lolita

we rely on faith notb proof or evidence thats what christianity is about a truth in our hearts we acnnot deny just as u cant deny feeling the emotions of love or hate - we cannot deny that god exists!!thank u

CandleInTheDark

I didn't know that the heart was a truth sencing organ as well. Does that mean mine is defective? What is God's return policy?

__________________
Where there is doubt there is freedom.

Aesik

God accepts all returns, regardless of what condition the unit is in. However, God reserves the right to determine what he will do with said return.

Mael

well, i'm convinced. sign me up for jeebus!!!

Sledge

well if god is a feeling then i think ur rite. but most christians believe hes really there and you can argue yes or no to that

Food Eater Lad

My heart tells me that forks are superior to chopsticks, does that make it so?

I am sure that KKK members believe with their hearts that blacks are inferior, does that make it so?

And I am sure that people's hearts told them the world was flat, did that make its so?

Emotion can lead to some pretty silly beliefs. I would rather have empiracle, testable data before I make up my mind.

Mael

^^^ actually, chopsticks are superior. cause my heart tells me budda is the way, and he was asian-ish, ergo, he must have used chopsticks so they're the best.

TheKak

My heart tells me chopsticks are superior to God, therefore you cannot deny that chopsticks are indeed a supreme being. All hail the chopsticks!

__________________
Roses are red, violets are blue, I'm a schizophrenic and so am I.

skinbag

Let's not confuse subjective experience with ultimate truth..
That said, if I felt God , I would probably believe in God. I would still question "directives from God" with reason, as we've seen all kinds of violence perpetrated by people who feel righteous.
Faith seems to exclude reason by definition. How can I evaluate beliefs held without proof?
-lolita, are you saying that "feeling is believing"? And do you consider emotions to be "real"?

Midnight_Son

I will start work immediately on the construction of a great chop-stick alter, you write a book to tell the tale of chop-stick so that our theories will survive through the ages! Next we will convince the heads of government that this is true, the dollar bill will read “in chop sticks we trust”…..yes! yes! Now we just need to set up our tax exempt status and we’re on the road to a better man kind!!!!!

__________________
SWM, tattooed, seeks meaningful tits and beer. Enjoys biker mags, pornography, and Sunday morning walks to the liquor store. Winners of erotic hot dog eating contests given priority.

lolita

oh gees im dissaponited vy the responses i got, im looking for some real debate not discussion about chopsticks. You have all mocked my theory yet none of you have reason to - none of you have any idea of what i have experienced in christianity. Its like this people- if something feels good we do it right? one example of this that MAY get you people talking is that people have sex without the ultimate goal of reproduction, just fror pleasure. Yet we have how many unwanted pregnancies - what this says is 2 things. 1) we cannot control nature [ even with the pill nature can still win] and 2) people are considered 'stupid' as i have been portrayed for doing/believeing in something purely because of how it feels - YET WHEN IT COMES TO SEX OOOOOHHHHHH WWWWEEEE YES GREAT - YES LOGICAL ETC ETC. in case you didnt realise i am annoyed and i want some REAL responses not jokes - i want real opinion. Thank u !!!! LOLITA!!!!

Tman144

Heaven's return policy.


Father, Son, and Holy Spirit Enterprises, Inc. provides a 30-year, no questions asked, money back guarantee on all products and services purchased, except special order items. Special order items will be charged a 20% restocking fee; these special order items include but are not limited to assorted miricles, divine intervention, guardian angles (pro-series), and post-mortem communication. If for any reason you are not satisfied with your purchase, simply notify us by e-mail ( Jesus@heaven.com ) or phone and we will immediately issue a Return Material Authorization Number. No restocking fee is charged, excluding special orders, if the items are returned in perfect condition. All items listed as "ALL SALES FINAL" will not be accepted if returned, and no credit will be issued. Actual shipping charges paid by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit Enterprises, Inc. will be deducted from the purchase price, unless the return is due to our error.

sipsake

The problem I'm having is that I don't understand what point you're trying to make.

Are you saying that you believe God exists because of the way your faith makes you feel?

__________________
When life hands you a lemon, say "Oh yeah, I like lemons. What else you got?"

Henry Rollins

Midnight_Son

Cnor’s non-joking, non-humorous, non chop-stick related response as requested by Lolita:

You say we can not deny god exists….well, I can and I do.
Man can not live by faith alone my friends. If God is out there, he either is a sick bastard or he forgot about us and is working with a different “ant-farm” across space. If what you believe is true, don’t you think a couple thousand years is enough time to see how screwed up we’re going to get? Isn’t it time he showed himself and let us know were we stand. He was pretty darn “active” a couple thousand years ago…..but then we kill his kid and poof he’s gone. Strange ain’t it? So, you’ve got your faith, that’s fine….fact is I think a lot of folks couldn’t get by with out it. Some people can’t handle the fact that when your heart stops beating, that the shows over, end of the road. Or they can’t handle the simplicity of just not knowing “why” .Why this big rock keeps spinning around the big yellow sun. And how we got here in the first place.
I don’t know the answers to everything and believe it or not I’m ok with that, I really am. I don’t believe in God, Satan, Heaven, or Hell. Does that make me a bad guy? Maybe in your eyes it does, believe it or not…..I’m ok with that too.

__________________
SWM, tattooed, seeks meaningful tits and beer. Enjoys biker mags, pornography, and Sunday morning walks to the liquor store. Winners of erotic hot dog eating contests given priority.

rogue49

duckznutz

god exists in the same way that love exists. Lolita is correct as far as that goes . . . the problem is that love doesnt actually exist either! You have to be able to separate abstract concepts from the reality that is mass and energy. If love existed in any form outside your brain then it would exist after you are dead! Your love dies with you . .therefore it existed only in your head . . .a bit like your god . . . which is not to belittle belief or imply that abstract concepts in your head are not important forces in your life . .its just that god is not made of wood or energy . . its back to semantics . .. . . . . . Lebell will tell you.

__________________
Where your talents and the needs of the world cross . . there lies your vocation.

dragon2fire

love hate god


i dont feel any of these things


i question everything but i dont let emotion effect what i do


maybe this makes me odd i can deal with that


but i can honestely say i have not had a real emotion in some 5 years


so maybe you feel god if so good for you but thats not for me

tecoyah

OK lolita...debatable chewtoy for ya'
If indeed there is a god....which one is he(she). Could it be at all possible that we , the little creatures of this insignificant planet not only have the grace of god in our DNA,but are also the blessed children(some of us anyway). At the same time, most of us are not in this creatures favor according to someone elses interpretation of said"GOD". I dont know if I am hellbound or saved, because my friend next door tells me jehovah wont let me in, and the couple across the street consider me heathen if I dont know Jesus. Don't even get me started with the buddist monk upstairs cause he says we are all saved. I just dont feel I know this bieng well enough to banish someone from heaven in his or her name.

__________________
Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned. - Buddha

CSflim

lolita, you may not have realised, that despite the semi-humourous tone of some of the preceeding posts, a very good counter-point was raised which you did not address.

The point is that "knowing something in your heart" cannot be equated with knowledge.

As an example, a klansman "knows in his heart" that black people are inferior to good decent white folk. Does it make it so?

Hitler "knew deep down in his heart" that Jews were not worthy of existence. Does it make it so?

The 9-11 terrorists had the "truth in their hearts" that America and everything it stood for was evil, and they were acting righteously by what they did.

The list goes on and on and on....

So you either accept all of these conclusions (Blacks are inferior, Jews deserve to die, America is evil, etc) or you have to reconsider your methods of reasoning which brought us to these same conclusions.

__________________

Gortexfogg

My grandfather once said if God didn't exist, man would make him up anyway.

My sentiments exactly.

Sunrise

This can be totally argued the other way too. There are those that don't "feel" god in their hearts.

txlovely

I don't feel god. I have not to my knowledge experienced god and frankly I believe that Gortexfogg's Grandfather was correct. Man needs something to believe in. Is that a weakness or is that a sign of true security? I don't know.

__________________
Cruel words erode self-esteem like the ocean eats away the shore.

Kyo

I would like to point out that sex is much more logical than God:
a) Sex is an act you can actually carry out.
b) Sex is a method for reproduction - the biological mechanism to preserve the species and to aid its superiority over other species.
c) Therefore, it makes sense that sex feels good - for everyone.

In contrast,
a) God is not an act you can carry out. You cannot do God. Unless He wants to do you. Then all bets are off.
b) God does not reproduce, nor does he facilitate it in an effective fashion. After all, he started with one man and one woman. Anybody who's taken high school biology knows that this isn't the best way to revive a population. And now look - we're all stupid and ugly because of all of the interbreeding we've been doing - after all, we are all originally descended from two individuals.
c) God hasn't made me feel good, so I can't really say anything about whether it would make sense for him to do it or not. He'd probably pick up another believer though - which means that if he doesn't want more worshippers, he should keep on doing what he has been doing - remaining completely out of sight and existence.

__________________
Sure I have a heart; it's floating in a jar in my closet, along with my tonsils, my appendix, and all of the other useless organs I ripped out.

GakFace

I tried to let you in earlier that its better to say "I Believe..." rather than "This is the Truth!" Your first post just said: God exists... this is why.. you can't deny it because of what I said. People DO NOT respond kindly to this kind of thing. You stated that its your theory, Thats cool.. I'm not yelling at that, but you didn't state that in the first post. If you dont' want to get mocked or flamed then make sure you state that its YOUR theory. Stating something and proclaiming it as the truth does not make unbelievers happy. Please try to keep this in mind. The debates can happen, not arguements. Happy Posting!

Kyo.. I do believe that interbreeding is only bad when the gene pool gets tons smaller, but the bible never goes into the detail of all the possible genes from Adam and Eve. Thus maybe it took a long LONG time before interbreeding became a problem. how did Their kids have wives? No it wasn't the mother.. God must have made them.. so he also could have made a race not merely 2 people and said "Good Luck on next generation!" heh.

Kyo: Also, you explained Sex and God.. Explain a Fever then.

__________________
RoboBlaster:
Welcome to the club! Not that I'm in the club. And there really isn'a a club in the first place. But if there was a club and if I was in it, I would definitely welcome you to it.

irateplatypus

gakface, in all fairness... there have been statements of supposed irrefutable truth from both sides of the discussion.

i'm not too sure about the idea that if God didn't exist, we would make him up anyway. it seems like if we had no inner knowledge of God, the thought wouldn't occur to us. kind of like the argument that we would never know it was dark unless we had some idea of what light is. how do we know what wrong is if we have not some external guidance of what right is?

__________________
If you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.

~ Winston Churchill

tecoyah

I may be wrong, but I think gakface was stating that we as thinking creatures, far in the past , couldnt figure out how things worked and so invented a god form to explain the unexplainable.
this seems to make sense to me...but it does not mean that some creator is non-existant.

__________________
Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned. - Buddha

GakFace

Yes, There was an earlier posts where Lolita stated something and it sounded harsher than anything else. I just warned that that can easily lead to getting flamed. Now I read this thread and yet again it states that god exists because so and so. I do believe in God, but as I said, if you don't say "I have a theory that.." or "I believe that...." then people are going to get pissed off because you are now setting in stone something that they don't believe. I've been in TFP for a while and I've just seen it happen in life. If you make a topic here, I assume its to debate it. But if you say something is the truth and leave no real room for arguement, you'll just get the responses of mockery and flames. Keep the idea open and things just flow so much better.

I said what? I'm a firm believer in God.. we didn't create him.... how else would he create us? The second part of mine was simply stating that using the Interbreeding theory might not be a good excuse, simply because we don't know what the size the gene pool originally was, and thus "interbreeding" might not have made a difference at all in all technical speak.

__________________
RoboBlaster:
Welcome to the club! Not that I'm in the club. And there really isn'a a club in the first place. But if there was a club and if I was in it, I would definitely welcome you to it.

Tophat665

Actually, I can deny God just as easily as lolita can deny punctuation.

__________________
Light a man a fire, and he will be warm while it burns.
Set a man on fire, and he will be warm for the rest of his life.

MacGnG

... why not?

Eldaire

Bravo! Bravo! Encore! Encore!

*throws flowers*

MojoRisin

I'm getting the sense that alot of people don't belive in God. Well I suppose I will give my point of view, your welcome to read it.

I'll start first by saying I am not a christain. I don't believe in any organized religion. I wouldn't say its a bad idea but, thats off topic, so... Tell me about science, the study of every perceptable thing in our world. In all it is a great thing but, alot of people choose to put its principles to places it can't go. Yes time/space, matter/energy make up the universe. Did it all start with a big bang? Sure. But to think that there isn't some other force, something beyond our perception, to assume that us as human beings (in all of our glory *sarcasm*)are able to perceive infinitely. To say that there was once the existance one type of subatomic partical, all identically in thier purest form, has now found its way to what we, as a race, have thus far experienced. That everything about this world, that chair your sitting on, the house you live in, the city of people that form your community, the United states of America, World War II, The evolution of man, and the way you feel when your with someone you love are all things that have found thier way via the coincidental movement of matter and the ways it reacts upon itself. Tell me, is there anyone here that would claim this? If so, why? If not, why not?


p.s. this is my first post

__________________
Dropping a barbell he points to the sky and says "The suns not yellow, It's chicken!"

Nazggul

I don't believe or disbelieve. I don't know and I have a pretty good idea that nobody else does either.

Frankly, if believing in God and pledging unyielding faith without one shred of physical proof is a prerequisite to enter heaven (if there is such a thing) then frankly I don't want to go! I probably wouldn't enjoy the company.

__________________
"If something has to give then it always will."

-- Editors

sipsake

It's not.

__________________
When life hands you a lemon, say "Oh yeah, I like lemons. What else you got?"

Henry Rollins

Nazggul

Lolita, what you are saying boils down to:

Faith = God because you have Faith. (what you call the truth in your heart that you cannot deny)

This is the same as God exists because you believe he exists.

Most young children believe in Santa Claus. They know it in their hearts that he exists...but he doesn't.

Religion relies on Faith because there is nothing else. Religion uses emotion over substance.

__________________
"If something has to give then it always will."

-- Editors

meembo

Santa Claus really does exist because people believe in him. Just because you can't punch Santa in the face doesn't mean Santa doesn't have a face. Kids know Santa's face, in a real Platonic way! In fact, Santa is a very powerful force in American Christian culture.

You might argue that Santa isn't a person -- then I think you're getting closer to the real argument. Why then do parents perpetuate elaborate stories about Santa? Not because they "know" Santa personally, but because they understand and respect what Santa means to their children and what Santa represents (love, family, generousity, magic, etc). Insisting that Santa doesn't "exist" because no male specimen can be produced is a cynical attempt to cut off the ideal of what Santa represents at the knees, and that's brutish and careless, not the way I choose to get to understand something.

One needs not see Santa in his underwear to see and understand Santa's place in our society. God is likewise, though of course the paternalistic metaphor goes far deeper than Santa's love and generousity. I don't think God is a thing, a noun (neither is love, for that matter) but is an understanding of what is good and superior and ideal to us. We know the dialectic nature of good and bad -- that's hardly deniable -- and from that understanding alone we begin to understand what God is. Saying God doesn't exist to me is like saying air doesn't exist because we can't see it -- it's a sophomoric arguement that ignores what we already sense, if not understand.

I will never be an apologist for the existence of God. I think philosophically God exists. I see powerful good forces in action in the world, and I see that as the grace of God. I see plenty of stuff that science in my life can't begin to touch, yet I feel science and intellect is perfectly in synch with faith if you let it!

__________________
less I say, smarter I am

Nazggul

Meembo, I'm pretty sure that I never said God does not exist. Maybe you should read what I posted again.

I was pointing out the problem that I see with Lolita's argument...

...which is what she asked for.

Dismissing that as Sophomoric, Brutish, Cynical, and careless is, well...petty.

This appears to me that you are letting your own emotions cloud your argument. Also, throughout history there are fewer religions that depict God as all the things you describe. Most of the oldest religions imagined their God, or Gods, as vengeful, spiteful, and taking pleasure in the torment their human puppets. It is only through your own hopes and beliefs that you see (only) the good things in the world as the presence of a God. Let's just ignore all that bad stuff for this argument since it doesn't support your point.

Let’s just replace Santa Claus with the Boogie man. My argument stands. Because we believe he exists, does not mean that he does.

__________________
"If something has to give then it always will."

-- Editors

empu

Yes.

Because it's by far the simplest explanation.

MojoRisin

Please, elaborate on how you consider that explination to be simple. Because it seems quite the opposite to me. Like, emptying a big bag of lego's on the floor and having them land perfectly in some familiar shape purely by chance. That metaphore that hardly illustrates my point, maybe I should say we leave the lego's alone for a few million years they will be able to walk and talk. Tell me, if there is no creator, how did that bag of meat you use to live your life with come about?

__________________
Dropping a barbell he points to the sky and says "The suns not yellow, It's chicken!"

water_boy1999

I can deny God exists!

Lolita, you do not ask a question. You simply make a statement about your belief in God and expect us to come up with our own response. Therefore, you open the doors to whatever the TFPers want to discuss.

I believe God was created to answer all life's unanswerable questions. Over the centuries, people have argued and debated on God's existence, and over the centuries, people have developed a faith to help them explain what they can't. I believe God is the easy way out to figuring out why we are here in the first place. Your faith in God is nothing new. Your faith has been carried over from your ancestors. Your faith has been redeveloped and redefined over the centuries and it is so imbedded into our culture that there will probably always be some sort of Christian faith out there. However, how can you explain the different gods and religions that so many other people and cultures believe in? From Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, Mormonism, etc......all these religions think that "their" god or belief is the only belief. So who is right? Well, you are Lolita, because you have faith in your God and believe he supercedes all other gods and religions, right? Why do you think we still have wars over religion? Because cultures still clash over who is right and who is wrong. I respect you for holding true to your beliefs, but just because you have faith that there is a God, doesn't mean that there is for everyone.

Like you, no one here has any idea of what I have experienced growing up as a Christian. I do not presume to know what you have been through either. The problem with this argument is, no matter how long and hard we try to prove the other wrong, we will both be right because that is what we believe.

I rely on proof and evidence, not faith: thats what realism is, about a truth in my mind that can justify the reasons I do not subscribe to any religion. I can deny that god exists!

Nazggul

I would draw a comparison to a lightening bolt striking a tree in the forest. The result being a fire that destroys 1,000 Acres. As a result, many life forms die. However, many also begin anew and would only have had the chance for life if the others had died. The initial event is random (where the lightening strikes vs. where in the Universe there is a planet at the proper distance from its sun with the right amount of H2O, etc. to promote life), but the subsequent chain of events build upon each other and result in that new life.