Btw Karen... not believing in God will definitely cost you a ticket to heaven.
Believing in him.. will at least give you a chance. Why take the chance?
Belief isn't something that can be willed. Once belief is gone, it's gone. I used to believe in Santa Claus, (as most people did when they were children) and when I quit believing in Santa Claus, that was it -- it's gone. Could you believe in Santa Claus again? Also, aside from "a deep feeling" nobody who "believes" in their particular deity has proof that their's is the only one, or that their's is the RIGHT one! (Hence the birth of the Flying Spaghetti Monster -- to illustrate to believers how delusional creation science is). What if, (as per Bertrand Russell's analogy), "God" were a huge China teapot orbiting the sun, and "He" was a jealous god--now the fact that you believe in the Biblical God, has put you at odds with his holiness, the China teapot, and you've angered him because of this.
What you propose, the "why take a chance" argument, has a name. It's called Pascal's wager, and it's flawed, because it makes the assumption that there is only 2 possibilities, that there is the Christian's god versus atheism. On Pascal's own premise, God is infinitely incomprehensible, therefore there would be an infinite number of possible ideas about what that god is, all of which are equally probable. Nobody has the "hook up" on God.
Ever thought the paradoxes were put there on purpose to test our tiny human human brains.
I used to think that when I believed. When I lost my faith...actually a little bit
before I lost my faith, I started to wonder "what if"....what if the "God" depicted in the Bible were really Satan, and Satan was really God. Since the Bible (according to Christians) was written by God -- tooting His own horn, so to speak, creating his own propaganda, He could claim anything about Himself that He wanted to delude people, including the fact that HE'S the only way, when in fact he's the straight way to damnation; and the REAL God (who in this supposition is the persona depicted Biblically as Satan) left the propaganda out there because he only wanted
reasonable people in his eternal afterlife, people who were intelligent enough to know right from wrong and evil from good, thereby reading the Bible and recognizing that the "god" depicted in it's pages is cruel, arbitary, a mysogenist, a racist, mean, psychotic, and not to be trusted...in essence "knowing Him by his works" -- anyone who creates a place of eternal damnation for it's own creatures and sends their chosen people in to destroy whole nations, men, women and children who will then go directly TO eternal damnation even though they just had the misfortune of being born into a nation that does not know "the truth," isn't
good!, no matter how supreme they may be!
Look, Romans 1:20 says "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—
his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse." - this says, even if someone has never heard about the "good news" the fact that nature exists and by observing nature, people will know who God is and how He works. Well, in nature, the fittest survive -- weak things that don't use logic, that aren't selfish, that are easily swayed by "tricks" (like those angler fish use, dangling that thing in their mouth that looks like a worm to entice smaller fish into their mouth) are the ones that "win" -- so by observing nature, it seems to me that the people who use their logic and intelligence and self preservation skills will be the ones who are rewarded with "life," and those that just follow their feelings (which aren't based in evidence but on an ancient tale that has been told for many generations that puts ultimate power on the one telling the story) would be the ones to be destroyed.
You should follow your heart, all the brain does is cloud the truth.
Every time I've followed my heart it's cost me dearly. My heart is an idiot. My brain is a bitch, but at least she knows how to keep that idiot from walking into certain destruction.
This is not the point of my thread--the point of my thread is that as artists and lovers of free speech, we need to be firm in preserving that right. Obama made the statement that at times "free speech has been
abused" - (i.e., in the instance of the Danish cartoon depicting Mohammed's head as bomb) -- I think that statement is absurd! Free speech cannot possibly be 'abused' -- to throttle free speech means there is no such thing as free speech; speech is either free or not; in order for it to be free, it must be USED; and to throttle it means that it is not being used!
It's totally frightening for me, because there are places in Europe that have now kowtowed to radical Islam and are punishing those who exercise free speech. Actress Bridget Bardot was fined $23,000 for stating (factually in my opinion) that Muslims were destroying France. Geert Wilder of the Netherlands was not allowed entry into Great Britain, due to the fact that he created and produced a short film factually stating the hateful things in the Koran. It just seems to me that it's time to take what comes out of this guy's mouth a little more seriously than I had intended, and I am now on alert.
