Jayhawker Soule

I'd be interested in the answer to that question as well.

himynameisPwn

None of this is tangable evidence. Martyrs do not prove anything, unless you agree with Osama, and then the 9/11 hijackers are going to heaven and getting 1000 virgins. Of course, this is still not proof.

Peoples lives aren't evidence for the existance of God.

Give us reproducable experiments, and not questions without answers that show we don't know enough about the universe therefore there must be a God(i.e. everything has a cause whats teh universes cause). REAL evidence. If you cannot produce real evidence your claim is unsubstainciated and based on BLIND faith.

Blind faith gets you killed(look at the lives of martyrs ), and has no basis. Do you understand comparing the pink dragon with God? Both have no basis, so essentially I could argue for the pink dragon just as much as I can argue for God. God in himself is contradictory, not even to mention that bible, as an all powerful being is a logical impossiblity.

Blind faith also gets you nowhere in any arguments ESPECIALLY on a board of metaphysical naturalists. I think you should read what metaphysical naturalists believe in, your proofs or evidence is useless because we live in a closed system. Proving we don't is impossible, because humankind as of yet doesnt have the telescopes or rocket ships to do such.

So, basically, your telling me all your beleifs are based on faith? That also contradicts your first point(whether any body remembers), that what you believe is either true or false, regardless of emotion(i.e. blind faith). *cheap shot* I really can't see how you come to the conclusion there is a God, it must be hard to stare at evidence otherwise and totally ignore it *end cheap shot*.

(Edited to fix my grammar )

[ May 31, 2002: Message edited by: himynameisPwn ]</p>

Rational Ag

[quote]Originally posted by Gemma Therese:
<strong>It is indeed better (as no one ever could deny) that men should be led to worship God by teaching, than that they should be driven to it by fear of punishment or pain; but it does not follow that because the former course produces the better men, therefore those who do not yield to it should be neglected. For many have found advantage (as we have proved, and are daily proving by actual experiment), in being first compelled by fear or pain, so that they might afterwards be influenced by teaching, or might follow out in act what they had already learned in word.
-- Augustine, Treatise on the Correction of the Donatists

If I had a message to my contemporaries, I said, it was surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.... If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted. If a university concentrates on producing successful people, it is lamentably failing in its obligation to society and to the students themselves.
-- Thomas Merton, quoted in James E. Kiefer, "Thomas Merton, Monk, Poet, Spiritual Writer"

The danger of education, I have found, is that it so easily confuses means with ends. Worse than that, it quite easily forgets both and devotes itself merely to the mass production of uneducated gradtuates -- people literaly unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade which they and their contemporaries have conspired to call "life".
-- Thomas Merton, quoted in James E. Kiefer, "Thomas Merton, Monk, Poet, Spiritual Writer"

The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no sins because all the sinners have been wiped out.
-- Thomas Merton (1948), quoted from Laird Wilcox, ed., "The Degeneration of Belief"

Gemma Therese

[QUOTE]Originally posted by himynameisPwn:
[QB]

None of this is tangable evidence. Martyrs do not prove anything, unless you agree with Osama, and then the 9/11 hijackers are going to heaven and getting 1000 virgins. Of course, this is still not proof.

Peoples lives aren't evidence for the existance of God.

__________

I was not trying to produce tangible evidence of God. I was stating the reasons why *I* believe in God.

In God's Love,

Gemma Therese

Samhain

Seven-headed dragons and unicorns. Belief or no?

himynameisPwn

Gemma, that contradicts your first post. God either exists or doesn't, it has nothing to do with why you believe in him. The entire argument of the thread is that something exists regardless about how you *feel*. You have provided no tangable evidence thus you cannot prove your claim. An unproven claim is as good as non-existant, because, just as I dont believe "dfhghjdfsjkdjkghf" exists, doesn't mean it can't but rather theres no reason to believe why it could or should exist. now, it may turn out "dfhghjdfsjkdjkghf" does in fact exist. I would be mistaken, but not wrong. If theres no reason to believe "dfhghjdfsjkdjkghf" exists, then you really shouldn't base your life on "dfhghjdfsjkdjkghf", whether "dfhghjdfsjkdjkghf" exists or not.

Samhain

Even further, this argument can be extended to my argument as stated earlier to Ox, which I still haven't got any reply to from Gemma as of yet.

Darwin's Finch

Gemma, thanks for responding to my question. I took a late lunch and just returned a few minutes ago; I hope you didn't think I had skipped out on you.

I notice that your list included a number of Christian contemplatives. I must confess that the monastic/contemplative tradition of the Catholic Church is the one such tradition that I actually take seriously. If you don't mind a further question, I would like to know what, aside from mythical content, differentiates this experience from the contemplative experiences of people in other cultures.

Allow me to clarify what I mean. The people you mentioned experienced some sense of union with Christ. However, their methods for acheiving such states of mind don't differ significantly from methods of meditation and prayer recorded by Muslim mystics or Hindu yogis, to mention just a couple. The only real difference that I can discern is in the content of the experience itself. After all, yogis don't report experience of a union with Christ, but their reported "mystical" experiences don't otherwise differ much from those reported by, say, Theresa of Avila.

Recent research seems to point toward these experiences as being a predictable outcome of certain meditative practices, regardless of one's cultural or religious affiliation, provided one has a healthy, normally functioning brain. I have in mind a book called Why God Won't Go Away, though I am afraid I can't remember offhand the names of the authors.

The question I wish to ask is, is it not possible that the "Christian" content of these mystical experiences is nothing more than the result of these people "finding" what they expected to find in the first place?

Ion

You nailed it.

Gemma Therese

I have a simple mind, so I apologize if this question sounds elementary.

Are you saying, if God exists, I shouldn't base my life on Him?