The intimacy between god and man …?
by sjjohnson89
Hmm
…………….
A majority of Christians i meet have one thing in common, no its not that they are nice people or that they live by the moral code of the bible. What they have in common is this, to term it as they do a relationship with god. What is this, this relationship they talk about? I welcome insight from anyone who claims to have such a thing.
To have a relationship with god it would have to be an emotional being. Now, there is no room for such a being within our existence, at least not to our knowledge. The only way god can be this emotional being is for god to exist outside of our rules, outside of our existence. For god to exist in our domain i cant break it down to any other possibility than god=mathematics. If god is mathematics, then it cant be an emotional being but an endless sequence of rules. So, with what we know and what we can project with our current scientific knowledge today, for god to be this spiritual being it must live outside of our reality no? Such a projection opens god up to an infinite number of possibilities, what it can be, how it exists and so on.
I find it difficult to believe in miracles that many Christians lay claim to witnessing. Just today i was speaking to a lady of faith, she went on to tell me about this baffling story involving god speaking to her and healing her distorted leg many years ago. I wont get into details but i have no explanation for how exactly her leg could have healed by itself when she was briefed by doctors that she would be disabled for life. This happened just over a couple of days from how she described it. She went from being a cripple to dancing about in joy.
Ok, something is missing here.
These kinds of miracles dont exist to our knowledge, or do they? Im willing to bet shes missing key points out in her story, she believes god healed her no doubt but it cant have played out how she claimed. If god is capable of bending the rules with which the universe is based on, being mathematics, surely we would have witnessed such a thing no? Why is it that the only people who witness these kinds of things are either on drugs, woken up late at night, are suffering from cold temperatures or more to the point, believe in god. I want to witness one of these miracles myself, i want to witness water turning into gold. I want to see it with my eyes, i want to make my own conclusions. I want to rationalize it myself.
This relationship between man and god is supposed to be an emotional one. The holy spirit im told is the key to this relationship. What is the holy spirit? Nicky Gumbel puts it something like this, be filled with the holy spirit and be filled with gods love, like a sponge being drenched in water. Something is really off here. The point im supposedly missing is that god loves me. If i can understand that then everything else will come into place, thats what im told. This just feels ……. i dont even know. What i do know is that something feels very very off. Almost like preying on our need to be loved, which we all suffer from whether we admit it or not. Theres nothing bad about these people, in fact, if youve read my earlier posts they are overwhelmingly good people. I guess, maybe because they feel they have been fulfilled they have a sense of being complete. Hence why they give of a very positive energy? I do not know. But it would explain this supernatural atmosphere and kindness they give off to others.
As a thinker, i cannot take things at face value. Christianity demands that i do it to understand them, to understand faith and to understand god. They ask i jump of a cliff with a leap of faith, blind faith. I want to understand the Christian mind, i want to see what these people are seeing, i want to experience this relationship with god that they claim to have so i can judge for myself whether they are living in a delusion. It seems i am destined on my current path to go round and round in circles Something needs to change if i am ever to truly understand the Christian from their perspective, rather than just mine and that of science. I understand the scientist, i understand the general motivations of people in everyday life, but what i do not understand is faith.
Maybe i seek too much in my pursuit of answers. But, i ask for answers to my questions regardless.
…………………………………………
You’ll find it, you just need to have ‘faith’ that you will.
Jesus: the softer side of YHWH. Wikipedia does a fair job of the personal god thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_god
Hi myatheistlife,
Thanks for that!
Out of interest, what is your background?
Background? In what way? How did I become an atheist? When did I start writing? What are my hobbies? What’s on my resume? LOL, I can’t fathom which you want.
lol, well, im not really sure exactly what i meant by it either. So, ill reword.
Tell us about yourself lol. (including of course, how did you become an atheist)
I tend to keep my real life separate or off of the Internet for reasons not wholly concerned with atheism and the effects that can have.
I was a child of an evangelical fundamentalist preacher. By the time I graduated school I had already seen reason to doubt that being Christian made anyone Christ-like. Thinking that the church I was in was simply doing it wrong, I sought god in others and yet even others. I began to explore religions of the world looking for the “real god” that I was indoctrinated to believe in. Eventually I gave up on that and settled on ‘spirituality’ and later agnosticism.
Despite looking there was no evidence that there is any reason to believe in gods or the supernatural. After many years, fed up with looking and with great fear I told god that he would have to show himself to me because I’m tired of waiting to see him or credible evidence of him. I feared I might be struck dead. I wasn’t, so weeks to months later I was comfortable enough to say what I knew that day – I’m an atheist and there is no god.
I’ve continued learning and searching since then. Nothing has sent me back to theism and everything has pushed me further into atheism. Now, I’m anti-theist, having seen the damage that religion does both in society and first hand. I was literally afraid for my life that day. I had been living in fear for my life. That has a long term detrimental effect. I’m free of it now.
I find now that nihilism/atomism/mechanical atheism get a very bad rap that they do not deserve. There is much reason to hold nihilistic values. We are mechanical animals, borne of evolution and made senile by our ability to think. Sentience is both a good and a bad. I have never been more at peace with myself and life than now. I find transcendent moments in seeing the stars at night, watching a wild creature go about the business of staying alive, and the sheer beauty of the written word when it reaches out across miles and decades and touches the mind of another. I give meaning to my life. It has the purpose of allowing me to experience and be, nothing else. People are generally prone to all sorts of silliness. Sometimes it gets dangerous for the rest of us. Now I blog and write about the things that I find caustic and dangerous to society, mostly monotheistic religions. You can read a lot about me in my blog too.
Im sorry i havent responded sooner, i have been busy and have not been on since my last post. I need to make time this month to post more regularly.
I had a suspicion you came from a background with some religious influences. I will respond to you tomorrow, i plan on posting as well, will catch up with your posts on your blog too.
Ill tell you about my background too since you have gone into some depth yourself.
Regards
SJ
The relationship I have with God is slightly different than what other Christians might claim. Your average everyday Christian might say that they speak to God and God speaks back. That is not so for me. My relationship with Him can be explained by that sentence, but it’s not so literal. For me, I pray and ask God, and He answers me. He speaks, not literally, but through actions. He lets me know He’s there.
You say that God in our realm has to be mathematics, He cannot be emotional. I don’t agree. Mathematics, if you think about it, is very narrow-minded. 2+2=4 always. No matter what you do, this will be so. Seeing as how God created me, you, and other open-minded people, He can’t be narrow-minded. Another thing, God created what we call the laws of Physics and Mathematics. This makes it possible for Him to work within and outside of those laws. Thus, He can be emotional and mathematical.
You say that you are searching for this “relationship with God”. Personally, I believe that this is a good thing. You are already on the right path. You believe that in order to acheive this relationship, you must understand faith. I agree with you. Understanding faith is hard for any thinking individual. As I understand it, faith is something you must have for everyday life. You have faith that you will wake up the next morning as you go to sleep, you have faith that air will be there when you take another breath, you have faith that a chair will be there when you sit down. It’s this kind of faith that you and every other person in the world has, a truly BLIND faith. Some people have faith that God is there and others have faith that He is not. Even then, such faith isn’t as blind as previously described.
Hope this helps.
Sincerelly,
Luke the Wolf
Hi Luke the Wolf,
You are right about faith, we have it in many aspects in our lives, all of us. I have faith in one specific area of my life, faith in my feelings for my other half. Faith that our love is real, faith that i will never be with another woman. I have an immense amount of faith in our relationship, in her.
Whats different when it comes to faith in god is that, i cant ‘touch’ god in a way which my senses tell me i am touching god. Therefore its an impossibility for me at this point to bridge that gap. Something has to change for that bridge to become visible to me.
You say god speaks to you through actions, i can understand that. If i am honest, i believe that fate is a possibility. My life is a series of ‘flukes’ and ‘coincidences’ that at times when i reflect, seem unreal and implausible. If my mind wasn’t in the way, how i perceive things personally, its likely i would be religious as i am an emotion based person at the heart of it, i act by my heart as opposed to my brain in a majority of aspects in my life.
When i said if god exists within our realm, he has to be mathematics, what i mean is i dont see a way that a god can exist within our existence. I feel that if god exists, god exists behind mathematics, if god created them, how can god exist within those rules, wouldnt then god himself become caged by such rules? Mathematics is our way of articulating the language, the code on which the universe seemingly built on. If you were to change the rules, it would act like a domino effect, we would see the effects of such things scattered across the universe surely? Mathematics is narrow minded in the sense that its confined by rules. If god exists, i have to speculate that he must exist outside of such rules, perhaps outside of any rules. Hence, god is incomprehensible as how can you exist outside of rules? A human mind cannot understand such an existence.
If the Bible is accurate, if Jesus really did perform those miracles then one has to wonder and speculate that maybe god can work within our rules, within our time and space. But to me, whether Jesus performed those miracles or not is an unknown factor that will stay unknown as i havent witnessed it with my own eyes. So, for me to take on board the possibility of god working within our rules, i need information that i do not have now. Something that is evidence of such a thing being possible.
At times, it feels like i am going in circles. I hope that at some point i find myself moving in a straight line.
Thank you for commenting, i enjoyed reading and responding to it.
I welcome you to post your thoughts anytime.
SJ
I agree with you when you say that God must exist outside of the rules and laws of this universe. If He existed within them, then He would be confined by them. I believe that He exists outside of them, but also works through them. He can work through them in the same He can work through you to reach someone in need.
Yes, you can’t sense God with your five senses, causing it to be a completely blind faith. But, let’s say that your having lunch with some friends. For some reason, you need to get up and go do something. When you come back, you sit down without looking at your chair only to find out that one of your friends has pulled your chair out from under you. You then fall to the ground with a little bit of anger toward that friend. Now, when you were fixing to sit down in your chair, you had faith that your chair would be there, yes? Such faith is also blind.
Sincerely,
Luke the Wolf
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