle, cause the odds of this planet being here with all the elements need to sustain our fragile and insignificant existance are like what, 1 in 150 or 200 million?

atheists and theists aften argue about evolution. atheists say it's fact and it proves the bibles account of creation wrong. most theists say evolution didn't happen. after all there are gaps in it and some stages apparently overlap by like 200 thousand years. i'm stepping out on a limb by assuming you agree with with the atheists point of view. i'm not saying evolution didn't happen. i think it's very possible. but it in no way proves the bibles account of creation wrong. as a matter of fact it actually supports biblical scripture as far as i'm concerned.

i'm glad i found this forum. it's very interesting. i like reading all the posts, both for and against my belief. i've enjoyed reading your posts, i think u have made some good points, but the more i read ( for and against ) the more i believe in my faith.

 

Belief without evidence is irrational. If there is "proof" then there is no need for belief.

Again, naive. You can NEVER prove non-existence. Don't even try. And to ask someone to do so demonstrates a lack of understanding of this principle.

Yes - a choice of whether to be irrational or not.

Another one who thinks our planet was created for us, in our current form, to live on!!

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

We do.

It is. It has been demonstrated and observed time and again.

Evolution does not concern itself with creation!
Evolution only kicks in when there is something to evolve!

Wow - 200,000 years!!
I'm shocked.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

What "stages" are these that seem to overlap by some 200,000 years?