By far the most provocative post I've done was the one about the corrupt Christian organization, CBN (Christian Broadcast Network), headed by Pat Robertson. Christians seem to be incapable of seeing, acknowledging and opposing the evil in their own ranks. The brainwashing of Christians is so thorough that even when it is obvious that Christian outfits such as the Catholic church is not only a bastion for pedophiles and the church has historically defended such animals, the Christian faithful synchronically turn a blind eye. Ironically, as Christians promote willful ignorance towards their own corruption, they simultaneously judge others for theirs. Christians are some of the most ignorant people when it comes to the history and origins of their own religion. An explanation for their ignorance is partly due to the doctrine of blind obedience which says that one's faith in Jesus/Christianity is supposed to be allowed to override all doubts - even those based upon common sense or blatant inconsistencies within the church or its doctrine. The Christian religion would not survive without the willful ignorance of its flock. It depends upon the flock not researching the truth about the religion. It's not just Christians who have been hoodwinked, however.
The most frustrating thing about religious people, Christians in particular, is that the only reason that they are Christians or whatever they are is that they were raised to be so - not that their religion makes any sense whatsoever. We should remind ourselves that there would be no Christianity or Islam if Judaism had never been. Both Christianity and Islam were born of the Jewish religion which is strange considering the fact that the Jewish faith is explicitly for Jewish people. It is clear throughout the Jewish doctrine that the pact God made with the Jewish people was for the Jewish people alone. According to Jewish doctrine, that pact God made with their forefathers allows them to pretty much get away with just about anything and still be "saved" from the wrath of God. Apparently God isn't supposed to break the promise he made to their predecessors that their people are his chosen and therefore protected. According to their doctrine they are also the direct relatives of the first man, Adam, and therefore the only valid humans on the planet.
Christianity was established as a usurping of Judaism and its Godly pact, which appealed to the masses in the early a.d. years. Many people wanted in on the "Godly pact" because this was becoming the leading theology of the state but the only way in was to be a Jew and the Jews had strict rules about what made one a Jew, the most annoying of which was that one had to have been born of Jewish parents. So what to do, what to do? What was done was a new version of Judaism was created with new rules that said that all you have to do is believe that the Jewish man they called Jesus, was the Jewish prophesied Christ (son of God)/Messiah and you will be counted as one protected/"saved" under the Godly pact. In essence, belief in Jesus is supposed to make you a Jew. The same is true of Islam. In fact, Muhammad, the prophet and founder of Islam, attempted to have his people accepted by the Judae-Christians and was shunned because his people were considered unacceptable as they were clearly prejudiced by Jewish doctrine - the Torah/Old Testament makes them the enemies of the Jews at every turn. Muhammad, not one to be deterred, issued forth the Holy Koran, which is basically his people's guide to being included in the pact - becoming Jews. That's really amazing seeing as the Muslims and Jews never seemed to have made their peace with one another and til this day appear to be the sworn enemies of one another.
So Judaism is the belief, worship and practice of Yahwehism. Why Judaism was so admired was that it simplified religion. Prior to the advent of Judaism, the dominant religions in the world all had a more complicated understanding of creation and man's relationship to it. Most religions believed that there were more than one power always at work thus, God was often plural: Gods. The plurality of Gods made it easier for men to understand the imperfections in the world because divine acts required the cooperation and diplomacy of a congress of deities. All man had to do was look at its own governing bodies and the chaos surrounding the decisions between them in order to accept every one of the oddities in the world as the fallacy or mischief of the Gods. The Jews struggled in their own doctrine to get around believing in God as a singular entity. The Jewish God was supposed to be the "one true God". So everything in the world was put on the shoulders of Yahweh. The problem was that if Yahweh was the only God and he was supposed to be all powerful and all knowing, how could he make a mistake? If he knows all, why would he create a people who he knew would betray him? If he is all powerful, why doesn't he prevent a wrongful thing from ever happening to an innocent person? The one true God concept had its own issues but they got around these issues by way of "The Lord God". God the creator is Yahweh while God that dwells among man is The Lord. There is also the "Holy Spirit". This split identity of God is how the Jews got away with having their cake and eating it too. So they could have their less logical one true God along with the more acceptable plurality of Gods by giving God a split personality. While Yahweh and the Lord are the same God, they exist as independents who communicate with each other and one does some things, sometimes, that the other might not necessarily agree with but they each honor the commitments made by the other. The Holy Spirit is like this middle-man which is basically the go to guy for the unexplainable. Christians use the Holy Spirit to explain immaculate conception or the semi-divinity of Mary.
If you're atheist, the one true God theory probably sounds just as ridiculous as the plurality of Gods theory but I digress. It's amazing that I remain a theist with as much as I know about the wrongfulness of religion but again I digress.
So, now that we see where Christianity and Islam comes from, let's see where Judaism comes from. For almost all of their history, the Jews were a nomadic tribe of herdsmen and tradesmen having no homeland and a maintaining a mutable culture that absorbed aspects of the cultures and beliefs of the people they encountered. Jews had no one formal religion until after they fled Egypt. They arrived in Egypt as a result of fleeing drought in Europe. The Egyptians welcomed them and gave them their own land to harvest. Egypt had a formal religion which in time became the religion the Jews also practiced seeing as they were in Egypt for nearly 500 years. Eventually their arose a craving for self identity among the Jews - they desired their own religion with a God that looked like them. They desired their own home land governed by them - where they were in control of their own destiny. The Jews migrated from Egypt in search of their own. In the process, they created/recreated what they understood about religion and made their selves the children of God. After practicing a religion for 500 years that said that the Egyptians were the "Children of the Sun"/children of God, it didn't take long for them to get used to the idea of a God that supposedly favored them above all others.After having lived as a nomadic people for generations, they had gathered enough religious stories/beliefs to create their own and after having practiced a formal religion for nearly 500 years they knew how to institutionalize religion. This explains why almost every mystical tale in the Old Testament can be found in the religious doctrine of many other cultures that predate the Torah.
Even though the tale of the Jews in Egypt is taught as some terrible slavery saga, the fact is that they were not slave and not tortured and not captive. They were welcomed by the Egyptians, given their own land and some even accepted in the government. When you read the Biblical tale you see that prior to the Jews coming to Egypt, the Egyptian people owned their own lands and payed no taxes to the Pharaoh. When the land was in drought, the Jewish governor appointed by the pharaoh decided to force all Egyptians to consolidate their harvests from which his people were free to feed while the actual Egyptians had to sacrifice their land or agree to pay taxes to the state in order to feed their families. This does not sound like any form of slavery I've ever heard of. Then there is the tale of the Jews' exodus from Egypt. These people were a parasite on the Egyptian culture and the Egyptians were too kind it seems to destroy them which they could have done with ease at any time but according to the ridiculous Biblical story, the Egyptians were preventing them from leaving. Why? First off, the Jews were a small minority tribe within Egypt that could have been exterminated without the Egyptian army even blinking. Secondly, what benefit to Egypt was the presence of the Jews? None. In fact, their exodus would have been a relief on the resources of the country and it's no surprise that their so-called exodus coincides with the time of the famine. As they always did as a nomadic people, they fled for greener pastors. No one attempted to stop them.
So the Jews flee famine in Egypt, recreate the Egyptian religion with the inclusion of the religious sagas of other cultures they'd encountered and in a simplified fashion of the "one true god" concept. Their religion is eventually idealized by the most powerful states and reissued as Christianity and Islam by those wanting to be included in the Jewish god pact. The net result is that Judaism, Christianity and Islam become the bloodiest instruments of evil ever formed. More people have died in the name of the "one true god" than for any other reason ever in the history of humanity. In my opinion, the devil created a godly form of himself: Yahweh and everyone who worships him are unknowingly worshiping the devil. This explains why the more influence and power and people the big three religions have in their ranks, the worse off the world - the more corrupt the world is. Shouldn't the world be getting better as a result of all these religious devotees increasing in numbers? Why is the exact opposite happening? Because they are actually joining the devil's ranks.
Showing posts with label Christianity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christianity. Show all posts
Friday, October 4, 2013
Monday, December 7, 2009
Biblical Flaws: Genesis
There is so much talk and debate about Christianity and the Bible. I have decided to start a lofty project to point out Biblical issues from the beginning (Genesis) to the end (Revelations). If you disagree with or have an explanation for the things I point out, please comment. The Bible I will be quoting from is a King James version published by Thomas Nelson, Inc. and copyrighted in 1984. It is a very standard, widely used and available version of the Bible, which is precisely why I chose it.
There are two major books of the Bible: The Old Testament (comprised 19 minor books) and the New Testament (comprised of 28 minor books) for a grand total of 47 books. Of course the number of Biblical books have changed since its creation but this is the current count.
Genesis - The 1st minor book of the Old Testament. Genesis describes the beginning of the creation by God of everything from nothing, the creation of man and woman, Heaven & Earth and the lives of the first man & woman (Adam & Eve) and their offspring.
Genesis Issue 1: There appears to be two separate Gods creating two different men, by two different means on two different days.
-on the 1st day of creation (Genesis: 1, 1-5) God created heaven & earth.
-on the 6th day of creation (Genesis: 1, 24-31) God created all the living animals, insects, plants and the first man & woman in his own image. The text reads (Genesis: 1, 26-28): And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it....
-on the 7th day of creation (Genesis: 2, 2) God rested and blessed the day.
-Genesis: 2, 4-25 then introduces the Lord God (a term that had not been used up until this point in the text) and describes that he was creating a man on the first day of creation - not the sixth. It reads: These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth, when they were created (1st day), in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, (Genesis:2, 7 continues) And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. And the Lord God planted a Garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.
Apparently, the Lord God created a man alone (no woman) from the dust of the earth, breathed a soul into him, built a dwelling for him (Garden in Eden) and placed him there, on the first day of creation while God was busy completing the Earth. God didn't get around to making a human being until the 6th day of creation and when he did, he created both a man and a woman at the same time and not of the dust but rather, in his own image. As well, God apparently didn't place his humans in a garden - he simply gave them dominion over everything on the earth and instructed them to subdue it. It also appears that both God and the Lord God are given credit for creating the heavens and earth as well.
This is the first issue I have with Genesis. Actually; it's the second but this is the first I'd like to discuss. I'm sure there are some Biblical scholars or true Christians out there who have an explanation for this and I would really like to hear it.
There are two major books of the Bible: The Old Testament (comprised 19 minor books) and the New Testament (comprised of 28 minor books) for a grand total of 47 books. Of course the number of Biblical books have changed since its creation but this is the current count.
Genesis - The 1st minor book of the Old Testament. Genesis describes the beginning of the creation by God of everything from nothing, the creation of man and woman, Heaven & Earth and the lives of the first man & woman (Adam & Eve) and their offspring.
Genesis Issue 1: There appears to be two separate Gods creating two different men, by two different means on two different days.
-on the 1st day of creation (Genesis: 1, 1-5) God created heaven & earth.
-on the 6th day of creation (Genesis: 1, 24-31) God created all the living animals, insects, plants and the first man & woman in his own image. The text reads (Genesis: 1, 26-28): And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it....
-on the 7th day of creation (Genesis: 2, 2) God rested and blessed the day.
-Genesis: 2, 4-25 then introduces the Lord God (a term that had not been used up until this point in the text) and describes that he was creating a man on the first day of creation - not the sixth. It reads: These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth, when they were created (1st day), in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, (Genesis:2, 7 continues) And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. And the Lord God planted a Garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.
Apparently, the Lord God created a man alone (no woman) from the dust of the earth, breathed a soul into him, built a dwelling for him (Garden in Eden) and placed him there, on the first day of creation while God was busy completing the Earth. God didn't get around to making a human being until the 6th day of creation and when he did, he created both a man and a woman at the same time and not of the dust but rather, in his own image. As well, God apparently didn't place his humans in a garden - he simply gave them dominion over everything on the earth and instructed them to subdue it. It also appears that both God and the Lord God are given credit for creating the heavens and earth as well.
This is the first issue I have with Genesis. Actually; it's the second but this is the first I'd like to discuss. I'm sure there are some Biblical scholars or true Christians out there who have an explanation for this and I would really like to hear it.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
My Personal Evolution Out of Christianity
I talk more bad than good about religion and criticize more than support religious people. I do this and not very often do I talk about my own beliefs and expose myself to the same scrutiny. I'll take a moment now to talk a little about my personal evolution on matters of the spirit.
I was born and raised in the Baptist denomination of Christianity. My family originates in the south and as you know, southern Christians are perhaps the most extreme Christians. They are taught that it is a sin to "question God" that it, to challenge the Bible. Growing up, I lived half of every year in the north and half in the south. I attended school in the north and spent the rest of the year in the south, Mississippi to be specific. The southern mind state and ideas are so entrenched that when I was young, they still had the "whites only" signs up at many of the diners in town. I remember that we had to go around the back of restaurants and have our food handed to us out of the back doors of restaurants because we weren't allowed inside. I'm not that old, people. This practices should not have been taking place at that time in history but because it was so difficult for those people to accept change, the wrongfulness of their own ideas and to welcome a more evolved view of the world, they clung to the past long after those things had died and were being covered in dirt.
Their way of thinking was transported to the north by families that migrated and by evangelists who went forth to proselytize the masses. I, perhaps due to the northern citified half of myself, was always questioning the Bible. I was kicked out of Sunday School when I was about 8 years old because I asked too many questions about things in the Bible - things that the teachers had no answer for. I remember the last question I asked, the one that got me booted, was about Genesis and And & Eve. I wanted to know how, if Adam and Eve were the first and only people God created, did their sons leave and find wives in other lands outside of the area around the Garden of Eden? It was my understanding that the only people that supposedly existed were Adan, Eve and their offspring and none of them had left and it was never stated that God ever made another Adan and Eve somewhere else. None of the answers they provided sufficed and I continually debunked what they offered as answers. Eventually they decided that for the sake of the children who were willingly being programed, I should be removed.
In spite of the fact that I had been booted from Sunday School, I still considered myself a Christian. I believed wholeheartedly and I thought the answers to my questions were there in the Bible but that I hadn't yet found a person astute enough to provide me with those answers. I was Baptized in a Mississippi river in white robe, in a scene that looked like something straight out of the Bible. It would take more than a lacking Sunday School teacher to remove me from my belief. As I grew up, I only found more questions and even fewer answers. I talked to all kinds of people on all levels of the faith and still got no real satisfaction - I still didn't understand. I tried finding the answers on my own. I have read the Bible from cover to cover, a thousand times and every time I read it, I found a hundred new questions - new inconsistencies - no new answers.
When I was about 17 years old, I had a friend whom I discovered was raised a Muslim. I had no idea he was a Muslim. I had never had anyone close in my life who was not a Christian. We never talked about religion so I had just assumed he was Christian just like everybody else I knew. It wasn't until we were eating at a fast food joint one day that it caught my attention that he always ate with his right hand and he always kept his left hand beneath the table. I asked him about why he did it and he explained to me that he uses his left hand for personal sanitation (you know what I mean) therefore he never eats with it or extends it to greet people unless he means to insult them. I thought this was his personal thing until he explained further that it was part of his religious customs as a Muslim. I had never thought about other religions before. I had never considered that there were people who really didn't believe in Jesus or Christianity. He and I had a lot of religious conversations after that and I came to learn for the first time that I had options. I did not have to be a Christian if something else made better since to me. Because I grew up in a family and a church that never talked about other religions (bad or good) I didn't have any prejudices when considering another religion. I think that's why I had an open mind.
I then began studying other denominations of Christianity in the hope that perhaps the answers I sought could be found there. All I found was that they all believed pretty much the same thing, they just applied it slightly differently. They had no more answers than Baptism. The fact was that if I wanted to really know the truth, I would have to be open to changing faiths all together. I remember the day I fell to my knees and prayed - no - begged God to stop me from abandoning Christianity if I was wrong. Of course, I was not stopped, in fact, it seems that I was encouraged because within that same week, I was inundated with encounters with people of various faiths. I had never met so many people of different faiths in my life like I was then. In actuality, I was probably just paying more attention and taking more deliberate action to encounter new ways of thinking. There were so many new things for me to study at that point that I didn't know where to begin. I decided to start with Islam since I knew something about that as a result of my friendship with a Muslim. I began attending meetings at N.O.I. Masques and started reading the Koran. Eventually, I found myself in the same rut in Islam that I was in as a Christian - many questions - few answers.
Though I really appreciated the Muslim faith and the absolution that came with total surrender, my intellect was not satisfied and I had to move on. After that experience, I really opened myself up and started studying Taoism, Buddhism, Ifa Divination, Confucianism, Judaism, Hinduism, and everything I could get my hands on. The more I studied, the more I realized that there were some remarkable similarities between many faiths and many of their stories. I decided then to study the history of religion to determine if there was a connection between all of the various faiths and I discovered that most, especially the dominant faiths, are remakes or evolutions of ancient religions. Then I began studying ancient religions and found that most of them were retellings of but a few very ancient spiritual systems. Not only that but religions were instituted in most cases as societal controls in times before fully developed governments. In these times, there were only Kings and it is obvious that one person is not an adequate representative of an entire nation. In today's societies, we have hundreds of representatives and they have a hard time of adequately representing the people. It only makes since that a King would need the unquestionable backing of God himself to maintain rule.
It became clear to me that religion - especially modern religion -has little to nothing to do with God and spirituality and much more to do with keeping people under control. I then understood that if I wanted to understand God and spirituality, I would have to do it on my own - without the aid of a Bible or a Koran or a Torah or a collection of Sanskrit writings or a casting of cowries or runes or any other crutch. I would have to start from scratch. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that that is exactly what science was doing! So I started learning about and studying scientific explanations. What I learned from the scientific approach was that it believes only what is provable and challenges what is not until it is either proven true or false. I liked this because when you hold a scientific belief, it is verifiable and undeniable. What I didn't like about it was that it considered things false until proven true. Therefore, in spite of much evidence supporting the reality of a spiritual side of life, it must be considered false because it can not be placed into a test tube or beneath a microscope for examination.
Where do I stand today, after nearly 20 years of studying, challenging and questioning faith, religion and God? Here are my current beliefs though I remain open to change:
Belief:
I believe that there is a God.
Reason:
I have nothing that explains away an initial intelligence that began the process which resulted in all that there is today.
Belief:
God is not so nominal as to be concerned about the day to day lives of humanity.
Reason:
If anything I've ever read from any religion about God being an all righteous being who oversees and dictates law to man were true, there is absolutely no way that the millions of atrocities that have occurred in the history of man would have been allowed to take place.
Belief:
God is more a thing than a being.
Reason:
I believe that God is EVERYTHING: space, planets, water, stars, animals, plants, man, energy etc. I believe that the rock that exploded and formed the galaxies and all therein, was God itself and within and of that rock was all of the ingredients of life - intelligent or otherwise. Therefore the energy that we call intelligence/mind was there and for whatever reason, it chose to change and split itself into many pieces and forms.
Belief:
I believe that there is a spiritual side to life although it is as elusive to the objective side of life as is dark matter which we can see and know exists but can not prove is actually there.
Reason:
I have personally experienced and have been a witness to experiences that even my reason-loving mind had to accept as something "else" as they defy all of the known laws of objective reality.
Example 1:
One of my uncles died in a hospital before my aunt (his wife) could get there in his final moments. She arrived hours after his death and he had been pronounced dead. The sheet was over his face. When she entered the room he removed the sheet from his face and told her not to worry because he was with God. He then closed his eyes and died again. I witnessed this and not one person could explain it.
Example 2:
My mother was sick with cancer before she died. During the slow course of her moving away from this world, many strange things occurred. The day she took a turn for the very worst and had to be removed from our (her children) care at home, the very moment she screamed out, a very large shadow seemed to move across the house and the house lost all power. When we checked the circuit breakers, none of them had been tripped. When the paramedics arrived, the power restored itself. Then on the day before her passing, I and my siblings were seated around her bedside at the hospital, watching her regress through her own life before our eyes to a point where she believed that she was a child again and no longer recognized us. Then suddenly she reached her hand out and tried to lift herself from her bed, something she should not have been capable of doing in her condition, before collapsing back on the bed and covering eyes as if blocking a bright light. She declared out loud, "You know you have to come closer Lord...you know I can't reach you". The next day, the day of her passing, at the exact moment of her passing, all of her children including myself got sick and vomited just before receiving the call advising us that she had passed.
I have witnessed or experienced many more strange things - enough to leave me convinced that there is "something" else.
Belief:
I believe that man is governed by his/her own conscience - not God.
Reason:
Because I believe God to not be some ego-persona roaming around meddling in the affairs of what to him must be microscopic germs (us), I believe the quality of our lives is determined by us and us alone.
Belief:
I believe that the purpose of life is for us to give it a purpose.
Reason:
Without us - intellectual reasoning beings, there appears to be no other point to anything. Our job is to determine what life should be and it doesn't appear to matter if we make a choice of wickedness or righteousness, wisdom or ignorance. We have free reign to do with this life, whatever we want and no one will stop us but us. Remember; it wasn't God that stopped Hitler - we did.
Anyway - I think you can see where I'm going and can probably extrapolate from the beliefs I've outlined, what else I might believe. So, there ya go. Have at me.
I was born and raised in the Baptist denomination of Christianity. My family originates in the south and as you know, southern Christians are perhaps the most extreme Christians. They are taught that it is a sin to "question God" that it, to challenge the Bible. Growing up, I lived half of every year in the north and half in the south. I attended school in the north and spent the rest of the year in the south, Mississippi to be specific. The southern mind state and ideas are so entrenched that when I was young, they still had the "whites only" signs up at many of the diners in town. I remember that we had to go around the back of restaurants and have our food handed to us out of the back doors of restaurants because we weren't allowed inside. I'm not that old, people. This practices should not have been taking place at that time in history but because it was so difficult for those people to accept change, the wrongfulness of their own ideas and to welcome a more evolved view of the world, they clung to the past long after those things had died and were being covered in dirt.
Their way of thinking was transported to the north by families that migrated and by evangelists who went forth to proselytize the masses. I, perhaps due to the northern citified half of myself, was always questioning the Bible. I was kicked out of Sunday School when I was about 8 years old because I asked too many questions about things in the Bible - things that the teachers had no answer for. I remember the last question I asked, the one that got me booted, was about Genesis and And & Eve. I wanted to know how, if Adam and Eve were the first and only people God created, did their sons leave and find wives in other lands outside of the area around the Garden of Eden? It was my understanding that the only people that supposedly existed were Adan, Eve and their offspring and none of them had left and it was never stated that God ever made another Adan and Eve somewhere else. None of the answers they provided sufficed and I continually debunked what they offered as answers. Eventually they decided that for the sake of the children who were willingly being programed, I should be removed.
In spite of the fact that I had been booted from Sunday School, I still considered myself a Christian. I believed wholeheartedly and I thought the answers to my questions were there in the Bible but that I hadn't yet found a person astute enough to provide me with those answers. I was Baptized in a Mississippi river in white robe, in a scene that looked like something straight out of the Bible. It would take more than a lacking Sunday School teacher to remove me from my belief. As I grew up, I only found more questions and even fewer answers. I talked to all kinds of people on all levels of the faith and still got no real satisfaction - I still didn't understand. I tried finding the answers on my own. I have read the Bible from cover to cover, a thousand times and every time I read it, I found a hundred new questions - new inconsistencies - no new answers.
When I was about 17 years old, I had a friend whom I discovered was raised a Muslim. I had no idea he was a Muslim. I had never had anyone close in my life who was not a Christian. We never talked about religion so I had just assumed he was Christian just like everybody else I knew. It wasn't until we were eating at a fast food joint one day that it caught my attention that he always ate with his right hand and he always kept his left hand beneath the table. I asked him about why he did it and he explained to me that he uses his left hand for personal sanitation (you know what I mean) therefore he never eats with it or extends it to greet people unless he means to insult them. I thought this was his personal thing until he explained further that it was part of his religious customs as a Muslim. I had never thought about other religions before. I had never considered that there were people who really didn't believe in Jesus or Christianity. He and I had a lot of religious conversations after that and I came to learn for the first time that I had options. I did not have to be a Christian if something else made better since to me. Because I grew up in a family and a church that never talked about other religions (bad or good) I didn't have any prejudices when considering another religion. I think that's why I had an open mind.
I then began studying other denominations of Christianity in the hope that perhaps the answers I sought could be found there. All I found was that they all believed pretty much the same thing, they just applied it slightly differently. They had no more answers than Baptism. The fact was that if I wanted to really know the truth, I would have to be open to changing faiths all together. I remember the day I fell to my knees and prayed - no - begged God to stop me from abandoning Christianity if I was wrong. Of course, I was not stopped, in fact, it seems that I was encouraged because within that same week, I was inundated with encounters with people of various faiths. I had never met so many people of different faiths in my life like I was then. In actuality, I was probably just paying more attention and taking more deliberate action to encounter new ways of thinking. There were so many new things for me to study at that point that I didn't know where to begin. I decided to start with Islam since I knew something about that as a result of my friendship with a Muslim. I began attending meetings at N.O.I. Masques and started reading the Koran. Eventually, I found myself in the same rut in Islam that I was in as a Christian - many questions - few answers.
Though I really appreciated the Muslim faith and the absolution that came with total surrender, my intellect was not satisfied and I had to move on. After that experience, I really opened myself up and started studying Taoism, Buddhism, Ifa Divination, Confucianism, Judaism, Hinduism, and everything I could get my hands on. The more I studied, the more I realized that there were some remarkable similarities between many faiths and many of their stories. I decided then to study the history of religion to determine if there was a connection between all of the various faiths and I discovered that most, especially the dominant faiths, are remakes or evolutions of ancient religions. Then I began studying ancient religions and found that most of them were retellings of but a few very ancient spiritual systems. Not only that but religions were instituted in most cases as societal controls in times before fully developed governments. In these times, there were only Kings and it is obvious that one person is not an adequate representative of an entire nation. In today's societies, we have hundreds of representatives and they have a hard time of adequately representing the people. It only makes since that a King would need the unquestionable backing of God himself to maintain rule.
It became clear to me that religion - especially modern religion -has little to nothing to do with God and spirituality and much more to do with keeping people under control. I then understood that if I wanted to understand God and spirituality, I would have to do it on my own - without the aid of a Bible or a Koran or a Torah or a collection of Sanskrit writings or a casting of cowries or runes or any other crutch. I would have to start from scratch. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that that is exactly what science was doing! So I started learning about and studying scientific explanations. What I learned from the scientific approach was that it believes only what is provable and challenges what is not until it is either proven true or false. I liked this because when you hold a scientific belief, it is verifiable and undeniable. What I didn't like about it was that it considered things false until proven true. Therefore, in spite of much evidence supporting the reality of a spiritual side of life, it must be considered false because it can not be placed into a test tube or beneath a microscope for examination.
Where do I stand today, after nearly 20 years of studying, challenging and questioning faith, religion and God? Here are my current beliefs though I remain open to change:
Belief:
I believe that there is a God.
Reason:
I have nothing that explains away an initial intelligence that began the process which resulted in all that there is today.
Belief:
God is not so nominal as to be concerned about the day to day lives of humanity.
Reason:
If anything I've ever read from any religion about God being an all righteous being who oversees and dictates law to man were true, there is absolutely no way that the millions of atrocities that have occurred in the history of man would have been allowed to take place.
Belief:
God is more a thing than a being.
Reason:
I believe that God is EVERYTHING: space, planets, water, stars, animals, plants, man, energy etc. I believe that the rock that exploded and formed the galaxies and all therein, was God itself and within and of that rock was all of the ingredients of life - intelligent or otherwise. Therefore the energy that we call intelligence/mind was there and for whatever reason, it chose to change and split itself into many pieces and forms.
Belief:
I believe that there is a spiritual side to life although it is as elusive to the objective side of life as is dark matter which we can see and know exists but can not prove is actually there.
Reason:
I have personally experienced and have been a witness to experiences that even my reason-loving mind had to accept as something "else" as they defy all of the known laws of objective reality.
Example 1:
One of my uncles died in a hospital before my aunt (his wife) could get there in his final moments. She arrived hours after his death and he had been pronounced dead. The sheet was over his face. When she entered the room he removed the sheet from his face and told her not to worry because he was with God. He then closed his eyes and died again. I witnessed this and not one person could explain it.
Example 2:
My mother was sick with cancer before she died. During the slow course of her moving away from this world, many strange things occurred. The day she took a turn for the very worst and had to be removed from our (her children) care at home, the very moment she screamed out, a very large shadow seemed to move across the house and the house lost all power. When we checked the circuit breakers, none of them had been tripped. When the paramedics arrived, the power restored itself. Then on the day before her passing, I and my siblings were seated around her bedside at the hospital, watching her regress through her own life before our eyes to a point where she believed that she was a child again and no longer recognized us. Then suddenly she reached her hand out and tried to lift herself from her bed, something she should not have been capable of doing in her condition, before collapsing back on the bed and covering eyes as if blocking a bright light. She declared out loud, "You know you have to come closer Lord...you know I can't reach you". The next day, the day of her passing, at the exact moment of her passing, all of her children including myself got sick and vomited just before receiving the call advising us that she had passed.
I have witnessed or experienced many more strange things - enough to leave me convinced that there is "something" else.
Belief:
I believe that man is governed by his/her own conscience - not God.
Reason:
Because I believe God to not be some ego-persona roaming around meddling in the affairs of what to him must be microscopic germs (us), I believe the quality of our lives is determined by us and us alone.
Belief:
I believe that the purpose of life is for us to give it a purpose.
Reason:
Without us - intellectual reasoning beings, there appears to be no other point to anything. Our job is to determine what life should be and it doesn't appear to matter if we make a choice of wickedness or righteousness, wisdom or ignorance. We have free reign to do with this life, whatever we want and no one will stop us but us. Remember; it wasn't God that stopped Hitler - we did.
Anyway - I think you can see where I'm going and can probably extrapolate from the beliefs I've outlined, what else I might believe. So, there ya go. Have at me.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
A brief history of the founding of Christianity
I host and read a lot of blogs and I participate in a lot of web discussions on the subject of God/religion. It is so frustrating to me to attempt holding a conversation about anything spiritual when there's a Christian involved in the discussion because I have come to realize that Christians, unlike any other group that has opinions or spiritual matters, have ABSOLUTELY NO UNDERSTANDING or knowledge of the history of their own faith. Christians base their very reason for believing in what they believe, on the Bible and that's a lot like buying a used car solely based on the fact that the dealer says it's a good car. You have to do some research on your own before you can make an informed decision. You can't just read the dealer's literature (The Bible) and decide from that.
Christianity claims that the Bible is the "Word of God".
Why would you simply accept such a HUGE claim without investigating? Shouldn't you try to determine who actually wrote the various books of the Bible? Shouldn't you investigate the character of those various authors before you accept that God was writing through them? Shouldn't you try and determine who/how they arrived at the determination that these words were the words of God rather than just wise words written by inspired people?
Were you to do the leg-work yourself, you would find that there is absolutely no reason to believe that the books of the Bible are the "Words of God". Most of the authors of the books don't even dare claim that what they are writing is anything other than wise instruction. Most of the books of the Bible were never even intended to be compiled into one manuscript because they were written by different people at different times in history for people of faiths other than Christianity. Christianity claimed these writings as their own when they were attempting to establish an official doctrine. These books were then edited and later re-edited and revised and some even done away with all together from the Bible. If they really believed these writings to truly be the "Word of God," don't you think that they would not have dared to ever alter them, let alone, remove entire books? Obviously the founders and up-keepers of the official Christian doctrine understand that its doctrine is of man and fear no reprisal from God for altering it.
Christianity claims that Jesus, the foundation of their faith, was the literal "Son of God".
Before you accept another such HUGE claim, shouldn't at the very least, verify that Jesus actually existed and do so from a source other than the Bible? Imagine if you had no religious belief what-so-ever and I approached you and said, God is a talking rock in the desert and he gave me his wise instructions to write for all man kind to follow. Would you simply take my writing and decide whether or not to believe me based upon those writings or would you demand further proof? I'm sure you would require more than my own writing which tells you I'm telling the truth, before you believed me. Would you suspend common sense which tells you that rocks don't talk? I believe you would require more than hearsay in order that you accept such a proposition. Why then do you simply accept the idea that a VIRGIN but married woman became impregnated immaculately - then even further that somehow it can be known that this child was the literal son of God, when the only people making these claims are the people selling the religion?
When you do the research you find that there are NO RECORDS confirming that a person named Jesus was immaculately conceived by a virgin, who by the way was a married woman. If there was an actual Mary & Joseph, you better believe that in a time before the modern calendar was even made and in the middle-east, they were consorting. It is unreasonable to believe that Mary would have been a virgin and even less reasonable that if she had a child that wasn't Joseph's, it wasn't due to anything other than infidelity. Christianity make all sorts of claims of the miracles of Jesus but there are no records ANY WHERE confirming any miracles outside of what's written in the Bible. There isn't even a record of a Jesus being crucified. None of this is surprising when you do the research and discover that Jesus was fabricated during the Council's of Nicaea wherein the bishops of Christianity regularly convened to determine what the beliefs of Christianity would be & what doctrines would be upheld/omitted. When you challenge the piety of the authors of the Christian religion you find that their hands were covered in blood. These were not good people and historically the up-keepers of the Bible were pretty corrupt people. King James, the commissioner of the most widely used version of the Bible was an absolutely horrifying person. King James was a bi-sexual fornicating glutinous monster who had authority over the doctrines of the Christian faith.
In fact; the founders of the Christian faith, usurped the spiritual doctrines, rituals and beliefs nearly every popular faith over a 400 year period. The purpose was to create a religion that had something for every person so as to make the faith palatable to people from a wide array of spiritual backgrounds. Religion was bigger than business and more powerful than politics during that time. Religions were born and died daily. Everyone was trying to get in on the hustle because at the time, it was the means to acquiring the greatest luxury, protection and profit in life. Christianity became such a success because of the fact that its founders were smart enough to duplicate the concepts of every other faith and thereby attract the followers of those faiths. In case you didn't know, the Son of God, born into the flesh, slaughtered and resurrected story, is a remake of the ancient Egyptian story of Heru being born into the flesh by his mother, Auset via magical (immaculate) means in order that he avenge the death of his father, Ausar, who was resurrected as the judge of the souls of men. The story was tweaked to get rid of the parts that wouldn't sell to people outside of Egypt, rearranged to make it consistent with Jewish ideas of the Christ and the characters given names that were similar enough to be accepted by those familiar with the story, but more relatable to the Europeans they were trying to directly market it to. This is why you have no evidence to confirm the miraculous events surrounding Jesus - because they were fabricated. They didn't even bother tampering much with the Torah, the Jewish doctrine, they just took the whole thing and called it the Old Testament. The reason for that action was that the Jewish faith was the dominant faith at the time and Christianity wouldn't have stood a chance at surviving would it have challenged it. In stead, they did the smart thing and decided to join'em since they couldn't beat'em.
Long story short, Christians should learn the history of their own faith and not just the history within the Bible. It seems everybody knows the history of Christianity but Christians. Most people who have chosen to not be Christian have far more intelligent reasons why they are not that Christians have for why they are.
Anywho, I'm vented on this...for now.
Christianity claims that the Bible is the "Word of God".
Why would you simply accept such a HUGE claim without investigating? Shouldn't you try to determine who actually wrote the various books of the Bible? Shouldn't you investigate the character of those various authors before you accept that God was writing through them? Shouldn't you try and determine who/how they arrived at the determination that these words were the words of God rather than just wise words written by inspired people?
Were you to do the leg-work yourself, you would find that there is absolutely no reason to believe that the books of the Bible are the "Words of God". Most of the authors of the books don't even dare claim that what they are writing is anything other than wise instruction. Most of the books of the Bible were never even intended to be compiled into one manuscript because they were written by different people at different times in history for people of faiths other than Christianity. Christianity claimed these writings as their own when they were attempting to establish an official doctrine. These books were then edited and later re-edited and revised and some even done away with all together from the Bible. If they really believed these writings to truly be the "Word of God," don't you think that they would not have dared to ever alter them, let alone, remove entire books? Obviously the founders and up-keepers of the official Christian doctrine understand that its doctrine is of man and fear no reprisal from God for altering it.
Christianity claims that Jesus, the foundation of their faith, was the literal "Son of God".
Before you accept another such HUGE claim, shouldn't at the very least, verify that Jesus actually existed and do so from a source other than the Bible? Imagine if you had no religious belief what-so-ever and I approached you and said, God is a talking rock in the desert and he gave me his wise instructions to write for all man kind to follow. Would you simply take my writing and decide whether or not to believe me based upon those writings or would you demand further proof? I'm sure you would require more than my own writing which tells you I'm telling the truth, before you believed me. Would you suspend common sense which tells you that rocks don't talk? I believe you would require more than hearsay in order that you accept such a proposition. Why then do you simply accept the idea that a VIRGIN but married woman became impregnated immaculately - then even further that somehow it can be known that this child was the literal son of God, when the only people making these claims are the people selling the religion?
When you do the research you find that there are NO RECORDS confirming that a person named Jesus was immaculately conceived by a virgin, who by the way was a married woman. If there was an actual Mary & Joseph, you better believe that in a time before the modern calendar was even made and in the middle-east, they were consorting. It is unreasonable to believe that Mary would have been a virgin and even less reasonable that if she had a child that wasn't Joseph's, it wasn't due to anything other than infidelity. Christianity make all sorts of claims of the miracles of Jesus but there are no records ANY WHERE confirming any miracles outside of what's written in the Bible. There isn't even a record of a Jesus being crucified. None of this is surprising when you do the research and discover that Jesus was fabricated during the Council's of Nicaea wherein the bishops of Christianity regularly convened to determine what the beliefs of Christianity would be & what doctrines would be upheld/omitted. When you challenge the piety of the authors of the Christian religion you find that their hands were covered in blood. These were not good people and historically the up-keepers of the Bible were pretty corrupt people. King James, the commissioner of the most widely used version of the Bible was an absolutely horrifying person. King James was a bi-sexual fornicating glutinous monster who had authority over the doctrines of the Christian faith.
In fact; the founders of the Christian faith, usurped the spiritual doctrines, rituals and beliefs nearly every popular faith over a 400 year period. The purpose was to create a religion that had something for every person so as to make the faith palatable to people from a wide array of spiritual backgrounds. Religion was bigger than business and more powerful than politics during that time. Religions were born and died daily. Everyone was trying to get in on the hustle because at the time, it was the means to acquiring the greatest luxury, protection and profit in life. Christianity became such a success because of the fact that its founders were smart enough to duplicate the concepts of every other faith and thereby attract the followers of those faiths. In case you didn't know, the Son of God, born into the flesh, slaughtered and resurrected story, is a remake of the ancient Egyptian story of Heru being born into the flesh by his mother, Auset via magical (immaculate) means in order that he avenge the death of his father, Ausar, who was resurrected as the judge of the souls of men. The story was tweaked to get rid of the parts that wouldn't sell to people outside of Egypt, rearranged to make it consistent with Jewish ideas of the Christ and the characters given names that were similar enough to be accepted by those familiar with the story, but more relatable to the Europeans they were trying to directly market it to. This is why you have no evidence to confirm the miraculous events surrounding Jesus - because they were fabricated. They didn't even bother tampering much with the Torah, the Jewish doctrine, they just took the whole thing and called it the Old Testament. The reason for that action was that the Jewish faith was the dominant faith at the time and Christianity wouldn't have stood a chance at surviving would it have challenged it. In stead, they did the smart thing and decided to join'em since they couldn't beat'em.
Long story short, Christians should learn the history of their own faith and not just the history within the Bible. It seems everybody knows the history of Christianity but Christians. Most people who have chosen to not be Christian have far more intelligent reasons why they are not that Christians have for why they are.
Anywho, I'm vented on this...for now.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Deep Thought Of The Day: The Atheist's Dismissal VS. The Religious' Faith
I like to think myself to be an open-minded person - willing to hear and consider new ideas, even those that contradict my own. If you have read some of my past posts, you probably have in inkling that I am not religious though I do consider myself to be a Theist (I believe there is a God) and Spiritualist (I believe that life has subject and intangible qualities that are yet to be scientifically quantified). I am however, extremely anti-religion. I have the Paltalk Instant Messenger program and I love going into the "Atheists VS. Christians" chat rooms and listening to the debates. I have yet to hear a Christian intelligently defend their position or win a debate against an Atheist and that's because a debate is won by the one with well articulated, rational and verifiable positions. The very basis of religion is unreasonable and irrational as it requires "faith." For those of you who don't know what the word "faith" really means, at it's simplest, it means to BELIEVE (Accept something as true) without any evidence to support that belief. In other words, if I came to you with my fists closed and declared that I have a mountain concealed in my hand and that I would like you to believe me; it would be ignorant for you to accept that claim as truth without evidence and intelligent for you to reason that it is unlikely that there is a mountain in my hand. To accept my claim would make you a person of faith but it would also necessarily make you an ignorant person. To dismiss my claim would make you a person without faith but also a reasonable person. Why believe that there is a mountain in my fist if all of the observable evidence suggests that, that is an impossibility? First off, my hands are not of a size that is capable of concealing a mountain. All known evidence says that no person is strong enough to actually hold an entire mountain. Lastly, and probably more important is; if I have a mountain in my hand that I want you to believe is actually in my hand; why don't I just show it to you? You see the problem that religion has with debating a person who refuses to be ignorant or blindly follow something just because someone else says it is so? Religion says that there is a God who created all things and has a purpose for every creation. Religion goes further to claim that God's desire is that we all be "good" people and do "good" things and if we don't, he will punish us. Religion goes even further and lays out how God achieved creation, his rules for how we should live, the rewards & punishment for abiding by or breaking the rules, etc., etc. The cherry on the top of the religious argument is that God wants us to accept him via faith, not reason, not evidence, not common sense. So the question becomes; if God wants us to be faithful, he obviously doesn't provide evidence of his existence so where do the religious doctrines get off claiming to be the "word of God"? Religion wants it both ways; they want you to be faithful when they don't have the answers but 'use the "word"' where the answers are provided.
I dropped religion over twenty years ago when I decided to actually take it upon myself to study its origins and establishment. I was raised a Christian and it's ironic that I learned nothing about Christianity until I researched secular sources which had no vested interest in me believing one thing or the other. Imagine my surprise to realize that Christianity was fabricated of the books and concepts of various faiths and intellectual thinkers. Imagine my surprise when I realized that books of the Bible were arbitrarily added, removed or edited at will. Isn't this the word of God? How can you edit the word of God? Imagine my surprise when I realized that the person called Jesus might be a complete fabrication and in fact, if he did exist, he practiced Judaism and never claimed to be the literal "son of God". So if Jesus believed in Judaism, why create Christianity? Shouldn't we all become Jews if the Messiah himself taught from Jewish doctrine and followed the Jewish faith?
The fact is that every religious doctrine was conceived in the mind of a man, penned by the hand of a man and disseminated by the mouth of men. God had no part in creating religion. Men desire validation of their lofty ideas and they get that validation by convincing others to agree with what they believe. What better way to achieve agreement than to declare your ideas to not be your own but rather, the intellectual property of God. On the other side of the debate are the Atheist who say that they choose to not believe there is a God because there is no evidence of his existence. Atheists can argue, debate and demonstrate to no end, the evidence for the obvious but have no argument that actually disproves God's existence. Atheists have successfully disproved the validity of religion but invalidating religion doesn't necessarily invalidate the potential for there to be truth in the idea that there is a God. In other words; proving that it is impossible that the world was actually created in 7 days, only proves that the doctrine of the faith(s) which make that claim, are wrong - it doesn't mean that there wasn't a God who created the world. When I made the decision to believe that there is a God, after having considered a wide array of religious, spiritual and anti-religious/spiritual beliefs, the chief factor in me making that decision was that the logical conclusion to the Atheist logic is that there had to be an intelligence at some point to start the ball rolling, at the very least. Perhaps that intelligence or God is completed uninterested in us, perhaps we are a mere inevitable/by chance consequence of the universe taking form. Perhaps there is a God and he/she/it is completely undeserving of praise and worship. Perhaps a lot of things. When it's all said and done, the debate isn't what kind of God, God is, if he exists; the debate is whether or not he does. While I can make no claim to know God's intent or his place in the grand scheme of things (he might actually be just like us - trying to figure out what's going on), I believe it to be reasonable to believe, from a scientific perspective, that there was always an intelligence present and in all likelihood, is the ultimate causality of things.
My reasoning for my position begin with the logical notion that all existing or potential matter and energy, has always existed - things were not created from nothing. Though things evolve (change form) the base elements of the construct have always existed. Because I believe this, I have to also believe that the energy that we identify as "intelligence," has also always existed. There is no reasonable concept that says that everything has always been but intelligence. Then there is the scientific fact that all things within the universe seem to be traveling outward and way from a source of force. What that suggests to me is that there is an origin, a place from which all things are traveling, a state before being pushed outward. Were the universe chaotic and had no order to it, it would make sense to me to assume that there was no intelligent cause for the current state of things but that's not the case. The fact is that there was obviously a cause for things to go from the state and they were in to their current state. If you accept the notion that intelligence is an energy that has always existed along with everything else, it becomes just as reasonable, perhaps even more so, to believe that the cause was due to that intelligence, as opposed to an inexplicable act of nature.
What it comes down to for me is a choice between to brands of ignorance. Religion offers you unverifiable and often contradicting concepts based on you trusting that what their doctrine says was actually written/issued by God. Atheism offers you the comfort of believing in the absolute and obvious but dismisses the potential that there is a God. What I have decided is that science is that truth and God fits into scientific reasoning somehow, we just haven't yet figured out the details of what God is. What we do know is what is the truth that stares us in the face: whatever God is, he/she/it does not care to or have the ability to control the actions of man. If the religious concept of God were true, it would terrify me to think that the King of reality beckons us to be "good" yet sat back and observed as the bloody Holy Crusades took place, the American slave practices were conducted, the Holocaust occurred, the Darfur genocide was waged, etc., etc. Rather than believe that an all-powerful and all-good God was able to sit back and allow such things to happen, it makes more sense to me that either God is not all powerful or isn't all-good or isn't watching our every move. Life is our own responsibility and we can be as wicked or righteous as we choose to be and God will not prevent us from doing either.
So another question is inevitable and this is; why choose to believe that there is a God if one believes that God serves no real purpose to man's life? I answer that by saying that it really doesn't matter to me what God's purpose is - I don't pretend to know, but I can no more deny that I believe he/she/it does exist than I can deny that there are clouds surrounding this planet. To me, it is just a reality. I accept many things to be true that serve no benefit to me, simply because it makes sense. I believe that I will drown if I swim too deep in a body of water for too long. I have never drowned before but should I find myself swimming in a deep body of water, I'll be cautious not to go too deep or stay under for too long. Until the day comes that my belief about drowning in deep water becomes relevant to my life, it's just a belief. When/if the day comes that an understanding of God becomes relevant to my life, I will have one.
I dropped religion over twenty years ago when I decided to actually take it upon myself to study its origins and establishment. I was raised a Christian and it's ironic that I learned nothing about Christianity until I researched secular sources which had no vested interest in me believing one thing or the other. Imagine my surprise to realize that Christianity was fabricated of the books and concepts of various faiths and intellectual thinkers. Imagine my surprise when I realized that books of the Bible were arbitrarily added, removed or edited at will. Isn't this the word of God? How can you edit the word of God? Imagine my surprise when I realized that the person called Jesus might be a complete fabrication and in fact, if he did exist, he practiced Judaism and never claimed to be the literal "son of God". So if Jesus believed in Judaism, why create Christianity? Shouldn't we all become Jews if the Messiah himself taught from Jewish doctrine and followed the Jewish faith?
The fact is that every religious doctrine was conceived in the mind of a man, penned by the hand of a man and disseminated by the mouth of men. God had no part in creating religion. Men desire validation of their lofty ideas and they get that validation by convincing others to agree with what they believe. What better way to achieve agreement than to declare your ideas to not be your own but rather, the intellectual property of God. On the other side of the debate are the Atheist who say that they choose to not believe there is a God because there is no evidence of his existence. Atheists can argue, debate and demonstrate to no end, the evidence for the obvious but have no argument that actually disproves God's existence. Atheists have successfully disproved the validity of religion but invalidating religion doesn't necessarily invalidate the potential for there to be truth in the idea that there is a God. In other words; proving that it is impossible that the world was actually created in 7 days, only proves that the doctrine of the faith(s) which make that claim, are wrong - it doesn't mean that there wasn't a God who created the world. When I made the decision to believe that there is a God, after having considered a wide array of religious, spiritual and anti-religious/spiritual beliefs, the chief factor in me making that decision was that the logical conclusion to the Atheist logic is that there had to be an intelligence at some point to start the ball rolling, at the very least. Perhaps that intelligence or God is completed uninterested in us, perhaps we are a mere inevitable/by chance consequence of the universe taking form. Perhaps there is a God and he/she/it is completely undeserving of praise and worship. Perhaps a lot of things. When it's all said and done, the debate isn't what kind of God, God is, if he exists; the debate is whether or not he does. While I can make no claim to know God's intent or his place in the grand scheme of things (he might actually be just like us - trying to figure out what's going on), I believe it to be reasonable to believe, from a scientific perspective, that there was always an intelligence present and in all likelihood, is the ultimate causality of things.
My reasoning for my position begin with the logical notion that all existing or potential matter and energy, has always existed - things were not created from nothing. Though things evolve (change form) the base elements of the construct have always existed. Because I believe this, I have to also believe that the energy that we identify as "intelligence," has also always existed. There is no reasonable concept that says that everything has always been but intelligence. Then there is the scientific fact that all things within the universe seem to be traveling outward and way from a source of force. What that suggests to me is that there is an origin, a place from which all things are traveling, a state before being pushed outward. Were the universe chaotic and had no order to it, it would make sense to me to assume that there was no intelligent cause for the current state of things but that's not the case. The fact is that there was obviously a cause for things to go from the state and they were in to their current state. If you accept the notion that intelligence is an energy that has always existed along with everything else, it becomes just as reasonable, perhaps even more so, to believe that the cause was due to that intelligence, as opposed to an inexplicable act of nature.
What it comes down to for me is a choice between to brands of ignorance. Religion offers you unverifiable and often contradicting concepts based on you trusting that what their doctrine says was actually written/issued by God. Atheism offers you the comfort of believing in the absolute and obvious but dismisses the potential that there is a God. What I have decided is that science is that truth and God fits into scientific reasoning somehow, we just haven't yet figured out the details of what God is. What we do know is what is the truth that stares us in the face: whatever God is, he/she/it does not care to or have the ability to control the actions of man. If the religious concept of God were true, it would terrify me to think that the King of reality beckons us to be "good" yet sat back and observed as the bloody Holy Crusades took place, the American slave practices were conducted, the Holocaust occurred, the Darfur genocide was waged, etc., etc. Rather than believe that an all-powerful and all-good God was able to sit back and allow such things to happen, it makes more sense to me that either God is not all powerful or isn't all-good or isn't watching our every move. Life is our own responsibility and we can be as wicked or righteous as we choose to be and God will not prevent us from doing either.
So another question is inevitable and this is; why choose to believe that there is a God if one believes that God serves no real purpose to man's life? I answer that by saying that it really doesn't matter to me what God's purpose is - I don't pretend to know, but I can no more deny that I believe he/she/it does exist than I can deny that there are clouds surrounding this planet. To me, it is just a reality. I accept many things to be true that serve no benefit to me, simply because it makes sense. I believe that I will drown if I swim too deep in a body of water for too long. I have never drowned before but should I find myself swimming in a deep body of water, I'll be cautious not to go too deep or stay under for too long. Until the day comes that my belief about drowning in deep water becomes relevant to my life, it's just a belief. When/if the day comes that an understanding of God becomes relevant to my life, I will have one.
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