Stephen Fry on God

a reply to: 3NL1GHT3N3D1
Define when God abandoned people before they were ever born?

How do you know that humans were ready to be alone? By what standard I know my kids are ready to face the world out there?
We made the rules, but are they right? Who define the maturity age at what a kid is ready? At 18, 20, 25?

a reply to: ketsuko

Diseases, natural disasters and the like are impersonal and part of nature. The very fact that we feel them to be unfair or evil is a powerful argument for the existence of God whether you like that or not, after all pretty much everyone can agree that such things seem to be pretty unfair or evil when they strike good people or people who seem to be unfairly targeted because they're very young. Otherwise, it would just be nature doing, you know, what it does which is more or less what it's supposed to do.

its about as unfair as my troll doll making me lose in bingo. i think its getting jealous of my lucky marker collection.

As much as I like Steven fry as a TV host and comedian, I think alot of his hatred for god stems from the persecution of homosexuals in most religions and has obviously highlighted all the extreme negatives to validate his point ( like everyone does). I don't believe in a religious god as that ultimately is absurd but I am open minded to a "creator", hence my agnostic look on life

originally posted by: Abednego
a reply to: 3NL1GHT3N3D1
Define when God abandoned people before they were ever born?

How do you know that humans were ready to be alone? By what standard I know my kids are ready to face the world out there?
We made the rules, but are they right? Who define the maturity age at what a kid is ready? At 18, 20, 25?

that last question will get you arrested in most places..lol

a reply to: rossacus
I was raised a Christian, but as I grew up I became more of a gnostic (through self study and lately I gain a teacher). God is more than just a religion. In my case I still call myself a Christian but the view and understanding I have of God is way different from Christianity.
I'm a theist. I do believe in the existence of a Supreme Being.

originally posted by: Abednego
a reply to: rossacus
I was raised a Christian, but as I grew up I became more of a gnostic (through self study and lately I gain a teacher). God is more than just a religion. In my case I still call myself a Christian but the view and understanding I have of God is way different from Christianity.
I'm a theist. I do believe in the existence of a Supreme Being.

I am the same...I believe the majority of Christian values are correct and will teach those to my children in terms of love thy neighbour etc etc. However I am a man of science and cannot find any possible reason to believe the fabrications within religious text. They are not relative to our current understandings and when analysed closely are vague comments like that of psychics, open to the interpretations of those willing to believe/ those not willing to question them. Only 1% of me believes in supreme power simply because of the vastness of space

Yeah.... Love Stephen Fry and agree 100% with him on this.
Have said almost identical things many times myself.

a reply to: Cobaltic1978
I think we need to separate a "creator" from the human concept of a "god/goddess". Once you do that, things make a little more sense. If there is a creator(s), the likelihood that any religion on earth is representative of said creator(s), is infinitesimal in the best case scenario. Once you strip away all religion, what is left is easier to digest.

A creator(s) need not be perfect, but rather fallible like any other entity in existence. Just because an entity has the power and understanding to create life as we know it, does not mean that entity is to be revered or worshiped. It means simply it has the technological know-how to accomplish the task.

Therefore, if we were created, or modified at some point in our evolution to be as we are today, it could be that entity see us more as an experiment, or we may have been forgotten altogether. Whatever the case, we have the intelligence, and the tools on this planet to make life 1000% percent better for the whole of our species, if we just will. No gods/goddesses necessary.

We are what we are. It's time to grow up, be big boys and girls, and take responsibility for ourselves, and the mess we have allowed this world to get into. We have to fix it, ladies and gents. No one else is going to. It's time to stop looking for a savior. We ARE the saviors!

a reply to: Abednego

After Jesus died on that cross and rose into heaven. Ever since he has been totally silent, not intervening one bit to help humanity. Hundreds of generations have gone by since he left, he abandoned those people who were yet to be born and left them to the devices of the church and man.

A good and loving parent would never abandon their kids at any point. Just because you let them out into the world doesn't mean you start ignoring them when they need help. God was all for helping his children out when the world was less connected, but now that the world is more connected than ever he has suspiciously gone silent. How ironic.

People are born into situations that they have no control over, why doesn't God intervene now that the world is interconnected? Probably because of the reasons I listed in my first post.

a reply to: 3NL1GHT3N3D1
He did not abandoned us, He just gave us the tool for salvation is up to us to use it or not.

a reply to: Abednego

Yes, and he didn't have the foresight to see that some people would be born into families that would demonize such a tool? Muslims were raised to believe a man being God is blasphemy, they had no control over that. Why would God send them to hell when they never had a chance to know any differently?

a reply to: Cobaltic1978

if God exists, how come evil deeds are so prevalent in this World. Not just evil deeds by humans, but the evil of disease and pestilence as well as other evil deeds in nature...

God knows things that most people never think about. Such as, "What is life?" All we know about life is that it's short, relatively speaking, compared to the afterlife. And other things, like "Nobody ever really dies." Your body may turn to dust, but you, your consciousness, is an eternal being. Therefore, from God's perspective, nobody that he's killed or ordered the death of actually died. God doesn't explain himself, either. "Go kill everyone in the promised land," he said, without adding something like "...because after I reincarnate them, they won't be as evil anymore." In that case, killing them all would give them another chance to be better in another lifetime, because they got trapped into a false religion by an accident of birth. The way they thought and believed wasn't their fault, they were just raised that way. Killing them did them a favor. Yes, true, that might not be the way it actually happened, but it is a theory that explains it. Preachers sure won't propose that idea, because they were brain-locked by their seminary into believing stuff that has no basis in scripture, such as "There's no such thing as reincarnation." I defy anyone to prove that to me using scripture. It can't be done... in fact, if you push me, I can show you scripture proving that reincarnation does exist.

God's seeming disregard for human life is just one of the concerns everyone has. "Why does God let bad things happen to good people?" for instance. There really is a simple answer. God has let Satan have his way with the human race since the expulsion from Eden. Satan wanted to prove some point about the humans God created, about how Satan's creations were "just as good" or something (I don't know the specifics), so God is letting him try to prove it, knowing that anything that happens to us in this life, including leaving it, does not matter in the slightest from an eternal point of view. Only survivors mourn.

But we can guess, and that's all we can do until we find out for sure. So here's my guess.

It starts with the war in heaven that occurred before this universe existed. Satan led a third of the angels in rebellion against God, and they all got kicked out of Heaven. Where could God kick them out to, though? There was nowhere but The Real Universe that God created. And so, he made this universe. The Bible doesn't say why God made the heavens and the Earth that we all know and love, does it? But it does say there's another universe, "The Kingdom of God," out there somewhere. Genesis 1:1 is about the creation of this universe, as a prison to keep the rebels in. The creation of The Kingdom was never written about. And once Adam and Eve became rebels too, they ended up in the same place Satan did: right here.

Some things did get written down, if not explained, which is the next stop: the Nephilim. How is it that the Earth was already populated with human beings when Adam and Eve were tossed into it? Scripture contains nothing to explain their existence, so I've made it part of my guess...

Satan was jealous. He wanted some beings of his own to worship him, too, and he had this whole big universe all to himself. So he created the Nephilim and stuck them on Earth. The Nephilim are "children of Satan." Adam and Eve started out on a different Earth, the one God created, the perfect Earth; this Earth is a cheap imitation of the real one, and Adam and Eve were relocated from the Kingdom to this universe when they were tossed out of Eden. But it was necessary for that to happen; otherwise, the Nephilim and all their billions of descendants would have been a lost cause, eternally doomed. Adam and Eve were the cure for Nephilimism, deliberately set up to fail in Eden so they could be sent here. They were a hot-fix patch to start the process of slowly correcting all the bugs introduced by Satan. To make industrial diamonds, you have to start with a tiny piece of actual diamond, and then the rest of the carbon crystallizes around it, keeping that same structure. Without that starter seed, that nucleus, all you get is a big charcoal briquette. Adam and Eve were that nucleus, around which all of humanity eventually crystallized "in their image." Nephilim and God-made Men have intermingled, like Neanderthals and Cro-magnons, to the point where now, it's one smooth species slurpee(tm). And it only took 6,000-ish years and maybe 80 generations. Now you know why Adam and his lineage could live to the age of 1,000 years; they weren't diluted with Nephilim corruption yet. Now, with that corruption thoroughly mixed into humanity, we're lucky to get 100 years.

So anyway, seen from that perspective, everything God's said to have done in the Old Testament makes perfect sense. If someone's evil, kill him, and he can get another lifetime, another chance to get it right. If everyone but one guy and his three sons is evil, give them protection and flood everyone else to death ("rebooting humanity" to give it a better chance). If everyone in an entire city is evil and selfish except one guy and his family, get them out of the city and wipe it out; then, the influence of those evil people vanishes, and they can be reborn to have another chance if they aren't beyond redemption. (I hope nobody tries to argue that God can't reincarnate people, or pretends to know him so well that they can state that he wouldn't ever reincarnate someone.) Can everyone see that this reincarnation method would be the only way to break someone out of the belief system they were born into, which wasn't their fault? (The only way other than God forcing someone's free will, that is, which he'd never do; we're here to make choices, thus proving whether we're mostly-good or mostly-evil and determining our eternal-life status by our worthiness.)

Then there are tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunami, diseases, and all manner of "acts of God" that aren't acts of God at all, any more than the tornado that wiped Job's family out. The Book of Job is a perfect, literal explanation of what's been happening to all of us since the beginning. If you curse God for a tsunami killing your children, it can only be because you didn't read or understand Job. That Wasn't God. Satan rules this planet and its weather and beasts and evil people right now, because God let him. Someday, God will say "Okay, enough, you've had your chance," and then everything will change for the better. But not for everyone... only for those who stuck by God through thick and thin. Ever wondered where Hell is? Answer: you're sitting in it right now. It just isn't Hell yet. Hell is eternal separation from God; the Earth is temporary separation from God, with only the Holy Spirit left here to keep us from losing all hope. Once that Spirit is taken out of this universe forever, this universe becomes Hell and stays that way.

I tangentialized a lot, but the point is: you don't know enough to say "God's a bad person for all that OT stuff he did." The things that happened had to happen. And it hasn't changed since.

I agree with Stephen. It does say in Isaiah that he created everything. That means things that kill us like insects, viruses, snakes or animals. Why would he do that, does he not want to be kind to his creation.

Isaiah 45:7 (King James Version):
I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.

a reply to: celticdog

So he does create evil?

Very interesting, thank you.

originally posted by: celticdog
I agree with Stephen. It does say in Isaiah that he created everything. That means things that kill us like insects, viruses, snakes or animals. Why would he do that, does he not want to be kind to his creation.

Isaiah 45:7 (King James Version):
I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.

But you gotta understand. The author of those words is speaking from the perspective of the transcendent mystery source, beyond names and forms, beyond good and evil, beyond tribal mentality, even beyond words. The immanent God is a mask of the transcendent God. All our names and images and concepts of God are masks. They both conceal and reveal the ultimate mystery.

👣

The question of whether God exists, to me, is completely irrelevant. You're going to die, we all are, and that's inevitable but it's also all that matters. Believing in God is not going to help you live longer or make life better for you and vice versa. Live your life the way you want but be kind to others and love as much as you can, that's a basic blueprint and that is all.

Is there anyone here that wouldn't help a suffering child if you had the power to?

Is there anyone here that wouldn't help the suffering child if he/she told you to **** off?

originally posted by: Prezbo369
Is there anyone here that wouldn't help a suffering child if you had the power to?

Is there anyone here that wouldn't help the suffering child if he/she told you to **** off?

You are arguing with a concept of God, a mask, that you've mistaken for God.

Fundamentalists do that too.

👣

originally posted by: BlueMule

originally posted by: Prezbo369
Is there anyone here that wouldn't help a suffering child if you had the power to?

Is there anyone here that wouldn't help the suffering child if he/she told you to **** off?

You are arguing with a concept of God, a mask, that you've mistaken for God.

Fundamentalists do that too.

👣

Sure, you're onto the correct concept of god......

I'm asking those with the more common, general concept of a god.

originally posted by: Prezbo369
Sure, you're onto the correct concept of god......

There is no correct concept of God, because the transcendent transcends concepts.

I'm asking those with the more common, general concept of a god.

Good plan. The more common, general, mainstream thought of the masses is always right.

👣