Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god hi.Here's some more options to think about: Why should god fix all the things you want it to fix?Why must the creator care about us?What if we chose to go to this lower relm and gods in such a high vibrational state that reaching us is very hard to do even if it wants to fix things for us?I don't think it's as black and white as god didn't fix x y z so therefor god doesn't exist. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619721/#p619721 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god Wing of Eternity, ideally if someone is born, it means they're a new member of a family or whatnot. This is usually a cause for joy or celebration, because in many cases the birth was expected, planned for and welcomed.Abdullah, you've gone through some extremely rough stuff. If I lived through half of what you have, I can tell you I'd be thirty-seven times more angry with a supposed god than I am right now. Because everything you just said rings hollow. If you get solace from god somehow, I just don't understand why. There's a short circuit happening, and I'm frankly not interested in "fixing" it.Canlorn, call me a bright-eyed optimist I guess. It isn't so much that I think all religions are horrible, awful things, nor that I believe that all religious people are deluded fools. That's not my stance. It's that I keep convincing myself that people will do better if given enough incentive to do so, and time after time, I'm proven wrong. It's kind of like Linus and the god-damned football. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619719/#p619719 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god Hi.@abdullah_mohammad I agree with you. God not existing because there's pain and suffering in the world makes no sense to me.I've suffered through bullieing, and family drama, but I don't deny an existance after we die because of that.IF there wasn't pain and suffering in the world, guess what, we'd hate it here. If there wasn't drama, we'd hate it here, if there weren't causes to fight for or things to improve upon, we'd hate it here. If it were peaceful all the time; we'd quickly get very bored of life.Peace and a lack of pain is a good thing but there must be a balance for humans to be well, human. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619717/#p619717 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
2021-03-03
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AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : wing of eternity via Audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @Jayde, well said. Only one more question, why should you be happy when someone is born? URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619715/#p619715 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
2021-03-03
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : wing of eternity via Audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @Jayde, well said only one question, why should you be happy when someone is born? URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619715/#p619715 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
2021-03-03
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : abdullah_mohammad via Audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god jayde, god doesn't exist for you. god does exist for me however. and if you are complaining about how some deaths are slow, you should come to palestine and see how it is here. all deaths are very slow here and very painful but you don't see me blaming god and saying god doesn't exist for that reason, but saying god doesn't exist just because someone died slowly and painfully is literally the definition of bullshit. i lost my friends, and they died very slowly too between my arms, but you don't see me whining about how god doesn't exist. i was close to dying many times and you don't see me whining that god doesn't exist. i was close to an air strike by the israeli army and i survived with ptsd and you don't see me whining that god doesn't exist. simply telling me that god doesn't exist just cause someone died slowly and painfully is stupid and it doesn't make sense what so ever. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619711/#p619711 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
2021-03-03
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : abdullah_mohammad via Audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god jayde, god doesn't exist for you. god does exist for me however. and if you are complaining about how some deaths are slow, you should come to palestine and see how it is here. all deaths are very slow here and very painful but you don't see me blaming god and saying god doesn't exist for that reason, but saying god doesn't exist just because someone died slowly and painfully is literally the definition of bullshit. i lost my family, my friends, and they died very slowly too between my arms, but you don't see me whining about how god doesn't exist. i was close to dying many times and you don't see me whining that god doesn't exist. i was close to an air strike by the israeli army and i survived with ptsd and you don't see me whining that god doesn't exist. simply telling me that god doesn't exist just cause someone died slowly and painfully is stupid and it doesn't make sense what so ever. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619711/#p619711 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @jaydeI wouldn't bother arguing. People claiming that god has reasons are using it as a denial mechanism, of a sort, because if god has reasons then it's not meaningless suffering, it's meaningful suffering, which is better.I say the world would be better without religion because if it were meaningless suffering we'd spend more time trying to fix it. But the argument is more about taking someone's security blanket away, not what's true, and arguing about what's true is missing the point entirely and isn't going to get you anywhere.I have basically checked out from this thread because at the end of the day I've already said everything. You have too. People are either already atheists or not. When you say "but show me what god's plan is" and stuff you're not getting satisfying answers because people who sit around saying that there's a plan and therefore this sort of pain has meaning and makes us grow as people can't cope with a world in which that's not the case. They don't care about whether or not it's true. They care about whether or not it makes them feel better. Unless you can offer something that would make people feel better about there not being a god and it's really really strong memetically, no one will care what you say unless they already agree with you. Neither of us is good enough to do that. Lots of people who are way better at this than us have tried and failed for the last however long--say 60-70 years, I think that's probably about how old modern atheism is. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619710/#p619710 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
2021-03-03
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AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : GrannyCheeseWheel via Audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god Oh wise and all powerful god, could you not take a nanosecond from your eon and whisper in my grandmother's ear not to get out of bed. Because on the floor is where I found her this morning, and getting her up hurt her even more. No, you can't do that? Oh OK, that's alright because I got this. And well, again, the whole issue of you not existing rearing its ugly head.You know, it's really rather illogical to use coercion when people willingly give their love. If someone walks the righteous path not because they want to, but are afraid of what will happen if they don't, god has essentially raped their soul.It is apparent that these people are fanatics, and that they are not entirely sane. I'm grateful for those among the faithful that don't push it onto others, but aside from that, yeah, I want nothing to do with god. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619707/#p619707 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god Abdullah, you're right on one count. We shouldn't blame god. This is primarily because god doesn't exist, at least not on the terms that organized religion (of any denomination) would claim.It's perfectly natural to feel joy when someone is born, and to feel sadness or even anger when they die. Sure. But I think that sadness or anger gets multiplied when the way in which they die is needlessly long, painful or cruel. I, for instance, can take solace in the fact that, while my brother died needlessly and while still young, he died very, very quickly. Doctors say he might not have even felt his body hit the floor; one minute he was making a sandwich for his work lunch, the next he was laid out on the kitchen floor. I know he didn't suffer. I know he didn't linger and languish. He had no time to process his own death, so the cruelty I speak of applies to those he left behind, not to the boy himself. But in GCW's case, and in several others of course, it's clear that death is taking its sweet time. And there is no justification in the world, absolutely none, that makes this okay.God has a plan? Bullshit. Tell me what this plan is.God has reasons for making people suffer. Bullshit. If you want me to believe that, you need to first tell me the reasons and then hopefully convince me they're valid.Suffering toughens us. Bullshit. Yes, adversity can be enlightening in the big picture, but what exactly is GCW, or the rest of his family, learning from watching his grandmother die slowly? Because I gotta tell ya, most of what I see from the outside looking in is mounting frustration and nihilism, neither of which is good for the whole religion thing.Seriously, the main takeaway I've gotten from this thread is simple.Some deaths are quick, or expected and can be reckoned with. Others are just full of misery for absolutely no good reason. Some people will, even in the face of that obvious misery, try to defend religion, proving, to me at least, that their innate empathy has been rather badly warped by their belief in a supernatural being.To my way of seeing it, this just no-doubt-about-it sucks, and there's not a lot that most of us can do, either when we see someone suffering as GCW is doing, or when it happens to us, as it inevitably must one day. That's why I suggested trying to improve life for the dying person however and wherever you can, even if it's at your own inconvenience. You will have decades, probably, to not feel demands upon your time; you can spare a little of that time now to help the dying. But in the meantime, there's no sense pretending that it's all for a reason, that there's some grand plan. It isn't, and there isn't. Life just hurts us sometimes. The sooner you can end your search right there, the better you will be at coping with the messy aftermath of tragedy. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619703/#p619703 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
2021-03-03
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : abdullah_mohammad via Audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @JayJay my friend as i said before, the horrid cruels that are commited are not god's fault, this is merely how life goes. this is the rule of life my friend, and we can't change it. it is not god's fault that this is how it is. it is a test for us. every major religion says the same as far as i know. the example that you gave above is not sufficient to the universe as a whole. god doesn't have greed nore anything of the sort, he tests us to see who from among us will be patient and who won't. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619700/#p619700 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god Hi.I can't remember if I mentioned this in my last post but I went through the tunnel that peple speak about as a kid. I've left my body and felt energy in my hands and so on, i'm not afraide of dieing because I know I'll go somewhere.I think I like the idea of christ but equaly can say that about any religious figgure.I didn't grow up christian but was baptised. I doubt I'll follow a religion like todays christianity and here's why: 1. According to some chirches, being a gay/lesbian/trans person is a sin, yeah; no. I'm not gay but find this to be disgusting.2. The idea of helll. Piss god off and he'll put you in hell for ever? That makes no sense to me, that's so... Human. I've heard that we can put ourselves in a place where there's no god and I can understand that if we feel we deserve it but the creator actually putting us in a place of flames and so on for ever just because we didn't follow every law in some books doesn't make sense to me at all.3. The idea that christe didn't "sin" I'm sorry but if you come to this earth, you're going to do something negative because that's the human experience.Having said all that, I do believe we have a soul and that if sience looks hard enough, they'll find it.I'm not bashing christians here at all, as I said; I don't know much about your religion as I didn't grow up in it even though I was baptised as a baby, so if you guys and girls can give me your own understanding of the world, i'm totally ready to hear it. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619699/#p619699 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @85, allow me to put to you the following question.Lets say we have a household with a father, and his 3 children. One was sold off to a sex slavery ring, the other one is wipped and beaten while worked on the father's farm, and the other one was stabbed in the eye, tongue cut out and leg lost in a car accident. The former was a result of the father's greed btw. Back to the house. Each Friday, the children are still forced to show unconditional love and adoration for their father dispite what he's doing to them. Now, would you say that its a test on the children? Or the father is a bitch that needs to die? Now, obviously we're not saying god does such extremes to us, however as mentioned in this thread lots of horrid cruels are committed under his watch yet still we're all required to be his loving and devoted subjects. @Titan of War, I mean, I once wrote my own religious book about 2 years ago. It was about 145 pages, and it could have been more had I continued, however I quit. But where I'll give you credit though, I wrote that on a computer. Using MS word. Its safe to say thousands of years ago when the Bible was written they didn't have the technology to do it, and I'd imagine it being more difficult to write all of that by hand without the use of even a type writer or something. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619685/#p619685 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
2021-03-03
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : abdullah_mohammad via Audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @jayde life is a test. you have to be patient and simply blaming god for everything doesn't really solve anything. i am not trying to minimize no body's suffering, because we all suffer in some way or the other. we should all be patient and accept that everything and everyone has to go at some point, painfully or not, the end result is one my friends. as we are happy when a child is born, it is understandable that we should be sad when our elderly are gone, for it is a human nature to feel that way. i am here for anyone that wish to talk and believe me my friends, i do not harber any bad feelings for anyone of you. i hope that you will find the peace that you are looking for, and that you will be safe. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619674/#p619674 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
2021-03-03
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : wing of eternity via Audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @everyone do you know the story of Sisyphus? He was so powerfull and so wisse, that he could even keep himself alive by rolling a bolder. When I meat him for the first time he was happy, and let me tell you something, he is still happy...But in the end we know his delussion, no more asking if he was appy, rather did he know that he was happy? How the hell does he ask if the answers are there? Well, this was oit, Sisysiphus asked many things, but when he got an answer he gassped and wandered why are things worse? Why was the answer a burden? URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619672/#p619672 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
2021-03-03
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : wing of eternity via Audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @everyone do you know the story of Sisyphus? He was so powerfull and so wisse, that he could even keep himself alive by rolling a bolder. When I meat him for the first time he was happy, and let me tell you something, he is still happy...But in the end we know his delussion, no more asking if he was appy, rather did he know that he was? URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619672/#p619672 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
2021-03-03
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : wing of eternity via Audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @everyone do you know the story of Sisyphus? He was so powerfull and so wisse, that he could even keep the himself alive by rolling a bolder. When I meat him for the first time he was happy, and let me tell you something, he is still happy... URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619672/#p619672 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @Jayde, allow me to fix that. Get ready for some cursing...Fuck this idea. It's stupid. Lol URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619664/#p619664 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god Abdullah, you say it's human nature to suffer, or human nature for things to break down. Yes, okay...but -why is it human nature? If you're defending god, then you're also accepting that he created people, thus is responsible for human nature. He could make it cleaner and less cruel if he wanted to - supposing he exists at all, of course - and the fact that he hasn't is a really compelling argument of why he's not real. An all-knowing, loving god would never have permitted some of the cruelties we suffer every day. It's just that simple.I'm amazed that we've gotten through eighty-something posts without any explosions. Gives me a little hope for the future of civil discourse on this forum. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619658/#p619658 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god Hi,I think one of my biggest problems with religion is that there is so much contradiction, even here in a topic with less than 100 posts I’ve seen different people defending religion contradict each other. On one hand I hear people saying god can not directly intervene in human matters due to free will, but then within a few posts someone else is saying that god is a voice inside us directly talking to us and guiding us, so this is god directly influencing humans. then in another post someone else comes up and says they were unwell and god then directly worked through friends and family influencing their actions to speed their recovery, again contradicting this concept that god cannot intervene due to free will. . . I believe mankind has a huge thirst for knowledge, whether you believe in a god or not, there will always be questions. Someone mentioned indirectly the big bang theory, in that the universe cannot just have appeared from nothing, this is a question which may never have an answer , how could something appear from nothing, but the same question exists even if you believe in god, in the same way the universe could not just appear out of nothing one day, if you believe there has to be a beginning and that something must have created the universe , then by the same token god must have a beginning too, if the universe could not just appear one day out of nowhere, then neither could god. The argument someone or something must have created the universe is the same as the argument someone or something must have created god, regardless of whether you believe in god or not if you travel back far enough through time there has to be nothing at some point and god or the universe had to just appear one day. I think some people just simply need religion to answer the questions which seem unanswerable. Take the many Greek gods of old, people assigned gods to almost each and every element of the world and universe, there were gods and goddesses of the sea, the moon, thunder and much more, most of these were created as man kind needed a way to explain what back then couldn’t be explained . science has since come along and given reason to why the sea and moon work as they do and we no longer worship or believe in these gods because of this. Humans throughout the history have needed religion as a way of answering questions which can’t be answered, this can be seen in almost each continent across our relatively small planet, in that each have come up with their own very different version of god or religion. Again, I don’t have a problem with other people following their own believes and religion, but to me it seems some people just need something to believe in, I’ve seen here in this topic people which don’t believe in god say that even without religion or believing in an afterlife or a higher power that they are content with their place in the world or universe and that the simple act of being here and wanting to better ones self and to be here for friends and family is all the reason they need for why they are here, on the other hand I’ve seen people saying that without god what is the point, where is the purpose, why carry on, how to we define wrong and right without a god to guide us. Again, I don’t have anything against people having believe or faith in what ever they want or whatever god or higher power they want, but its seems to me and I don’t want this to sound shitty, but just that some people need to believe in a higher power to give them meaning, to support them through difficult times and to give answers to unanswerable questions. regarding a soul, Personally I don’t believe in a soul, I believe what makes each and everyone of us unique is our own personal experiences and memories, I don’t believe we do good because of god, I believe we do good because it is the right thing to do, how do we know it is right, because it’s what our parents instil into us as we grow. a parent wants their children to grow and reach their full potential, be the best they can be to do this they teach us to be good and kind and teach us morals. Going back to the point that we are governed by our memories and experiences, I believe this is much the same way that current AI works, the big difference here though is that as humans we’ve had billions of years to refine how we learn, the current techniques we use for artificial learning to the best of my knowledge are fairly new concepts, I couldn’t say how recent but I would imagine the huge leaps in AI learning have probably all come round in just the last ten or twenty years, so it’s a concept still very much in its infancy, try and imagine what we will have achieved in another twenty years, what about a hundred years, what about if given a billion or so years to refine that technology in the same way we have had billions of years to refine our own learning process, from neanderthal to the modern man. Finally, I do
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
2021-03-03
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : abdullah_mohammad via Audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god life is a test. you can't blame god for everything like that. your grandma will get a reward for being patient. you don't go around blaming god for human nature, which is aging, pain, etc. the sun doesn't just explode, it goes through stages before it does. the universe doesn't just end like that, it goes through stages before it does. i hope you understand what i mean. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619654/#p619654 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god again I have personally seen a higher power at work, but that doesn't get me the right to go chase it down. Cool, I had its assistance when I needed it. Now we have parted ways. If I need it again, whether I get the same one or not doesn't matter, as long as I get the help I need right then and there. Give the higher powers privacy. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619625/#p619625 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @GrannyCheeseWheel I can only begin to imagine what you're going through. Personally, if I was in your shoes I honestly don't think I could do it. So you have my respect! I really hope the remainder of your grandma's life is spent in relative comfort, that she passes peacefully and serenely when the time comes, and that she ends up in heaven or wherever she believes she is destined to go, if anywhere.As for the whole religious discussion, I think I'm a bit too simpleminded to argue the absolute truths/falsehoods, but I'll do my best.As a kid my grandpa tried to get me into religion, I think I wrote about that way back in another thread. He is a strong believer in Christianity.The big sticking point which kept me from accepting religion was that I couldn't understand what God actually was.My grandfather tried to explain this to me quoting the Bible, at least the Bible he learned from. But I had trouble understanding what he was on about. It sounded like a random story that was fun to imagine, but hard to believe. God could be so powerful, so all-knowing, so pure, yet so elusive. The more I heard about him, the more I didn't understand him.As a teenager, I used to find peace by telling myself that if our God is all-knowing, it will know I have trouble believing in it, it will see that in my aura or whatever emanates from me. But, because God is pure and God forgives, it will show me once and for all that it exists when the time is right, and if the chance never arises before my death, God will still see the love in my heart of skepticism. But something about that just didn't sit right; religious people's faith seems to go deeper than that. They don't have this mentality that God must prove its existence. They respect and worship God with unwavering devotion. And I'm sorry, but that is just not me.It's time for one of my stupid analogies. It would be like me bragging about a new computer and claiming I can do whatever I want with ease. I can play epic games. I can write documents. I can talk to people online. I can do research. If you knew nothing about computers, you'd think it was the most amazing thing ever since sliced bread.But then let's say I tell you that computers do have limits: I can't watch these HD videos because my Internet connection isn't fast enough, I can't have a discussion with my computer about how much it is crippled because the hard drive went out, and I certainly can't depend on it to get me a soda when I'm thirsty. A skeptic might, when presented with this, want to know why these pros and cons exist. But a non-skeptic, someone who accepts that the world works a certain way due to higher powers they can't control, might possibly just shake their head and live with the limitations, the caveats, and the annoyances.In a weird disjointed way, that's how I always felt when people tried to talk religion with me. Religious people seemed to not want to question things, they wanted to accept that the world worked a certain way which was out of their hands. Now, I'm not saying that everyone who is religious is not a skeptic or vice versa, but it's something I've been pondering as of late.Every time I asked a simple but hard question, I was not given a straightforward answer, because they could not give one. If I asked "Why can't the computer get me a soda?" I was not told computers aren't mobile. I would instead be told something like "Bill Gates and Steve Jobs don't want you to use it for that." And if I followed that up with a further query, they would get frustrated and tell me they could see I wasn't going to get it, and to forget the conversation took place.Okay, throwing the computer analogy out because it was stupid, but yeah... maybe it explains my angle? I dunno. Religion felt like a mold that I could never really feel out. I wanted to, though, because it seemed to calm people, give them something to look up to, but I couldn't get it. It bothered me for a while, made me feel like I was the ignorant idiot and everyone else was smarter than me, but after a while, I just said I don't really care, and lost most of my interest in it.Recently I became aware of the possibility that some people treat religion and church as sort of a social gathering. A friend of mine tried to encourage me to go to church once because I would meet nice people there. "You don't have to be euber religious to go to church," he said. "Many churches around here are extremely gentle with it."To this, I argue what's the point? If you're going to be religious and go to church, isn't your goal to feel God's divine presence? I dunno, maybe I am distorting the purpose of a church and overestimating what churches were designed to do, but I always thought if you're gonna go, take the whole hog. Don't put your toe in the water and tell me you're wet. But a lot of people around here treat it like that, and I've even heard a few st
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god Well, I considder myself an agnostic just because I remain always open to any possibility of God existing though, until now, my experiences haven't proven it's existence.I practice meditation, it has been about 10 years since I begun and in those years I've had some amazing experiences and results. I feel there is something we can't comprehend with our minds. Some might call it god but I preffer to call it universal consciousness. It is scientifically known that everything vibrates, even the atoms in our body vibrate at certain frequencies, light vibrates, even the atoms composing inanimate objects vibrate. My personal experiences prove me that we can, with practice, tap into this colective energy and retrieve data. Many of us might call this sense intuition. It's a sense that can be trained and your mind can be made to recognize certain patterns.Meditation is, in essence, a disciplining of the mind. By learning to focus just on one thing you shut everything else up, every nonensical chatter, every thought that isn't related to your object of meditation. At first it helped me get rid of insomnia. Before starting meditation, I would go for months on end sleeping just 2 or 3 hours a night. After a while I realised that my insomnia was due to my mind being too active at night. I had all these scenarios, all these thoughts that were basically useless and were keeping me awake. I learned to focus on my breathing and quiet all thoughts putting the mind to it's much needed rest. Now, I can fall asleep within minutes if I meditate with this intent in mind.My journey wasn't only about curing sleep ilnesses though, I wanted to see if god exist, I wanted to experience peace and love. And it is somewhat true. When the mind is still, when you live in the moment and forget everything else there is a sense of peace that is undescribable. I suspect this is what religious people mean when they say they can feel god because prayer is a form of meditation too and can induce the same effects. After a while though, I started having some experiences that I can not explain scientifically. It basically started happening after I had what you might describe as an awakening. A very intense experience where I was in a place without time and I was nothing and everything at the same time. It is really undescribable, language has no words for it, I could write a thousand pages on the experience and not cover even one layer of what happened in those seconds. Or was it minutes, hours, I can't tell even to this day. After that I started to develop some strange abilities. I suspect that my intuition got a lot stronger after this experience. I can feel for example if someone is going to visit me today, my lady always ask me if we are going to have a visitor today so she knows to prepare in advance, and when I felt someone is going to visit it always happened. I find myself picking up the phone and feeling that someone is going to call me soon and within seconds to a minute it starts ringing. When I am speaking with someone I can sometimes finish what they are saying. My friends got freaked out by this calling me mental so I am doing it in my mind now. I find myself what people are feeling, I can even tell, without knowing the people what relationship they are into. How I do this is, again, undescribable because I don't use words, it's much like going on the internet. As websites have different addresses, so does everything have its own vibration. I can, somehow, tap into it and read it, much like your screen reader does with a web-page.Why am I posting this? I honestly don't know. It's perhaps just to say my opinion on the matter, just to add my experiences to a topic that has developped beautifully and has some nice discussions going out. Take my post as you wish, I am not trying to convince anyone of my experiences nor to attract disciples or believers. I try to view my experiences as objectively as I can, that's why I haven't included any spiritual or religious beings into my post. I haven't included them because I still can not prove their existence, not even for myself. What I can say for certain is that there are many more things that we don't know, things that even the mind can not fully comprehend. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619610/#p619610 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god Well, I considder myself an agnostic just because I remain always open to any possibility of God existing though, until now, my experiences haven't proven it's existence.I practice meditation, it has been about 10 years since I begun and in those years I've had some amazing experiences and results. I feel there is something we can't comprehend with our minds. Some might call it god but I preffer to call it universal consciousness. It is scientifically known that everything vibrates, even the atoms in our body vibrate at certain frequencies, light vibrates, even the atoms composing inanimate objects vibrate. My personal experiences prove me that we can, with practice, tap into this colective energy and retrieve data. Many of us might call this sense intuition. It's a sense that can be trained and your mind can be made to recognize certain patterns.Meditation is, in essence, a disciplining of the mind. By learning to focus just on one thing you shut everything else up, every nonensical chatter, every thought that isn't related to your object of meditation. At first it helped me get rid of insomnia. Before starting meditation, I would go for months on end sleeping just 2 or 3 hours a night. After a while I realised that my insomnia was due to my mind being too active at night. I had all these scenarios, all these thoughts that were basically useless and were keeping me awake. I learned to focus on my breathing and quiet all thoughts putting the mind to it's much needed rest. Now, I can fall asleep within minutes if I meditate with this intent in mind.My journey wasn't only about curing sleep ilnesses though, I wanted to see if god exist, I wanted to experience peace and love. And it is somewhat true. When the mind is still, when you live in the moment and forget everything else there is a sense of peace that is undescribable. I suspect this is what religious people mean when they say they can feel god because prayer is a form of meditation too and can induce the same effects. After a while though, I started having some experiences that I can not explain scientifically. It basically started happening after I had what you might describe as an awakening. A very intense experience where I was in a place without time and I was nothing but everything at the same time. It is really undescribable, language has no words for it, I could write a thousand pages on the experience and not cover even one layer of what happened in those seconds. Or was it minutes, hours, I can't tell even to this day. After that I started to develop some strange abilities. I suspect that my intuition got a lot stronger after this experience. I can feel for example if someone is going to visit me today, my lady always ask me if we are going to have a visitor today so she knows to prepare in advance, and when I felt someone is going to visit it always happened. I find myself picking up the phone and feeling that someone is going to call me soon and within seconds to a minute it starts ringing. When I am speaking with someone I can sometimes finish what they are saying. My friends got freaked out by this calling me mental so I am doing it in my mind now. I find myself what people are feeling, I can even tell, without knowing the people what relationship they are into. How I do this is, again, undescribable because I don't use words, it's much like going on the internet. As websites have different addresses, so does everything have its own vibration. I can, somehow, tap into it and read it, much like your screen reader does with a web-page.Why am I posting this? I honestly don't know. It's perhaps just to say my opinion on the matter, just to add my experiences to a topic that has developped beautifully and has some nice discussions going out. Take my post as you wish, I am not trying to convince anyone of my experiences nor to attract disciples or believers. I try to view my experiences as objectively as I can, that's why I haven't included any spiritual or religious beings into my post. I haven't included them because I still can not prove their existence, not even for myself. What I can say for certain is that there are many more things that we don't know, things that even the mind can not fully comprehend. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619610/#p619610 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
2021-03-02
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : GrannyCheeseWheel via Audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @69 Not really. My mom yes, me, no. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619606/#p619606 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god I am not talking about NDE, though that also raises a lot of questions. I am talking about data like this. if it's all just hallucination, then it's a damned good one where the claims are actually verified.@Ethin: I fully agree. I've been looking into integrated information theory, although it is way too abstract for me to understand for the most part, it does seem a promising step. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619605/#p619605 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @72, the huge problem with proving that anything exists after death is the fact that there's no way of actually testing such a hypothesis. Well, there is: the scientific method, sort of. The problem is that there are ethical implications. It is unethical to study what comes after death because people would need to kill a lot of people, something no one is going to stand for in the scientific community. All the various sub-communities of the overall scientific community (psychology, biology, ) have these ethical boundaries that you just don't cross, and murdering someone in the name of science crosses pretty much all of them. You might -- the key word being might -- be able to gather a lot of data, but no one would be willing to publish or accept your data because of how unethical your experiments would be. Of course, this is assuming that I'm understanding what your getting at.As for scientists refusing to accept nonphysical phenomena, this very much depends on the entity your referring to. If it in some way violates a mathematical or scientific law, its much harder to prove satisfactorily because your contradicting a lot of well-established knowledge, and things like that tend to take a while. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619604/#p619604 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @72, the huge problem with proving that anything exists after death is the fact that there's no way of actually testing such a hypothesis. Well, there is: the scientific method, sort of. The problem is that there are ethical implications. It is unethical to study what comes after death because people would need to kill a lot of people, something no one is going to stand for in the scientific community. All the various sub-communities fo the overall scientific community (psychology, biology, ) have these ethical boundaries that you just don't cross, and murdering someone in the name of science crosses pretty much all of them. You might -- the key word being might -- be able to gather a lot of data, but no one would be willing to publish or accept your data because of how unethical your experiments would be.As for scientists refusing to accept nonphysical phenomena, this very much depends on the entity your referring to. If it in some way violates a mathematical or scientific law, its much harder to prove. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619604/#p619604 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god My understanding is that when you're dying, a lot of stuff is going on in the brain. All that stuff translates to hallucinations and such. Basically it's all in your head. As far as people seeing what's going on in the room at the time, I've read that a sleeping brain can still understand things it hears. Maybe something similar is happening. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619603/#p619603 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god The scientific enquiry has no way of explaining the data gathered by Ian Stevenson, though. Obviously something does happen after death, otherwise we wouldn't have such a shit ton of cases people remembering stuff they shouldn't. What happens though? I'd just wait for science to actually work it out. I am confident that it can. Though nonphysical phenomenon is always, always rejected by the scientists, which seems a bit dogmatic to me, but hey, at least they are willing to change their mind after empirically verified evidence and research backs it up, which is a plus point in their favor. Do you come back? Obviously not as the same person, there's nothing which remains the same for 2 consecutive moments, let alone after death. Then what happens? I await the scientific research on this, although there's just no way to do it without first working out the actuality of some sort of nonlocality in consciousness I think. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619602/#p619602 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @Camlorn, in my experience people can definitely be convinced into atheism. It happened to me and to some other people I know as well. I do agree that you probably do need to be a particular kind of person though, I'm not exactly sure how to describe it but I suppose something like the kind of person who actually consider what people say and reflect on it even if it clashes what you think is true. Growing up I did have questions and things that didn't make sense about my religious beliefs, but I didn't really start rejecting them until much later, and it was definitely because of counterpoints that made sense to me on the internet. So I guess it's maybe not the same as someone convincing you because I looked for it myself, and it obviously wasn't a quick process, there wasn't just a sudden epiphany and bang I'm an atheist. It started with am I sure this particular form of christianity really has the right idea, then progressed to is christianity really any different than the other religions that claim that there is a god while still thinking there probably is some kind of ultimate creator, to realising there's no reason to think that there should be and that it's actually a pretty weird concept to think the universe couldn't just have come to exist without a creator but somehow an all-powerful being that can create universes can just be there with no question as to its origin. And this happened over the span of a few years. I was only really atheist by maybe the end of high school. Obviously noone is going to change their worldview after one single discussion, but for some people a bunch of them over time can slowly help reality set in. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619600/#p619600 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god When I was younger, I used to be a lot more spiritual than I am now. I don't think I ever truly called myself a Christian, but I was always taught that God exists and is always there. I don't recall ever being taught to fear God, however. I once went to a blind Christian camp and they basically enforced the idea that God loves us and wants us to be with him. Basically a very simple version of Christianity. They probably hoped that we would study more on our own after we went home.As time went on, I got interested in things like energy work, magic, crystals, and the concept of the Force from Star wars. I didn't think too much about whether or not there was a god. I just believed what made sense to me at the time.Everything's made of energy? Okay, why not? Science pretty much says everything is made of the same stuff anyway.Crystals affecting your energy body with their vibrations? No real scientific evidence for it, but why not? Apparently everything vibrates, and maybe crystals do vibrate in specific ways that can affect people somehow. Who can say for sure?Magic? Hmm. Maybe not like the magic in fiction, but why not? To this day I do wonder what the real limits are if magic truly exists. It's always fun to speculate anyway.Psychic abilities such as telepathy, psychokinesis, etc. Again, no real evidence, but why not? We don't know everything about everything, so maybe it's possible.The Force is what makes the most sense to me. The Force in the real world shares some aspects with the Force depicted in Star Wars, and it's actually not a new concept. Lucas didn't just invent it out of thing air. I suppose one could say that anything involving energy work is all the same thing, and we can just call it the Force. Life gives off energy. Heck, even non-living things give off some sort of energy. All that energy is all around us, and maybe it somehow connects everything. It also sort of answers the question of what happens to us when we die. We become one with the Force. Whether there's consciousness after death is something else entirely. Now whether or not that energy can be used to affect the physical world similar to the Jedi in star Wars, I don't know for sure.So, what changed? That's simple. Someone tried converting me to Christianity. We had many debates/arguments, and I will admit that I was afraid at one point. Afraid because God, for one reason or another, absolutely forbids anyone to use magic or anything else that doesn't come from him. If you don't follow him, if you don't repent, if you do things like practice magic, you go to hell where you will burn for all of time and then some simply because you dare to defy him. There are also no marshmallows to roast. It was quite psychologically distressing.At some point, I concluded that this is extremely unreasonable, and that God couldn't be how he's depicted by Christianity. God must be extremely misrepresented. Who in their right mind would be such a jerk all while claiming that they love everyone? Sounds like a bit of an abusive relationship to me. Do as I say, or burn forever when you die! Oh but wait. We're all saved as long as we accept that Christ died on the cross for our sins, because that really makes sense. Especially when you consider that he was brought back in a few days, and that he's really part of a trinity/God himself. So God sent himself down an died so we could be saved from his judgement, when all he really had to do was just forgive everyone. Right then. Sorry. Makes absolutely zero sense in the real world. It's an interesting story though, and if people want to believe it, that's cool. No judgement here.Add to that that there are so many demoninations of Christianity, all telling us that they have the monopoly on truth. We can't even all agree how to worship this god of ours. Some churches even use different versions of the Bible. But wait, there's more! There are classes one can take that teach how the Bible's supposed to be interpreted based on the original Hebrew, because apparently the English translation isn't understandable enough and we need help. How the heck does this even make any sense at all? Why wouldn't the Bible just been innately understandable by believers in the first place? God supposedly wants people to come to him. Why make it extra difficult? Oh. Right. Satan. Of course. Has to be.There's more, but this is getting long as it is. Suffice it to say that if this kind of thing is what keeps people going and gives them hope, great. Sometimes it does inspire people to be better people. Sometimes lives really are turned around. I've seen it happen. Whether it was the holy Spirit or just their own desire to change, I can't say for sure. But so much of it makes no sense to me.So after realizing all this, it came to me. If I'm sitting here saying that God can't possibly be real as far as Christianity goes, then how can I possibly also sit here and say that anything else
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god Folks, I really don't know that continuing this thread is a good idea.@66 I'm sorry you're going through what you are. It sounds incredibly rough. I actually had a pretty bad breakdown a few weeks back during the Texas snowstorm, so maybe I can empathize a bit. I was taking care of my girlfriend through it, her attendants weren't able to make it for a stretch. and I just sort of melted down out of fear/exhaustion. I do an OK job taking care of her when we're not in the midst of a huge snowstorm, but her place is inaccessible to me in ways that make that harder for days on end, and I had to take care of myself then as well. Plus she does tenant organizing, so all day she's taking calls from folks in apartments with no water, using dog-shit-filled snow for flushing toilets..it was awful in a whole bunch of ways. Plus we're in winter, when I already struggle with depression. And we're in a pandemic which, well, the less said about that the better.What it also is was traumatic, and it really sounds like you're going through a lot of trauma right now. I'd like it if people here could be helpful, but I don't know that they can be. That isn't because they don't *want* to, but because it can be hard to relate.I don't know if I'm right, and I apologize if I'm not. But I thought that saying something and being wrong, would be worse than not saying something and being right.Do you have any other support? Do you need me to help you find some? That's a serious offer, and I have some bandwidth to help. I'm still not entirely on my feet, but I have enough to do a bit of research if you don't have the time, and to try connecting you with support if I can find it.Hang in there. I know that sounds hollow, but it's sincere. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619592/#p619592 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god Hi.@GrannyCheeseWheel, I know we haven't gotten on in the past man but I actually am sorry you're going through what you are.My nans (grandmas) mum had Alzheimer's and hearing her crying out at night, the family having to put an alarm mat thing on the floor for when she got out of bed, her not wanting to eat, all of that, was horrible.As horrible as this may sound to some, her suffering will end soon so at least there's that.My nan now has cancer and has a colostemy bag, and is going to the hospital later on today, it's 2:24 in London now and in the next week or so she's going for an opperasion to do something. From what I understand; she'll have about 10 years to live, hopefully it's more but we'll see.As for god or a creator, I do believe in one as I've left my body, I've had my energy drained, I've helled energy in my hands and can do that every time I wish, I've done it around my brother and he felt it, so to me; there's evidence of an afterlife an a soul and to me, the logical next step is a creator, if there wasn't one, why would these things exist to me?As for AI and the soul, they're not the same. A soul, in my oppinion is a bunch of energy with personality, it's your youness if you like, all clumped together in one energy packet. AI ON the other hand; as amazing as it's going to be in the future is code and an amazing computer brain, then again; who's to say the energy of that AI machine doesn't go on in some way. If you form an atachement to it; will you see it in the afterlife or a form of it at least? I don't know. I think all things are energy so in that way yes but would a machine designed to help you cross the road need or want to se you in an afterlife, I don't think so. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619591/#p619591 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @63Kind of. It is important to understand that science has actually changed very rapidly in the last 100 years. I'm not arguing with you: we have similar opinions. But it will help you to understand the other side of this if you look at for example Aristotelian philosophy, or the fact that Newton was an alchemist--and, more important, that in those places, at those times, that was the equivalent of atheism and blasphemy.The big bang having evidence has only been (I think) the last 60 years; evolution on short time scales has only really been something we could look into well after DNA sequencing. I think there is going to be an uptick in agnosticism soon. You can see it in Seattle, where instead of a god you get a bunch of people who believe in astrology and a bunch of stuff where there isn't a higher power, just this collection of personally meaningful stuff. But it's not time for that yet, if that makes sense. The truth of the matter is that in just the last 30 years we've gone from the position of having a ton of stuff that was a big black box that we could just say "the soul" or "evolution doesn't make sense" to "here's evolution affecting your covid vaccines" and "let's build artificial minds". You can't arguepeople into atheism. You really, really can't. But I'll be surprised if Christianity or any other religion that uses a singular higher power that actively participates in the world is nearly so dominant by 2050. There are a lot of things bleeding power off religions right now.@64I'll bite. Harry Potter is around the size of the bible. Lord of the Rings is around the size of the bible. The Wheel of Time series is something like 20 or 30 times the size of the bible. Discworld (the whole series) is even more than that. Basically any author who writes a trilogy has written more than is in the bible. Any cult leader typically goes off and writes a bible (for a really creepy one see scientology, but at your age maybe don't if you want to sleep well at night--they do a lot of very creepy stuff that does actually happen, like successfully infiltrate the IRS).With all due respect, while you're free to have your opinions, you're only 14 or so. I'd wait until you're older to get involved in these arguments. At the moment you're not equipped to participate, other than to throw your emotions out. For one thing many serious Christians no longer dispute the big bang and evolution, as one example. And to be honest "no one writes a book that big for fun" is kind of not a good look being as you're basically saying that every popular adult author doesn't exist. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619586/#p619586 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
2021-03-02
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : GrannyCheeseWheel via Audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god There is no truth giver, there is only truth. It's what you get when you take the substance of life and melt it down a crucible, so that all the impurities are gone and what remains is exactly the truth.All powerful god huh? Well I had to put my grandma to bed, or at least help at any rate. Like I said, she's got sun downer's, which means after about 5PM, you don't get much sense out of her until the morning. My mom was over there talking and talking and talking. "Mom, we want to get you in bed. Mom, mom, mom mom mom mom." Your mom is not able to comprehend things right now, and the longer you have her up, the more pain she's going to be in. In order to put her in bed, I have to hurt her. There's no way not to. So while you're over there blithely trying to get her up on her own, I just want to get this done. I don't even need her ass, I can pick up my grandma and carry her if I have to. Now you'd think, with as close a relationship she claims to have with god, that maybe he'd be like, "Your son is right you know. The longer she sits there, the more pain she's in."Then she's in bed and my mom stops and doesn't tell me she's not all the way up to the head. SO then more him-hawing and I'm like get her the medicine. I had to say that three times. By this time I'm agitated. Get her the fucking medicine for christ sakes. We can do whatever else when that's done. It's like this shit isn't fucking hard, it's not rocket science.But you know, he can't even be bothered. Oh yeah, that's because there is no god. The nerve of these people astounds me. Most of the time, I just kind of shrug it off. But when you come at me with that crap at a time like this, just no. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619583/#p619583 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god Why would someone write a seven-hundred-page work of fiction? Talk to Stephen King, whose motives were both money and entertainment. I suspect that those who originally wrote the Bible had far less pure a motive even than this. "Do what se say" pretty much boils it down. I'm sorry, but while I can take religious individuals each by each - as all of us should - I am not disposed to be kind toward organized religion. For every problem it tries to solve, it creates dozens of others.My fundamental problem is just this.Scientific inquiry will, if properly used, test hypotheses and ultimately will validate or invalidate those hypotheses. When a scientific theory is destroyed, it's pretty much done. We know that gravity exists, and peanuts won't float off into space if you spill them on the ground. We also know the earth is flat. This is demonstrable, and repeatedly provable. Science says, "If you can't prove it, it's not real".Religion starts in exactly the opposite direction. It applies a "therefore God" to every single dangling thread. It starts with a premise and then works backward. Ultimately, in religious discourse, we are challenged to -disprove an assertion. So while I'm here, discoursing religiously, I would like to state that there is a sentient organism on Saturn that is more powerful than God. Now, go ahead and disprove that, because until you do, it is fundamentally true. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619581/#p619581 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god I, am a christian, and i'm not the type to start some argument about how you should trust god, and at 61, well, it's science, but. what made all that stuff happen to create this earth we now live in today. I Really don't want to start anything so just please don't say anything to me if it's about how it's not true, you people have your beliefs and we christians have hours. Now, second of all, and there might be some answer for this, but why would anyone even rite a 700 page book in the first place if they were human? about all that.And there have bin videos of ture mearicles happening, now sense i guess most of us are blind weal probibly never see that.Now that's the end of my post again, please i really dont' want to start something smilyface. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619575/#p619575 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @57, I didn't know the scientific method was that new. But my point is that science has hundreds to thousands of years of knowledge and experimentation backing pretty much everything. There are some purely theoretical things, like theories about time, but the majority of knowledge has been proven. Granted, science is just a ton of theories if you break it down to its constituents, but the theories it has have been tested over and over and have been proven time and time again. You can't apply the same thing to religion, and I personally choose to believe in something that lets me prove pretty much anything if I wish to and I have the required knowledge instead of something that's purely based on what a book and some people say. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619574/#p619574 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
2021-03-02
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : wing of eternity via Audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god My question would go may be a bit ferther, why would a good god even create anything? What makes someone create a universe or anything else for that matter? URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619566/#p619566 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god So if you guise didn't believe in god then, Think about us, earth, sky, sun, moon, animals, plants, waters, who created all that?I can't think of someone else other than god him self. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619565/#p619565 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god I've never said that Jesus didn't exist in some form. But just as Trump supporters claim he won the 2020 election and claim his two impeachments don't matter, so I would argue that followers of Christianity have, over time and with great personal motivation, adopted beliefs that suit them.Put another way: you can't accept that the answer is "we don't know", and some sort of god fits. That's great for you. You are not one of the pushy ones. But the Christian god is as much a fiction as the Muslim Allah, and as much a fiction as any of the Hindu pantheon. These are constructs based on imperfect human understanding. They were written about by humans, for the purpose of getting other humans to follow teachings and behave like good little sheep. It's very easy to control people when you scare and shame them first, and unfortunately, if you read any holy book thoroughly enough, you will see plenty of fear and shame and gaslighting and guilt in amongst the love. You admitted yourself that a lot of things that Jesus supposedly did were "apparently". You made a really excellent case for how those things were essentially small acts turned into legends by people who were not well educated and not well acquainted with close examination of their own system of beliefs. I'm sorry, but you can't then prop up a religion based on all of this.The only reason I am conflicted is because I'm not willing to say that there is no power greater than us. I am firmly convinced that none of our understanding of religion even comes close to the surface of what might actually exist out there. Practically speaking, I might as well be an atheist, but technically I am an agnostic because I can acknowledge that there might be things beyond our understanding out there to find. In fact, I'm sure of it; but as to what those things are, and how they operate, or how they'll interact with us (if they ever do), I, like everyone else, has no idea.Now, to your other point, about love mattering because it comes from outside. My answer to this is far more prosaic. We are intelligent, and we are observant. We are also social, and being social, this means that at base, we don't want to be alone. Not being alone means we want at least some people to like us. When those who like us stay around, we eventually begin to observe how life treats them, or mistreats them. Because we have emotions, and because we have enough intelligence to recognize those emotions, we can feel pain, outrage and other things on their behalf. We can want to do things for them to make them feel appreciated. We can want to get closer to them due to shared experiences, good and bad. We can, because we do have a rather large biological component, even find those people attractive in some way. Thus, in one guise or another, love is born.You say there has to be some sort of greater source of love. I disagree. This isn't emulation of a purer source. It's learned behaviour on account of our intelligence, our social nature and our empathy. Some of us are better at giving and receiving love than others, for a whole plethora of reasons. This speaks not to our relationship with something divine, but to our ability to process our emotions, our willingness to be social and to share our world with others, and to our observation of the world in which we live, as well as the processing of the data we receive. Machines can process all that data, but the chemicals which constitute a machine are not the exact same as those which constitute a human being. The same goes for a sea sponge; it may have a survival instinct, but it's unlikely to be thinking complex, emotional thoughts beyond its own survival. This is how evolution works. It's not about god, or greater love. It's evolution, baby. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619562/#p619562 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @Camlorn, I seriously have to assume you were trying to be funny, as you and I both know that you don't care about the existence of gay unicorns anymore than I do as they have no bearing on your life whatsoever. Nothing changes if it is proved or disproved that gay unicorns exist; it really is a "so what" moment. ON the other hand, the god question is real to everyone whether they choose to contemplate it or not, because if he is real, no amount of denying him is going to make him unreal. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619559/#p619559 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @43, by your logic, if there is absolute truth then I have to accept that truth may not exist, making the all truth is relative concept a thing all over again. No, if absolute truth exists, it is because there is an absolute truth giver, else truth is merely a belief you can wipe away with another.@Jayde, 44, it is up to you if you're the one claiming he doesn't exist and that you're personally convinced of it, in as much as you believe it's up to me because of my personal conviction. Making the claim is what puts you in that position because you're making a statement you claim is true. To say that God does not exist is to say that you know without the shadow of a doubt that what you are saying is true. ON the other hand, you also state that you don't know so we should keep trying to find out, which tells me you're still conflicted to some degree, as you cannot hold to both as true.As far as Christianity goes? Yes, you are absolutely right, and apparently it began as the result of the audacious claims of some guy who was born out in the middle of nowhere to a young woman who had apparently never had sex with anyone but was apparently visited by at least one angel and told that she had found favor in God's sight. Why her? I don't know. He also apparently performed 7 signs that affirmed his divinity.1. He reportedly turned water into whine, bypassing the way chemistry usually works.2. He supposedly healed a man who is not in his physical presence, bypassing both the ways medicine and space/distance usually work.3. He apparently healed a man who has been crippled for 38 years, bypassing the way time usually works.4. He is said to have fed at least 5000 people with 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish, bypassing the way matter usually works.5. He was mysteriously seen walking on water, bypassing the way the human body and the forces of nature usually work.6. He was um, sighted? By blind people? Healing blind people, bypassing the way chronic disabilities usually work.7. And finally, he somehow, by some means, at some point, at some home, with a bunch of someone's watching him, raised a dead man after he'd been buried and all that jazz for quite some time, bypassing the way life itself usually works.Now, this is a bunch of apparently and reportedly and supposedly and hypothetical yada yada that came to us from a bunch of other guys who were around some 2000 or so years ago who all believed this stuff to be real, and that's a lot of big stuff to believe in. But he apparently, yeah, apparently, went further!1. He claimed to be the bread of life. Interesting that he should then feed 5000 or so people with just a few loaves of it...2. He claimed to be the light of the world... I guess giving blind people sight wasn't such a miracle after all?3. He claimed to be the door/gate by which all good sheep enter. I'm not sure how that ties into the 7 signs so I won't even bother to try there...4. He further reaffirmed that sheep business by stating he was the Good Shepherd... I guess he really wanted people to follow him.5. He said he was the resurrection, and the life. Lazarus apparently felt the same way, after his sisters had left him for dead.6. He stated he was the way, the truth, and the life. Nobody who wants to go anywhere of any great importance and know anything of great importance and see anything of great importance can do it by any other means, if that statement is to be believed.7. And finally, he said he was the true vine. Apparently that's how water became whine, or some such.In reality, what makes any of these statements of any worth is the utterance "I am," coupled with the symbolism he used to illustrate without any hesitation that he was the foretold messiah of scripture, written about hundreds of years before his time. IN and of them selves, those I am statements are useless. Coupled with the old testament and if he is to be believed as having had any ounce of truth in him, Jesus was in essence saying that all of this had been planned from the beginning of time and that he was equall to all of it.Is it true? Most biblical scholars are at the very least in support of some Jesus who apparently lived in Nazareth, born in Bethlehem. The archeological evidence of his existence, however, is practically none. What does that mean? That Jesus, like 99 percent of the world in his time, made little impact on it from an archeological standpoint. It means he was a peasant. It means that if he lived he lived a hard life. Eyewitness accounts of him are biased in every respect, as they should be given what those people reported. Outside of the new Testament, historians such as Flavius Josephus coroberate his existence in his writing the Jewish Antiquities Coupled with Annals of Imperial Rome, we get the idea that there was a Jesus who was excecuted by Roman law and that his followers were blamed for many things by the gre
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god I've come to the ultimate conclusion that it's a bunch of shit primarily designed to comfort people into believing there's something after death. Magic isn't real, and it still isn't no matter how hard I wish it was to make this boring world much less so. As for God being the ultimate benevolent being? No way! A truly benevolent God wouldn't allow evil people to get away with stealing presidential elections in the greatest country on the planet, allow babies to die due to birth defects or other issues, stand by while the Jews were massacred, etc.Religion brainwashes people, and while it's not as harmful as other forms of brainwashing, it's still a form of brainwashing in my view. Accept God or you will burn in the lake of fire for all time! Yeah, that's a really compelling reason to worship God. Not! Oh, what's up with all this lord and servant bullshit? I'm not a servant to anyone and would rather die before I become one. If God is truly benevolent, he/she/it will accept anyone regardless of whether they believe or not. Until you can prove to me that magic exists, I'm not taking this stuff seriously.As for dying, we'll see what happens. The more I think about it, the more I think there's nothing. There was obviously a time before when I didn't exist, and I have no memory of that, so presumably there will come a time when I cease to exist as well and I won't know or care. Perhaps we're all doomed to wander the Earth as ghosts, or maybe this crap is real (highly unlikely). If it is, I've got a lot of questions for the almighty bastard. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619553/#p619553 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @51The scientific method is very, very new. I think 1700s-ish, but not sure on the exact dates. It's not innate to people. You have to learn it. It's not self-propagating, and is actually counterintuitive to most people even once explained.I would go so far as to say that really getting the scientific method at a deep level is as rare as atheism, and with a large overlap. it's easy enough to do it because the science god/your teacher/whatever said that's how science has to happen, but it's very hard to understand *why*.@53Population control can be solved in many ways without pain. Population control can be solved without even mandating that humans die. For example an infinite universe in which there is no speed of light, any human can opt out of gravity for them and their spacecraft, and every single planet is capable of supporting human life and close enough to all the other planets that you can go home for dinner. Just add on that there's a couple magic rocks that are easy to find and when you put them next to each other you get a controlled reactionless rocket engine that doesn't require any energy and there you go, space eutopia.The only beings that would have to use things like disease for population control are not all powerful by any means. In order to need to implement suffering of any sort, you have to be a being that's operating under constraints. For example some alien civilization who is stuck with the laws of physics as implemented in our universe. All-powerful beings actually don't necessarily have any need to even bring humans into being, because if they're lonely etc they can just rewrite themselves so that they're not anymore, no "here are other people to talk to" workarounds necessary.People really have trouble getting what all-powerful god means. The arguments for why pain must exist and so on, they all have implicit assumptions. There couldn't be a war in heaven if god were all-powerful, either. All-powerful means you get whatever you want exactly how you want it, and if it's impossible you just change the rules so it's possible. Any being such as that which creates something with suffering and death is so evil that it makes Hitler look like a saint, and if we had the power to end them we should unquestionably do so instantly. If we assume that god exists, they're either all-powerful or good. They can't be both. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619554/#p619554 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god I've come to the ultimate conclusion that it's a bunch of shit primarily designed to comfort people into believing there's something after death. Magic isn't real, and it won't be no matter how hard I wish it was to make this boring world much less so. As for God being the ultimate benevolent being? No way! A truly benevolent God wouldn't allow evil people to get away with stealing presidential elections in the greatest country on the planet, allow babies to die due to birth defects or other issues, stand by while the Jews were massacred, etc.Religion brainwashes people, and while it's not as harmful as other forms of brainwashing, it's still a form of brainwashing in my view. Accept God or you will burn in the lake of fire for all time! Yeah, that's a really compelling reason to worship God. Not! Oh, what's up with all this lord and servant bullshit? I'm not a servant to anyone and would rather die before I become one. If God is truly benevolent, he/she/it will accept anyone regardless of whether they believe or not. Until you can prove to me that magic exists, I'm not taking this stuff seriously.As for dying, we'll see what happens. The more I think about it, the more I think there's nothing. There was obviously a time before when I didn't exist, and I have no memory of that, so presumably there will come a time when I cease to exist as well and I won't know or care. Perhaps we're all doomed to wander the Earth as ghosts, or maybe this crap is real (highly unlikely). If it is, I've got a lot of questions for the almighty bastard. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619553/#p619553 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @NocturnusI find your morality argument quite interesting. Please do correct me if I am wrong here, but it sounds to me a lot like you are saying, that you cannot imagine living in a world with no ultimate moral standards.I see one problem in particular with this, and that is, what then, if God doesn’t exist? I mean, whether or not you want to or can imagine living in a world with no God has no impact whether or not there is one, right?Another interesting thing with God and morality is the Euthyphro Dilemma, which simply put goes like this:Either something is good because God pronounces that it is good, which means that God can change what is good and bad anytime he wants, in which case my question to you would be “Would torture, murder and rape be moral if God said so tomorrow? And would you do it, why / why not?”Or, God pronounces that a thing is good because it is good, in which case why do we need God? And here you have the exact same problem as atheist do, namely figuring out where morals come from.I just find It much more realistic and simpler to understand if we say that morals are an ingrained attribute of humans, which we have evolved as a social species, and together we should strive towards a setting hour own moral goal, which we can evaluate our actions upon. I would suggest as many others the maximizing of health and wellbeing and the minimizing of the opposite. It is not perfect at all, but I think it works quite well, and I hope very few people would disagree with the statement. Now, why we should follow it? I think It is quite simple, while the universe or anything beyond our little tiny place in it might not care at all, we do, and that is what matters, it is, after all, our morality we are discussing.I just don't really get the "why does anything matter" questions, I mean, I don't really think things matter in the great picture, but it definitely feels like things in my life and the lives of those around me matter to me, why isn't that enough. Does there really need to be some underlying reason to it all. If you really don't see any reason to live, to love and so on other than God, I really am sorry for you, and I think you should get some psychological help. Please believe me, when I say that I am not trying to insult anyone or anything like that, I just think you can unlock so much more in life if you find value in yourself, just because you are here in this world, it doesn't matter whether somebody put you here or not, whether somebody has a plan for you or not. We are here, and that is the thing that matters. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619543/#p619543 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god The population-control argument is kind of undone by the fact that many of these diseases either don't kill at all, or do it really, really slowly. If population control was really a problem, why not make humans a lot more susceptible to aneurysms or something? Quick, relatively painless deaths; the older you get, the more likely it becomes. Yeah, in the world we live in today, that would suck and be terribly scary, but if it was all we ever knew...then okay, sure, sometimes people would die young, but they wouldn't do it over weeks, months or even decades in some cases.But an even better question is: if a godlike figure really is all-powerful, then why did he create or allow to come into being a world that would not meet the demands of the species which lived there? On a more religiously-minded angle, if god supposedly helps/inspires/guides people without stripping their free will away, why not encourage people toward better resource management, better technology to maybe find other homes if this one really and truly plays out? So far, he kind of hasn't done that...unless you count a rover drawing a penis in the dirt on Mars. Either way, it's kind of hung. Canlorn is right.The only reason I stop short of calling myself a hard atheist is simple. There is a ton that we don't understand, and however unlikely it is, it's quite possible that some creature, some race out there in the cosmos, is so far advanced from us that it might as well be some form of god. We might consider that race or creature divine or omnipotent even if it is neither. That's about the closest I'll get. Our gods don't exist and cannot be real; they're just projections of our fears, right down to the "do this or else" rhetoric prevalent in so many religious texts. But some sort of god, or all-powerful force, might exist, and might have a lot more control over us than we care to think about.Generally though? I don't get angry at god when things go badly. I get angry at the situation. The people involved, the scenario itself. I get upset with the concrete aspects. I may ask why, but if I do so, it's because I know the answer might be that there really is no answer. Why did my brother die? His heart enlarged. Why did his heart enlarge? Nobody's certain. And you know what? It sucks that my little brother isn't here anymore. I miss him. I wish he didn't have to die. But he did, and I don't have all the answers. I can either get used to this fact, or I can rail against it and still end up with no answers and a head full of ghosts. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619548/#p619548 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god I'm an atheist myself. I respect peoples beliefs, of course, and I'm not going to force anyon to believe what I believe or anything. But I don't believe that God exists because there's absolutely no evidence to prove that he does. The only things indicating that God exists are the bible, which is a book written by man, and a ton of people who put their beliefs in the bible and simply repeat what it says. I've had many people come up to me and get me into a discussion about God, and I always tell them that the reason I don't believe in God is because the bible raises far, far too many questions and provides no answers. (Also, the Bible has been rewritten, translated and mistranslated so many times that I doubt the current book we call the Bible is anything remotely close to the original.) Atheism is, to me, the right "religion" (if that term is even applicable here) because the only thing that then exists is science, and though science may not be a complete replacement for a religion, it is a sufficient one. Science has theories, nearly all of which are backed up by evidence and experimentation. Very little of science is purely based on belief; the majority of it is based on methods that have been proven to work over thousands of years. The scientific method is probably the oldest method of learning and understanding that exists, and yet it proves its efficacy all the time. If you use the scientific method and you get incorrect results, then you did something wrong, or didn't consider something critical. But you can't blame the method itself for the problem.Religion, on the other hand, has no such method and is purely based on faith alone. I, for one, am unwilling to put all of myself into something as flimsy and unstable as faith. Faith is purely based on the beliefs that one holds at a given period of time. It is just as volatile as emotions are, and to say that this or that is true because I believe it is so doesn't actually make it so, especially given the fact that that very belief can change at a seconds notice. I've seen some people categorize the bible as fiction, and I can see the sense in that because there's no evidence that anything in the book ever happened; if some of it did happen, then its been warped to fit the narrative of Christianity. But the final reason I don't believe in religion -- particularly Christianity, which is probably the most pervasive religion in existence today -- is because every time people say how wonderful God is, I can never get an answer to questions like "Why would God allow us to develop weapons and devices capable of completely destroying the entire planet if someone got trigger happy" or "Why would a beneficent deity who has absolute power over all things allow humans to slaughter each other for corrupt and unjust causes". There's free agency/free will, which is one thing, but that's only reasonable to a certain point. There is a point where freedom must be restricted, if not entirely eliminated, because the actions that one would undertake with that freedom would be destructive and dangerous, and the lives of the people around them must be taken into consideration. That's why we have prisons and jails. That's why we have laws. There's freedom, and then there's too much freedom. And I don't think a deity who truly cared and loved all of us would give us unlimited freedom. There would be points where they would need to intervene, for the good of everyone.So yeah, that's my take on things. Maybe God does exist. But if he does, I've yet to see any proof, and saying "God will only show himself to you if you believe in him" is nonsensical, for if God truly did exist and he had created the universe and all within, I imagine God would show himself to all, not just to those who believe in him.Beyond that, there isn't much more I can contribute to this discussion. I used to hang out with a friend who was Christian who prayed for God to cure my blindness, claiming it was a curse in my past life. That cure has yet to happen and its been over two years since then. Furthermore, I find it entirely unreasonable to suffer a punishment for something that I don't even remember doing. It doesn't matter if the memories of whatever I did are in my physical mind or my soul or whatever; the point is, if I get punished for something, then I better remember it, or I'm gonna raise hell. And I can't imagine a deity like God happily punishing us for something we don't even recall. If he's willing to do that to me, then tell me why exactly I should believe in him at all? Why should I trust him? Because that doesn't sound like a deity who's kind or perfect at all. It sounds a lot more like an autocrat: "I'm God, and you did something in your past life, and so in this next life you shall suffer blindness. Oh, and I'm not going to even tell you what you did wrong, nor will I allow you to remember
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god Ironically, we are getting more and more diseases, so that may becoming closer and closer to the truth. Only 1 problem with that theory... god doesn't exist! URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619546/#p619546 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @NocturnusI find your morality argument quite interesting. Please do correct me if I am wrong here, but it sounds to me a lot like you are saying, that you cannot imagine living in a world with no ultimate moral standards.I see one problem in particular with this, and that is, what then, if God doesn’t exist? I mean, whether or not you want to or can imagine living in a world with no God has no impact whether or not there is one, right?Another interesting thing with God and morality is the Euthyphro Dilemma, which simply put goes like this:Either something is good because God pronounces that it is good, which means that God can change what is good and bad anytime he wants, in which case my question to you would be “Would torture, murder and rape be moral if God said so tomorrow? And would you do it, why / why not?”Or, God pronounces that a thing is good because it is good, in which case why do we need God? And here you have the exact same problem as atheist do, namely figuring out where morals come from.I just find It much simpler to understand if we say that morals are an ingrained attribute of humans, which we have evolved as a social species, and together we should strive towards a setting hour own moral goal, which we can evaluate our actions upon. I would suggest as many others the maximizing of health and wellbeing and the minimizing of the opposite. It is not perfect at all, but I think it works quite well, and I hope very few people would disagree with the statement. Now, why we should follow it? I think It is quite simple, while the universe or anything beyond our little tiny place in it might not care at all, we do, and that is what matters, it is, after all, our morality we are discussing. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619543/#p619543 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god Another thing is population control. A joking theory I always say is, natural diseases exist because god got too greedy and wanted more worship, so he kept letting the population grow larger and larger. There had to be a way to kill off the population, so natural diseases started doing god's work of balance. Oh btw i made sure not to capitalize the word god in this post. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619544/#p619544 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @NocturnusI find your morality argument quite interesting. Please do correct me if I am wrong here, but it sound to me a lot like you are saying, that you cannot imagine living in a world with no ultimate moral standards.I see one problem in particular with this, and that is, what then, if God doesn’t exist? I mean, whether or not you want to or can imagine living in a world with no God has no impact whether or not there is one, right?Another interesting thing with God and morality is the Euthyphro Dilemma, which simply put goes like this:Either something is good because God pronounces that it is good, which means that God can change what is good and bad anytime he wants, in which case my question to you would be “Would torture, murder and rape be moral if God said so tomorrow? And would you do it, why / why not?”Or, God pronounces that a thing is good because it is good, in which case why do we need God? And here you have the exact same problem as atheist do, namely figuring out where morals come from.I just find It much simpler to understand if we say that morals are an ingrained attribute of humans, which we have evolved as a social species, and together we should strive towards a setting hour own moral goal, which we can evaluate our actions upon. I would suggest as many others the maximizing of health and wellbeing and the minimizing of the opposite. It is not perfect at all, but I think it works quite well, and I hope very few people would disagree with the statement. Now, why we should follow it? I think It is quite simple, while the universe or anything beyond our little tiny place in it might not care at all, we do, and that is what matters, it is, after all, our morality we are discussing. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619543/#p619543 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god I'm an atheist myself. I respect peoples beliefs, of course, and I'm not going to force anyon to believe what I believe or anything. But I don't believe that God exists because there's absolutely no evidence to prove that he does. The only things indicating that God exists are the bible, which is a book written by man, and a ton of people who put their beliefs in the bible and simply repeat what it says. I've had many people come up to me and get me into a discussion about God, and I always tell them that the reason I don't believe in God is because the bible raises far, far too many questions and provides no answers. (Also, the Bible has been rewritten, translated and mistranslated so many times that I doubt the current book we call the Bible is anything remotely close to the original.) Atheism is, to me, the right "religion" (if that term is even applicable here) because the only thing that then exists is science, and though science may not be a complete replacement for a religion, it is a sufficient one. Science has theories, nearly all of which are backed up by evidence and experimentation. Very little of science is purely based on belief; the majority of it is based on methods that have been proven to work over thousands of years. The scientific method is probably the oldest method of learning and understanding that exists, and yet it proves its efficacy all the time. If you use the scientific method and you get incorrect results, then you did something wrong, or didn't consider something critical. But you can't blame the method itself for the problem.Religion, on the other hand, has no such method and is purely based on faith alone. I, for one, am unwilling to put all of myself into something as flimsy and unstable as faith. Faith is purely based on the beliefs that one holds at a given period of time. It is just as volatile as emotions are, and to say that this or that is true because I believe it is so doesn't actually make it so, especially given the fact that that very belief can change at a seconds notice. I've seen some people categorize the bible as fiction, and I can see the sense in that because there's no evidence that anything in the book ever happened; if some of it did happen, then its been warped to fit the narrative of Christianity. But the final reason I don't believe in religion -- particularly Christianity, which is probably the most pervasive religion in existence today -- is because every time people say how wonderful God is, I can never get an answer to questions like "Why would God allow us to develop weapons and devices capable of completely destroying the entire planet if someone got trigger happy" or "Why would a beneficent deity who has absolute power over all things allow humans to slaughter each other for corrupt and unjust causes". There's free agency/free will, which is one thing, but that's only reasonable to a certain point. There is a point where freedom must be restricted, if not entirely eliminated, because the actions that one would undertake with that freedom would be destructive and dangerous, and the lives of the people around them must be taken into consideration. That's why we have prisons and jails. That's why we have laws. There's freedom, and then there's too much freedom. And I don't think a deity who truly cared and loved all of us would give us unlimited freedom. There would be points where they would need to intervene, for the good of everyone.So yeah, that's my take on things. Maybe God does exist. But if he does, I've yet to see any proof, and saying "God will only show himself to you if you believe in him" is nonsensical, for if God truly did exist and he had created the universe and all within, I imagine God would show himself to all, not just to those who believe in him. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619542/#p619542 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @24I have considered whether or not to write this post for a couple hours and have finally decided to do it.I am sorry, but you have in this post lost a great deal of respect from me. You pretty much did the only small thing that makes me really mad, and that is taking credit from humans and giving it to God. You say that God spoke through the people around you to help you. What little respect do you have for your fellow humans? Have you thought about what they did for you, the doctors fixed your body, and your friends and family kept you sane during all that, they stayed strong for you during your hardest hours, and you want to give all that to God? “How dare you?”, I say. And if God actually exists, and he made your family and friends do the things they did, and they wouldn’t have done them if he didn’t make them, that says more about your family than it does about God.And how cruel is it, that grieving parents must pray to the being that took their child from them not to take their other children? How backwards and evil is it, that you must love and worship someone, who just took your one child and then goes on to say “you better kiss my ass or who knows what will happen to your other children…”It truly sickens me and saddens me, that you find this a fitting story to show God’s grace. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619538/#p619538 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @NocturnusSee, that's the thing, and why I don't bother with these arguments. Good arguing 101 isn't "prove x doesn't exist", it's "prove x does". For example, to borrow a thing from Feynman, prove that there's not a dragon in the room with you. "but I can't see it", well, it's made of gas and is entirely transparent. "But I can't feel it either" well, it's not moving right now, and is just sitting in the corner, of course you don't feel it.You can take refuge behind the "atheists have to prove god doesn't exist" argument forever, which is why most of us just avoid religious people and don't bother. We can't do it. We also can't prove that gay rainbow unicorns don't exist, either. It's an impossible demand. As I said, I gave up really bothering a long time ago. in any other domain, you probably wouldn't put the demand on the other side to prove the absence of something but, as with every other religious person I've interacted with, you're fine doing it to defend your position on religion.Either you have to say that gay rainbow unicorns exist because no one can prove that they can't, or you have to universally apply the standard that you apply to non-religious things everywhere. Anything else is inconsistent. I am not being sarcastic. I mean this seriously. If atheists have to prove god doesn't exist, then by that standard gay rainbow unicorns must exist too. Ever seen a not-gay-rainbow-unicorn? No? Thought not.But here's why i say that you're probably born an atheist, and don't come to it later. I worked this out literally when I was like 6, the day I realized Santa wasn't real. How that conversation went was that we got into something about how monsters under the bed weren't real, then I asked if Santa was real, then shortly after that I realized that god can't be real either, because if god were real then we couldn't also say that magic and other supernatural stuff doesn't exist. Obviously at that age the argument wasn't fully formed, but that's when I realized the arguments were flawed, that everyone around me would say "god exists and is real and you have to have faith" while in the same breath saying that other things like it weren't real that were equally plausible like faeries (I don't mean cartoon ones, I mean the old scary ones from the 1800s and earlier). Discovering I was an atheist wasn't a process of being converted or anything like that, it was a process of discovering that the reason I always felt uncomfortable and bored at church had a name, while going along with it because I had Christian parents.I don't have good religious friends, and doubt I ever will. Religious people can be kind, smart, all that. Not disputing that. But no one religious can get past a certain point, because atheism isn't a religion, it's the absence of one, and understanding how that's even possible in the first place seems to just sort of break 95% of humanity. You and most of the rest of humanity are mildly insane by my standards. That's fine. I even understand why. But it's creepy to watch you and everyone else who are otherwise smart, consistent, and able to make good arguments, all these people who are willing to say "there is an objective truth and that's valuable", just...have this giant hole where all of that goes out the window, and not only does it go out the window, it goes so much out the window that you start demanding something that you know to be impossible from atheists rather than saying "huh, this is odd, maybe we should work out what's actually going on here, because only one religion and/or the atheists can be right". And no matter what I say you'll never really see it either. Maybe you personally will surprise me, but I've had this conversation enough and watched this conversation enough that I doubt it. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619532/#p619532 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god Not to worry, even I am affronted by the claims of presence of imaginary beings sometime. My condolences for what you and your grandma is going through. But remember, suffering is an inherent part of life, and whatever has begun must inevitably parish. This is the eternal law of the conditioned creation. So the pain would end soon, too. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619526/#p619526 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
2021-03-02
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : wing of eternity via Audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god then I think one can do it, but still it's a strange thing to be sure. Sometimes I wander if I would be able to end someone's suffering. It's so strange that suffering it's unique, and it has so many forms. Such a horible thing to be sure. I sometimes am not even to comprehend the intensity of ones suffering. As I ususally say go to a hospitle and after a bit you will become a buddhist if you weren't.And what do you mean by I am afronted by the presence of god? URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619517/#p619517 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
2021-03-02
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : wing of eternity via Audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god then I think one can do it, but still it's a strange thing to be sure. Sometimes I wander if I would be able to end someone's suffering. It's so strange that suffering it's unique, and it has so many forms. Such a horible thing to be sure. I sometimes am not even to comprehend the intensity of ones suffering. As I ususally say go to a hospitle and after a bit you will become a buddhist if you weren't. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619517/#p619517 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
2021-03-02
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : GrannyCheeseWheel via Audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god The person would have to indicate that they wished to have it done. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619516/#p619516 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
2021-03-02
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : wing of eternity via Audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @43 Did you performe Euthanasia on that woman? But did you ask her first if she really would want it. I would say that euthanasi means nothing because none has the right to take the suffering of another person. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619513/#p619513 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god When we're dealing with nonverifiable claims, the onus is virtually -always on the person making the claims to provide more than just their word that it's occurring. Put another way: it's never up to me to prove that god doesn't exist. It's always up to you to prove that he does. There is no hard evidence of the existence of any god, much less a Christian one. In my more philosophical moments, I can accept that the world is an extremely complex place. But in those moments, I will also ask the inevitable, "Okay, so what?". It is technically possible that there was some greater design involved, but again, no proof. I am firmly convinced that every single human religion is based out of fear, and even then, mostly it's a fear of the unknown. Humans are always questing for more, bigger, better. We always want what we don't have. And one question that has eluded us is, in essence, "What's it all for?". The place where you and I disagree, Nocturnus, is that I can say, "I don't know, but let's keep trying to find out", without having a problem with any of it. I do not believe that empathy is divine just because many of us have the trait. I don't believe that doing good, or the supposed universality of perception, has to do with any divine figure. Put bluntly, Christianity only came about less than two and a half millennia ago; in geological terms, that's ridiculously, insanely young. Even if there is some sort of all-powerful architect out there, it is probably so far beyond the realm of our understanding that any attempt to quantify it is entirely outside of our grasp. Put another way, I can say with certainty that God, or Allah, or Shiva, or whoever else, are not real. They are humanity's manifestation of something they cannot understand, a mechanism by which to try and make the world make more sense. Your rejection of this sort of logic is just more proof that it was ever needed in the first place. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619503/#p619503 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
2021-03-02
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : GrannyCheeseWheel via Audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god If there is absolute truth, then there is the possibility that god does not exist, and never has. If you believe that truth cannot be relative to the individual, then you must believe in the chance that your god does not exist or you will be in conflict. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619502/#p619502 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god If there is no such thing as truth, then I humbly submit there is no point. ON the other hand, if truth exists at all and it exists outside of ourselves rather than as just a man-made construct by which we do our best in our flawed state to govern the world we're in, then I believe there's all the reason to keep on trying to find it, and doing anything less than that makes us intelectually dishonest people. It is no different than the ongoing search for life in space. Is it an exercise in futility? We can speculate, but do not at this point in time truly know. I don't hold with Christians who claim that just because there's no mention of aliens/beings from other planets in the bible that they simply do not exist, as the bible doesn't mention a whole lot of things and places and people. Would it shake my faith if something was found on another planet? Naturally, no. For that to happen, the responsibility lies with atheists to prove that God does not exist, but to do that, atheists will have to become universally knowledgeable, which I do not see happening any time in the distant future, anymore than I see Christians being able to have the power to prove without the shadow of a doubt that God is real. Give the Christian that power and then all the love flows right out of the equation, because people would be forced to believe in God by virtue of the fact that you know without the shadow of a doubt that he exists and a Christian forced that knowledge down your throat. That, is where faith, truly comes in, and I contend that the atheist who truly, solidly, consistently believes in atheism has a greater leap of faith to make than he who believes in God. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619498/#p619498 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
2021-03-02
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : GrannyCheeseWheel via Audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god Don't think the thought hasn't crossed my mind as to a way to do it without being noticed. And yeah, Jayde covered the moral constraint, it's not putting my life above hers, because hers is ending soon, mine may, or it may not. If everything goes good for me, I could have another 40-50 years left.There is selfishness surrounding death. I've seen it too often. For me, I want her death to be swift because it eases her suffering. I don't want to prolong her life just so she can be there. That's what my folks tried to do with my grandpa, but he had other plans. To me, that's selfish.Here is my position, and it works with humans as well as pets. Your parents don't ask a whole lot of you in their lifetime, yet, it is they who not only gave you life, but provided for you until you could do so for yourself. Pets don't generally ask for a lot. You feed them, make sure they have water, shower them with love and affection, and play with them and give them exercise. But when the time comes, whether human or animal, they need someone to stand up for what they want. Animals can't even articulate it, but when you have to pick up your 30+ pound dog and carry it outside because its back legs don't work well enough to let it get over the hump, it's time.It's hard for the ones they leave behind, and it's harder still knowing you hastened their end, but no one said it would be easy. You're their champion now, and champions don't let their beloved family members languish in a slow death. For people, the law hasn't caught up yet, and I really wish it would.This is the price we pay for our attachments, be they human or animal. It's one of the many ways the universe balances itself out, even if, in our own lives, we don't strive for balance.Back to the topic of euthanasia, let's just say that I was able to do it in such a way that escaped the law's attention. Unless I was really, really good, my family might suspect, or even figure it out. They'd think me a murderer. Their morality doesn't allow them to think outside the box. Not only that, but the other half of me would feel guilty, because we're not solely creatures of logic, neither are we always unified in heart and mind. Society deems murder to be wrong, and as I have taken that value unto myself, a part of me would think it's wrong, even if most of me did not. The procedures in place with legal euthanasia would be a help there as well. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619496/#p619496 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god I'm agnostic, meaning I just go through my day normally, don't give 2 shits about higher powers or the like. But I do know something exists. What is it? I don't know. But I have gotten its attention before. It's probably something I can never ever do again, but I'm just glad that I was able to save a close person's life. I don't know anything about the high power, what it can or can't do, what it's existence is for, or anything else. I just know that I was able to get its attention 1 time to save someone's life. And just barely might I add. Whatever it was, it didn't do much, but it did enough to keep life going. I'm angry it only did the bare minimum. But thankful it did anything at all.The only thing I will say about this god debate is, the history of the universe is getting older by the second. For every thing that we discover about it, another second has past. We can try all we want to reach the beginning, but we are constantly being pushed further and further away from it. So what's the point; we will never reach the beginning. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619492/#p619492 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god I'm agnostic, meaning I just go through my day normally, don't give 2 shits about higher powers or the like. But I do know something exists. What is it? I don't know. But I have gotten its attention before. It's probably something I can never ever do again, but I'm just glad that I was able to save a close person's life. I don't know anything about the high power, what it can or can't do, what it's existence is for, or anything else. I just know that I was able to get its attention 1 time to save someone's life. And just barely might I add. Whatever it was, it didn't do much, but it did enough to keep life going. I'm angry it only did the bare minimum. But thankful it did anything at all.The only thing I will say about this god debate is, the history of the universe is getting older by the second. For every thing that we discover about it, another second has fast. We can try all we want to reach the beginning, but we are constantly being pushed further and further away from it. So what's the point. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619492/#p619492 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god I'm agnostic, meaning I just go through my day normally, don't give 2 shits about higher powers or the like. But I do know something exists. What is it? I don't know. But I have gotten its attention before. It's probably something I can never ever do again, but I'm just glad that I was able to save a close person's life. I don't know anything about the high power, what is can or can't do, what it's existance is for, or anything else. I just know that I was able to get its attention 1 time to save someone's life. And just bareally might I add. Whatever it was, it didn't do much, but it did enough to keep life going. I'm angry it only did the bare minimum. But thankful it did anything at all.The only thing I will say about this god debate is, the history of the universe is getting older by the second. For every thing that we discover about it, another second has fast. We can try all we want to reach the beginning, but we are constantly being pushed further and further away from it. So what's the point. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619492/#p619492 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @camlorn, but that's just it. Why is it good? Why is it bad? By who's standard and who or what gives that person or subset of people the right to determine good and bad and let it be what it is and why it is? By that same logic you can keep changing the definition of good and bad with the times and say that what you see as good today doesn't have to stay that way because you say it is, and if someone comes along to question that logic, well, that's bad because you believe it is! Honestly? If atheism could provide me with a huge amount of evidence as to why it is all round better and easier on life and why practically it makes more sense than an external influence that governs the laws of time, space and everything else in this big bad world we live in, I'd at the very least consider it, but at present, the idea that things are what they are and why should we not just let them be is, to me, as strange in the ear as you say my god is to you.@Jayde, it all comes back to what you believe about God. If you're going to go by the creation story found in Genesis, then we suffer from illness and sickness because man disobeyed the higher power in question and instead wanted to take the chance and become the higher power himself. ON the other hand, if your idea of God is that he is one with the universe or that everything is God including man, I can only imagine what one might believe under such mindsets... I suppose anything goes. And if you believe in no god, then you have to come up with a better alternative for much of the world population because God is such a grounded belief in humanity that at its core it really is a basic belief or one that at the very least can be justified by its simplicity, which states that it is easier to believe that a world was manufactured into existence by a higher power, than it is to believe that the world came from nothing and, by accident and chance, became something. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619491/#p619491 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god I'm agnostic, meaning I just go through my day normally, don't give 2 shits about higher powers or the like. But I do know something exists. What is it? I don't know, and I don't care. But I have gotten its attention before. It's probably something I can never ever do again, but I'm just glad that I was able to save a close person's life.The only thing I will say about this god debate is, the history of the universe is getting older by the second. For every thing that we discover about it, another second has fast. We can try all we want to reach the beginning, but we are constantly being pushed further and further away from it. So what's the point. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619492/#p619492 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @27We did all of that in 5 years, though. Less time than it takes a human child to learn to talk.I was trying to avoid the argument because it feels very off topic, but the thing about "does the soul exist?" arguments is that every time someone puts evidence on the "no it doesn't side", the "yes it does" side raises the bar. 20-30 years ago it was psychiatrists are crackpots and we can never understand how to treat mental illness. 10-15 years ago it was this AI thing is bullshit because humans are special. Now, it's "well AI isn't that great and can become racist". What will it be tomorrow? You tell me.I consider any argument where one side of the argument continues providing evidence and the other side of the argument continues moving the goalpost and even going so far as to say of course we can't provide evidence because it's faith to be a pretty clear-cut argument. There will always be room for a soul, but only if people keep changing the definition of a soul so that it fits in the hole that's left for it.@28I'm not saying that good and bad don't exist. You believe in ethics because god, which isn't an argument for ethics as such, just "I believe in a thing called god, there's no real evidence, but I believe". I believe in ethics because I have ethics because I believe in ethics because... which is a tautology, and also no real argument for ethics. People just have it, same way we have 2 legs. Is it a good thing? yes. Why is it a good thing? because. You can't really get deeper at it than that. You can try, but trying requires saying that there's no particular truth, or believing in a god, and if you use believing in a god then which god? Sure, you can construct big towers of philosophy and freak out about it and watch as everyone constructs incompatible towers of philosophy that end at the same place, and maybe say "well there must be a deeper truth". Or you can just accept that it's a thing that happens, same way as the sun coming up.One of the reasons I no longer bother trying to get people to be atheists is that one of the key inherent capacities of atheism is the ability to be fine with questions that end in tautologies or big question marks. As with everything else atheism-related, there's no particular value judgement on it though: as far as I can tell it's either a thing you're born with or you aren't. It doesn't make you a better person, just one who is more able to value truth as an end in itself. And I'm pretty sure it can't be learned. There's very little research and such on these topics, probably a lot because atheism is actually quite rare and admitting to it is still somewhat taboo. I don't believe in a higher power because I don't need one: I can be fully comfortable with the universe existing just because it exists, or people doing things we can't explain because we just don't know yet, and so on. When I think about those ideas and stuff like it I don't feel the slightest bit of discomfort not knowing.It would be nice to know, but what I care about is truth, not having a reason. Saying "but god" is a reason, but one to which there's no truth. Saying "because god" has no predictive power, and just makes the universe more complicated without actually explaining anything at all.But mostly, I'm an atheist because (like with the soul) we keep having to change the definitions of what god does because science and other evidence-based things keep intruding. There'll always be room for a creator and higher power too, but if you keep having to change the shape of the hole that it fits in, then it's a bad argument, nothing more. if someone had said 2000 years ago "here is exactly what god does, you can go talk to him, and these things reliably happen", sure. But instead it starts with finding reasons that god "withdrew" or whatever and just keeps going and going and going, taking capacities away but still saying "there's a god". If it were anything else at all and people treated it like they do arguments about god, we'd laugh them out of the room--but god/higher powers get a pass, you're allowed to pull out every tool in the arguing in bad faith toolbox, every cognitive bias in the cognitive bias toolbox, and we praise it and call it wisdom. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619489/#p619489 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god Killing should never, ever be easy.In a position like that of GCW, yes, there does come a point where one life has more potential value than another. We're talking about one person in his twenties or early thirties, and another who has almost reached the end of her projected lifespan. Left alone, she will die in months. Assisted in dying, she would stop suffering far sooner. This results in a net loss of months of suffering, traded for years, perhaps decades, of suffering for someone who is left alive. I don't see any problem in weighing that as objectively as possible and deciding not to sacrifice your own freedom in order to save someone else a few months of further misery. It's not a case of two clearly even outcomes here.The attempt to boil everything down to moral relativism as proof of God is a little suspect, I think. Why can't empathy just be a trait that creatures with intelligence show one another when they witness suffering? Why does any greater good or greater ill need to be defined by, or ascribed to, any supernatural figure? I've seen this argument before, and it's never yet held any water.In addition, my argument about God allowing preventable illness even though he doesn't have to still hasn't been touched. It's not necessarily that I want him to answer all prayers, because sure, a two-year-old who didn't get her ice cream is maybe a bit lower on the list than someone who is dying for a preventable reason. But surely if god is all-powerful, he would simply never have allowed such illnesses to occur. This isn't a breach of free will; we generally do not choose to get ill, after all, it mostly happens entirely outside of our own choices or scope of actions. The fact that he not only 1. designed the universe with these awful diseases, then 2. did virtually nothing when people are targeted by them, is proof positive that either we're dealing with a sociopath, a mad scientist, or a fictitious construct that has been created to assuage our greatest fears about what comes next. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619487/#p619487 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god For what it's worth? Unless something has seriously broken in you, I don't think killing is as easy as one thinks it might be, otherwise there wouldn't be such a thing as soldiers and the like with PTSD and such. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619485/#p619485 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god If you are living in a free country and you can't kill someone because of laws, what is freedom? And if you believe what I mentioned is selfless and does good to the person, but you don't do it to her yourself, why do you expect a god to do it for you when you are not willing to do it?By the way it is possible to kill someone in a way that no one notices. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619483/#p619483 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god I find that interesting; it is not wrong or immoral to end the life of a suffering woman. It is wrong to spend the rest of your life in jail for doing it. But then, it is also not selfish to not want to spend the rest of your life in jail while you watch the suffering woman. Somewhere, somehow, that says to me that the suffering woman is not worth spending the rest of one's life in jail, thus you elevate one life over another. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619482/#p619482 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
2021-03-02
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : GrannyCheeseWheel via Audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god I would face a lifetime of consequences for doing so, which is why I don't. But I don't feel that it's immoral. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619477/#p619477 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god I guess there's a debate to be had regarding selfishness vs selflessness then, and what those terms mean in this scenario. I suppose it might be selfless to end their suffering even though you could be prosecuted for that. I wouldn't do that, personally. I would only do it if it were within the law, because I don't want to face consequences for it. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619474/#p619474 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god I could be wrong, but I think what @29 was suggesting was even deeper than that, as disturbing as it may seem. Op says, and I quote, "I would happily end her suffering if it were possible to do so within the law." IN essence, the law is more important than ending someone's suffering. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619473/#p619473 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god He's already gone over this. It's against the law where he lives. I also agree with assisted suicide being legal and I think keeping people alive in misery is probably morally wrong. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619470/#p619470 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @camlorn, I'll bite. You outlined all of the great goodness we can accomplish if we were to just set God, spirituality and religion aside as nonsensical whims of the human brain. My question, I believe, is an intelectually honest one; why? What for? If what you say is true and the only thing that is true is that things are as they are, neither good nor bad, neither right or wrong because they are all subject to interpretation and perception, then what's this life for? It begins and it ends and neither point is any greater than the other. That you left a legacy serves no purpose other than to further other lives that are all equall to yours with a beginning and an end that have no significant value or worth. Nothing is true; nothing is a lie. Everything is simply what it is, neither good nor bad, neither right nor wrong, greater or lesser, because it is all governed by this being called man that can dictate the whims of it all by simply saying, "I think, therefore, I am."As for the implications of that? If I decide that tomorrow I want to pick up trash because it'll help better the world I live in? I've made a choice. It is neither good or bad; it's simply something I've decided to do. If I tire of that pursuit and start dumping my trash out on the street because I burn out, I've made yet another choice in my life. By definition, no one has a right to tell me it is either good or bad; it is simply a decision I've made. That it impacts humanity and the world it lives in negatively... Negatively? Why does that even matter? What is negativity? Is it simpy a mixture of chemicals in our brains that hardwire us to say more or less collectively, "Hey, stop it! You're killing our world!" So? It's all going to come to an end anyway! Screw you! Why should I care! Who is right? Who is wrong? What right have you to tell me that I have no right to destroy the world you live in? Who gave you the right to believe you're better than I am, and who gave him or her that right to give to you anyway?No, I can't buy that, and I buy it even less when two things happen every single one of us has done to some degree or another. We admire and respect altruism for no good reason, and we all, each and every single one of us, want to hold a higher power responsible for pain and suffering. When the chips are down, you don't blame the cosmos for having somehow manufactured itself into existence and carrying you along with it on its insane journey from oblivion into oblivion. I can't say I've ever heard a single person say"Damned this cosmos! Universe be blowed!" I do here, "Good God, why me? Jesus Christ, why? Oh lord, have mercy!"So, what exactly is a higher power? Well, if I take those two words literally, I submit that it is an entity that is greater than I am in some sense or another. It either knows more than me, can do something I cannot do or go somewhere I cannot go and or has seen things I have not seen. Perhaps it is all of these things and more. It's not a computer I created; it's not a piece of technological hardware I put together. It's not something fashioned by my brain. For a higher power to be a higher power it has to be outside of my sphere of influence, and at the point that it has to answer to me, it is no longer a higher power; it is an equall power.And this is where we are going to differ, because nobody I know, myself included, really, truly, honestly, sincerely, by default wishes to be governed by a higher power. WE just want to blame it if it exists for everything that is going wrong. That having been said, some of us will choose, if we are convicted, that said higher power is worth obeying, respecting, worshipping and giving our lives to, because living outside of the will of said higher power, if in fact it is who it claims to be, whatever it claims to be, whatever it is we're convicted of, is the difference between many things, between having value and worth or having none, between true justice and none, between a standard for good and bad or a standard that can change with the mood and the sands of time, between a static and consistent reality of things that are or an opposing force that says nothing is ever what you think it is and you can't even trust yourself to figure it out because someone else has other ideas that differ from yours and they might just think you're stupid crazy! URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619467/#p619467 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god I do not want to talk about god and all that right now but I have a question.If you believe that your grandmother does not deserve what she's going through, if you believe that death would end her pain, why won't you kill her?You do not need to be a god to be able to kill someone. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619468/#p619468 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god I do not want to talk about god and all that right now but I have a question.If you believe that your grandmother does not deserve what she's going through, if you believe that death would end her pain, why won't you kill her?You do not need to be a god to kill someone. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619468/#p619468 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @camlorn, I'll bite. You outlined all of the great goodness we can accomplish if we were to just set God, spirituality and religion aside as nonsensical whims of the human brain. My question, I believe, is an intelectually honest one; why? What for? If what you say is true and the only thing that is true is that things are as they are, neither good nor bad, neither right or wrong because they are all subject to interpretation and perception, then what's this life for? It begins and it ends and neither point is any greater than the other. That you left a legacy serves no purpose other than to further other lives that are all equall to yours with a beginning and an end that have no significant value or worth. Nothing is true; nothing is a lie. Everything is simply what it is, neither good nor bad, neither right nor wrong, greater or lesser, because it is all governed by this being called man that can dictate the whims of it all by simply saying, "I think, therefore, I am."As for the implications of that? If I decide that tomorrow I want to pick up trash because it'll help better the world I live in? I've made a choice. It is neither good or bad; it's simply something I've decided to do. If I tire of that pursuit and start dumping my trash out on the street because I burn out, I've made yet another choice in my life. By definition, no one has a right to tell me it is either good or bad; it is simply a decision I've made. That it impacts humanity and the world it lives in negatively... Negatively? Why does that even matter? What is negativity? Is it simpy a mixture of chemicals in our brains that hardwire us to say more or less collectively, "Hey, stop it! You're killing our world!" So? It's all going to come to an end anyway! Screw you! Why should I care! Who is right? Who is wrong? What right have you to tell me that I have no right to destroy the world you live in? Who gave you the right to believe you're better than I am, and who gave him or her that right to give to you anyway?No, I can't buy that, and I buy it even less when two things happen every single one of us has done to some degree or another. We admire and respect altruism for no good reason, and we all, each and every single one of us, want to hold a higher power responsible for pain and suffering. When the chips are down, you don't blame the cosmos for having somehow manufactured itself into existence and carrying you along with it on its insane journey from oblivion into oblivion. I can't say I've ever heard a single person say"Damned this cosmos! Universe be blowed!" I do here, "Good God, why me? Jesus Christ, why? Oh lord, have mercy!"So, what exactly is a higher power? Well, if I take those two words literally, I submit that it is an entity that is greater than I am in some sense or another. It either knows more than me, can do something I cannot do or go somewhere I cannot go and or has seen things I have not seen. Perhaps it is all of these things and more. It's not a computer I created; it's not a piece of technological hardware I put together. It's not something fashioned by my brain. For a higher power to be a higher power it has to be outside of my sphere of influence, and at the point that it has to answer to me, it is no longer a higher power; it is an equall power.And this is where we are going to differ, because nobody I know, myself included, really, truly, honestly, sincerely, by default wishes to be governed by a higher power. WE just want to blame it if it exists for everything that is going wrong. That having been said, some of us will choose, if we are convicted, that said higher power is worth obeying, respecting, worshipping and giving our lives to, because living outside of the will of said higher power, if in fact it is who it claims to be, whatever it claims to be, whatever it is we're convicted of, is the difference between many things, between having value and worth or having none, between true justice and none, between a stanrd for good and bad or a standard that can change with the mood and the sands of time, between a static and consistent reality of things that are or an opposing force that says nothing is ever what you think it is and you can't even trust yourself to figure it out because someone else has other ideas that differ from yours and they might just think you're stupid crazy! URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619467/#p619467 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
2021-03-02
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : GrannyCheeseWheel via Audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god AI doesn't do any of those things well. In fact, sometimes it picks up traits it shouldn't, like Tay from Microsoft, and if you listen to the AI continuation of this song at the 2:14 mark, it literally says, and I quote, "I want niggers to be slaughtered", in a way that's so obvious, I don't know how it doesn't get taken down. It's imitating things it sees. Had it not been trained on huge data sets, it could not do the things it does. Creativity is innate. You don't need to be trained to be creative. But AI cannot be creative without training.Just look at things like AI dungeon, and how often stories generated with it turn towards sex. Not only that, but incest and vampire sex and all other sorts of shit that exists online. It starts with a base, some random permutation has it look for something else, and it fills in and makes sentences that are grammatically correct. It's impressive until you realize that the only way it's able to do that is because there's such a wealth of information for it to pull from. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619454/#p619454 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @20You won't believe in the soul in 20 years, not because you're going to get older, but because every time the soul exists crowd makes a claim about how we can't just be circuitry, the AI crowd says hold my beer and goes off and does the thing. Poetry? Yep. Music? Yep. Just a couple weeks ago we got "give it a description of the image you want and it draws it for you even if it's insane thing like baby cabbage wearing a tutu". There's a lot of other evidence, but there's nothing like a concrete demonstration of circuitry for the people who don't go off and learn about it on their own.In addition to that, thought is clearly in the brain. If there's a soul it's not doing much, and every day that goes by we discover more about how the brain does what it does and take yet another thing out from under whatever a soul might be doing for us, if it existed.I imagine that if evidence were going to sway you it would have, and gave up on trying to convince people a long time ago, but if you can short-circuit to the end it makes this easier. Unfortunately I think the capacity for atheism is innate, being as I can't think of many people who "converted" and everyone I know was an atheist at a very young age. It takes a particular personality type to deal with all the implications, and dealing with the implications has no particular moral weight or "this makes you good" or whatever so it's not like there's a reward or a warm fuzzy feeling. The only thing you get out of it is that it's true.I do think the world would be better if more people were though, if only because we might stop fucking around and start solving problems. One of the many things that helps keep the world sucky is that everyone is able to go off and say "but god will provide" rather than just, like, providing. We could put way more of society's resources into solving aging, world hunger, etc. if people got off their asses and got serious about things like death. I don't know how far immortality is--50 years, 500 years, 1000 years, all reasonable estimates. But one of the neat things about atheism and not believing in souls is, that's actually a problem that could be solved. But as long as there's a soul and an afterlife and a god dictating human morals, and letting most people just say "but the church of whatever is in Africa solving malaria, isn't that neat?" we won't ever really get something like a government that says "you know, let's take making the world better into our own hands and make the world concretely better by actually coordinating resource usage and spending money".I blame humanity for cases like this. We couldn't even handle covid. We should have been able to, but everyone was busy going "but challenge trials are unethical, we must go through the government-prescribed mechanisms that are okay". We could have had vaccines in a month. I don't know how far along cancer research would be if people stopped fucking around with this stuff, but it's the same mindset as religion: someone wrote a bible, and we now believe in the higher power of medical ethics whether or not they make sense. Can't do it faster, can't do it differently, just have to follow it through blindly. This is equivalent to the capacity for religion and comes from the same place. Again, I don't know how far cancer would be. But a hell of a lot further than it is now.The fundamental underlying problem when it comes to medical ethics is that the belief in an afterlife gives everyone an out when it comes to medicine. The worse dying seems to people, the more we'd be trying to solve it. Anything that takes away from that directly takes resources away from medicine, climate change, etc. This mindset is what lets Musk and Bezos go off and be like "I'll spend billions going to mars!"And I haven't even got into how arguing over whose god is better is responsible for the entire middle east yet.But, as for why I suggest this--well, if you're angry at humanity, that's actionable. There's things you can do about it if you feel the need: donate to cancer research, lobby the government, protest. Get involved in clinical trials. Not so much for blind people, but for sighted people go off and volunteer somewhere. Whether or not you believe in a god doesn't matter so much, but it's always important to remember that being angry at god isn't an anger you can do anything about. Either there isn't one, or there is, and if there is it's so powerful that your anger can't ever matter. If you get angry at people instead, there's ways to get them to listen, even if you're just a small drop in a bigger bucket. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619447/#p619447 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
2021-03-02
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : GrannyCheeseWheel via Audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @21 You're starting to stray into problematic territory. Even if we could prove Jesus existed, can we prove that he died as described? Can we prove he was resurrected two days later?But it doesn't really matter, since you can't even talk to me on my level, because your back is ram rod straight. Here I am, prostrate before you, and all you care about is that I don't believe in your god. Congratulations, you were aiming at a deer, but your shot went so wide of the mark that you hit a hunter getting out of his truck almost a mile away. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619446/#p619446 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god I know that some will not like what I say, or think it is insensitive, but I am here to testify about my own experiences with suffering, and how the Lord carried me through. When I was born, I was 13 weeks premature, and was approximately 2 pounds, along with my twin sister. I was rendered totally blind by Retinopathy Prematurity (ROP) stage 5, that came with a mild case of Cerebral Palsy, which still affects my right side to this day. Almost 10 days before the birth of my sister and I, my parents lost another baby who was in the womb with us, a 1-pound boy. Throughout the time my twin and I were in the NICU, for 73 days, my parents prayed constantly, even amidst their heartbreak for the loss of their child born too early. Even though I was rendered blind at birth, and even though my sister and I were close to death, we survieaved through blood transfusions given to us from people my paren'ts knew, but had not considered contacting until then. One doctor I visited told my parents I would not be able to sit up, or walk at all, or do any of the things I can now do today. Also, I had an experience that is still very memorable for me to this day. About 8 or 9 years ago, I had to have a major done on my legs, because I was walking in a posture bent over for several years, and if that surgery had not been done, I would be permanently wheelchair-bound. When I was recoverIng from that surgery, there were times when the pain was nearly unbearable, to the point that I thought death would be preferable to this existence of pain which had become my life. The sleepless nights, in which pain ruled my senses passed by as though years were passing, the hours like days, the minutes agonizing. Through this experience though, a number of people helped me through it, and it is my firm and unshakable belief that God worked through them in little but impactful ways to help me. My great-grand-mother, who is now dead, talked to me during my recovery, which helped her, and me both. My friends, both from school and elsewhere, visited me with a container of jokes that were read to me to keep me laughing, they played games with me to keep me distracted, and told me the hard truth that I had to do something, when I didn’t want to do it. That is why I say that through this experience that I whole-heartedly believe that God whispers in our pleasures, and shouts in our pain. We may not hear him, because we are too focused on our circumstances. I can testify to that firsthand, because at the time, when I was recovering from that surgery, if you would have told me that God was going to carry me through this, and give me confidence in my steps, I would have scoffed at you, or at best, been skeptical. Now, I see what he did through this experience, and it has made me more empathetic to others suffering through pain. Let me say though, that although I have not watched someone experiencing the effects of Alzheimer’s Disease, nor the pain which Cancer brings, I do feel very sorry for what your grandmother went through, and I will pray for ernestly. I pray that your eyes will be opened, and that you may see the plans that God has for your life. We may not see the full picture from our point of view. If God were to snap his fingers, and take away every problem we experienced, then where would our faith come from? I believe that through suffering, we can see the ways in which the Lord works, both big and small. Again, I know that this may not convince all of you, but think for one moment, that even though someone may experience bodily suffering, they can experience an inner peace, a joy that only faith in God can give. This is not the same joy that momentary happiness gives us, but a constant belief that God is faithful, and will deliver them, through anything the world may throw at them. That is all I have to say. I pray for all of those who do not believe, and anticipate the discussion that may follow this post. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619443/#p619443 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god 21, doesn't quite answer the OP's question. Remember even Jesus thought his father forsaked him URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619442/#p619442 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @15, But your signiture says oh my god, Are you fighting your self or something? LOL. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619438/#p619438 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god Brother, I ask you a question: did Jesus deserve to sweat blood, to be betrayed, denied, mocked, filled with beating and spitting, to be scourged, loaded with the weight of the cross, to be crucified and to die like this? It does not seem to me, since in all his earthly life he did nothing but good! He is the only man without sin, perfect and just, yet he wanted to undergo all this! Think carefully, in this post of mine there is the answer you are looking for, there is no need to add anything else! URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619436/#p619436 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
2021-03-02
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : GrannyCheeseWheel via Audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @3 I am less angry at god than I am at the people who throw religion at me like it's supposed to somehow make this better. I do believe in the soul though. I mean, if we're just organic circuitry with an expiration date, OK, I can deal with that. It's shitty, but OK. But I don't think we can be who we are if we're just circuitry.@5 Yeah, pretty much how I feel.@7 Your attempt to, "god me up", did not work. The bible doesn't just say that we need to love and worship him, but that we must give our lives over to him and be his servant. I refuse to do that.@11 Your aunt will need to grieve properly, or it will affect her for the rest of her life. And isn't it so convenient that we can throw all our feelings aside because god made it OK. Even if your family were with god or jehovah, they're not here. Are you not allowed to feel the loss?@12. I would happily end her suffering if it were possible to do so within the law. I am a big proponent for euthanasia. But yeah, if this god were so all powerful, he could just zip back in time and catch up on what he missed. He could hard code us to die in our sleep at 80, etc.@14 I don't need healing though. I don't need strength to deal with this. I don't need guidance, because her death is fast approaching. Why would I want uplifted spirits at this time. "Hey granny, we're taking a vacay to Hawaii, never mind that you're stuck in your bed dying... See you when I get - oh wait, you'll be dead."I want to get back to the strength thing for a minute, because it's something people often say to try to comfort those around them. You don't need strength to grieve the loss of someone. You need a safe space to become weak and vulnerable for a while. Maybe you depend on others a bit more than usual, and that's OK, because they generally want to help. @17 I don't know what would come of it. You're not going to convince me to believe in god. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619432/#p619432 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god And this exactly why I think religion is a load of worthless shit. I don't have a problem with it as such as long as people don't try and ram it down my throat. That will piss me off very, very fast. But if you wanna believe, cool. You go ahead. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619429/#p619429 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god I spent a month in a nursing home after fracturing my leg and I did experience the sun downers on my hall at night and it made me want to cry. Picture this waking up in the middle of the night and hereing a lady cry for water like in a desert even thoe there is a full cup of water by her bed and the nurses check on you in the night and bring you new water cups. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619426/#p619426 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god @OP I'd like to talk to you. Much like what you've done here, our conversation may get controversial, but my promise to you is to address you with as much respect and humility as I, in my imperfect and flawed humanity can muster. I realize your struggle is real and that your questions are valid. They really are! Your situation is similar to something I went through not too long ago, though it was my grandfather suffering rather than my grandmother. There were moments when he was as clear as a bell and he could tell you who he was, where he was and how he was truly doing, and moments when he didnt' even recognize his own name. In my mind, he was needlessly kept alive for far too long and for no reason I can truly understand, and it was exceptionally hard for me because I saw him as the solid rock throgh most of my childhood and in to my teen years. He was physically fit, a hard worker, an outgoing soul with a load of stories to tell and a generous heart that gave freely and abundantly. Everyone else must eat before he ever did, especially his grandchildren.Anyway, if and when you feel up to it, please PM me or contact me by email so we can work out the details. I also promise that I won't take any offense to you not following up, but I would appreciate the privillege of speaking to you on a personal level, given I've already discussed this matter publically, and while I could continue this here, I also believe that 1 on 1's can sometimes produce greater opportunities and understanding on both sides because you don't have a load of loose cannons being fired off and causing unnecessary ruccus. This is a very sensitive subject, but given my personal experience I would like the chance to try and help with it if I can. I know it's asking a lot for you to trust me because you and I dont' know each other very well, but I would take it as a personal favor if you could find it in yourself to do so. Thanks for reading, and whatever happens, I sincerely hope you have a great day. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619418/#p619418 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god Hi,Again, as previously stated I don’t believe in god, I’m not trying to poke at religion either but this talk of religion makes me think of something a friend said to me jokingly the other day which made me laugh, hopefully it brings a smile to others too: “The devil punishes bad people, whereas god allows bad things to happen unchecked and offers bad people forgiveness, surely isn’t the Devil the good guy then?" regarding quotes or sayings, Chris’s post did make me smile with his comments about god grabbing for some nachos , but it reminded me of a great quote (one of many) from the film and book fight club where Tyler Durden mentions gods indifference towards us and refers to us as the middle children of god! Its also that concept that god will welcome you into heaven, once you have asked his forgiveness and repented for your sins, but surely that means you must first sin? Anyway for anyone who wants the full fight club quote it is below:“How Tyler saw it was that getting God’s attention for being bad was better than getting no attention at all. Maybe God’s hate is better than His indifference.If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?We are God’s middle children, according to Tyler Durden, with no special place in history and no special attention.Unless we get God’s attention, we have no hope of damnation or redemption.Which is worse, hell or nothing?Only if we’re caught and punished can we be saved.”Paul Lemm URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619412/#p619412 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god GCW, Can't even begin to think what you and your granny are going threw. Stay strong and try to comfort her with whatever she likes.As for my beliefs:I don't think god exists, but if he does, I hope my (now dead) uncle tells him that he's a dick. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619405/#p619405 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god seems like most of you on this post has it figured out already, so my comment is not aimed towards you at all. if you don't think there is a higher power over us then so be it, i am not here to convince you otherwise. my comment is for the person that is reading this post, that may be feeling lost, or depressed about there life or tribulations. if you want healing, if you want guidance, if you want brighter days, i suggest seeking prayer, seek knowledge of the bible, trust me it will uplift your spirits. am i saying it will cure your disability no, am i saying will it cure or fix the issues in your life no, but it will give you the power and the strength to deal with them, and make the best of them, and possibly even change them. i am not telling you to even join a specific religion, only thing i am saying is seek a higher force, a spiritual presence that you will fill inside of you. do this consistently for a month, 4weeks, and see if you see a change within your spirit, within your heart, your attitude, and the way you look at life. if after 4weeks you come to me and show me proof that you have done this, and that you have felt absolutely nothing, that praying did not uplift your spirits, that it did not help you accept your issues and problems and even help solve them, if you tell me it did absolutely nothing for you, then you have a free audio game of your choice on me, for me wasting your time, and that's my word. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619404/#p619404 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
Re: I am affronted by the presence of god Yeah well there's 1 question that wraps the "Does God exist?" debate in a neat little bowIf God doesn't like gambling and you win a billion dollars, do you give thanks or no? I mean, if we're supposed to follow his wishes, but still we deviate from his wishes and pull ourselves out of poverty and suffering, do we pray to him? Do we suddenly ask forgiveness? I do believe there's some kind of higher power out there, responsible for the goodness within the world, but its just hard to believe at times there is a man in the sky looking down on us that's supposed to give us the answer. I won't challenge someone's beliefs, because maybe I could be wrong, and its a free world, we're all entitled to believe in what we believe in but I just don't buy shoving hyper religion down someone's throat. I recently saw someone on here with mental issues and their response was god. But I mean, talking to god is as good as talking to yourself. Especially to someone suicidal. That's just me, personally. URL: https://forum.audiogames.net/post/619401/#p619401 -- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
