Just a lil something…

Question with boldness even the existence of God;
because, if there be one, he must more approve of the
homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear

– Thomas Jefferson

There is No God and You Know It

I believe in a form of afterlife and some sort of omniscient energy. But I oppose the idea of a human-like God whom has a significant affect on us from day to day, or at all for that matter.

“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense”.

What’s your contribution to life?

Help me to help others: Cost of $O and 8 seconds. It’s true. Simple, fun and rewarding – but the main attraction of modern day readers: it’s free.

Yes FREE, and no this is not your average shady international money scheme.

As you may have noticed, I’ve added a Charity Water widget to the blogs sidebar.

By clicking help on the charity widget and answering several questions you can enable those less fortunate access to clean drinking water. For example by answering 6 short questions I gained 186 gallons of clean water to be donated (all within 8 seconds, this is too easy). This program works simply through the questions focusing on advertisement/sponsors i.e. “Out of these two movies which one do you like most?” and the sponsor fee being directed into said charity.

Try it out at least once, you might even direct friends to GiD to do likewise. Alternatively, and just as helpful, is Free Rice – which prompts guests to answer simple questions based on grammar, vocabulary or math and for each correct answer rice is donated. This is superb for the young ones – being granted access to free education in a game format whilst earning real rewards for a good cause.

My ten cents on near-effortless donation and affect, at least try it just once.

Must read of March: The Buddha Said – Osho

A delightful and constantly enthralling exploration of human moral, action and purpose through reflection of great teachings of the Buddha, guiding the reader to travel through a path of radical wisdom. Osho engages us at every level through contemporary anecdotes to make profound points , letting us experience and comprehend Buddha’s teachings and take in their timeless truths.

Osho is one of the best known and most provocative spiritual teachers of our time. “The most dangerous man since Jesus Christ” claims novelist Tom Robbins.

9.5/10

The Buddha Said – Osho, may be purchased from BOOKTOPIA [<– Click for direct link].

We come in peace

Understand, that it is not my goal here at God is Dying to emulate the blogs name. That is, that I do not deliberately exhibit a macabre representation of a form of mutated faith in order to belittle it and deteriorate public morale. No. It is a combined sense of curiosity and creativity that drive’s me to publish thoughts as such and to share inspirational findings with the wider community (You!). Whether it is being influenced by an enlightening writing or chancing upon an enriching source of information, that development can and should be shared. Afterall, if your looking for a good read or insight, why filter through the vast internet when someone else is doing just that for you?

Peace.

From omnipotent to impotent – The Evolution of Religion and death of divine.

I felt like writing. Do you feel like reading?

This concerns the predominantly Western religions. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam do not quite apply as they are in a sense integral to life in their particular contexts.

God is Dying

In an age where religion is no longer needed it shall cease to be. That time is now, if God has not died already he is surely terminally ill.

All matters of life relate to, contribute to, and are products of survival. All that aids in the continuation of life processes of an individual is valuable and thus replicated; whether consciously like the tool or genetically like the trait.

There was once a time, in the not so distant past where religious ties and loyalties would unite men, each one of these weak – forming a great amalgamation of believers. Such a community was labeled, in the case of my article, ‘Christianity’ and it was with this system of beliefs that all of identical faith would together destroy the competition. Prospering together. Surviving together.
[These opposing sides were also banded together by faith and simply sought a better existence, however they and their families were slaughtered by the warriors of Christianity].

But. Modern technologies saw to the sustainability of humanity and the destruction of the ‘holy’ through scientific revelations of what was once the sacred and attributed only to be known to the almighty himself. How did life begin? It must have been through intelligent design, there is no other possibility? Wrong! We now know many possible origins of life. Then how do we and all animals exactly suit our environment, we were made to be at one with it? No! Although not necessary ‘answered’ in terms of certainty this area is answered through the multitude of answers we now have. Evolution and natural selection for starters. The last universal question is “When did the universe begin?”. This too is another virtue of Christianity and the Genesis chapter. But as time ticks and the sand falls likewise will occur. With the introduction of the large hadron collider and other theoretical sciences the answer or at least an approximation of an answer will be revealed by the men in white. God is Dying. Slowly but surely, God is Dying.

Prayers are sent, are prayers received? No longer content, should we believe?

Prayer - Instigator of miracles or a pointless demand?

What would happen if we get down on our knees and pray to God in this way:

Dear God, almighty, all-powerful, all-loving creator of the universe, we pray to you to cure every case of cancer on this planet tonight. We pray in faith, knowing you will bless us as you describe in Matthew 7:7, Matthew 17:20, Matthew 21:21, Mark 11:24, John 14:12-14, Matthew 18:19 and James 5:15-16. In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.

We pray sincerely, knowing that when God answers this completely heartfelt, unselfish, non-materialistic prayer, it will glorify God and help millions of people in remarkable ways.

Will anything happen? No. Of course not.

This is very odd. Jesus makes specific promises in the Bible about how prayer is supposed to work. Jesus says in many different places that he and God will answer your prayers. And Christians believe Jesus — according to this recent article, “54% of American adults believe the Bible is literally true.” In some areas of the country the number goes as high as 75%.

If the Bible is literally true, then something is seriously amiss. Simply look at the facts. In Matthew 7:7 Jesus says:

Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!

If “every one who asks receives“, then if we ask for cancer to be cured, it should be cured. Right? If “our Father who is in heaven gives good things to those who ask him“, then if we ask him to cure cancer, he should cure it. Right? And yet nothing happens.

In Matthew 17:20 Jesus says:

For truly, I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you.

If “nothing will be impossible to you“, then if we ask to cure cancer tonight, cancer should disappear. Right? Yet nothing happens. Note that if we take the Bible less-than-literally here, the statement “nothing will be impossible to you” becomes “lots of things will be impossible to you,” and that would mean that Jesus is lying.

Then there is the vast plethora of paradoxical questions;

So can God create a stone that is so heavy that he cannot lift it? Either he can or he can’t.

If God can’t, then he isn’t all-powerful. If God can’t create a stone that he can’t lift, then there is something that he can’t do: create the stone.

If God can create a stone that is so heavy that he can’t lift it, though, then he also isn’t all-powerful. If God can create a stone that is so heavy that he can’t lift it, then there’s something that he can’t do: lift that stone.

There is, therefore, no way of answering the question

There is significant evidence for both existence and absence. For example Epicurus’ logical musings: “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”

Probably the most well-known of God’s incommunicable attributes are what have become known as the “omni” attributes – omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. However, none of these words are actually mentioned in the scriptures, but are in fact Latin derivatives used to identify the theological constructs pertaining to God’s power, knowledge and presence. It is because of this that these attributes of God have been misunderstood by many people – both Christians and non-Christians. People’s understanding of God’s power, knowledge and presence seems to be limited to their understanding of the words “omnipotence”, “omniscience,” and “omnipresence” respectively. But I wish not to defend it at this point in time.

And those I frequently ask myself about life purpose;

For what purpose does a predetermined experiment hold?, for what reason does is life created only to face inevitable destruction?, for an energy that is all, knows all and controls all, what point or reason lies in the existence of its creation or even itself?
When the question, journey and answer are already known, before the question is ever asked, such an existence in it self has no purpose. And we think our “lack” of purpose is harsh.
I feel empathy towards such a being. For a God would surely end its own absurd and uninteresting existence.

Just some things to think about. Some days I argue for the existence of God. Today, however, I do not. Without pressure there is little improvement.
I am but a religious man who is skeptical of his religion. I am creating pressure.

The existence of ‘God’ is debatable, but this cannot be demonstrated or refuted.

Love Shen

Man’s explanation of reality

Long, long, long ago. Soon after man attained the ability for cognitive thought but when he still feared things such as the moon as a living entity…he attempted to understand everything he saw to the best of his limited ability. And it is from these attempts at reason that he formed the first explanations for the nature of his environment.

And as often as not, to understand those things he could not…the huge knowledge gaps…he often assigned the supernatural. From that all of our religions were born. As we evolved into a more sophisticated species we developed science as a means to more correctly explain everything that is.

So with respect to the origin of everything we currently have two basic choices.

1. Some supernatural being created everything.

2. Everything is a natural occurrence with no divine beginning.

The human mind still has difficulty with the second explanation as science has yet to produce a “how.” While we do understand the Big Bang we still have no idea where the pure energy of the big bang came from or how long it might have existed. It remains one of those troubling “knowledge gaps” so many of us still assign a supernatural answer to fill the void.

But IF everything needs a Creator, who created the Creator? And IF a Creator needs no Creator and can be eternal…then why not the pure energy of the Big Bang? Logically removing the Creator actually makes it simpler, although we still lack an answer to the question.

For myself, with the understanding that the Universe, the current one as anything might have pre existed prior to the Big Bang, is about 18 Billion years old and that man didn’t make an appearance in his most primitive form until about 1 million years ago, I have a bit of difficulty with the idea that some great big version of us was behind everything. The Earth itself is only about 4.5 billion years old and Dinosaurs had it all for about 200 million years.

If God was a great reptile I could almost buy that one.

Good day and goodnight.

Greetings and welcome to the God is Dying blog.

The purpose of this blog is purely to express my own opinion in a way that will [hopefully] influence believers and non-believers alike to question their beliefs and systems of faith, instead of blindly following inherited paradigms. It is as the Buddha said: “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense”.

Check back often for new and informative posts, and feel free to comment – advice, feedback and criticism is welcomed.

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!