Here is where you come to praise God, contemplate the meaning of worship, and get your personal prayer on.

Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name;
thy kingdom come;
thy will be done,
in earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive them that trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation;
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
the power, and the glory,
for ever and ever.
Amen.

Why do we praise God?
Should we praise God?

Please keep this in General Religion Chat.
It is not a Christian singles post.

I am interested in what people think about these questions
about God - not necessarily Christ but any God
Buddha, Wiccan, Abrahamic whatever.

Why? because I know Einstein or Darwin didn't create humans...
Should we? Yes, but not with a prayer from a book that asks or demands things from God.

The real question is why do so many people throughout the ages have such a need to have an answer for comfort, based upon faith, not upon truth ??

Interesting what we grasp onto….
In a book written 1500 years ago by primitive hut dwellers…
(500 years and approximately 25 generations of verbal passed down myth-stories after Jesus may or may not have lived)
God tells man not to eat an apple, but a talking snake tells man to eat it, so.. man listens to the talking snake…. God is upset (a loving, forgiving god ??), so he immaculately inseminates a woman (if not by her choice–rape ??, if she was married to Joseph at the time—adultery ??) and she gives birth to him/his son so he can suffer and die for us (Jesus chooses to die for us–suicide ??) because we sinned when we listened to the talking snake and ate an apple.. what a strange story…

I contend that we are all atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than religious people do. When religious “believers” understand why they dismiss all possible gods and religions except for their one “true” god , they will understand why I dismiss theirs.
The day people lose the fear of the threat of burning in hell will be the first intellectually free day of their life. Christianity and its rules and threats and prejudices was created by hut-dwellers thousands of years ago in order to gain power over their fellow human beings. New religions continue to crop up constantly in much the same way Christianity originally did- look at the Mormons, Scientologists and other less-successful religions. Christianity actually is like many religions, resurrection, virgin birth, god lives in heaven, etc….
The basis of religion and believing in Jesus is fear…. fear of going to hell (another man made myth–hell)
fear of what happens to us when we die. fear of God punishing us… (many examples especially in the old testament)
all of the stories, myths, fairytales about Jesus, including Jesus is God, were written hundreds of years after his death by primitive hut dwellers….
look at the big picture, Jesus is just another God in a long line of man-made Gods… during Jesus time, mankind was moving from polytheism to monotheism…. there were many “messiahs” ( 7 or 8 major ones) during Jesus life… Constantine helped Christianity become the big religion by making it the official religion of Rome.
Again, think about how ridiculous and unbelievable all of the other gods and religions are to you, and you will see why the Jesus myth is just another imaginary… (another word for faith) belief system.

Two things are needed to become a religious person….
1) exposure to religion… you are a Christian because you are surrounded by it, if you lived in a Hindu community you would gravitate toward.. I think you get my drift
2) a personal need and weakness…. religious people are less responsible for their actions and consequences, they lean on religion to help them deal with life, and use it as an excuse for their actions (religion is imaginary, a delusion, therefore actually a type of psychosis)

The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud

So you believe in 999 gods? Because I believe in them all...

I'm sorry, but I could NEVER be an atheist, logic and current scientific evidence tell me that I'd be delusional to believe life and all matter is just lucky happenstance.

Thanks for your lengthy and amusing non sequitur!



from the Wiki,

A non sequitur (pronounced /ˌnɒnˈsɛkwɨtər/) is a conversational and literary device, often used for comedic purposes. It is a comment that, because of its apparent lack of meaning relative to what it follows,[1] seems absurd to the point of being humorous or confusing, as in the following exchange:

Q: How many surrealist painters does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Fish.[2]

The use of non sequitur in humor can be deliberate or unintentional. Literally, the expression is Latin for "it does not follow."[3] It comes from the word "non" meaning not, and sequi, meaning to follow. In other literature, a non sequitur can denote an abrupt, illogical, unexpected or absurd turn of plot or dialogue not normally associated with or appropriate to that preceding it.

The non sequitur can be understood as the converse of cliché. Traditional comedy and drama can depend on the ritualization and predictability of human emotional experiences, where the Theatre of the Absurd uses disjunction and unpredictability.

This use of the term is distinct from the non sequitur in logic, where it is a fallacy.

Don't get me wrong. I like non sequiturs. I feel like they add to the ambiance. But I am more interested in various peoples attitudes towards praising God. How they do it and why.

why does god need praise?

exactly. i have my own take on the practice (and i do praise God
and i like the Lord's prayer too) - but i want to hear what others
have to say....

i guess i read a different science book. all the logic and scientific evidence points to a matter of luck that we are here.
out of a 1000 trillion suns, even higher number number of planets, one would think think just the odds alone would give a few lucky breaks.

OK so it is a little off-topic but this begs the question.
Why are we lucky? Why was there an opportunity for us to be lucky?



God has nothing to do with "odds" except for the creation of them.

luck is a matter of perspective, i guess
i really don't think "god" made anything
maybe not the whole universe anyway, thats a big order
personally, i'm wondering if the whole religion idea is just man's attempt to understand things that were not understandable at the time.
religion and man has held science back for hundreds of years.
400 years ago, they(religious leaders) would kill people that work on science that would disagree with their religion.
religion has always been a tool to control people, doesn't matter what faith or branch, which is neither good or bad. it just depends on whos doing the leading and controlling.

Where I work, it is filled with Christians. I go around asking questions and they get flustered with me such as

Why would God lead us into temptation (lead us not?)

why are we so demanding? (Give us this day)?
I changed it to my own likeing..
Thank You for this day and lead us away from temptation.
I think God is a S/he -Ying Yang.
You can see Female/male in all creation, except of course, in rocks and stuff...but then you never know.
I like to say, our Mother...who art in Heaven because ..well.. men don't ever seem that they'd listen to this sort of stuff. If God is strictly male, when we start praying he'd probally pick up the paper (UniversalNews) to read and say...Go ahead I'm listening..

the way i read the prayer i view such requests as
"lead us not into temptation" to mean "help us find the
strength to resist bad temptations" and "give us this day
our daily bread" as an expression of our god-given need for
all kinds of support - food for the body and soul

i also believe that God is sexless and universal very much
like yin and yang and the use of Our Father is purely traditional
perhaps a better choice would be "Our God who art..." etc.

probably should have written it gender neutral in the initial
post...

Then how do you explain science's "discovery" that the universe and all matter are NOT static?

I always like to point out the line from the "Lord's Prayer" that goes "thy will be done."

All things done are "God's Will," which means praying in and of itself is both boastful and useless. To ask god to change his plans to meet your needs is arrogance, pure and simple. It's the same as telling god "I know better." Either way, god will still do whatever he wants, so no matter what you pray for, you're wasting time. God doesn't give a sh** about what we want, all he wants is the praise. Well, praise should be reserved for those who actually do something altruistic, and not given to those that impose their will on others.

It's like the old saying, pray in one hand, sh** in the other. Then see which fills first.

And there will those who would pray for a handful of shyte, go figure...

well it is God's will that we have choice and the ability to affect our lives and others so it is nonsense to speak of predetermination.

basically all you are saying is that you do not understand prayer.

personally i don't think prayer is for God at all....

Very true, but you have to also keep in mind God's will is for us to have a good life, have lots of happiness in life, lots of love, and so on. So in praying all you're telling God is such and such would make me happy, thus then God grants you such.

what does that mean?

And no there is no predetermination, that is what we have free will for. We choose our own destinies in a such. We choose weather we perish after this earth, or we live for eternity in God's palace. This is done through our actions and choices we do and choose in life. When we are born it's not like Sue will go to heaven when she passes away on earth and joe will perish. It's not like that, it's chosen through the actions and things we did on earth. That is why it's called a judgement, not a damnation or anything of such.