So having said all this, am i really that crazy to belive in in my God? Could the reason people dont understand is because i am using my "mind" much more than the normal person? Am i thinking outside of my 5 senses to find somthing real? Is the reason the you have not found such because you have not exercised this part of the brain?

"Convinced that theres an invisible man "
"some silly fictional "God""
"source that is written by man"
"egotistical Godhead"

Would these posts by fellow JSH memebers disregard that maybe i have opened up a part of my mind that allows me to have faith?


Ah interesting, maybe we should look into our mind instead of our vision, for answers.

if you have never met God or seen God or can even describe God without sounding delusional then without the five senses you would have no way to either influence someone or be influence by someone of a belief in a God ..without the belief there is no need for evidence

Ok i can accept your thoughts, how about a worldy response to evidence, would you need evidence? Or would there be alot of faith required? In this post im not talking about religion more-less in life

faith is required because of lack of evidence ..everything you know now about God you got from others and used others to confirm the belief so without the five sense if wouldn't even be a way to get any information pertaining to the belief or to confirm the belief ..so without the belief no evidence would be required

Kalamazoo:

The way that I 'see' it follows...in brief. What would a 'mind' be without the extasensory extensions? It would be like a huge blob of nothing. One big ball of what could be if 'it' could only experience anything. Without the senses it experiences nothing. No worldly fingerprint could exist without the ability to process information. The senses are the 'vehicles' which carry all information to the mind.

Without any cabs my friend, the cab company cannot exist.

There have been several studies that all verify the following. Babies that are born with all their senses in tact, will not thrive and will die, if they are denies 'stimulation' of those senses.

A child can live without love, they can not survive without stimulation of the senses. The "basic" suggestion for this is; without anything to stimulate the brain functions the brain ceases to function.

We are an 'integrated' machine, like all machines, there are just some things we can not function without. Our senses are are one of the intregal parts. Take away one or two or three but not all.

Therefore - the OP question has no validity for a logical argument. We are seeking answers based on the reality of our current existence.

however "studies" prove very little.. and unless theres is FACTUAL evidence i dont think this should be brought into play.

This is the silence before the storm...I am coming

"If a person opposes even the possibility of there being a God, then any evidence can be rationalized or explained away. It is like if someone refuses to believe that people have walked on the moon, then no amount of information is going to change their thinking. Photographs of astronauts walking on the moon, interviews with the astronauts, moon rocks...all the evidence would be worthless, because the person has already concluded that people cannot go to the moon."


.....swords ready...posting time 1 of 10

i agree, evidence in general goes much deeper than the 5 senses

THIS IS FOR FUNCHES!

Read it.....

"The two questions that lead to God are simple ones. What is right and what is wrong? Is this all there is?

I considered the second question to be of greater importance than the first, because if this life is all there is, the answer to the first question is irrelevant. This isn't to say that an afterlife actually exists for us, just that in order to make this life objectively meaningful, there must be an after-life.

Logical thought tells us that there is no such thing as absolute moral truth. We can say that killing is wrong, but is it always absolutely wrong? We can give exceptions but quickly find that there are exceptions to the exceptions! Hence, the view of moral relativism. Yet none of us would deny that there is a right and a wrong concerning issues of human behavior. We simply disagree over what is right and what is wrong!

What is the truth about morality? If we say that no such truth exists because it can't be captured through logic, then we are hypocrites every time we demand justice and our entire legal system is the result of a delusion. Moral truth exists - we just can't seem to pin it down.

In asking the first question, I found that I could logically justify contradictory behavior. I could give logical reasons for divorcing my spouse and I could also give logical reasons for staying married. I could justify lying, and I could justify telling the truth, both for the same situation. If I could intellectually reason to equal and opposite conclusions, then I had to admit that moral behavior could not solely be determined through logic. If logic alone could not allow us to determine the truth about right and wrong, then perhaps logic alone could not tell us the truth about a god who is closely connected with morality.

When Christians make a distinction between a person's mind and a person's 'heart', this is the issue they are addressing. The logic of the mind can come up with any number of moral, rational options, but the 'heart', that part of the mind that is above logic, is what makes the decision. What allows the heart to make a decision for the 'good' depends upon the goodness that is present in it. While that sounds circular, I believe it is circular only because it is true. Consider the following example:

(Matthew 20:1-16) A vineyard owner hires 10 men to work in his fields from sunup until sundown and agrees to pay them $100.00 for their efforts. As evening approaches, he hires 10 more men to work the last several hours but pays them the same amount as the men who have worked all day. The first group of men is irked that the other group of men received the same pay. Judge the actions of the vineyard owner; was what he did right or wrong?

When I saw that parable, at first I thought the vineyard owner was unfair and I sided with the first group of men. The more I thought about it, however, I began to realize that my selfish nature was influencing my perception of the vineyard owner. Why couldn't I find joy in the idea that the other 10 men would be able to provide for their families as much as I could for my own? The vineyard owner had paid me what he had promised, so he had treated me justly. It was only my jealousy concerning his generosity that caused me to gripe. After going through countless paradoxes of morality in scripture, I concluded that selfishness (sin) is what blinds us to an accurate perception of what constitutes good'. Therefore, the only person who could know what was good would be one who was completely unselfish (sinless).

No man is without selfishness and so no man can tell us the truth about what is right or wrong. It is this dilemma that causes man to reach out to, or generate the concept of, a god or gods. The idea is that God is perfect and holy, without sin, and therefore only God can know the truth about right and wrong. But if no man is selfless enough to recognize that which is right and wrong, then man can't generate the concept.

Believing that such a Good Being exists, creates in our consciousness the idea of seeking its approval, realizing that we can't know right from wrong. We are actually seeking the approval of a personality, or the person of God. When we act within the context of a personality, we escape having to define moral absolutes because we can speculate on the personality's reaction to our actions. For example, I know my mother. I'm familiar with her as a person. We never discussed the issue of drugs, their legality or the morality involved in using them for recreational purposes. However, I don't need to hear my mother explicitly state her opinion to know that she probably wouldn't approve of me smoking a joint.

Knowing the personhood of a god would enable us to act in the spirit of the law instead of being bound by the law, which we can't adequately define. I think that we CAN, however, adequately define a personality through text alone, and I think that any writer who depends upon character development, in creating a story, will agree. This is why Christians place such an emphasis on KNOWING God, something that can easily be done by studying the words and actions of Jesus Christ. The spirit of the law, then, is loving a good God and seeking its approval in the way we live our lives.

In seeking a god's approval, we make it a judge and try to please it by living according to its standard. We know that the standard is higher than our own standards but we don't know what the standard is. How can we be judged fairly if we can't even know the standard by which we are to be judged?

Every time we encounter another person, we start forming an opinion about them. We discover that we can be very critical of the faults of others, but pretty lenient, or even blind, when it comes to our own. If God, being without sin, could be presented to us as a person, it would be interesting to see how we would judge the personification of God. In judging a good and innocent person, we would be establishing the criteria by which we ourselves would be judged. What could be more fair? This idea is summed up in Luke 2:34-35; "And Simeon blessed them, and said unto Mary his mother, Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign which shall be spoken against that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed."

If we can be judged fairly, then there should be justice. I won't repeat the argument that I give in 'The Games Skeptics Play', but there should also be mercy. If justice and mercy, then reward and punishment.

I arrived at these conclusions independently. In other words, I didn't have to rely on the bible or any other sacred text to TELL me these things. I'm not saying that my reasoning was not influenced by my knowledge of religion, only that these arguments stand logically on their own. My argument is similar to that given by Immanuel Kant.

FAITH WITH FUZZY LOGIC
So far, I have only given reasons why the CONCEPT of god - specifically, the concept of the Christian god, which contains all of these elements - makes sense, but I believe that the Bible describes a very REAL God because of the way in which it was revealed. It wasn't as if the prophets sat down and decided which elements would go into making a good god model. It's as if they were given the parts to the model and, with no understanding of how they would fit together, accurately described them. The parts of the model were delivered over a span of 1500 years and through over 40 different authors, yet they come together to make sense when they are viewed in the light of their entirety. That's why the Bible is said to be authored by God, because the writings were designed and directed by one source. The model isn't a product of reason, but a product of alleged perceptions that result in a reasonable model. In other words, I don't think that Christianity is true because it works, but that it works because it is true.

I consider the gospels to be accurate and honest documentation, because the logic and nature of men who would knowingly create a false god, would not have included so many ambiguous passages, which could have been misunderstood to indicate that Christ wasn't God. It is man's nature to tell, "I am God." It is divine nature to allow a person to arrive at that truth on their own; "Who do you say I am?" I don't get the impression that this is fiction.

The words of Christ also indicate that He knew the effect that His resurrection would have on people. How could any man think that to be crucified would result in him being glorified unless he also knew that he would be resurrected? Yet His words carried Him confidently to Calvary. Christ knew that faith in Him as God was the answer. I believe that He knew the things He knew because He is who He alluded to being."

...yeah Funches eat that one

I enjoy this post however, we dont even have the mind power to stop a "smoking" or most drug addictions, the majority of us dont have such mind power. Our senses, paralyze our brain. We rely on the skyline, beautiful sunset to "Coat" our brain. This is satisfies the brain allow us to feel good, but isnt this all relative? Quantum Physics was mentioned earlier, having such mind power yet we focuse on what is visible and What we hear? How can such a sense compare to the mind? The mind drives all 5 sense not the other way around.

I enjoyed you post, however i feel our mind is way underrated and is too easily over-looked.

Somtimes the Cab Company must go to its root, to figure out its mission statement, providing transportation, not Cabs.

Kalamazoo "So having said all this, am i really that crazy to belive in in my God? Could the reason people dont understand is because i am using my "mind" much more than the normal person? Am i thinking outside of my 5 senses to find somthing real? Is the reason the you have not found such because you have not exercised this part of the brain?"

If a person believes that we have a mind/body/spirit perhaps they are using their spirit to be in touch with this evidence?


Whilst pondering on where you were going with your thoughts I came across something interesting:

http://www.nerd****.com/wordpress/?cat=8

Archive for the 'Mind/Body/Spirit' Category

« Paralysed man’s mind is ‘read’

Monday, November 19th, 2007
Electrodes have been implanted in the brain of Eric Ramsay, who has been “locked in” – conscious but

paralysed – since a car crash eight years ago.

These have been recording pulses in areas of the brain involved in speech.Now, New Scientist magazine reports, they are to use the signals he generates to drive speech software.

Although the data is still being analysed, researchers at Boston University believe they can correctly identify
the sound Mr Ramsay’s brain is imagining some 80% of the time..."
--------

It will be interesting to see if they are able to learn something from that.

I was wondering if scientists believe in man as Mind/body/spirit.

That is the subject heading where the article is located.

Very intersting, thanks for the post. I do believe that we underestimate our mind and think even in a worldy sence everyone should pay more attention to our mind instead of our senses, i think this will help to bring Atheist Agnostics and Christians together and at least share some common ground, then we can contine the verbal bashing.. At least we will not be bashed for using our mind as a creditble source =)

sorry J-head but you read this ..it's no reason to read this sermon you posted especially when I know that you "google cut and paste" the thing....the fact that you run and hide when it comes time to answer rational questions shows you lack the mentality to be the author of any post that long

I've asked you many times in the other thread to describe God without sounding delusional but yet you haven't even made an attempt but only just deversion tactics as not to answer ..if you wish to play with the big boys then take a shot at answering the simple questions or don't come preaching to me about anything that you know nothing about

Kalamazooguy what the heck are you talking about..you have yet to explain your theory as to how humans can conceive a belief in God without the five senses ..and please don't say you can feel God or sense God...because how can you when you don't have the 5 senses ...wow I can't wait to hear this theory ...oops I meant this belief

I read it it was actually geunine and came from his opinion, nice try though


As the second response. Not to conceieve a belief in God but to not rely on our senses as evidence in life. Relying more on Faith in a worldy mindset.

Kalamazooguy..again you are avoiding answering to your own concept...without the 5 senses explain how you conceive evidence of the existence of God ..

thats wasnt my question

Kalamazooguy you said that you and I quote "believe we as humans rely on somthing too much when in reality we dont need it to survive."

so kalamazooguy.. explain how would humans surivive without the 5 senses

We can survive through our mind in all reality we dont need to see to move, hear, or any of those, We would be living in "society" standards however we can live, but my faith we live, and im talking in a Worldy sence, can someone who disbelieves in religion have such a faith?