oh, what to believe! (everyone welcome, atheists and agnostics especially)

by zannahdoll 21 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

  • zannahdoll
    zannahdoll

    moshe

    Interesting. Thanks for your post and for answering with your reasoning. The thing is that for a theist paradoxes are not a problem; I'll explain below.

    Quit worrying about Theism.

    Also I don't worry about Theism... or do I? I don't even know if I understand your statement. I don't see it as a problem to work out. I have my doubts about God, every theist does, and then, due to faith or personal experiences or due to trusting those around us, theists DO believe in spite of doubts. I worry more about the doubts, but then when I believe it is no worry at all, instead it is a delight. At any result: you too worry about it to some capacity or you would not have felt moved to comment. Any time you talk about the lack of existence of God or why God is not probable YOU are worrying about Theism.

    So: about paradoxes (here is something I posted in another thread; so excuse the broken record for skipping here, the end I changed to make it relevant to this thread and the Crocodile paradox):

    In reading some beginner theological concepts and listening to some speakers I have learned that time does not exist. We only have NOW. We never experience yesterday nor tomorrow. We have memories of the past and plans for the future... but really all we ever know is this current moment in time... which, if carefully thought about, does time then exist? Or is it simply a way for us to file and compute our life - to make sense of it?

    In a philosophy class I learned about a philosopher, that I can't remember his name for the life of me, who in a similar manner questioned the reality of space. He said something to the effect of distance can always be divided in half, and so you should always be able to divide an area... mathematically we can continue to divide and divide: we get into negative numbers: however when it comes to physically going half the distance, and half of that distance, and half of that... so on and so forth... there comes a point when the only distance is standing still and you can no longer cut it in half. You can only cut a pie in half only so many times before it disappears into our bellies. [I'm not sure if I'm expressing this guy correctly, I don't even remember his name...]

    As a result: these things bring into question: do time and space exist? Plato gave us the Allegory of The Cave. [The story goes something similar to this: There are children tied up inside a cave facing a wall of the cave. Behind them is the entrance/exit of the cave and behind the entrance are people carrying objects and behind them a fire. The fire casts shadows of the people onto the wall. All the children see or know are the shadows of the people and objects that are cast by the fire behind them. The children think that these shadows ARE the people and objects themselves. Finally they are set free: they now see the actual people and objects (not just the shadows) and they are in shock of reality. And having been in a cave the light of the fire and light of day are overpowering. It turns out the children had no idea of what was real due to their limited capacity to see and learn.] There are pop-movies like the Matrix and Inception that also show pseudo worlds. The Matrix was the whole world complete with things as large as continents and seas and people were connected/wired up to see and experience the same places and things. None of it took up any actual space. Inception shows dreams within dreams, worlds within worlds. None of them taking up any actual space: only a person's imagination to create a whole world. These movies remind me of the children in the caves with their conceptions of what is real and waking up is like walking out of the cave.

    All this said: if time and space do not exist except for us to categorize our lives and have understanding with a sequence of events... it could be our matrix made up for us. Thus said: none of it REALLY takes up any space except what our minds imagine and project...

    And so: to bring this to relevance to the topic at hand of paradoxes here are a few correlations: Our world and reality may be such as the simulated reality in the Matrix and as such: the dream state in Inception. Paradoxes in these worlds exist. Just as it is a paradox that we can continue to cut things in half mathematically but in reality we cannot.

  • moshe
    moshe

    The Bible is full of paradoxes and since by nature, human logic can't solve a paradox, it follows that either God put these paradoxes in the Bible for a reason or He didn't and humans did it.

    If God put the paradoxes in the Bible, then to me it means that humans can never understand the true nature of God or solve the mysteries of life.

    If man wrote those words, then why worry about what the Bible says? Subtract everything you have learned about God from Church indoctrination and what do you have left to go on? Either way, we are out in left field when it comes to knowing anything about God, since we lacking any first hand information.

    zannahdoll, It's been 5 months, so what have you decided?

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