James Larsen wrote:All hail the dark lord Satan...I mean, praise Jesus...wait, still not right...Buddha, no that's too early...hmm....I'll go with Satan for $300. Seriously, it's only theories and nothing hard proof. Let the kids decide what they believe in before they either turn hardcore extremist Christian or hardcore extremist psychotic.

Maybe it's because it's 6:30am and:

1. I'm not a morning person
2. I couldn't sleep until after 2am
3. I got up at 4:30am...

but I found that to be funny.


Anyway, I think the problem with people is that they're too generally "closed minded". Their way is the right way, end of story, they don't even want to think for one second that anything outside of their realm of "beliefs" could be wrong, or not fully correct. It's like Chris Rock said in Dogma (not verbatim, my brain hasn't warmed up yet) "it's better to have ideas than beliefs, ideas can be changed, beliefs can't be... well it's much harder to change a belief".

People have died based on their beliefs. What I can't understand is WHY people have to argue and hate over their own personal set of beliefs. Maybe the universe was created with a big bang... a random thing in time that somehow managed to spawn life. Maybe there was an allmighty powerful being behind the creation of everything, maybe it was more than one all powerful being in charge of creating everything. Maybe we're all part of some weird science experiment by alien beings. Maybe we're all like that Jim Carey movie where his whole life is a tv show... er... the Truman show!! That's it! Maybe whatever supernatural being created everything got bored with stars and decided to make himself his own "cable network"... hence everything... for his amusement. But then there's another question, how did the all powerful being that created everything come into existance? In theory, if you believe in an all powerful being creating everything and that it is impossible for everything to just go "poof" and exist... then you could say you're contradicting yourself... because that all powerful being had to have gotten here somehow? Did He/She/It just go poof and appear? In that sense, we could have done the same. Maybe life really is like the matrix. Maybe we're really not here at all and we just don't know it............

Point being... no one in our lifetime is really ever going to ACTUALLY know... so why are people (other than the fact that they're people, and generally closed minded to anything out of their realm of "norm") so hateful or arrogant when it comes to a discussion such as this? I mean, how hard is it to say "hey... this is what I think is right, this is my idea. I could be wrong, I could be right. Your ideas are different than mine, so since no one has actual concrete proof... I'm not going to hate you because of it or try to condemn you to hell because you don't believe what I do (or say you're going to hell because you don't believe what I do). Gosh I hate that. I can't stand when someone goes "if you don't believe this, you're going to hell". Who are you to make that judgement? For all we know there is no hell (I don't think there is, and if there is... we're here).

My train of thought just got derailed. I'm surprised I got that much out on 2 hours of sleep LOL.

^^^People claiming their beliefs are salvations and others are damnation have less to do with religion and more to do with power. After all, if i lead you to salvation, you'll be greatfukl and then be more apt to do my bidding.

How else could someone with an ugly suit, bad haircut, and horrible southern drawl con people into sending them money?


Goodbye Callisto & Skaði, Hello Ishara:
2022 Kia Stinger GT2 AWD
The only thing every single person from every single walk of life on earth can truly say
they have in common is that their country is run by a bunch of fargin iceholes.

Quote:

^^^People claiming their beliefs are salvations and others are damnation have less to do with religion and more to do with power. After all, if i lead you to salvation, you'll be greatfukl and then be more apt to do my bidding.

Its interesting in my Sociology of Religion class to see how much political influence has influenced religion/religious leaders in the past (i.e. the crusades)

Fallen Angel... I'm not closed minded and I'm not trying to impose my beliefs on you but if you like I'll offer a short explanation regarding "the beginning"

God being immortal and infinate has always existed. Because there was "nothing" including time, there is no "before" God, there can be no "before" without a measure of time. The concept is known as "Simultanious Causation" In one action or thought God created all the matter in the universe, the space for the universe to exist in, physical existance itself and "time". That is "the begining". God did not have "to get here somehow", there was no "here", God made it. There was no "existance" before God did whatever it was that caused the "Simultanious Causation" of all things. There was no here, or there, no before, and no after, there was nothing except God. The more you think about it, the easier it is to grasp, initially it's quite abstract but consider a single thought "awakening" or something similar and with that action caused all things to come into being. That is the idea. It come from the idea that for all things there must be a cause. Consider the laws of motion. All things remain in their present state unless acted upon by an external force. Something put everything in motion, and because God pre-exists all things including the laws of physics (which only apply to physical things), God must be that "prime mover" or "cause" for all things.

I honestly do not believe that the average God follower has any concept of this, and most follow blindly, meaning that they simply connot offer any explanation that makes sense at all. This leads to anger and frustration in their faith and a general hostility in defence of the thing that they do not understand. I wish people actually thought about these things, after all, what could be more important that your eternal life, assuming it exists?

Anyway, to kind of answer you question. God did not come into existance, God is eternal and infinate, there fore has always existed, even before there was such a thing as existance itself.

PAX

The thing that I've grown to truly mistrust in my life is ideology. In fact, I've even made up a little word to describe people who recite what they've been told as if it's their own ideas: Ideaologists.

Neat huh?

I love ideas. All ideas have merit. All ideas are simple. All ideas are created equal. Know what else? All ideas are neutral. No liberal VS conservative pap here. Like I've said about being against abortion in America VS being against abortion in Japan. Here it's a very conservative thing to be pro-life. In Japan it's very liberal. (Conservatives in Japan believe that you owe EVERYTHING to your country and that by having just one child, at all and any cost, you are helping sustain the land. It's an old idea born out of neccesity.)

Ideas who are collected into one big ball of ideology can be dangerous because it's assumed that by accepting one idea, you accept all of it. It's not loose. It's not a human thing. It's almost like passing a mental Bill into Law with all these unwanted attachments.

Then I see people trying to interpret the bible, in which long passages are written using the slang and euphemisms of a dead language. Using it's often misunderstood ideas to power their ideology. Attaching meaning that it may not have to bolster their views.

Just lemme give you an example of ENGLISH slang and euphemism that makes no sense at all to anyone but the local speakers. Ready? "F**king the dog" I know... I know... sounds gross. Bear with me. In parts of Canada, people will say "There was a huge storm outside and the roads weren't driveable, so f**ked the dog all morning yesterday.". What does it mean? It's not LITERAL of course, otherwise Canada wouldn't get many visitor. So what's it mean? IT'S ENGLISH ISN'T IT????? Surely just knowing how to talk and read it must give you some clue, right?

Some of you have no flipping idea do you? You can sorta decypher the sense, but it could mean anything couldn't it?

Now imagine this applied to the bible. A dead language where the last native speaker who would have understood the jokes and the dirty bits died around the 8th century. After that Latin was mainly used in a very proper intellectual sense and the bible was translated as such.

Just take the famous passage in Mark where Jesus asks the possessed man "What is your name?" and the man replies "My name is Legion, for we are many!" After which these devils beg to be sent into a herd of swine as Jesus drives them out, drowning themselves (and the little piggies they were in) moments later.

It's a bit dry but think about it for a minute... who was the Jews' enemy at the time? Romans. And what were Roman military units called? Leeeeeeeeeeegions. Yes, now you got it. The passage jokes that a) the Romans are devils b) compares them to swine and c) ends it with the punchline that they should all be drowned.

It's not Henny Youngman, but it's still political humour. Now a literalist would refuse to see this as anything but the whole truth, but the joke still remains. And this brings up the problem with the bible. Everyone wants THEIR views to be the real view. No one is really reading it or grasping it the way people back then would have AND because there's this vagueness their reading what they want to see and so it's easy to translate bits and pieces to mean what you want it to mean and use it in your ideology. Hellishly easy.

Trust in ideas, never trust ideology. Always believe that things don't have just one meaning. To do that, is wisdom.