Americans’ belief in God, the devil and other spiritual entities has fallen to a new low, according to a Gallup poll released on Thursday. Seventy-four percent of Americans said they believe in God…
Americans’ belief in God, the devil and other spiritual entities has fallen to a new low, according to a Gallup poll released on Thursday. Seventy-four percent of Americans said they believe in God…
I just spelled out the difference.
Have more longevity != more alive. See the definition of life here. Ideas/memes are not comprised of matter with biological processes.
I agree that they all contain, spread, and celebrate many sociopathic ideas, but that does not life make. Memes are interesting in that they propagate in a similar way to biological organisms, like pathogens do, and can be studied in many similar ways, but that does not make them alive.
I think most of the confusion here has to do with your use of the term, “literally,” which you are literally using incorrectly.
Ok, I can see you’re limited by your materialist mindset. I don’t need to convince you. I will only tell you that understanding that there are angelic and demonic ideas that can possess and control our lives allows you to develop a tactic to counter or utilize their effects. Everything that’s known about resisting and defeating demons is reflective of the necessary tactics one needs to resist and defeat demonic ideas. The Temptations of Christ are parables designed to teach the reader how to avoid the temptations of ignorance and malice. Everything known about invoking angels and Gods is reflective of what needs to be done to utilize those ideas in your life.
Hoo boy, sorry to discover you have a propensity for magical thinking. Yes, I am proudly a materialist, and my beliefs are founded in physical evidence. Since beliefs that are not founded in evidence are seldom dispelled by it I’m going to wish you a good day and stop wasting my time here.
When man invented machines, he began believing God was a machine. Now that man is creating computers, we believe the universe is a simulation. Invariably when people say there is no God, they’re completely unable to satisfactorily define God.
Because there isn’t one. So there’s no way to define something that doesn’t exist.
So what you’re saying is that something that doesn’t exist doesn’t exist. I agree with that. You haven’t said anything about God though.
I’m loving this thread, thanks to all the contributors.
People are meme/idea factories, creating new ones or refining existing ones. I think that it’s difficult (impossible?) To find this in any other instance of nature or even in man made AI.
Some ideas are bad/demonic in that they stifle the creation or refinement of new/existing ideas.
Some are “angelic” in that they open new threads and avenues for thinking.
What’s a fictional God got to do with any of that?
God is just a word. The word points to an understanding. The universe as far as we can tell is infinite, expanding, subject to entropy and the laws of physics. What is it expanding into? Why is there something rather than nothing? Why does it share features across immeasurable distances? Why did it start? What is time? What is conscious experience? All of these questions point to a higher order of organization than could be comprehended with infinite accumulated lifetimes of research. God is just shorthand for the fundament, the reason there’s something rather than nothing.
Matter isn’t the basis of our universe, it’s energy. We’re in the God-field. Information cannot be created or destroyed, only occulted and translated. Your entire life exists as a 4D worm traveling through a 5D minkowski space of probability. Your perspective is bound to a single point in 4 dimensions you know as the present. Your whole life and every possible choice you could make is nothing more than a series of coordinates in an infinite fractal field. You are simply a memory or an idea of God. You’re a dream. The eye of God is consciousness and the light that shines through this matrix creates a shadow play that you see as your material life. All those ancient stories you deny carried this information, but the translations are nonsense because you don’t have the perspective of a civilian from 4-6 thousand years ago.
The word points to a MISunderstanding. Fear of the world, nature, and the universe is where it originates. Drug-fueled pseudo-scientific woo woo doesn’t change that it is an outdated concept.
Super hot takes, genuinely. I agree with a lot of what you’re saying but would point out two corrections
It’s presumptive to assume that I don’t understand the stories from thousands of years ago. Knowledge evolves just like we do. We possess that same knowledge in a condensed and efficient format. Just as massive dinosaurs evolved in to chickens or whatever other analogy you like, a 15 minute story in the bible can be condensed in to “help others in need” or “don’t steal”
Is information lost in these condensations? Absolutely, evolution comes at a cost, chickens are missing some things that dinosaurs had. The great part about ideas though is that they can always be picked back up and reassessed. If there is some old story that contains a grain of wisdom that society has missed, by all means pick it up and share. But to address your specifically quoted piece, you would be directly contradicting yourself if you are saying that knowledge has been lost. It’s laid out and available for anyone to pick apart.
I think this misconception comes from our perspective on time. You and I were born so our consciousness began “somewhere” so it is easy to fall in to the trap that all things are conceived. While all actions have a cause and an effect, you can “see” the effect 10 seconds in the future, just as you could have seen the cause 10 seconds in the past. There doesn’t need to be a beginning of time, things always were. A rock floating through space at x speed in y direction can be predicted to be at another point days, years, infinity in to the future, just as it could be done in reverse.
Long way to say that there need be no fundament, just varying states of the universe. It always was and always will be.
Hey, your imagination exists so, thus, the god you think exists does. He’s stuck in your skull, thankfully.
I think you failed that one. We passed it though.
If Yahweh doesn’t speak to you he doesn’t listen to you either. The first thing would be just as easy as the 2nd thing.
I wasn’t talking about Yahweh. That name is a religious invention. I’m not religious.
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Then I don’t know why you use words like “God” when it is a completely meaningless word except as a character in ancient fictional stories.