There are many gods, God acknowledges that in the Bible. The distinction is that God is the Living God, all the others exist only in the fevered imagination or are made of crude matter.

lol...

That is good. Like I already said if we all agreed it would be pretty boring.

I met your God. Billy Graham Introduced me personally in 1972 on stage at the local theater.
Everything was fine while I took every word as gospel. Then I started trying to figure out why. That's when it all went south. Religion started seeming like some guy wrote it and it was written by a moron. No offense intended, moron is an actual psychiatric term describing low intellect.

As I started to remove the delusions from my life my religion started making less and less sense to me. Now, I do believe in a creator as something that initiated the Universe in all its vastness. I just don't know what that was.

The God my religion commanded me to glorify seemed to have all the vices the religion told me was being sinful. Vanity, gluttony, wrath, envy, greed, pride & sloth.

Vanity in wanting all attention from everyone
Gluttony in pursuing prayer and more prayer
Wrath in punishment for non-compliance with his wishes
Envy in nothing is more important strike down those that try
Greed in wanting your total reverence
Pride in the six days of creation
Sloth in the only place you can find him is in Faith.

I was lead to believe that my faith would protect me and those I love. That prayer was how to petition the Lord.
Work hard, be a model citizen and you will be rewarded.
Then I died and everything changed. I decided to die again but was talked out of it by reason. I was taught to see the world for the first time.

For the last 10 years I have been peeling back the delusions in my life. Looking at and embracing the cold reality. I see the delusions of others and know their origins. I see the stress their beliefs give them and it is all from delusion.

We all have our own beliefs and if yours gives you contentment then who am I to argue with that? Its Your Life. You should be the most important thing in your life. Without you its a moot point.

When I do finally die for good this time, My energy will be reabsorbed into the energy of the Universe. In a sense, I will be returned to God. Since energy can not be created or destroyed my energy will endure as long as there is energy in the Universe. I will live forever. Energy changes phase and becomes matter. Over the lifetime of the Universe my energy will be in many billions of manifestations. I might spend millions of years as a rock, a billion or two as a burning star or a moment as an atomic particle. Maybe all?

I am part of the Universe. Not beside it, not looking in at it, Made of it. Even my mind is the Universe. It is so vast and so complex it has become conscious. I am part of the Universe's consciousness. You are too. It uses us to expand into the realm of imagination. The Universe is not just matter & energy, it is fear, love, joy, trepidation, fantasies, science, art, music and everything that we see, do and think. Our dreams are the Universe dreaming. Not only us, but all living things. The Universe is being a rock right now. A table, a car, the Sun, a grain of sand.
Who can know the mind of God.
The Universe knows itself.
We only know a tiny bit because we are only a tiny bit.

Come on now, that's just reaching. That doesn't even make sense.



You died? I assume on the operating table or something like that?

You seem well intentioned, but very, very confused about Christian theology. Your list of sins above...it makes no sense. God created the universe in 6 days, how is that prideful? I can't make any sense of that. God must be worshiped through faith, how does that make God lazy? If God were lazy, wouldn't God just reveal himself to the world, rather than working in the hearts of believers? I'm sorry, I just can't follow your reasoning at all.

As an observer I see far more evidence of reasoning in Toms posts, even though I am very critical of his reasoning.All I can see in your posts is blind acceptance,no evidence of reasoning whatsoever.Of course I may be wrong.

That would be because I haven't offered much in the way of reasoning. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I could go on and on about all the reasons why Christianity is the one world view that ties together the human experience, science and religion into one neat package. I could, but what I wrote would be ignored or dismissed with a hand wave and no reasoning or argumentation. This isn't my first rodeo. There are plenty of videos on YouTube giving the necessary reasoning for the truth of Christianity, just search for "William Lane Craig" or read "Mere Christianity".

I would bet that there are more videos on YouTube with opposing views.I am an admirer of Craig and his debating skills however I don't always agree with his conclusions.

That is a problem, since his conclusions follow as logical outcomes of the arguments he presents. I assume you have reasoned arguments to refute his own arguments? I would like to hear them.

Yeah,me too is of opinion that god has certainly some expectations from all the living beings,that's why he creates them & provides them some time to prove themselves ...the time which is known as life.

However,I don't believe that god expects us to worship him....but I like a thought I read somewhere few years back.

'What we are is god's gift to us,what we becomes is our gift to god.'

I like it.

You are correct in pointing out the problem in my statement.His conclusions are logical.What I should have said was the premises on which he bases his arguments often cause me concern.

~~~~Thread BUMP....to clear the cobwebs

Thank you for acknowledging my attempt to relate how I see a religion that I don't study.
As for that list, now you know how I feel. Religion doesn't make sense.

I recall something about false prophets which by any other term is simply liars. From what I understand, a false prophet is one that twists the word of God to make it say something it wasn't intended to say...Which is lying of course.
So in religion I am supposed to never trust a liar - Good Idea.

Open most bibles, go into most churches and you find a few things that must be lies. The only churches I have been to are Christ churches and the only books I have ever looked into are christian bibles in this context, These observations may or may not hold across all religions.

It is established that a church is a representation of the house of God. It is somehow divine. They are usually dressed in the finest construction materials, impeccably clean and dressed with ornaments and religious artifacts. People entering them are supposed to feel humbled. I have seen churches that are in the backs of old run down warehouses, out of the back of vans, in school buses and just about any vacant lot or field. Those churches usually are of few people and lack the grandiose of the 'established' ones.

Inside the churches you will find at least one cross, usually a big one behind the stage. People wear a cross, place crosses on their walls, use crosses on advertisements and they will kiss it, hug it and pray to it. Back 2,000 plus years ago in the region of the middle east people were hung on crosses. Problem is the crosses didn't look like the ones in church. They resembled an X more than a T. Some false prophet one day decided that the cross should be a T and implemented that to the visual reinforcement of the religion. But a lie is still a lie.

I have seen many depictions of Jesus Christ in many formats. I have actually walked the same Earth as Jesus Christ when I was deployed in Lebanon. I looked around in awe of how close I was to His lands. Then I noticed that the people around me looked NOTHING like the Jesus I knew. When I had liberty in England, I noticed that the people closely resembled the Jesus I knew. So, I did a search for the true face of Jesus. I found a representation of a face that would closely match what Jesus really looked like and he had more facial features in common with Saddam Hussein than the Prime Minister. It appears that I was taught to worship the wrong person.
Some religious artist somewhere decided how Jesus should look and that became the basis of belief. But a Lie is still a lie.

Seeing that they got the look of Jesus wrong I took a close look at Mary. His mom. Not only is she the same nationality as her son, she has perfect symmetry. Perfect symmetry gives the observer pleasure when gazing upon that visage. Yet, Another lie.

Now God cannot tolerate other Gods or representations of other Gods. I recall something about Him destroying the idols at the grouping at the mountain where He decreed his Laws to mankind. It makes no sense to me why He would tolerate such misrepresentations in a religion meant to glorify his only son? Perhaps He feels accuracy is not important? But knowing something is inaccurate and allowing a whole religion to practice for 2,000+ years based on a lie is False Prophesying. Yet, we are told to beware of False Prophets?

Shall I go on?...Yeah, for a little bit, just a few more things...

Here is something that really gets me, The age of the Earth.
I have been told that the world is only 6,000 years old or something like that. It has been suggested that dinosaurs existed along with mankind. Science dates the planet around 4.5 Billion years old. They do that by measuring the atomic rate of decay of known isotopes. That rate of decay can be applied to a mathematical formula to determine the age of something. It is known that dinosaurs and other animals and plants existed millions, hundreds of million years before man. Mankind and its evidence of civilization extends roughly 15,000 years into the past. 4,500,000,000 VS 15,000. That is a lot of time difference. The man animal can be traced back roughly 2 million years. that's 2,000,000 VS 4,500,000,000 still a large difference.

Another thing that gets me right here is the age of man. Noah & Moses supposedly lived into their hundreds. Not just hundreds, multiple hundreds. Living in a time where not much was known about disease, people didn't eat right, there was rampant inbreeding and life was hard, I am supposed to buy into the idea that someone could live for hundreds of years? Even if seasons were represented as years the time frames still make no sense. I am 54 years old. I am also 19,710 days old. Calculated at that rate. Months gets the result of a lower number. At 54 years I am 648 months old. At 900 months I will be about 75 years old. Now given that astronomy was not an established science back then, perhaps calculations were done considering months to be years. But God, who instructed the book to be written, is almighty and all-knowing. Why would there be an inconsistency in time? The book has a disclaimer that it may not be changed in any way. Why would God, Knowing all, write a book that is going to be proven wrong by simple observation? Was the Bible written for the simple minds of the times? Did God expect the world to end earlier than actual? Was the book meant to be rewritten to reflect the knowledge as time passed. A new chapter was written after Christ. What other new chapters have been written and where are they? In some musky basement being studied and rewritten by priests? What about the discovery of newfound dead sea scrolls? Are they added to the book? I don't speak dead sea scroll. Someone does obviously because they transcribed the scrolls into our language.
What if the scribes had a bad harvest one year and instead of transcribing exactly the intent and the word of the scrolls they shortened it so they could get done with the day's scribbling so they could have some food? What if they just read it wrong? What if it was a key factor in the whole scroll. Sometimes a false prophet has no idea they are being false. Their references may be tainted.
But a lie is still a lie.

Today on facebook I saw a caterpillar with a face on it. The face looked like a picture of Edgar Allen Poe. Is Edgar Allen Poe divine now? More likely it just appears to be a face because we are conditioned to recognize the human face. Was it a miracle? No. So why is it that when someone sees a resemblance of the 'known' virgin Mary or the 'known' Jesus Christ in an inanimate object do we decide that it is a miracle? Why is it that when someone beats cancer or survives a terrible car crash we decide that it was a miracle or a gift from God. We say it wasn't his time or He has more work for him to do. What if it is just the result of not being subjected to fatal circumstances or that the science of medicine was accurate for that individual? How is it that a thought process can affect reality. If that were the case, certainly by now someone would have mastered telekinesis. Albino-ism manifests in a population after a certain number of generations. It does this with no input or methodology. Certainly telekinesis should manifest over generations because it is practiced by many. If you think about how many albinos exist in the human gene pool and how many people have telekinesis you realize that telekinesis just isn't possible. Chaos has more to do with miracles than praying does.

Shall I go on? Frankly I am getting tired of typing. To me, religion is based on false prophets (Lies). How I see God works in reality. The most important thing is that you should believe what you wish. If your beliefs make sense to you, why should my belief give you trouble? I can allow everyone else to have any religion they choose. Why are my views on God so wrong that you must argue that I am wrong? If my views threaten yours you might want to take a look at your own to see why they need defending. There is something inside you that makes you feel threatened.
Its not like religion needs to be explained, most of it is common knowledge. It is the views of God that don't fall into religion that should be explained, a different look at things. Blind faith in anything is perilous.

LOL, WOW, I just looked at what I wrote and sheesh, took me a lot of typing to get a simple point across.

The only point I can glean from all your typing is that you have a gross misunderstanding of christianity.By your own admission you have not studied this subject.How can you critique anything you have not studied ?
The only statement you made that has any substance is "These observations may or may not hold across all religions. "
I am not a christian so I am not defending my faith.I may be defending what I believe but what I believe has nothing to do with religion,I hope.

I think Religion was Created by human Beings to keep us connected to a source, but unfortunately, we have lost touch because of dogma and division. Just my humble opinin!

i wouldn't disagree, i can see how humans could have developed religion... my personal opinion: the aliens started religion, before Sumeria and Babylon, and it branched out from that...

You write like a drunken duck flapping around in a thunderstorm. I don't have the patience to try to make sense of any of it.

Hahaha, Nice one!

I am sure you have a lot of good idea's but your writing bounces from one subject to another. It is hard to figure out what your point is. One thing I think you should realize is that biblically a church is not a building. The Church mentioned in the Bible is the group of people who are following the commandments of god. Anyone who does not follow the commandments of god is just kidding themselves, if they think they can eat a little cracker, sip some wine, or say the lords prayer ten times a day and that will get them "saved".

Tom... ?

Perhaps, it would be helpful is one subject at a time were concentrated on.

For example it might be easier to discuss Your pessimism about the longevity of ancient people like Noah and Moses.

While Noah did live into multiples of hundred years (950), Moses likely didn't live more than a century and a half.