All Things Religion Thread

Oddly info the cynics amongst us would say you’re spot on; you’re a very funny man.

guy....."In my book people can believe in or who they like and I’ll respect that if they live a more fulfilled and happy life but for someone to say their god is the one true god is beyond contempt. Why must there be one true christian god? To say that immediately shows great disrespect for all the ancient belief systems known in human history and yet you want to be respected for your belief! Yeah nah. Optimist has lots of form in this regard by the way, another bad day or two? So if you believe in a god great but also recognise the basic tenets of all belief systems or religions are shared and there is no one true god."

firstly you say you respect what people believe, then use the word contempt to describe the same people who say their God is the true God !

All civilizations believed their God/Gods were the true Gods?

Then you go on to say that Christians disrespect " ancient belief systems " because we say ours is the one true God.......there are no ancient belief systems older than the Old Testament/Christians...

Then you state because of "your" facts , that there is no one true God......and that's your opinion and why I questioned your "Facts".....on how you know there is no true God, and seems my questions are offensive to you....?

"Religion, where grown men argue about who has the best imaginary friend"

Where an inability to grasp the facts of science and nature lead to a personal belief system- invented by others! LOL

There's a family of fairies that live in my garden. i know they are there because they whisper in my ear at night and provide me with special life force powers. You just can't see them because they are too small for the human eye.

no one has proved they are not real so it logically follows that they exist.

...or if you are agnostic. they may exist.

No belief system older that the Old Testament........Thats a big call

Ethnocentric?
Or racist.

I get it brutus, to accept that your god has no more or no less legitimacy than any other god is a bridge too far in how you view spirituality in others, after all to accept other gods are equal in status to your one true god would mean you’re questioning the written word in which your faith is based. I’m happy that you have that strength of faith if it brings some meaning or joy but equally I would want to look the strongly cultural person in the face and genuinely respect their belief or the Buddhist monk, or Rabbi or Imam or Hindu etc ... get it? Don’t look for the differences, but look for the common ground, in the goodness of all faiths .....

It is by the deep and hidden currents all oceans are made one.

yeah Fitzy , sorry to destroy your friend concept...but a God/Gods are not friends...and it's easy to see when man has no spirituality.....there's always money and power to worship!

Rusty , so your studies have shown you that there is an older belief system than the Old Testament and Christianity?

Andy....you speak about human ethnic culture , we are talking about God/Gods ...Jesus , no race baiting or racism.....when a Christian transcends his race!

Guy..".I get it brutus, to accept that your god has no more or no less legitimacy than any other god is a bridge too far in how you view spirituality in others, after all to accept other gods are equal in status to your one true god would mean you’re questioning the written word in which your faith is based. I’m happy that you have that strength of faith if it brings some meaning or joy but equally I would want to look the strongly cultural person in the face and genuinely respect their belief or the Buddhist monk, or Rabbi or Imam or Hindu etc ... get it? Don’t look for the differences, but look for the common ground, in the goodness of all faiths ....."

I do not judge , but can make observations....It's interesting that on this forum that the debate seems to be about secularism vs spirituality ....Optimist and I follow and worship our God and the son of God , Jesus.....so I am not sure where you are coming from if you think Christians have some kind of beef other religions....I certainly don't as there is so much to read and learn from the old and new Testament.......and then there are the actions that I try very hard at being a Christian....to try and base your spiritual life on the Gospels...is for me and a lot of others , a journey of peace and giving........which with my history , seems like mission impossible till you understand that Humans are sinners , but God loves us and has forgiven us through his son Jesus , which is what the resurrection was all about......but now I wander off into the details of my Faith.......when really , here on SN......which is a secular Forum.....what is man without spirituality?

Brutus I can’t believe that you of all people are totally discounting indigenous beliefs systems.

Andy ..."Brutus I can’t believe that you of all people are totally discounting indigenous beliefs systems."

I am not discounting Indigenous belief systems...there is a deep spirituality and also the most refined social system I have personally experienced.....as I said to Guy, this forum is about secularism vs Spirituality....

So are you a secularist ?

It depends on how you define spiritualism.
I certainly don’t believe in an all- powerful creator, especially one in human form.
I’ll dig up a reply I posted a while back, it probably best describes my general outlook.

Why not an all powerful creator...Its all about your understanding of scale. Most humans cant get a sense of "bigness" even though we can now see smallness with our microscopes etc.. To an ant we are massive and probably way too big to comprehend or understand, but there is a sense to them that something big is going on out there.
The big bang theory is that everything erupted out of one tiny small point and is still travelling outward and expanding. The funny thing is that most don't believe that someone could be so powerful that the small point could be someones mouth and that everything could be spoken into existence through unimaginable power.... Obviously if this being exists as Brutus and I and many others believe, He's a big fella and way too big to see. Its why He sent the visible version...Jesus called Christ.. we can connect with the Father of all things through the Son....This connection is personal...you have to want it....and if you really really want to know.....you will be answered....be warned though, everything you thought was real in your "Matrix" life may change really quickly.

Brutus, this is something I posted relatively recently.

It’s a bit tricky to know where to start – a quick Google search defines spirituality as being a “a sense of connection to something bigger than ourselves, and it typically involves a search for meaning in life”, or maybe being about “non-religious experiences that help people get in touch with the human spirit”, where the human spirit includes our intellect, emotions, fears, passions, and creativity.

With this as a starting point, my first stop in personal spirituality (I was going to talk about “nourishing” the spirit but that word makes me retch) has always been the natural environment, whether it’s being on the water, under the water, in the rainforests, desert or up on a glacier somewhere.

I probably don’t need to bang on about the benefits of being in an intact environment but l find it grounding and very fulfilling and it’s provided a healthy and positive thread through life.

I think what’s interesting is that the more I know about the environment from a factual point of view, the more I get from the interaction. This especially applies to geological processes – having some understanding of the change in a landscape, whether over a matter of days or over thousands or millions of years is fascinating and very humbling.
So from my point of view, science works hand in hand with spirituality, or, it is possible to successfully “endeavour to make sense of the world with the best knowledge we have of the day" and have this positively affect us in a spiritual way.

Something else that I don’t think about that much but is also intriguing is the concept of “mathematics being the language of nature” and how maths and physics can help explain the way waves refract and break, how galaxies spiral, seashells curve and how patterns replicate in nature. This replication can be seen in snowflakes, leaves, flowers, lightning and also the hexagonal basalt columns seen at many headlands.

So I really think that when looking for answers or some sort of fulfillment and meaning, traditional religion had largely been looking in the wrong direction, especially in the past few hundred years when ideology doesn’t seem to have kept up with advances in understanding.

The Earth has huge processes of unimaginably long periods of time and in the not too distant future I’ll decompose and become absolutely intimate with the soil and the waters which will in turn, be recycled as the Earth and its tectonic plates move and shift.

Optimist.

An "all powerful creator" in human form is probably the least imaginative solution I could think up.

And makes the least sense, certainly in light of scientific advances and enlightenment thinking.

Most humans can't get a sense of bigness?
Maybe, maybe not.

I can have a fair crack at imagining scale and it's got nothing to do with a human-type god and quite a bit to do with physics and time.

I really do think that the whole Bible and the bearded man way of thinking is woefully outdated, lazy and arrogantly anthropocentric.

I'm not particularly into the Australian Aboriginal Dreaming thing but at least Indigenous Australians weren't anthropocentic and so were able to keep going for tens of thousands of years.

Great stuff Andy.

We really are just a speck on a speck having a moment.

At the same time the universe is immeasurably big, thanks to science.

Could science be the religion of the 21st century?

(My 11 year old daughter showed me this video yesterday - it does help with getting a sense of 'bigness'.)

A human-form creator is not the abrahamic conception of God but a later Hellenistic bastardisation. The creator was thought to be a non-physical being. (a good way to think of it would be a transcendent mind).

Great video westo

A speck on a speck having a moment.

I like it Westof.

A freakish set of circumstances on a tiny planet in a universe so large that our existence wasn't freakish at all, it was actually inevitable.

Here's some more food for thought.
It's set to start at 1.54 to avoid the Americanisms at the start.
And in case you were wondering, apparently there are about 50 000 000 000 000 000 000 atoms in a grain of sand.

Except not.
On naturalism, there is no a priori reason for the universal constants on which the laws of physics act to have life-permitting values, yet they do. So going back to that (what you might call the initial conditions & boundary conditions of the universe), considering all "allowable" values, chances of life arriving are not inevitable but vanishingly small. Can highly recommend the likes of Sir Roger Penrose to those with an interest in the physics.

Perhaps given said values, there may be a high probability that life eventually arrives, but the age & scale of the universe is not yet such that it would be inevitable.

Pops so in a near-infinite universe you're saying that the chances of life are very small?
Even the briefest of Google searches shows that to be a very difficult position to defend.

Given the constants are what that are, something less than inevitable. I know Penrose calculated them to be small, and he's one of the most respected minds in cosmology.

Once you ask why the constants are what they are, odds become vanishingly small (again, see Penrose's calculus).

Of course, not everyone agrees with Penrose (it wouldn't be live science if all agreed!)
Paul Davies' "The Goldilocks Enigma" is a really interesting book that looks into a few different arguments/perspectives. He has his biases of course, and the book would be a little out of date now, but a really interesting read for anyone wanting to get more depth in this area (while still at a popular level).

Also, Andy, near-infinite is an incoherent concept. Any finite number is equally far from infinite.

(Even though pretending very large numbers are infinite is a common trick in physics to make the maths doable).

Speaking of "near-infinite universe"

This video is along those lines watched it the other day and blew my mind.

(description from video cut and pasted below)

"Is the universe infinite? Visualizing infinity. This is part 2 of the Planck length video. if the Sun was the size of a Basketball, Proxima Centauri our nearest neighbor would be 4500 hundred miles away. And there are 10 sextillion such stars in the universe that is 1 followed by 22 zeros. And each one of them is approximately the same distance apart from each other as proxima centauri is from the sun.

In fact, the universe is bigger than even what our most powerful telescopes can see. How big is the universe in terms of numbers? And in fact, could it be infinite? Is there any way we can even begin to visualize what infinity is?

At 1 quadrillion meters, We will be passing by the Oort cloud which is thought be a spherical shell consisting of up to 2 trillion comets that surround the solar system. This spherical cloud starts about 1 trillion kilometers away from the sun and ends about 15 trillion km away from the sun. This also forms the outer boundary of our solar system, where the gravitational influence of the sun is minimal to non-existent.

The Milky Way galaxy is about 106,000 light years across, or almost exactly 1 quintillion kilometers, containing up to 400 billion stars. There is nothing particularly remarkable about our galaxy. It is a typical spiral galaxy. There are billions of others like it in the universe. Our neighbor the Andromeda galaxy is larger, containing 1 trillion stars.

When we go 1000 times larger than this, we begin to see the super structure of the universe which is made up of superclusters. We live in such a structure called the virgo superstructure. We reach the end of the visible universe at about the scale of 10^27 meters. The observable universe has a diameter of about 93 billion light years or 1 x 10^27 meters.

The reason it is actually 93 billion light years across and not 13.8 billion light years is because the universe has been expanding for the entire 13.8 billion years, and due to the cosmic expansion. And we can calculate the universe is actully 46.5 billion light years from us by this time. So the diameter of the universe would be twice that, or 93 billion light years across.

But we will actually never eventually see the light from that distance because in 1998, we discovered something dark energy, and learned that universe is not in a steady expansion, but rather an accelerating expansion, so that light will be receding from us at greater than the speed of light.

But could it be though that what we see can see is a miniscule portion of a universe that is actually infinite? Well, the cosmic microwave background gives us a clue. It’s the leftover glow from the big bang. One of the things that this microwave background tells us is that the universe appears to be flat. How do we know this? Scientists look for what we would see if the universe was a certain shape.

They look for the curvature of space. If space was not flat but positively curved like a 4 dimensional sphere, then we would expect to see multiple images of the same object in the sky because distant light rays would converge. In a positively curved universe, the angles would add up to greater than 180 degrees.

Data from the WMAP as well as Planck spacecraft, however, indicates that the universe is flat, or nearly flat with an error of 0.4%. A flat universe would be an infinite universe. But if the error is taken into account, then it is possible that the universe could have a slightly positive curvatire. In that case it would be finite, but would have to have a radius at least 250 times larger than the part that we can see. This would be a minimum size of (250 x 46.5==11.6) 11.6 trillion light years in radius or about 23 trillion light years in diameter, instead of the 93 billion that we can see.

This is huge, but would be much smaller than infinity. Infinity is a very large number. Imagine a very large number like a googol, the real googol, spelled differently than what you are used to seeing. This is 10^100 light years. That’s 1 following by 100 zeros.

Or a googolplex which is 10^10^100 – that’s 10 to the google power. An extremely large number. Much larger than even the number of planck volumes that would fit inside the observable universe (4.7 x10^185 planck volumes could fit inside the universe). But infinity is much much larger than either of those numbers.
#infinity​
#arvinash​
#infiniteuniverse​

What we do know for sure is that universe is much larger than the part we can observe. The problem is we only have access to the information contained our in our tiny 93 billion light year diameter bubble that we call the observable universe. We can only infer from what we can see."

Let's say there are 200 billion galaxies in the universe (a common estimate).
Each galaxy has maybe 100 thousand million stars as a very conservative estimate, with numerous planets orbiting those stars.
Huge figures indeed, it's very difficult to imagine.

Seems like Penrose believes the universe is not here by chance but at the same time he's an atheist.
Davies discusses possible solutions, such as the anthropic principle, the idea of a multiverse which contains many different universes (including our "just right" one), and the idea of intelligent design.
Trying to get your head around a multiverse along with six extra dimensions beyond the three space and one time dimension we’re familiar with is very difficult.

no one has proved a multiverse or intelligent design, ever. fact. there is no evidence.
it's just speculation, its ideas can not be best tested so thus it can not be disproven.

The videos are awesome and so humbling. I remember as a teenager laying flat on my back one night with mates looking at the stars, talking about the vastness, as you do. I thought I’d possibly discovered alternate life with a little theory that night (which of course is not true, but still to this day ive a soft spot for it)
Theory being that we were looking in the wrong place for it.
You think about the structure of atoms being loosely described as similar to solar systems. Then understanding all the little living microbes that call your body home. Then why not the galaxies and the universe as we know it making up larger life forms on a massive scale. Our solar system being an atom in something far bigger. It goes without saying that we were stoned at the time haha

I’m trying to imagine sitting in a modified 737, trying to get across the universe, for 93 billion years.
Narrow seats, sitting next to a fat person who wants to monopolize the armrest and with the cunt in front reclining his seat.
With the only movie being Jumanji or maybe When Harry Met Sally.
Then it really would feel like an infinite trip.

Is heaven full of trillions of aliens?

With one god one would assume there is only one heaven.

So with intelligent life very likely on millions of planets and earth relatively young, when Mr Optimist and his fellow believers get to heaven they not only have to contend with a few billion bored souls from earth all taking about "remember when" and "isn't this great" in a multitude of languages for eternity but also billions upon billions of weird alien souls hanging about. Some aliens might even be from planets formed early on and so have perhaps done 5 billion years of "heaven" by the time Optimist meets them.

Sounds appealing??!!

Now. that would make an interesting discussion in bible study.

But of course they would sidestep the question and find some reassuring sentence or two to quote and go back to dreaming about the pearly gates and meeting Jesus and sort of blank out any thought of what happens beyond that.

I find it very interesting when people start thinking about Infinity and how small Earth is in the cosmos and where do humans fit in and why?

Science is man's attempt to answer questions .....where did we come from and why , where did the Cosmos originate , how was it made ......these are Big questions and ones that have been answered with speculation , theory's, science based possibilities.......

For years/decades I too loved the adventure of science and the possibilty's of science answering all my questions.....I love science and the ability of man to conquer problems , and see technology as man's great strength in providing a better tech based life for all....

As I get older I am seeing failure of man to use technology as a tool to better humanity's existence and future demands being posed right now with major problems being created by technology for future generations , because there is a secular presence in society called money and power.....Public co's first rule make $'s for your shareholders etc.....we are using technology to rape and pillage the planet for profit , at levels never seen before......we dump plastic in the ocean , we soil the air , we cut down forests, we have overfished and have Super Trawlers , we live in a disposable society , where we gobble up new phones/cars/fashion...Western Society throws out 40% of it's food....we have world poverty where whole country's are on the verge of collapse , because the climates changing , they have been left out of any Global conversation on equality are used as slaves...cheap labor/deforestation/mining etc.....

So I see man's abuse/greed with technology as doomed , as of every other civilization that has preceded our current one.

But when you start looking for answers from science and consider the idea of the Big Bang Theory....once there was a big gas build up and it exploded with a Big Bang....Planets/Stars/Galaxy;s the Universe all came in an instant...and science is still trying to prove , spending Trillions of $'s on where we come from...

Intelligent design...this is what we could discuss further.......https://intelligentdesign.org/whatisid/........this is a study by scientists/scholars/philosophers..etc...

Because of a couple of near death experiences , the meaning of life became pretty real for me....and there was an intervention from the super natural , and I had moment where I said I surrender as I looked at the sky...and the next year or so I felt and experienced something that could not be proved by science, but was and is as real to me as me sitting here writing the longest post of my like LOL....

So I studied the Bible Jesus, the Gospels....is it real , what is the proof , what does it mean....?

now 5 years in I still love science and technology , but it has no answers to my questions....in fact now I see the fallacy of secular man......I see God as the creator...as Jesus was his son........this brings peace.....

I see God holding the whole universe in his hand as infinity is his domain ....

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-clues-found-in-understand...

as per usual there is usually a much simpler albeit less exciting explanation.

edit - article meant to be https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/peace-of-mind-near-death/

(have left the original for transparency )

Peace can come from a simple answer whether it be a truth or just the scribblings of man.

It can also come from accepting there is no "answer" and possibly there should not even be a question.

My dog has peace. I think dolphins have peace.

It can also come from accepting there is no "answer" and possibly there should not even be a question

Boom

bonza....yeah another theory , not much more ....having lived thru the age of psychedelic's , and experienced them myself , to even consider Ketamine as a psychedelic pretty limiting to say the least...the link you provided is just a few examples...Ketamine is a horse tranquilizer !

Frog..if mankind did not ask questions.....we 'd still be living in a cave...

As usual Brutus you're a rambling collection of contradictions.

andy...well tell me which ones, as probably need to explain more....I see your whole idea of nature as flawed , because man is destroying his habitat , so how can you claim that nature is a positive force for you....are you aligned with a Green group trying to stop the carnage?
have you even bothered to read.....https://intelligentdesign.org/whatisid/

brutus - actually its an article that highlights a number of studies that have shown how near death experiences can be explained biologically thus directly refuting the claim that near death experiences are an act of god.

"I see your whole idea of nature as flawed , because man is destroying his habitat , so how can you claim that nature is a positive force for you"

Haha, christ you do say some things!

brutus - apologies posted the wrong link - have edited my post above.

nevertheless the incorrect link on drugs still provides another good evidence based insight into the explanation of near death experiences

Andy I am interested to spend a lot of time and energy "discussing" secularism vs spiritualism......what science means or doesn't......what God means or doesn't....what proof there is or isn't and the conclusions drawn from all the above.....if you see contradictions point them out , if you feel I have misread your posts well , explain it to me.....otherwise there is no discussion

Bonza...it's a theory , based on a very limited cases.....but does not disprove or prove anything ....but a discussion point