by cyberjesus 92 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
A journey of 1000 miles begins with one step, as we all know. A good first step is to ask the Source for help in overcoming some weakness that you know you cannot fully control on your own. Don't worry about religion or dogma or feeling foolish. Just humbly ask and see what happens.
Can get the same results from yoga. So no supernatural being necessary. In fact, one might get confused that a supernatural being has somehow manifested itself, but it's just brain activity.
Religion is completely imaginary.
One thing is how nature behaves and another very different thing is what we know about that behavior. Our ignorance or our erudition do not influence in facts of nature.
Having said that, I have experienced that the healing intention used in acupuncture is very effective.
I know what I know
Can you explain that/?
Also you said you are very intelligent... what makes you say that?
Wow Cyber. 1. I never said I was very intelligent.
2. This is very one-sided dialogue, bordering on an interview. Do you actually want to discuss anything?
XChange: Your response to a quote of mine implies that I referred to a supernatural being. This is incorrect. For all I know, we are praying to ourselves. Also, what is supernatural? Anything we could possibly discover in the universe is still natural. Some people can conceive that there is more out there than the world of matter and form, and it all falls under the umbrella of natural.
You know you're in for a leg pulling when a group claims Special Revealed Knowledge by said Deity. S.R.K. is very seductive. Fred Franz was big on this, ideas were coming to him from the Anointed in heaven or from God, some here will tell you straight up you can't really understand the Bible without their particular version of the Holy Spirit. Once convinced you are usually trapped for many decades until some event or piece of logic starts you on the road to unwinding the mysticism that has occupied your mind.
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A NEW LIGHT:
(ALN): A good first step is to ask the Source for help in overcoming some weakness that you know you cannot fully control on your own.
If you can't control it fully on your own, why are you asking yourself to overcome that weakness that you can't fully control?
(ALN): Don't worry about religion or dogma or feeling foolish. Just humbly ask and see what happens.
Ask who? The Source? Yourself? What is the Source?
(ALN): Your response to a quote of mine implies that I referred to a supernatural being. This is incorrect. For all I know, we are praying to ourselves.
So you are stating that when humbly asking a Source, that is not an entity but yourself? Your statements above say to ask the "Source" to overcome weaknesses. I'm sure that a person who has some weakness they wish to overcome has already tried themselves to overcome it. If to ask a Source (which according to you is yourself), isn't that like banging your head against a wall?
If you want to argue what "knowing" means, then fine.
I don't want to argue at all, OTWO. Yes, it was your "most atheists" distinction I disagreed with, which you have retracted. No argument and no offense intended. People disagree all the time. If they didn't, we'd all be the same, and what would be the fun in that?
Do you consider yourself a 7 on Dawkins' scale?
Or, to put it another way...
I once had a close friend (who is no longer my friend and won't even return my phone calls) whose wife claimed she had concocted a drink she called Pep-Up which WOULD GROW BACK my friend's receding hairline with healthy hair.
I told both of them I didn't believe it was possible. They got very defensive, angry and sullen and the friendship ended badly.
To remain friends with them I would have had to do one or all of three things:
1.Keep my opinions about Pep-Up to myself.
2.Not contradict the hair restoration claims.
3.Pretend to be "open" to the idea it really worked.
None of the above was I willing to do.
Why?
I have a right to reality. Period. End of sentence.
Nobody can make claims which infringe upon my access to reality or create a friendship hostage situation.
(P.S. Scooter (that was his nickname) never grew hair back in all the 30 years since that argument.)
The Atheist can find no reality in the claims of believers. It is not GOD which is being denied but only the CLAIMS of reality.
The idea of praying to Thor would just as silly and objectionable to an atheist. Why? Thor is imaginary.
An Atheist can only deal with the reality of claims. Going beyond that is infringement.
I personally don't see how being an Atheist is possible. What I deny are the claims for reality which I have encountered so far in religion.
I think it is possible that God (or gods) is a completely unknowable reality--but--only as a possibility.
That is as far as I can go. Saying there IS NO God isn't a statement of fact; only an opinion based on lack of evidence.
An athiest friend of mine said that an athiest is a person that doesn't believe in "any of the available Gods of any of the available religions".
Do you consider yourself a 7 on Dawkins' scale?
Yes. We are far too primitive in our understanding of the universe to accurately "know" how it came about. The Big Bang is just the current best explanation that will be abandoned or improved upon in the future. I do understand that before the universe exisited (as we know it) that time itself did not exist, so eternity in the past is meaningless. Eternity in the future may or may not happen, we may figure that out eventually. But clearly, none of the gods that men have created actually exist. And while we are not ready to understand everything, any higher intelligence in the universe beyond our current understanding had some kind of beginning. Even in the mathematically insignificant possibility that such a higher intelligence had manipulated matter and energy and life to create the world as we know it, it isn't worthy of our worship. What a cruel joke that would be.
Entertaining the thought of "God" as a necessity complicates things more than it simplifies things. If men insist that life could not have come about by scientific methods without God, then God could not have come about by scientific methods either.
