I'm an "everythingist" (A Spiritual Eclectic). Essentially I believe that God loves variety in all things, and so loves variety in our worship of him.
Holding a belief that "your" religion is the only true religion is arrogant and impossible to prove.
However, I am not so arrogant myself as to believe that you are wrong. Instead I believe that no one can ever truly know the will and intent of the Lord. This view is reflected in all religious teachings.
One more point: I also do not believ in Original Sin. This concept has lead to guilt-based existential perspectives, a view I cannot embrace. It would be better to allow humanity to die out, then to allow one human soul to perish for all eternity in damnation for merely failing to worship in a specific way. Thus, I can never accept Christianity, but I accept the fact that it is impossible for any living man or woman to know anything for 100% certainty.
To me, faith is believing in something that you know cannot possibly be true. It takes no faith to believe in, and worship, the Lord. This is because purpose defines reality. If there is purpose in one thing, then there exists purpose in all things.
An atheist views the universe as primarily the object of chance. Essentially, the view is held that initially all energy in the universe was concentrated and that a chance occurence caused this energy to interact with itself in a way that resulted in massive and total instability. The result is our big bang theory. The idea that order of any kind has formed from the chaos of this energy, is due in part to the realtionship between chaos, energy, order, and probablity.
Consider the following:
Imagine an empty space. Devoid of light, of objects, of heat or cold, of any impule whatsoever. Now consider an object of energy, a positive impule. This particle of energy can, may, may not, will, or will not act in any manner whatsoever. Will it double itslef? Can it? Will it not? Will it move or remain static? Can it? What if their are two similar particles of energy? Will they interact through attraction? Interact through negative attraction? Will they be netrual to each other? Now multiple this by infinity- an unknown quantity of energetic material in existence. This is chaos.
The difference between atheists and believers is essentially the relationship between chaos, order, and energy.
An atheist believes that this chaos, through chance alone, has interacted with itself to eventually become the current state of things. The existence of this energy is indisputable. How the energy initially came to be is irrelevant- it simply exists. This notion is furthered by scientifically solvent principles that matter cannot be destroyed- it can only alter its form.
On the other hand, someone who believes in God sees the order as evidence of God. A believer would see the relationship between chaos, order, and energy from a different perspective. The guiding principle behind this is that chaos itself is impossible. No true chaos actually exists. If true chaos existed, then that would mean that order could not exist, because the two are mutually exclusive. The question then becomes one of explaining our perception of chaos. This is where predictable chaos fills the gap for religious orderists. In essence, if chaos were to be engaged within defined limitations, then chaos itself could be made predictable. If chaos is predictable, the it is useful. Now we come to religion. Chaos can only be made predictable through purpose. By assigning intent to chaotic exchange, it can be controlled through prediction.
That is why I say, if there is purpose in one thing, then there is purpose in all things. Chaos is made predictable through purpose. This purpose is imposed by the will of God.
The Lord does not act in some imaginery 4th dimension. He is a living God. His acts are thus visible for study in our lives. The evidence of His will surrounds us. The purpose behind His will is what escapes humanity.
Consider this: Close you eyes and let the world evaporate from your consciousness. Ignore the sounds, the smells, your breathing. Ignore your very mind telling you that this is stupid and what is the point.
Consider this state as the perspective of God. But the difference between you and God is that He would remain in this state for eternity, while you, a mere mortal, will perish.
Existence, our existince, is His purpose. The purpose of God's will is existence itself. We live for God's pleasure. And all religious texts offer that information.
He created the "universe" as an environment. But imagine a fish tank with no fish.
He created living this that will serve him automatically. They are pre-programmed to serve his will. Thus there is no good or evil in their actions. Their will is God's will.
Then he created humans. Unique as can be in that we have free choice. We can do the will of God or we can refuse. And it is this choice that defines not us, but the Lord.
By choosing to act as the Lord desires, we fufill his purpose. Our will reinforces his will. We are his reason for existence, and He is ours.
But what about violence, murder, senseless acts of selfishness?
That is our actions against God's will.
What about natural disasters and random accidents that cause death and mutilation?
That is the environment that God has placed us in. In order for it to exist, there must exist some chaos. We cannot exist ourselves without this environment. And God works within his creation, not outside of it.
What about Big Bang?
That is God's will. Let there be light!!!
What about evolution?
Again, the Lord works within his creation. We do not "magically appear". You are the product of living material that has existed for thousands, if not milions of years. We did not appear out of thin air. We came from genetic material that has existed for longer than recorded history.
Consider the concept of adam and eve. Before "the apple" they were unable to differentiate between good and evil. Thus they were incapable of following God's will voluntarily. An event, call it an apple or whatever you wish, occurred that transformed the human consciousness into what it is now. That event was the will of God. And it is the reason I do not believe in "Original Sin" as is presented by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. We should not be regretful of that event. We should embrace it! And thank God for giving us the gift of knowledge of Good and Evil so that we may voluntarily choose to do his will.
You see, since matter cannot be destroyed, only "recycled", our bodies did indeed come from the earth. Our bodies are up of substances taken directly from digested plant and animal matter. This plant and animal matter itself did not come from nothing. The plants grew from a combination of nutrients in the soil, oxygen, adn water. So, in that sense, we most certinaly come from the dirt itself.
Consider further- Evolution explains that man, through a lengthy process, came from a series of less and less capable and adaptable beings. The very bottom of this step is the creation of life itself- a single-celled being with just the right balance of properties (probably a simple early form ofplant life). This was then "injected" with the ability to govern it's own behavior in accoradance with the programmed will of God. It became the difference between dirt and, well, living dirt. It would be indistinguishable to us. What is a dead man? He is not living, but yet he is made up of material that once was alive. What is the difference between a dead man and dirt? Nothing. The cells have ceased to be self-governing. That is the only difference between life and dirt.
But God would not create a man from thin air. He works within his own creation to achieve what we see today. YOU are the direct product of that "living dirt". YOU are actually a very very old being. You were not "created" at the day of your conception. You, or what would become you, existed in living material for millions of years. We are all actually much older than ourselves.
God comes in before that. It we who do the interpreting, and many times we who do the MISinterpreting.
I do not believe that God wants to "work from behind the curtain", like the wizard of oz. Nor does he work in mysterious ways.
God wants us to find him. Through science. At that point, all knees will bend. And humanity will be changed for the better. We will still have choice, but the relevance of that choice will be real. Because now, people can act like they do not have a choice by arguing that there is in God.
Take away the mystery and we do not take away choice. We make the choice more real than ever before.
I do sin. And I do ask for forgiveness. And it is given. The messiah is each of us, within ourselves. Our savior is ourselves- to have a relationship with the Lord and continually seek to do his will. We can never be perfect, and Jesus was right when he said that all will fall short. But what differentiates one man from another is his continual individual development towards God's purpose. Man must continually strive to align his own purpose with God's purpose. This is neither action, nor thought, not attitude, not intentions alone. It is all of this, but under the recognition that one will never attain perfection, though one can certainly pursue it. And through this pursuit, one finds himself closer alligned to the will of God.
Jesus was unique because he recognized that he was his own pathway to God. It not "No one comes to the father but my me". It is "No one comes to the father but by you". He was "the way the truth and the light", but so can each of us be. We are each simultaneously our own worst enemy and own best friend. We can facilitate our realtionship with the Lord, or counter it and deny ourselves. But each is a Messiah. Our relationship with God is on an individual level, so each of us requires an indivudal saviour. Ourselves.
How do we atone for our sins? Simple. By recognizing them and asking for forgiveness. We know when we do wrong. Some are bigger sins (like checking out naked hotties on the web. ), and some are almost forgetable, like cutting someone off on the freeway then flipping 'em the bird. And some are just downright evil- murder, rape, molesting alter boys, etc.
How God forgives us and what we feel in that forgiveness is a little different depending on the sin. Do evil and you will know how long it stays with you, no matter how much you ask for forgiveness. Do a minor sin and you will be forgiven with relatively little difficulty.
More importantly tha even forgiveness, is life allignment. Namely, setting a course in your life that is alligned to the will of the Lord. Plan your day knowing that you will be challenged throughout. Seek strength, comfort, wisdom, and tenacity from the Lord. When you begin to falter, ask for assistance. When you still fail, ask for forgiveness. It is not a matter of "doing good deeds", it is a matter of living a life alligned with God's will. When this done, one no longer needs to think about doind good deeds for their own sake. It becomes automatic and ingrained within your spiritual self. And in this way, we pre-emptively act to prepare ourselves against sin and to do the will of God. The best "atonement" for sins is to not commit them in the first place. Through right allignment, we can actively pursue perfection, while planning for oursleves to evetual fail in some measures.
Then the Lord will know we are his servants. And when we ask forgiveness of him individually, he will not hesitate to forgive and continue his love for us.
Buddhism teaches that all suffering is the result of desire and ignorance. Essentially, our ongoing want is the cause of suffering. We want many things: happiness, life without pain, comfort, food, etc.
Only by recognizing the impermanence of all things can we alleviate suffering. We must, as Christians say, Let go and Let God.
This does not mean that we should not work towards peace and prosperity, instead it means that we should recognize that everything is temporary. When we realize this, everything comes into perspective.
This works well with an ecletic religious perspective, because it recognizes the freedoms that God has given us while providing a way to cope with the pain that we experience in our short lives.
Our attempts to be eternal instead of worship, gratitude, and humility is the source of human pain. We should continually strive for perfection in right action while simultaneously recognizing the futility of all.
Because we are the Lord's agents and it is our purpose to freely choose to do His will, the Lord answers prayers through the actions of people.
What do people ask for when they pray? Money? Power? Health?
They should be praying for strength, for understanding, for patience, and for humility. Our prayers are ALWAYS answered, when our prayers are unselfishly motivated and fall within the Lord's design.
For example, let us assume you have a sick child. Do you pray for his health? Instead pray that your child will be filled with understanding and courage. Pray that you, too, will be understanding and accept our impermanence in this world. Of course you want your child to be well! But this is the cause of your suffering- desire for more than our fragile mortality offers. Thank the Lord that you were able to know your child and be grateful that he had a life to live at all.
When we pray for the external, our wishes will not be fullfilled. When we pray for the internal, our prayers are always answered. And because of this, we can do the good work of God and become agents of change. Through us, God will do external work and make our human experience a better one.
On the matter of intervention, just to clarify. First of all, the Lord is a living God, one who dwells on our level of existence. He is all things and all things are in Him. He does not "live" on a cloud in a bodily form sitting atop a throne, presiding over the dead. He is here. In our time and with us.
God does not intervene by causing us to be remotely controlled robots doing his bidding. Animals do this. Existence is God's "purpose"; He simply exists and was not created, He has chosen to enjoy that existence with His creation. Our purpose is to choose freely to align our will with that of God's will. This is morality. We know what is God's will through prayer. Human experience can contribute towards guiding that prayer ever closer to the Lord. This is a collective experience of humanity, and we are drawing ever nearer to Him.
God operates "externally" (to us) through science. He has created existence using defined limitations on energy which act to make chaos predictable and consequently useful to Him in its ability to interact with itself. It is this order that provides proof of the Lord's existence. The alternative is based on chance, which is unpredictable chaos. The problem with unpredictable or total chaos, is that rules of order are unable to form because chaos itself counteracts against itself. Thus when a trend begins to form, chaos destroys the trend.
A simple proof that shows that chaos is not unpredicatble is this simple rule:
Matter cannot be created or destroyed, it can only alter its form. This is important because unpredictable chaos allows matter, or energy, to do anything, including double itself or cease existence without another force acting upon it.
How does predictable chaos prove God? Another way to frame this question is, can predictable chaos self-purpose? Or in other words, can chaos designate for itself how it is predictable? The answer is no. Chaos requires a will to shape its limitations, no matter how small. The opposite would be unpredictable chaos, because the energy decides action for itself, to include chaoticide and self-perpetuation.
Thus, predictable chaos proves the existence of a will that defines the limitations of chaotic energy in order to make that energy interact usefully with itself towards some end. This will is what we call God.
The question than becomes whether this will is self-directed or externally directed. Or in other words, is this will self-aware or not. This is the difference between a personal God like that of Judeo-Christian belief systems or an inpersonal God like that of Eastern perspectives.
Is he self-aware or is he simply a "will"? Is this "will" purposefully self-directed or does it act without purpose.
The question, my friend, is one of purpose. We must ask: what is God's purpose and is that purpose one chosen by God? A self-aware "will" designates its own purpose. A "will" without self-awareness does not assign its own purpose. What is God's purpose, if God Himself did not designate it? There is only one answer. God is chaos. He is a self-directed "will" without purpose. This is an impossibility, because, as was discussed early, chaos is self-defeating. Chaotic will could be self-destructive or self-replicating. Deicide. Or similarly, multiple and competing wills without purpose. Order would not exist because time is outside of this. A second is infinity and infinity is in a second.
That means that God is self-aware. A singular self-aware will that designates its own purpose in shaping the predictability of chaos, and thus of order. Consequently, It or He, may design.
Design and purpose are interrelated and a component of the discussion on intervention. From what I wrote, I believe it is difficult to refute the existence of God when debating within this frame work of chaos logic. I believe it is also difficult to refute that god is self-aware when using this logic.
But what about us? Why would God care about us?
It comes back to purpose. God's self-decided purpose is his design. His creation. To determine our own purpose within that design, we need to understand the purpose of everything within the design. This could get quite complex, but humanity has categorized and classified much of everything within our small sphere of influence. We know how our environment interacts withitself to remain self-sustaining. Our earth, this self-sustaining object acts in complete harmony with the will of God. It does everything it is "told" according to predictable chaos, exactly as God has designed. That's where we come in. We are unique in known existence in that we are the only being similar to God in a way that we can relate. We fullfill God's purpose by choosing to do his will. This validates his purpose for existence. We complete the circle.
"Divine Intervention" as you may call it, would be when we have a direct relationship with the Lord and our will is alligned with his. We pray for an internal embrace of him, nothing more. We are not asking for anything that is not naturally there. We reconnect the link and become a conduit for his will. Thus he acts through us, by our choice, and can directly influence his creation.
All world religions share a similar vision of the Lord. Our God is a living God. We have no evidence of any other existence than this one, but it is arrogant to assume that our feeble human minds know all. We do know for certain of this existence. And if the Lord is a living God, than he dwells with us here and now, not in a place of our imagination.
This, I think, is a critical foundation for a discussion on the nature of the relationship between mortality and relevance. After all, our search for heaven is nothing less than a search for relevance. If we conclude that our existence ceases beyond our mortality, than in existence our lives are futile and without purpose. Our existence, then, is without purpose, the universe is without purpose, and thus ultimately, there exists no self-aware will.
The two are interlinked and provide the key to our existence, the realtionship between the Lord, and our innate sense of being and purpose.
Through logical interpretation of the nature of chaos, we have discovered the truth of a living will. Through logical interpretation of the purpose of the living will, we have discovered that this living will is self-aware.
And now us. We exist. But toward what end? What purpose? We complete the cirlce of purpose through choice, choosing to serve the will with our own will. This, therein is heaven. This, you have found in life, should you manage to achieve it. We remember our impermanence in state to release our struggle with desire. Through the acceptance of things as they are rather than as we would wish them, we achieve harmony with our surroundings.
We come now to death. And as our will is alligned with the will of the lord, so to shall that continue in death. Our alligned will and harmony with the continual change of state will allow us to join the will. As we have been the will through our lives, choosing to allow God to work through us, choosing to sacrifice ourselves in order to truly be His will in life, so to should there be no reason for this ceasing upon death. We simply continue in being his will, and in so doing, become the will.
Because we have sacrificed ourselves and chosen to be his will, there is no self, only His will. And so the differences between us in life dissapear as we become the will. You do not cease to exist. You always were. And you always will be. You were never "born", as you have been alive since life was formed. You are aged. Older than yourself. Older than your parents, and they too, as old as you. And so on back through the ages, you have been alive, until the day that you were on this earth, in order to have choice.
The meaning of YOUR life
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Originally Posted by Evil_Maniac From Mars
Anyone think they can guess the significance of 852?
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