Human beings are pieces of shit. We eat sleep get drunk get high get stoned fight idealize idolize and more and like a big massive blob of stupidity, we make more of ourselves.The moment we evolved into creatures who could stand up straight from creatures who couldn’t, we thought of ourselves as special. Social sciences map our behaviour and it turns out that once you put one of us in a big group of us, we’re going to behave exactly the same way in a collective personality which is an identity of stupid. Let me emphasize by quoting from the film Fight Club:
Listen up, maggots. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else.
But we can’t help it. We’re human. Its human nature. This is how God created us. But God created our highly complex, highly sophisticated, intelligent bodies out of love. Love for us. That should make you feel special, but should not make you revel in it. Because ultimately, we are still human. We lie, cheat, steal, watch porn etcetera etcetera and yet, God loves us the way we are. That is insane.
But all of it – the wondrous beauty of the natural world, the mysteries of the universe, the properties of light as discovered by great scientists like Einstein (“God does not play dice” and a beautiful harmonious unification with Planck’s theories), the magnificence of electrons, quarks, neutrinos, bosons etc etc and etc i.e the micro universe, the neurons of the human brain, the self-regulatory systems of the human body, your fingers, were designed for one and one thing only – God’s glory.
It surprises me that people still deny the existence of God even after all the discoveries we have made through science, technology, rationale and art. Science is built on faith. Philosophy is built on faith. The fact that the earth being in its exact location in its orbit inclined on a 23 degree angle with the perfect mass and right amount of carbon dioxide is not just chance. The fact that you hit your mother’s egg out of a million other sperm first is not just coincidence or a number in a chart.
And yet, all of it. The Egyptians, The Greeks, the Renaissance – human civilization. Science and philosophy and art. You and I. All for the glory of God. Not you, not me. But for God.
In what way is Philosophy built on faith???
Also taking that God is not the sort of thing that can be known in-itself than it follows that statements like ‘God created us out of love’ are meaningless. It can’t mean anything to say that a proposed being necessarily different ontologically from ourselves occupies a relation to us which is sensible to us only in the context of conscious life. To say that ‘Tom loves me’ can make sense because I know what sort of a thing Tom is and therefore I understand the relation proposed by the sentence – however this cannot be the case where I do not know what sort of a thing is being related to me – the relation of myself to God in the form of love necessitates a great deficiency on my part namely that while that relation could mean something to ‘God’ it can’t to me, because I can’t begin to comprehend what it would mean for a thing like God to love, let alone to love me.
It seems to me that your post is devoid of any concrete propositions – for example ‘the world is complex’ ‘God created it’ are placed side by side one another with no explication as to how these two relate and what the consequences are if that relation holds. You see as these are two self-contained propositions unless you can show the necessary dependence of one on the other you won’t have said more than ‘the world is complex’ ‘God created it’ your argument consisting only in repeatedly grouping both propositions together.
Faith is not an argument. It needs an open mind.
Well what about your proposition that ‘philosophy is built on faith’ – surely you don’t think that you can believe that philosophy and the natural sciences are built on faith ON FAITH. That is surely whether or not you need faith to conduct philosophy is in fact a secular question that can be decided in discussion with argument. You can avoid discussing your own personal beliefs by saying that they are beyond rational debate but you can’t possibly say the same for statements like ‘philosophy is built on faith’. This is surely the kind of issue that can be settled in discussion.
So tell me why you think it is true to say that philosophy is built on faith.
Also it is deeply disappointing to see an unwillingness to engage in discussion about religion critically – take your position that it is insane that God loves us but God is sane. Is this not precisely what I was saying above? The incomprehensibility of God as invalidating any attempt to describe him/her/it qualitatively? What kind of a being can do something that is totally irrational and yet be entirely rational itself? The kind whose actions cannot be explained in terms of our own rationality. Therefore the attempt to describe God as loving is fallacious because it can mean nothing concrete to us..
The Greeks first came up with the idea of philosophy. However, if it was not for the Enlightenment period – a strong denial of Christian beliefs and traditions, there would be no philosophy as we know it today. There would be no modernism or concepts of it. Philosophy can never be proven right or wrong, it is made up of theories and it is up to you whether you have faith to believe them or not.
I view religion as entirely separate from my faith. I don’t believe in religion. It involves ritualistic practices without any soul or heart, figuratively speaking. Furthermore, God is not something to be critically examined. And I will not engage in that as I feel it dishonors Him, and my sole purpose in life is to glorify Him, not to take Him apart and explain with human rationality. I firmly believe in the Bible and its strong power to transform the lives of people. It stresses on Love, which God is about and which I have encountered first-hand.
If you’re looking for a critical discussion about God, I’m sorry you’ve come to the wrong blog.
Very good then, I will desist completely from bothering you unnecessarily about the private issue of your faith. It would be deeply inappropriate of me to try and force you into discussing something you do not wish to – akin to bullying. So I’ll back away from that.
However I would be more strict in the kind of claims you make; it is evident from what you’ve written that you have no real experience of philosophy at all. In general people should refrain from passing judgement on a discipline ['it is based on faith'] when they have no familiarity with it, no knowledge of it. As someone very dedicated to the subject to lightly dismiss it as reliant on faith is a kind of offense, one that I will not accept without actual argumentation to back it up.
You’re right. I do have no real experience of philosophy. My mistake. But thank you for not bullying me. :)
I love the theme just wish your writing made any sense, I assume you’re a christian and got this idea from bible. You’re the kind of person who will pick and choose from both science and bible to make sense of your pathetic life and I don’t blame you.
Assuming you’re a rational person which I doubt, Let’s get started. If I can disprove Bible, it automatically makes 3/4th your statements invalid. Bible promotes slavery, racism and more, its ethics are all wonky from the start, not to mention the bible constantly contradicts itself.
(http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/jim_meritt/bible-contradictions.html)
I really don’t know whether you’re a trolling or just plain stupid, You’re contradicting yourself when you say “Glory of God”, if you’re doing this for the glory of God then starting a line with “Human beings are pieces of shit.” doesn’t help any of your argument when you’re talking about love, it just makes you look like an self righteous fascist hater.
“I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” ~Stephen F Roberts.
Human beings are not worthy of God’s love. Even though we hate each other and bring down one another, God still loves us the way we are and even sacrificed His son for us. I was just emphasizing a point.
I may seem stupid or a self righteous fascist hater, but we all try and make sense of the same world. Believing in God benefits the soul in so many ways. But that was what I was trying to talking about. We don’t believe in Christ as the risen Lord because of the peace he can give or the trust we can have or how it benefits us but because we owe it to God, since it is only through his grace that we are saved not through our works.
I know what I just wrote may seem like nonsense to you. But try reading the book of John. That book confused me at first because it has some concepts that my mind cannot grasp. But that is characteristic of God’s logic. My human mind cannot comprehend it but I simply trust it.
As for that website, all of us who believe that the bible is the Word of God know all of that very well and we know that God can show his full wrath as well as be merciful and we don’t ignore one part and focus on another. We know God’s qualities, not his reasons, and that is no reason for us to not believe in him.