No, You're Wrong., >:-( Options

Anybody else here getting tired of the people who always want to say that you're wrong?

The "above average" student who tries to use science to debate whatever they can.
The religious zealot who uses arguments such as "Well, you're going to hell. That's just the harsh reality of it."
Or maybe just the goddamn skeptics who like to deny the existence of anything above them simply because they can never get enough proof.

Makes me freaking irate.

We should all do something about these people. Any suggestions? Maybe organized genocide? Mass marginalization and eradication? War? LOL. (It's funny cause those are all basically the same thing.) (IMG:style_emoticons/default/rofl.gif)

But no really. Something ought to be done about people like this. Maybe we could start a movement to pass a bill making it illegal to deny another person's beliefs, so that a person has to state that it is only their opinion. I mean really it should all be categorized as hate speech anyway. If I started saying in a public building that all Mexicans were shit, I would get arrested. Yet Christians can stand around in their Churches and belittle the beliefs of others, simply because the people who founded this country were Christian. ...They were also white. And isn't it more wrong to verbally assault someone for their beliefs than for their heritage? It's "Oh, Buddha was a fatty and you're going to hell" as compared to "I dislike you because your people have social standards that most of the rest of the world would imprison a person for."

Am I making sense to you guys? I'm saying that it's one thing to assault a person's heritage, but quite another to assault their beliefs. Yes, it is all marginalization, but one has some degree of rationale behind it (unless you're a hateful inbred).

And I was soooo not serious about starting a holocaust. I'm just making a point in the best way that I can at the moment, and would ask that the moderators not freak out over it. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Vagrant, I would appreciate your normal in-depth critique.

Personally, it was never good enough for me. I never understood why, if he was so all knowing, all powerful, etc., why God needed something like the Bible to let us know what he wanted. Why not inform us personally? Free will means choosing to believe in him... God's voice did not boom out of the sky one day telling me he was there and watching me. I wanted to know God, the bible wasn't cutting it and Jesus wasn't, apparently, going to patch me through, so I tossed religion all together and started from scratch with, "If you're there, and I sure hope you are, please just let me know." I had to get over the fear of what that would mean, and let go of the idea that I would be punished for going over Jesus' head in the matter (since no one goes to the Father except through him), and when finally those deep childhood beliefs cracked just a little bit, Spirit moved right in and shattered the whole thing. I have had literally no fear since then, or should I say, I know now the difference between the fear my brain creates and what I really feel, but I have no fear of death or suffering.

The Christian God is supposed to be all powerful, without flaw, perfect... and so on. So a very good question would be, "why can't God just tell me what the deal is here?" I think the answer has to do with people not being able to understand things. All of us have dealt with people who appear to be stupid beyond belief and cannot defend what they think or even explain why they think what they do think, which is the point of this thread. I don't think that being able to understand our own choices or the choices of others is similar to a lightswitch- something which is either turned off or on. It seems to me that people have a range of understanding, an understanding which can grow. For example, no matter how amazing our ability to speak is, I still think we would all run into people who are simply too ignorant to grasp our beliefs.

I think the same has to do with God and us. He is like a super intelligent, aware being who has created some creatures that are sort of like Him- only not fully developed. Experience speaks to people in a way words cannot. I have read many times and believe that magic can only be learned through practice. As with most things, it has to be learned by practicing and experiencing it. It seems to me that God wants people understand reality and the things in it; including ourselves, Him, and other creatures, through the most intimate way possible: first hand experience.

Up to this point I have wrote about God not talking to people, but that's not entirely true. Even if people's conscience is really nothing more than a chunk of brain cells- something I'm not prepared to believe- then there is still the point that essentially the entire Old Testament (and nearly every other major religion) is founded on mystical visions directly from God Himself. Now I think people at a magic based forum are more likely to agree that visions are plausible and authentic means of communication, or else we have to throw quite a bit of other magic oriented visions out the window as well, including our own. The Old Testament also writes about God talking directly to Moses, and Jesus clearly talks to people, who talk to us.

I see the point of wanting God to step down from the pearly gates and give each one of us 7 Billion (plus prior populations) a good long chat. God does after all have all of time right? But there are some problems with that too. One of the biggest is that God would probably overwhelm our ability to choose something besides Him, like C.S. Lewis mentions in Mere Christianity. Choosing Him would not be a choice. Instead God seems to use indirect methods of communication. I do not believe it is an issue of being able to communicate with us that has caused God to do so in the way that He has, instead I see it as a specific choice with specific implications. Those implications are a desire to see people achieve and pursue Him instead of relying on being spoonfed ambrosia like divine aristocracy for eternity.

I see the point of wanting God to step down from the pearly gates and give each one of us 7 Billion (plus prior populations) a good long chat. God does after all have all of time right? But there are some problems with that too. One of the biggest is that God would probably overwhelm our ability to choose something besides Him, like C.S. Lewis mentions in Mere Christianity. Choosing Him would not be a choice. Instead God seems to use indirect methods of communication. I do not believe it is an issue of being able to communicate with us that has caused God to do so in the way that He has, instead I see it as a specific choice with specific implications. Those implications are a desire to see people achieve and pursue Him instead of relying on being spoonfed ambrosia like divine aristocracy for eternity.

In a way, that's precisely the role I feel religion is best suited to play in human affairs, and the difference between the 'common' man and the 'uncommon' man. To me, religion is a sort of place holder. It's there, and most people are involved in some way, so on some level everyone is aware that there is a conception of 'god' in part because religion exists. Whether we would suspect inherently that this is so were there not such a thing as religion, is debatable. I would like to say that the awareness of a higher power is intrinsic even as a base instinct, but I have met people who claim to have absolutely know belief, desire, or hope of a higher power. So perhaps it is not so, or perhaps there have always been people who simply lack that instinct.

But in that light, it doesn't matter what religion your pursue, and that is where you encounter the wall in religious differences. Spirit has revealed itself to every culture on earth. Every culture has a myth of God's descent into the world of some kind, every culture has a spiritual current. It may be that different messages were delivered to different cultures because of different roles and purposes they were intended to play out in human history. It could also be that the inherent belief in a higher power is simply present everywhere and so unique explanations and traditions built up around that rather than Spirit ever actually contacting anyone in the ways that are written in the ancient tracts. I do believe in mystical experiences, obviously, so I'm willing to accept that Spirit revealed itself to people in the past, and I believe it does so in the present as well.

But the thread here is basically addressing the kind of religious zeal that convinces one person that their religion is the right one, or that their beliefs are the correct beliefs, and that all others are incorrect. It the assault on the beliefs of others on that basis. If the primacy of each major religion was clipped out, and everyone understood that there are many valid paths to Spirit, then many religions would simply collapse because they are founded on their own primacy. The competitive nature of the western world is present in western religion. The big three - and Ba'hai claims to be the next iteration in the judeo-christian line, so you could say the big Four - all claim primacy, that you have to be part of their religion or your beliefs are incorrect. There is simply no way to justify this without resorting the circular reasoning inherent in these religious traditions. And in order to belief in that reasoning, one has to accept that all other belief systems are incorrect and invalid. If you, Tomber, believe as a christian believes, that only Christ can save you from hell, then it follows that as a christian you also believe that unless I accept Christ as my personal savior, I will go to hell when I die. You can claim to have a looser definition, and to interpret the bible less literally - plenty of christians believe in 'christ consciousness' and that Jesus of Nazereth was not a real person but an ideal - but at some point the line has to be drawn or a religion becomes so obtuse and abstract that it's more of a hobby than a religion.

And the point here is that there is no way to justify this claim of primacy, so there is no way to claim that another person's beliefs are wrong on that basis. The more intelligent christians I have had the pleasure of debating this with cite historical 'facts' and discoveries that are intended to validate that Jesus was a real person, but even then they bow to a christian interpretation of those 'facts' rather than looking at them objectively (history supports, so far, that Jesus was never an actual physical person at all, from an objective point of view, but a spiritual myth just as all the other resurrected saviors throughout human history were myths.) If internal and circular validity - my book says this is true, so it is, and therefore my book is correct in all aspects - are all the grounds one can claim to invalidate the beliefs of others, why would a reasoning person even make the argument in the first place? Why would any individual with at least reasonably sound intellect assault the beliefs of another person when there is zero evidence that their own religion is in fact correct?

I'm not claiming, as I said before, that christian belief will not lead one to God, I think any religion can do this - again, that is about the human heart. But, choosing to be christian in the full knowledge that it is because one desires a religion in their life and is most comfortable with christianity or any other religion, is a far cry from choosing christianity because it is the only way to be saved from hell and believing that all others who didn't make that choice chose incorrectly.

peace