How can a person be sure that they have made the right decision about God?
- Thread starter wynn
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And you know this how?
Bullshit. The heart lies more times than it tells the truth. It is the always the mind that must filter the heart, less pain and suffering will result to you or other people. If everyone followed their heart, the world would have more evil. The root of evil is selfishness, or feeling only what the heart says. Morality is ethics and ethics is reason.
But, the real reason is that the heart is also good and much good comes from the heart. It is a matter of filtering out the evil of the heart with the mind because the heart says it is right to keep from harm.
The greatest harm can result from the best intentions.
Kindness and good intentions can be an insidious path to destruction. Sometimes doing what seems right is wrong, and can cause harm. The only counter to it is knowledge, wisdom, forethought, and understanding the First Rule. Even then, that is not always enough.
-Terry Goodkind
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People say the same thing about heroin.
When you are awakened to experience god, you'll know it. Experiencing god is a no brainer. Getting there requires honesty and humility. A sincere desire.
What if you are just in a profound delusion that makes you feel "complete peace about God and joy unspeakable"?
How do you know you are not delusional like that?
And only the Christian way is the right way?
People here are making valid points, there are different ways to achieving the peace that pasts understanding. I find my path to it in altruism.
Do you believe there are many Gods?
Sometimes the comedy just writes itself.
signal,
The god concept is born from pure fantasy, there is not a single scrap of evidence to support the possibility of gods. But absence of evidence does not necessarily mean non-existence. Let's good at the issue another way.
For your god to have meaning there must be a spirit world, of souls, and heaven and hell etc. This then depends on the soul concept being credible.
The soul concept appears to have begun when people noticed that dead people have no breath and it was assumed that this "breath" was a person's essence or soul. The word comes from breath or air. This gave rise to the idea that dead souls were floating around in the ether and could be breathed in and cause possessions etc. Most deceases at one time were thought to be the result of such possessions.
We know all that is now nonsense but the concept had taken hold and evolved and became more sophisticated over the years. The soul was considered the very basis of -
Emotions
Personality
Thought
Reasoning
Identity
Memory
Endless clinical studies over the past century or so has found quite clearly that all those aspects of humans is entirely the result of brain function.
What then does a soul do if none of those? Nothing. The properties of a soul can be easily equated to anything that does not exist.
Very simply there is no role that a soul can now perform that has any meaningful context for us, they simply do not exist, and if souls do not exist, then there is no spirit realm in which gods would operate making such concepts equally ridiculous.
Think about it, if your soul survives after your death then what can it do? It would have no memory, it would not know what or who it was, it would not have any emotions, it would not be able to think, etc.
As simply as we can see that the soul concept is now redundent then too we can conclude that the god concept is equally redundant.
Quite easy. Look at the evidence.
The god concept is born from pure fantasy, there is not a single scrap of evidence to support the possibility of gods. But absence of evidence does not necessarily mean non-existence. Let's good at the issue another way.
For your god to have meaning there must be a spirit world, of souls, and heaven and hell etc. This then depends on the soul concept being credible.
The soul concept appears to have begun when people noticed that dead people have no breath and it was assumed that this "breath" was a person's essence or soul. The word comes from breath or air. This gave rise to the idea that dead souls were floating around in the ether and could be breathed in and cause possessions etc. Most deceases at one time were thought to be the result of such possessions.
We know all that is now nonsense but the concept had taken hold and evolved and became more sophisticated over the years. The soul was considered the very basis of -
Emotions
Personality
Thought
Reasoning
Identity
Memory
Endless clinical studies over the past century or so has found quite clearly that all those aspects of humans is entirely the result of brain function.
What then does a soul do if none of those? Nothing. The properties of a soul can be easily equated to anything that does not exist.
Very simply there is no role that a soul can now perform that has any meaningful context for us, they simply do not exist, and if souls do not exist, then there is no spirit realm in which gods would operate making such concepts equally ridiculous.
Think about it, if your soul survives after your death then what can it do? It would have no memory, it would not know what or who it was, it would not have any emotions, it would not be able to think, etc.
As simply as we can see that the soul concept is now redundent then too we can conclude that the god concept is equally redundant.
The question is a general one, as if everyone would be sure for the same reasons. For me, sureness comes and goes, with so many things, issues like this included. I do the best I can, following the sense that what I am doing is right/best for me. Sometimes it feels more directly right, other times it feels like the edge of intuition.
I think this answer is pretty much the same as mine above.
too late for what?
Of course there is also the possibility - for all we know - that people are creating what happens and so LG will work his way through incarnations until he 'get it' according to his own - if unconscious - expections. The fundamentalist Christians will either go to heaven or to hell, depending on what they really believe about themselves and there status of repentence, guilt and sin. And atheists will simply no longer be.
And so on.
And so on.
How can you say that, the heart controls, love, hate, fear.
The mind controls logic, and wisdom.
So let me ask you this.
You have a child, he/she is very sick, the doctors give you the option to spend 500 000 dollars to do surgery which only has a 50/50 chance and is a very new technology.
Your mind says, thats a bad idea, not very economical, yeah lets just let him die.
But your heart, says no, try. Isn't a few pieces of paper worth the life of your flesh and blood?
But yeah i guess your right better to always follow your mind, then your heart.
And how can you be sure of this?
(we could start a thread "LG, sandy, cris and practically anyone else will succumb to eternal consequences in accordance to the whimsy of their imagination" on the authority of this world view
)Especially since at every moment of our lives we can see that the highest ontological element is not our will, desire or values.
I mean suppose someone gets cancer, raped, fails their exams or plummets to their death while trying to fly off a 50 story building. Is that simply because they didn't believe strong or enough ... or is it because we are contextualized by greater elements than our individual will?
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I'm not saying it is the case. I am saying that in terms of the kind of certainty Signal seems to be after, it could be the case, however offensive it may seem. Can we rule things out because they offend our sensibilities?And how can you be sure of this?
(we could start a thread "LG, sandy, cris and practically anyone else will succumb to eternal consequences in accordance to the whimsy of their imagination" on the authority of this world view
Especially since at every moment of our lives we can see that the highest ontological element is not our will, desire or values.
I mean suppose someone gets cancer, raped, fails their exams or plummets to their death while trying to fly off a 50 story building. Is that simply because they didn't believe strong or enough ... or is it because we are contextualized by greater elements than our individual will?
In any case, it is not my belief system, but there are a number of belief systems out there where there is not a single absolute truth, or really the absolute truth is on a meta level and people may experience radically different realities within what seems like a singular one with certain specific rules.