Josefina1110 wrote:Here are a couple of concepts. 1. God is merciful and mighty and he knows that we are but made of dust. All He wants of us is to believe that He exists and follow Him in good faith. 2. If you don't believe Him and ignore that He exists, He is also a God of wrath. He can do anything to us because He created us. But it is not Him that really do the testing of our faith. He will turn us over to the adversary. He created Lucifer the angel of light who turned out to try to overthrow Him so Satan was the overthrown Lucifer who tempts us not to obey God. But God knows Satan's limitations. He cannot do anything to us more than we can bear. But we need to repent and ask forgiveness for our disobedience if we acknowledge Him in our lives. He said that He has plans for us. He said that we are fearfully and wonderfully made for His pleasure. But when man fell his goal was delayed. God will reign in the end to his people who will not die. Unbelievers are what they are because it is fun to have nobody to be responsible for. But fun is temporary, especially in this fallen world. Only our belief promises us an everlasting life and happiness. This is what is difficult as a believer. "If you love me, take up your cross and follow me." A true believer follows a narrow path. That is the reason many don't want to go there. It would be very easy to ignore God because man follows the path of least resistance. You can't go to heaven just by being good. Jesus died for our sins. But, we first have to believe and then follow Him for our good and the Holy Spirit will guide us to do good because we are not perfect. " . . . Though your sins be scarlet, it shall be as white as snow."
I'm not expecting to go to any heaven because is only a human fancy.
And any god who hands me over to a satan simply because I didn't believe I had reason to think IT/He exists, well that's a small "g" god in my opinion, more concerned about about how people view him than he/it is about how we lead our lives. I expressed that in my previous post. Any self-centered god, existing or not, will never be my god. But of course again, no such true God actually exists. An any true universal God that just might possibly exist, if it's a good God, it won't be so trivial, at a human-like level, to demand such praise. And to go back to a previous point I made much earlier, just the idea of this whole topic, that the human species somehow imagines that it's significant enough to have any sort of a direct connection with some possible universal God is in itself such an enormously high anthropocentric opinion of ourselves that it almost demands laughter when one really thinks about it. But there are certainly plenty of humans who can't let go of that image of themselves.
What really is the difference between an all-powerful God not actually taking wrath out on us ITself but handing us over to a Satan which He can be sure will cause us unimaginable suffering? That's like Caesar saying, I'll not use the whip, here you, Satan, you use the whip. Its still God/Caesar making that decision.
-- Thu Mar 02, 2017 11:30 am --
My first response above was rather rapid as I didn't have much time. One correction that I'd like to make is simply with the word "trivial"... Any true universal God, being good and benevolent, wouldn't be so 'petty', as on a human-like level, to demand such praise and attention or otherwise IT will punish us or allow severe punishment to fall upon us.
But now I'd like to continue with a few more avenues of argument... First with a question: Hypothetically, what purpose would a universal God have, in a believer's mind, if the human species simply ceased to exist? Of course, who are we to even know what purposes a universal God may have, but my point is that if humans are so important, then would a significant Godly purpose then be gone if we ceased to exist?
Depending on how you answer that question will say a lot about how significant you think humans are in the universe. But really, IF we are so damn significant, why is it that the universe existed for at least billions of years (if not forever) without the human species inhabiting Earth? Why even did the Earth exist for at least 4 billion years without human existence? Some may say that the universe's time of existence is just the blink of an eye for God. If so though, then the timeline for the existence of humanity is so minuscule that it's not even measurable with one eye-lash from an eye. And then some may say that it all goes to the Biblical expression that "and on the 7th day God created man", but not literal 7 "days". Well, humanity hasn't even existed in a 7th of the time that the Earth has existed, let alone a 7th of the time that the universe has existed.
Truly humanity has trivial significance in the context of the universe. So even if there is some Universal God, and none of us is to know or can ever truly know, we, humanity, are of minuscule significance; we're just something that happened in one of the infinite corners of the universe. The God(s) that exists in our "holy scriptures" is purely of our own creation, because this God has a significance for us and we for it. We, humans, felt and many still feel the need for there to be this God that we have created, and that's the only reason this God exists, or more accurately, is imagined to exist. This God of our creation doesn't even exemplify the qualities that we at times bestow upon it, the qualities of a true universal benevolent God. This God and its actions towards us, if we do not exactly adhere to recognizing it, would treat us as any warlord would treat those around him who didn't give him the respect he demanded.
People who put themselves on any kind of level of having some kind of a direct contact with a Universal God are themselves the furthest thing from humble. How can you justify that as our position in the universe? Humility will never truly describe you. And I'd personally say to you: Please respect our planet, as it is the special circumstances that exist with respect to its position in our solar system that has led to our existence. Please respect life in general because, to our still very limited knowledge about the universe, life only accidentally comes into existence in special places, and the life of any individual living thing is limited. And please respect the lives of each other, because our lives are fleeting, and appreciate that we have this brief moment to experience life. And stop depreciating life by the idea that somehow we'll all be able to experience something even greater in an afterlife, if only we do what this God we've imagined tells us to do, which is also as we've imagined, because such thinking takes away from the appreciation of the only life and existence that we actually do have.
-- Thu Mar 02, 2017 11:45 am --
Oh, and one more comment...
IF there is actually some true Universal God, or the possibility of such, not the God humans have outlined in their holy texts, then most of believers won't even care; it'll be like information about a dying star that scientists have discovered somewhere far off in the galaxy. Today's faithful believers won't really care about the existence of such a God, because IT won't have any direct relevance to them. Few people would care about there being a universal God any more than they care about the possibility that the universe itself just always existed and we came into existence as one of the infinite possible results of that, because people only truly care if it directly relates to them and that they can imagine it to have a direct effect on their existence. Get over yourselves!