even though no voice was ever heard and the voices never said anything that would betray supernatural origins
No. The voice says "I love you". I know it's not me.
IS GOD REAL? HOW DO YOU KNOW?
by still thinking 778 Replies latest jw friends
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N.drew
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cofty
Whatever. Goodnight.
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Star tiger
Hi, N.drew
Don't you think it's time we gave mankind due credit for the benefits that our own scientific achievements have done, rather than something we cannot explain, as I've said before humans are the only architects of our own destiny no one else!
Regards,
Star Tiger
By the way I respect your views, even though they seem illogical to me!
May you have peace in whatever you believe
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N.drew
Don't you think it's time we gave mankind due credit for the benefits that our own scientific achievements have done?
I believe humankind does get due credit (but not all humankind). And it's much more than scientific achievement!
I believe it is God's will that ALL humankind gets due credit.
humans are the only architects of our own destiny
I believe this is a true statement.
By the way I respect your views, even though they seem illogical to me
Thank you. I am not looking for logical. I am looking for a solution. If god exists in people's heads then surely a solution can be found too!
Peace to you too!
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OnTheWayOut
Still Thinking, you will have to watch this video to make sense of my comments below it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkExxkrMyU4&feature=relmfu
I felt similar to Theramin Trees, the narrator. But my timing of each phase was completely different. My Santa phase about belief in God died off and was dormant for many many years. The psycho phase did come about, but not to any serious heavy extent because I didn't really examine the Bible until I was an adult.
All I can say about my upbringing with a JW mother and nonreligious Catholics on Dad's side, was that I wasn't sure if God was angry about holidays as the JW's taught, or if God was all about holiday candy and festiveness as my other relatives thought. JW's introduced me to the psycho phase by showing God to be angry about most things.
I went back into the Santa phase as a young adult because I needed the crutch of Jehovah as a loving God to smooth out my life. So I wasn't far along in my own examination of belief for a long time. I suppose it wasn't really a Santa phase all those years, because it would have included the Binker phase, where Jehovah is angry and Jesus is loving.
When I finally googled "Jehovah's Witnesses" because something wasn't quite right, I really started going back to the psycho phase. I couldn't believe in worshipping a God like the one described in Genesis. Once I realized that Jehovah's Witnesses were a dangerous mind-control cult, I continued examining the Bible with the same critical eye I finally used to look at JW's. I included examining evolution/archaeology/biology and then also eastern philosophy.
It's the funniest things that make my mind click. I have a strong desire to be an author and I realized that great novels are painstaking efforts to tell the story a certain way. If, toward the end of the story, the author decided to throw in some details, he could always go back to an earlier part of the book and make some reference to those details to make sense of the book before publishing it. But that cannot always be done in television series. If JR's brother, Bobby was dead last season on DALLAS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_(1978_TV_series), it would be difficult to bring his character back to life. But wait, DALLAS found a way- last season (where Bobby died) was just a dream.
I remembered things like that and put it together with religion. The Bible is a vast book and controllers can find just about anything in it to "prove" their point of view, provided they ignore some other part of it. Sometimes, the Bible is an obstacle to beliefs, though. Sometimes, it is so familiar to it's followers that using it to make your doctrine "the truth" would be just as difficult as bringing Bobby back to life on DALLAS. Well, they find a way- sometimes it's literal, sometimes it's allegory/metaphor. Sometimes, it's the essence of truth but the most important part is the lesson or what it teaches us about human nature, YADDA YADDA YADDA.
If Watchtower did no better than the writers of DALLAS to change the meaning, and if history shows that most all of the Judiao/Christians did virtually the same, then better to default to the position that the tyrant of the Bible doesn't exist. He's welcome to prove me wrong. Anytime he wants to present "His Will" to me, He has my number and can call.
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N.drew
No. The voice says "I love you". I know it's not me.
FYI The voice does not say in English I love you. I should not have put it in quotes. Right! Goodnight!
Whatever. Goodnight.
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still thinking
N.drew....thank you for accepting the invitation to join us on this thread.
So it is my understanding that "knowing" God is real (I agree with those who say the realness can be imagined) and knowing God is different. I believe I know God. I know what God's Name Yahweh means. I know what God likes
And that has hit the nail on the head...this knowing is what I thought I knew but now doubt...can you clairify HOW you know these things?
ps. I appreciate you leaving the bible at the door on the way in...and forgot to mention leaving the wibble there too if you don't mind. I am already trying to decipher what people are saying without trying to decipher that too....
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still thinking
Wizard of OZ....
I believe all that that we accept to be real, is nothing more than a figment of God's own imagination and that is how it has come to be.
Interesing concept for sure...but again do you KNOW this? Or is this a belief based on something you think might be true?
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N.drew
this knowing is what I thought I knew but now doubt can you clairify HOW you know these things?
God is King. So a person can't know God just because the person wants to.
Kings get to see who they want to see.
So how I know is I have been invited to know. That's how I think it's done.
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still thinking
cofty...
I'm saying that if people's inner voices were of divine origin even though no voice was ever heard and the voices never said anything that would betray supernatural origins this would be identical to people deluding themselves into believing that their inner voices were of god.
This is precisely one of the things I am trying to figure out...I believed that this was god speaking to me somehow, now I don't know if they were just my own thoughts and I attributed them to god. Again...back to believing and knowing...I really want to find out how people know for sure.