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WoodySt
Trad climber
Riverside
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In God I do believe.
And, that might be a shocker.
But it gives me much relief,
Because I climb with Locker.
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Bruce Morris
Social climber
Belmont, California
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Because they don't have anything better to do.
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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Here's something I wrote a while back. I think it applies
The question isn't so much "Is there a God?". Even according to physics, the world is all composed of the same energy. One thing comprises us all. You could call that God, if you can't stomach an old man in the sky. The question is the nature of that Reality. It is what it is, regardless of what we think about it. No matter how you slice it, the world is not as we see it.
and whatever we believe, we don't believe it very often. Most of the time we are living, eating, sleeping and otherwise separated from our concepts and ideas. It's who we are in our hearts that we carry around with us constantly.
My experience is that God is a supreme conscious intelligence and that our essential nature, our soul, is also consciousness. Thus we are created in the image of God.
No faith is required for this. Quiet your mind utterly and be deep inside yourself and you will see for yourself. Thus, if you seek (honestly and without prejudging the results) you will find. Beyond your changing mind, beliefs and concepts, you are a pure awareness that is inherently loving peaceful and fulfilled.
I've seen the light in folks from all religions, all countries, and those without religion as well. Dogma doesn't save anyone. God doesn't know what religion you are. God sees directly to the heart.
Peace
karl
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jdub
Trad climber
Atascadero
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Sit in Yosemite, take a look around, I mean really look. Then tell me that pressure, heat, time, glaciers, and whatever else occurs naturally is the only explanation here. Whatever you believe in it sure seems as though there has to be some sort of help? Or does s%@* really just happen?
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brett kassell
Trad climber
san jose, ca
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why do so many people believe in god?
take a climb up:
any climb in yosemite and you will know, my brohaminus
maybe not, but if you are ever very close to death, you will know. me, i see god in every locker hand jam i get in my life.
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Wonder
climber
WA
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Buddhists believe in a mind stream that continues on for life after life. They do not believe in one creator god. We do believe in many higher powers. You can call them gods and you can ask them to help you but you never submit yourself to them. Take Tara for example, she is there to protect you from all your fears but she never asks you for anything. So you offer her praise. All buddhist higher powers will help you through your mind stream but wont demand anything from you. We all come into existence through interdependent causes and conditions.
rw-edit-karl baba is on to this
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Jennie
Trad climber
Salt Lake
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" Is it logical to believe in something that cannot be proved?"
Can anything be proved using logic? Logic, a sequential evolution of human thought, is imperfect simply because it cannot prove all truths. Yet, mortals attempt logic, believing it their best tool in divining knowledge of the universe around them. Decide for yourself the value of human logic. But this is the "logical" (cosmological and ontological) argument for the existence of God:
The cosmological argument takes the existence of the universe to entail the existence of a being that created it. It does so based on the fact that the universe had a beginning. There must, the first cause argument says, be something that caused that beginning, a "first cause" of the universe.
The universe consists of a series of events stretched across time in a long causal chain. Each one of these events is the cause of the event that comes after it, and the effect of the event that comes before it. The world as it is came from the world as it was, which came from the world as it was before.
If we trace this series of events back in time, then what do we find? There seem, at first glance, to be two possibilities: either we eventually reach the first event in the series, the cause at the beginning of the universe that set everything going, or there is no first event in the series and the past stretches back into infinity.
The first cause argument tells us that the second of these is not possible, that the past cannot stretch back into infinity but rather must have a beginning. The argument then proceeds by suggesting that if the universe has a beginning then there must be something outside it that brought it into existence.
This being outside the universe, this Creator, the first cause argument tells us, is God.
If I told you that I had just counted down from infinity to zero, starting with “infinity minus zero” and carrying on until I reached “infinite minus infinity, i.e zero”, then you would know that this claim is false. Just as it is impossible to count up from zero to infinity, so it is impossible to count down from infinity to zero. If I had started counting down from infinity and kept going, then I would still be counting to this day; I would not have finished. My claim to have counted down from infinity to zero must be false. This is because it is impossible to traverse an infinite series.
The idea that the universe has an infinite past is just as problematic as the idea that I have just counted down from infinity. If the universe had an infinite past, then time would have had to count down from infinity to reach time zero, the present, and so would not have reached it. The fact that we have reached the present therefore shows that the past is not infinite but finite. The universe has a beginning. This claim, of course, has been confirmed by modern science, who trace the universe back to a point of origin in the ‘big bang’.
The past cannot go back forever, then; the universe must have a beginning. The next question is whether something caused this beginning, or whether the universe just popped into existence out of nothing. We all know, though, that nothing that begins to exist does so without a cause; nothing comes from nothing. For something to come into existence there must be something else that already exists that can bring it into existence. The fact that the universe began to exist therefore implies that something brought it into existence, that the universe has a Creator.
If this Creator were a being like the universe, a being that exists in time and so that came into existence, then it too would have to have been created by something. Nothing comes from nothing, not even God.
This tells us that the ultimate cause of the universe must never have come into existence; the ultimate Creator must be a being that exists outside of time, an eternal being with neither beginning nor end.
Assume that modern science is correct in saying that the universe began with a big bang, that the universe came into existence with an explosion that sent pieces of matter flying in all directions at an enormous rate. The big bang might have been other than it was; it might have involved more or less matter, or have involved a larger or a smaller explosion, for example.
That the big bang occurred as it did was crucial for the development of life, because the rate of expansion of the universe, i.e. the speed at which the pieces of matter flew apart, had to fall within certain limits if life was to develop.
Had the rate of expansion been too slow, then gravity would have pulled all of the matter back together again in a big crunch; there wouldn’t have been enough time for life to emerge.
Had the rate of expansion been too fast, then gravity wouldn’t have had a chance to pull any of the pieces of matter together, and planets, stars and even gases wouldn’t have been able to form; there wouldn’t have been anything for life to emerge on.
The rate of expansion following the big bang, of course, was just right to allow life to develop; if it weren’t then we wouldn’t be here now.
That this was the case, though, was either an extraordinary fluke, or was intended by the big bang’s Creator.
Had the rate of expansion been even fractionally slower then the big bang would have been followed by a big crunch before life could have developed.
Had the rate of expansion been even fractionally faster then stars and planets could not have formed.
It is highly unlikely that a random big bang would be such as to allow life to develop, and therefore highly unlikely, according to the argument from design, that the big bang from which our universe was formed happened at random.
The fact that the universe is fit for life requires explanation, and an appeal to chance is no explanation at all. It is far more likely that the universe was initiated by a being that intended to create a universe that could support life. The fine-tuning of the universe for life can only be explained with reference to a Creator, as the result of intelligent design.
The ontological argument is an argument for God’s existence based entirely on reason. According to this argument, there is no need to go out looking for physical evidence of God’s existence; we can work out that he exists just by thinking about it. Philosophers call such arguments a priori arguments.
There clearly are certain claims that we can tell are false without even having to look into them to find out. The claim to have made a four-sided triangle, and the claim to be over six feet tall but less than five, for example, are both claims that are obviously false. We know that triangles have three sides. We know that being over six feet tall means being over five feet tall too. No one that understands what the words in these claims mean would think that they might be true. There’s no need to spend time looking for four-sided triangles or tall short people in order to know that there aren’t any.
The ontological argument claims that the idea that God doesn’t exist is just as absurd as the idea that a four-sided triangle does. According to the ontological argument, we can tell that the claim that God doesn’t exist is false without having to look into it in any detail. Just as knowing what “triangle” means makes it obvious that a four-sided triangle is impossible, the argument suggests, knowing what “God” means makes it obvious that God’s non-existence is impossible. The claim that God does not exist is self-contradictory.
There are many things that something would have to be in order to be properly called “God”. For instance, it would have to be all-powerful, because a part of what “God” means is “all-powerful”. To call something that isn’t all-powerful God would be like calling a shape that doesn’t have three sides a triangle; to anyone who understands the words involved it just wouldn’t make sense. Another part of what “God” mean is “perfect”; something can’t properly be called God unless it is perfect. This is the key idea behind the ontological argument.
If something is perfect, then it couldn’t possibly be better than it is; there can’t be anything better than perfection. This means that if a thing is perfect then it is impossible to imagine it being better than it is; there is nothing better than it is to imagine.
If we think of God as being perfect—and perfection, remember, is part of the concept of God—then we must therefore think of God as a being that cannot be imagined to be better than he is. As St Anselm, the inventor of the ontological argument, put it, God is “that than which no greater can be conceived.”
It is therefore impossible to conceive either of there being anything greater than God or of it being possible to imagine God being better than he already is.
If we were to think of God as not existing, though, then we would be able to imagine him being better than he is; we would be able to imagine him existing, and a God that exists is clearly better than a God that doesn’t. To think of God as not existing, then, is to think of God as being imperfect, because a God that doesn’t exist could be better than he is.
The idea of an imperfect God, though, we have already said, is just as absurd as the idea of a four-sided triangle; “perfect” is part of what “God” means, just as “three-sided” is part of what “triangle” means. As the idea that God doesn’t exist implies his imperfection, therefore, the idea that God doesn’t exist is just as absurd, just as obviously false, as the idea that a four-sided triangle does. God’s non-existence is therefore impossible.
I, personally, do not believe the "logical argument" given here or other "logic based" arguments ABSOLUTELY PROVE the existence of God. Many if not most Christians believe proof comes only through communion and inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Some religions, outside Christianity have inspiration or revealation based precepts (that roughly parallel this Holy Spirit doctrine).
Some will see this as a sermon, I intended it to demonstrate that some find the existence of God entirely within the realm of logic.
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Mountain Man
Trad climber
Outer space
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Divine Interventions by Dan Millman.
pg 132 Transformation at Lourdes
pg 155 Our Lady of Guadalupe
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JuanDeFuca
Big Wall climber
Stoney Point
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 1, 2006 - 08:50am PT
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You can look around the earth and see granger, Yosemite etc.
But for every example of granger you can find examples of human suffering that would sicken you.
Face it. Living in America you won the lottery. You have no idea of what it is to go Hungry or live in the constant fear of death. We hide in out material world and rarely think of the rest of the world unless it slows down our constant search for pleasure.
I for one think the whole belief in God is for the less enlightened.
What does it matter. The whole question is irrelevant.
I behave in a moral way not because I fear some type of punishment.
All Physics says is that matter and energy are equivalent. It says nothing about an intelligence behind the expanding bubble.
JDF
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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Wonder wrote
"Buddhists believe in a mind stream that continues on for life after life. They do not believe in one creator god."
I'm not a Buddhist but find many truths in Buddhist writings, just as I do in the writings of many religions. I do find that they all suffer from the corruption brought on my time, politics, and human nature.
Buddha didn't deny God, he refused to talk about a God and didn't consider God a factor in freeing oneself. It's my feeling that's because once you start applying human perspective and concepts to God, you inevitably miscontrue God. (some members of some religions have God degraded to the worst torturing, despotic, egoistic tyrant imaginable)
Buddha didn't mention those other Demigods either nor condone Buddha worship, those are examples of corruption that has creaped into Buddhism. That doesn't mean that demigods don't exist or that Buddha Worship doesn't work, just that they have nothing to do with origninal Buddhism.
I think intention is everything. We are like children who can't truly know the "name" or nature of our source. If we approach "God" with good intentions, we get inspiration. If you baby is screaming "Da.da" you still come.
But we also make assumptions about the meaning of life and deny or condemn God because of suffering. That's like waking up in jail after a bender where you forget what the outside world is like, and thinking life sucks and there aren't any pretty girls.
This life is more like an epic climb. You fear, you suffer, and you grow from the adventure.
Peace
Karl
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JuanDeFuca
Big Wall climber
Stoney Point
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 1, 2006 - 10:42am PT
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Spwllinf hAS has never been =MY STRONG POINT.
i LIKE NUMBERS.
jDF
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TimM
Trad climber
somewhere on the Sierra Eastside
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Until 2 years ago I was an atheist. My new belief in God was, in part, inspired and summarized by the following verses:
16And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. 17In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him. 18There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. 19We love because he first loved us. 20If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. 21And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother. (1John 4:16-21, NIV)
Cheers,
Tim
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ron gomez
Trad climber
fallbrook,ca
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But Juan the questions IS...do you believe in god? Or...who(m) is God (god)? Im currently confused as to which one. Well gotta go...heading to Church (church)
Peace
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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DMT wrote
"Juan there is a god gene. You know this is true."
Yeah man, There is a certain kinda woman in a certain kind of jeans that always make me say "God!"
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Mighty Hiker
Social climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Q: What do you call an agnostic, dyslexic, imsomniac?
A: Someone who stays up at night, wondering if there is a dog.
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mdavid
Big Wall climber
CA, CO, TX
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because we don't have any real idea what happens when we die.
And that scares most very deeply.
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rockermike
Mountain climber
Berkeley
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Why do people believe that reality has no source or purpose if there is no proof that it has no source or purpose?
"As an explanation of the
world, materialism has a
sort of insane simplicity. It
has just the quality of the
madman’s arguments; we
have at once the sense of it
covering everything and
the sense of it leaving
everything out."
G.K. Chesterton,
"Orthodoxy"
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