Religion and faith

[TheGodBen]

The universe is too wonderful and complex and magnificent.

See, I look at it from the other perspective; this universe is so rubbish that it could not possibly have been designed and it only makes sense (in my mind) if it is the accumulation of random happenings. Just look at this universe, the vast, vast majority of it is empty beyond a few stray atoms. If this universe was in some way designed then it is an utter failure and the designer needs to start again with an emphasis on optimisation.

I'm rather delightful myself.

I have not seen any evidence to support this claim, therefore I cannot accept it as true. I'm not saying that it's impossible, just that I see no reason to believe it.

 

[Ha'kiv]

@Trekker4747 But isn't God then also too complicated and mysterious to have appeared by accident?

I suppose you realize that the condescending tone in many of your posts isn't helping your arguments.

Well, darn, eh?

You make us atheists look bad.

First of all, I'm not an atheist. Second, I oppose religion. I'm sorry if I'm giving you a bad name.

 

[Trekker4747]

@Trekker4747 But isn't God then also too complicated and mysterious to have appeared by accident?

The possibility of there being a God doesn't exclude the possibility that He also has a "God." Not knowing what kind of universe of plane God lives in, nor the complexity and mysteriousness of it I cannot say whether or not it would merit the existence of there being an even higher plane but there's certainly a possibility.

Just like matter is made of atoms, atoms are made of sub-atomic particles, sub-atomic particles are made of quarks, quarks have to be made of something and so on. But at some point you're going to reach the end, the most basic thing there is and can be as there's nothing smaller that makes it up and you're just at pure, raw, basic creation.

So it is possible that God has his "own god" or at least a belief system through which it is felt there's another plane that created the one God exists on as, logically, there's always going to be a higher dimension but at somepoint that'd have to end too until you're at the top. I don't think that top is the God we believe in and that God is no more aware of us or considers us anymore than we consider or aware of that infinitesimally tiny thing that makes up a sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-quark beyond "it could be there."

On a personal note, Ha, you've been here a few short days and you're hardly winning anyone over with your demeanor, I consider you get a bit more into the friendship and the fold before you start arguing with pretty much everyone on anything. In the time you've been here you've started three topic two of which have pretty much devolved into a melee of arguments with you pretty much calling people out for being wrong on their own views of things. I say this as a fellow poster and not as a member of the board's staff. Take a breath, get into a more calm, reasonable, discussion with people on more mundane topics and try and to consider that not everyone thinks the same way as you do or may have the same level of experiences or knowledge as you do.

Oh, and check your Group Memberships and come and join us in TNZ, we'd love to have you.

 

[Ha'kiv]

^Whoa, whoa, okay, wait. So basically, you're saying God (the one you believe in, at least) isn't aware of us? In what way is he responsible for our creation, then (assuming he must be, since that makes him our God)? Either way, once you reach the "top" God, he is without a creator. Am I correct?

*Much appreciated, but that's quite alright, fellow poster, I come online to discuss things, not to to take breaths or get into friendships.

Expecting no disagreements when debating religious beliefs, hurr durr.

 

[{ Emilia }]

Oh, and check your Group Memberships and come and join us in TNZ, we'd love to have you.

I'm having second thoughts there tbh.

 

[iguana_tonante]

I oppose religion.

And you are gonna oppose religion with all your energy... on a Star Trek board. Talk about minimum result with maximum effort.

I fundamentally disagree with religion as well, not only on the content of their beliefs, but also with their whole frame of mind. Yet, I can live with religious people without gouging their eyes out. Accept it: you are not gonna turn them to your point of view, you are not gonna convince them, and you are not gonna convert them. At most, you are gonna make them think about their beliefs from a different perspective, but then it's on their hands what they want to do with them. I'm the first one in line to mock the guy who comes here proclaiming "I asked God to make it stop raining, and he did! It was a miracle! Whoo-hoo!" But living your live in anger and resentment because people are not swayed from their irrational beliefs by your brilliant logic is not useful, and it's not healthy.

You know the obnoxious fundamentalist that rings at 7 am on a Sunday morning telling you that you are gonna burn for all eternity if you don't repent and accept Jeebus as your sweet, sweet Lord and Saviour dripping vaguely homosexual innuendos? Well, that's you, in method if not in content.

You doing nothing except making people roll your eyes at you, religious and irreligious as well. As a (supposedly) admirer of science, you should take a deep breath, consider your data, and rethink your approach to experimentation.

 

[Trekker4747]

^Whoa, whoa, okay, wait. So basically, you're saying God (the one you believe in, at least) isn't aware of us? In what way is he responsible for our creation, then (assuming he must be, since that makes him our God)? Either way, once you reach the "top" God, he is without a creator. Am I correct?

No, no, no..

That "top" god isn't aware of us (if there is one, and by "god" I meaning "creature who lives on higher dimensional plane than us") because we're way too below him to be considered. The plane directly above us, however, is where "our God" is and who may have interaction with us and is certainly "aware" of us just like we some day may become "aware" of 2D life, our narrow experiences with the universe precludes that being the case now.

But it seems to me there'd have to be a "top" at some point because at some point there just has to be nowhere else to fit another dimension but that's pure speculation on my part for all I know the higher dimensions could go on forever with each higher dimension becoming less and less aware of the lower ones.

 

[Trekker4747]

Oh, and check your Group Memberships and come and join us in TNZ, we'd love to have you.

I'm having second thoughts there tbh.

tbh?

 

[Ha'kiv]

I see. I don't understand how this fits the definition of a god. If there are beings who live in less dimensions than us, how does that make us their god?

 

[Nerys Ghemor]

I consider myself Agnostic, but to make people give me a WTF face I call myself an Agnostic Christian Scientist. My "religious" beliefs fall mostly with the Christian side of things but I don't believe in their book's sayings when it comes to the origins of life, the universe and everything, there I fall more in line with what science says and I do not believe we know, or can know, everything there is to know about God and what He may or may not want. (Agnostic.)

It isn't anti-Christian at all to accept science, despite what literalists may have told you. I believe that God did indeed create the Universe. I believe that He attempted to explain it in a way that would give people who did not understand science some way to grasp the basic concepts: that it was done in a methodical, step-by-step manner, that He did so with purpose, that He gave us souls, and that as beings of free will, we chose to abuse that creation as well as abusing each other. To my belief, however, this explanation was never intended to be literal, even though certain "snapshots" and "images" (particularly from the time of the Big Bang and the formation of the stars) do bear an artistic resemblance to what we have now discovered occurred. Note that I said artistic resemblance, not literal resemblance. However, just because something is a work of art does not mean it cannot carry truths that hold great importance to us. God didn't fuss with trying to explain the atom to the Israelites (heck, even the mathematical concept of zero hadn't been discovered when the earliest books of the Bible were set in writing) or time frames like billions of years, or even putting the steps in exactly what we are discovering to be the correct order. It was a general idea intended above all to convey the basic, upper-level concepts I described earlier...not a scientific treatise. I don't take it as such. I don't feel that undercuts my faith at all.

 

[{ Emilia }]

tbh?

Sheesh, Trekker. Learn your internet abbreviations.

To Be Honest.

And, yeah. It could be fun to have Ha'kiv in TNZ where we can flame trolls and call people out on their bullshit. But then again most of the time TNZ is also about having reasonable discussions and I don't see much of that in this thread.

I'm totally with the iguana on this one.

 

[Ha'kiv]

He sure dumbed down certain things for us in a strage way
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK7P7uZFf5o

 

[Ha'kiv]

Silly girl, do you know the definition of a troll?

 

[Trekker4747]

I see. I don't understand how this fits the definition of a god. If there are beings who live in less dimensions than us, how does that make us their god?

Right now it doesn't, because we've no interaction with them.

So let's go with this:

Say there's a universe of 2D beings that we are presently unaware of because either we've not the technology to interact with them or we've simply not found them yet due to different locations. From the perspective of the 2D creatures translated to our own, these creatures are living in an age similar to the one we had eons ago, perhaps when life was just beginning here on Earth.

Then, someday, in the future we discover this 2D universe and are amazed by it and eventually discover we can interact with it and even impose changes on it! We find that we can set things in motion, now these things have to behave in a "2D" way (i.e. nothing can move "up" or "down") and it has to obey whatever rules and physics exist in such a bizarre place but we can do it. Then we discover that if we do certain things we can guide their "evolution", we can see that certain creatures survive and see that others don't, again obeying their physical laws, hell if we really wanted to we can reanimate some of them! Time is different there, too, what's days for us is perhaps years for them, before too long those creatures begin developing an intelligence and realize that what they are now is too complicated for there to not be "something" guiding them.

Hell, maybe there is no 2D life but somewhere down the road we'll do something to make it, setting into motion events we've no direct or meaningful control of and it's pretty much on auto-pilot with us only being able to make the tiniest of changes that in grand-scheme of things has no real impact on the whole. We want to wipe out life in that area? Okay, well first we need to see what we need to set into motion for that to happen.

To me it's all "possible" much more than it's "impossible."

 

[{ Emilia }]

Ha'kiv: You need to get faster at replying to your own posts. These are just 2. I heard if you manage 4 in a row you win a prize.

 

[Trekker4747]

Silly girl, do you know the definition of a troll?

A troll is a person who says things in order to incite strong reactions from people, usually by taking the extreme side of an argument on the opposing side or by goading others into an argument by a strong use of language.

Some of the comments you've made here has pretty much called people idiots or intellectual inferiors for having their beliefs or beliefs that differ from your own which, slightly, treads into the idea of trolling.

 

[Ha'kiv]

Herp derp.

 

[{ Emilia }]

Silly girl, do you know the definition of a troll?

A troll is a person who says things in order to incite strong reactions from people, usually by taking the extreme side of an argument on the opposing side or by goading others into an argument by a strong use of language.

Some of the comments you've made here has pretty much called people idiots or intellectual inferiors for having their beliefs or beliefs that differ from your own which, slightly, treads into the idea of trolling.

This.

I just couldn't be arsed to give Ha'kiv a serious response there but this would've been it.

My reply probably would've been:

Trolls are large humanoids of great strength and poor intellect.
While in Norse mythology, the Troll was a magical creature with special skills, in Tolkien's writings they are portrayed as evil, stupid, with crude habits, although still intelligent enough to communicate with a known language.

Just for the sake of it.

 

[Ha'kiv]

I'll try harder.

 

[Ha'kiv]

Apparently, you've never met a troll who deserves to be called a troll. They are anything but of poor intellect. I, unfortunately, am not one.