No, I am quite serious. Perhaps if you don't understand, you should contact your local atheistic Pope to get a reality check on your own atheistic religion and personal faith in non God...
Ya, my 6 year old nephew thinks he knows everything too. How were you raised I am? Were you raised to believe in a god? Maybe you weren't raised to believe in it but you had an epiphany about god? Did someone initially teach you about god? Do you suffer from delusions of a god teaching you? Seriously please answer the question because I am curious. The absolute truth I am is that someone taught you something about god and the universe. Did god teach the person that taught you? Of course not. Some other person taught that person. You most likely expanded those teachings into your own original ideas but in the beginning you were pushed in one direction by a PERSON. Everything you know and believe in I am is not from a god. It is from other people. People have developed gods. People have developed ideas about truth and the universe.
"People have developed ideas about truth and the universe. " Yes, if you believe that people can develop anything. Can routers think? As a rule of thumb, the various ideas about truth and the universe go to support "the universe" as...the universe!...and nOt the truth. I will call these misleading ideas about truth and the universe as: Bob's reality Mike's reality stu's reality Barth Vader's reality Reverend Wrights reality Wallet's reality the Pope's reality the President's reality the general's "reality on the ground" ...ect. Get the point? Now, the only reality I am interested in is: Jesus' reality. Get it? Now, if you interpret the word "Christ" to mean reality, then you start to get the picture. Now we have: Bob's christ Mike's christ stu's christ Barth Vader's christ Reverend Wright's christ Wallet's christ the Pope's christ the President's christ the generals "jesus christ!" ...ect. Get it? Now, the only christ I am interested in is: Jesus' Christ. Get it? Jesus is a "person" who influenced me to think like he thought. I think like he thought in his pre-public ministry. Perhaps when he was contemplating in the desert. I am walking out of the desert with the "mind of Christ", so-to-speak. And what's the first thing I encounter? stu! Just kidding. Rather, I am encountering the temptations of "the devil" as it's routers channel choice words of worthlessness...trying to get me to *bow down* to it and its "universe". If I *bow down* I can be: "Bob" "Mike" "stu" "Barth Vader" "Wallet" the "Pope" the "president" the "fightin' Irish"...ect. Or, if I become a new ager of sorts, I can possible gain a huge tract of consciousness for myself! I could call it "christ consciousness"! But I don't fall for that. So you see, I've been raised a good Catholic boy! I went to Catholic School for six years till I got my parents to take me out mid-year and put me in public school where I could sit in the back of the class and lean back in my chair and smirk at the smart studious kids at the front of the class. That karma seems to be coming back on me as the special needs learners here badger me with b.s. and brain-dead balderdash. The voices in my head say things like: ''Everything you know and believe in I am is not from a god." Christ! P.S. - Why can't you people keep "the universe" in your homes and churches?
Like everyone else, in ignorance, for an experience of "liFe" nOt the truth. I called someone "mom". As far as I know, no man is my father. I was raised to believe in gOd [not GoD]. I've had perhaps three epiphany's. First when I was 20. First epiphany. I was in a heavy metal band and we were about to cover "The Number of the Beast" by Iron Maiden. I couldn't play that fast, so I got scared and went to church instead. Just kidding. Actually, I could play that fast, but I got scared by Hal Lindsey's book, "The Late Great Planet Earth". I said the "sinners prayer" at the end, and woke up the next morning with an epiphany...a voiceless message: "This is not your home". Everything seemed different, kind of dreamy. I looked up at the stars at night wondering where or what my "home" was. Within a week I quit both my bands [and my music career] and got myself into a fundamental bible church. The band leader tried to get me to stay, saying, "We will be guitar gods". After I quit, they changed their name to "Metal Church", and I went to...mental church. There, I ate the bible morning noon and night, backwards, backwards masked, and forwards again. Strong's concordance, the whole shebang. One day, two years later, I went to church without my bible. Then some pastor's speech was bragging about all his converts in South America, and how they all carry their bibles with them. And he said, "In fact, if you're not carrying your bible with you to church you're probably not even a christian". As the people were guided to turn in their bibles to some verse, I got up and walked out down the middle isle...gone forever. That was my graduation day from Prayer Prep. Surely the Catholics knew what they were talking about, right? After all, their tradition went all the way back to Peter in an unbroken chain of laying on of hands, er... So, I signed up for catechism, graduated, and attended mass religiously for the next five years till a personal crises with a broken relationship drove me into the desert of Arizona for months to contemplate. There, under the stars one warm night, I challenged every notion I ever held of gOd, of GoD...whatever! It was like a scene out of that movie "Forest Gump" where his former Nam lieutenant, legless, is cursing gOd in the middle of a storm on a shrimp boat. I gave gOd three minutes to answer the charges I brought against him. Challenged him to kill me. Told him I would crucify him if I could get my hands on him. I suddenly realized that my notions of gOd were all a figment of my imagination. Peace came over me, and the storm stopped. This was my second epiphany. It came from the very core of my being, this voiceless message: "Whatever comes of fear is entirely illegitimate". This I seemed to "know". This epiphany came to me at the base of Superstition Mountain. There, I broke some very superstitious chains that held my mind down in a vicious vice grip of obsequious, subservient, abject fear. I was left an agnostic and left "the Church". I had no opinion about God, except that if there was one, it was probably "good" and nOt "good and evil". For perhaps ten years I remained somewhat agnostic, daring not to develop an opinion one way or another. So I developed what I call "backburner theology". If I had a question, but was not sure the answer, I was careful not to make an answer, but rather, to put the question on the *back burner* of my mind, to sit there and stew and simmer. There, the question of who was Jesus simmered for about ten years. Only as I tried to walk in his shoes and identify with him did his way of thinking begin to emerge for me and dawn, quietly, upon my mind. My third most important epiphany came within a year or two of my second, during which I was digesting several self-help type books, ie. "Think and Grow Rich", "Psycho-Cybernetics"...ect. Anything having to do with the mind, I was interested in that because I was interested in mending the broken relationship I mentioned earlier. I learned that people have beliefs about other people that are simply not true, and simply vicious. And I could see that this was a kind of mental illness that I was not prepared or able to cope with. Somewhere in all the information that I inhaled, I took as a *core belief* that I am responsible for everything that happens to me. I did not realize it till years later that this is the turning point in salvation. And from that point in time, I was heading home along the straight and narrow path. Christ!
Well what, or who, is Jesus? Who or what taught him? I wanted to know. I took my best guess and flew with it for a while, endeavoring to keep an open mind along the way. Confusion is like a prayer that says, "help". Confusion is really a pain in the a$$. I don't like...don't want confusion. Not anymore. I got help in the same way a Sherlock Holmes might get help. Persistence, following leads, deduction, induction...research. And did I mention an open mind? I refused to *settle* for answers that just did not jive or make sense. The first "Jesus" I selected as a role model did not feel quite right with me. When help came, I recognized it immediately, and put on that character as if to "put on the mind of Christ". And when I shifted paradigms, I could really feel the *juice* so-to-speak. The Jesus I modeled my first year as "I am..." is not the same as the Jesus modeled the last two years or so. I have satisfied my own curiosity as to the authentic voice and message of Jesus...which is muffled and masked by canonical confusion. I thank everyone here who has challenged me in any way to get it right. I used the help I got like training wheels, letting it change my frame of mind. And as I opened my mind, I found yet more and more help. Now I fly freestyle, having understood the basics. I do not count myself *arrived*, but well on the way. It's not easy to fool me anymore with so much confusing balderdash bandied about as bulletproof, but not much better than bullsh#. Not even stu can fool me anymore. And that's the good news! Christ!
Interesting. Before you were 20 though who and how did you get pointed in the direction of god? As for the epiphanies i think you have realized that there is a large amount of holes within any organized religious organization. Upon realizing that you turned to yourself and self help books to find the answers. Once again everything you know comes from people. Everything people know comes from other people. I do understand your huge amount of passion on the subject which is why we can't reason with each other. Your beliefs correlate with your entire lifestyle which is why you can't question them. You questioning your entire foundation of life is like a heroin addict totally quitting heroin. It is your life source so in no way would you ever turn against it. You seem like a person who is very uncomfortable not knowing what happens when you die. You simply comfort yourself with ideas that are not true. I am our brains are made of cells and matter. When these cells die we die for good. There is no soul that reaches the heavens. We cease to exist. We are and than we are not. You love yourself so much that you can't even begin to fathom the idea that just in a few years you will cease to exist for all eternity.
To all the atheists out there: explain how you get from non-life (i.e. water, and rocks) to LIFE (i.e. one-celled organisms) Even if you have 100 billion years, how can you get from water (H2O) to that one-celled organism without a creator? Evolution only explains that living organisms can evolve into more advanced forms (in other words LIFE from LIFE)
It is about as rational to explain how to get from non-life to life as it is to claim that some supreme god created everything. You filling in the unknown void with a supreme god is about as logical as an alcoholic filling in the void of a screwed up life. All your doing is filling in a void of something you don't know. Answer one question. Do you know there actually is a god anymore than you now how non-life got to life? If you don't know one question anymore than the second question than you do not have a suitable argument. It's like arguing whether there are more orange or yellow rocks on the planet Jupiter. You don't know!!