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Originally Posted by adysav
If I continually claimed there were invisible beetles crawling under my skin controlling my actions and thoughts, you'd call me a nutcase. To me, faith in an omnipotent God is just as arbitrary.
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Hey, I might think you're a nutcase for if you claimed that, but does that make your assertation any less valid? Honestly, maybe you're right!
I don't claim that God controls my actions or my thoughts. Nor do I necessarily believe that God is necessarily omnipotent. I don't subscribe to many of the Christian beliefs of God; never in my previous posts have I said that I do. I believe in an afterlife, but not necessarily one divided into Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. This is based on my belief that we are more than the sum of the chemical processes that exist in our bodies.
My belief in God is centered around the following: God "sets the rules" in some sense; we are left to play within those rules. The universe seems too well designed to have happened randomly. Order does not come from chaos - chaos only breeds MORE of itself. Entropy always increases & the like. However, so much order exists in the universe! And it repeats across scale - atoms look an awful lot like planetary systems, which in turn looks an awful lot like galaxies, etc. That order, and the rules that govern it, seems too well planned to be random, especially when I take into consideration these differences in scale & distance. Perhaps I'm wrong...and if that's your estimation, fine - you're welcome to it!
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Originally Posted by adysav
That's my point, you don't see the effects of God around you. Everything you feel, see, taste and touch is the product of your body's interaction with a pretty rational reality. You're emphasising my point that belief in God is simply a blanket to cover everything that you don't understand about the world.
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Oh, but I
do see the effects of God around me! See my previous paragraph on design. My good friend Xepherys has stated:
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Originally Posted by xepherys
To say that nature, or snowflakes, or DNA is proof of god is assinine at best, completely foolish at it's worst.
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Again, I completely disagree - maybe it's the romantic nature in me, but I can't get away from the fact that all of what I see around me seems too perfectly
designed , for lack of a better term. I can't look at a tree, a sunset, a beautiful snowcapped mountain, or a beautiful newborn baby & not see the effects of the "design of God" (again, for lack of a better term).
Ultimately, though, my beliefs are no more or less asinine than believing in the Christian faith, believing that invisible beetles are telling you what to do, or any of the other myriad "crackpot" idea out there. The only thing that makes an idea "crackpot" is the fact that it does not coincide with our own beliefs or the collective beliefs of society.
Unfortunately, I fear that no matter how hard we try, the other side will always sound like the kid who sticks his fingers in his ears and shouts "LA LA LA! I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" to any concept s/he finds disturbing. Again, that's what makes these *beliefs*. What makes our collective society wonderful is the ability to discuss, debate, and compare these beliefs, while respecting each others' beliefs and maintaining our own.
At any rate - thanks for a good, reasoned discusson within a topic that doesn't contain much reason.