Two questions
- Thread starter jpappl
- Start date
I believe that god has many words and works, and I can see that the same story or parts of it have been told in the lives of many people, and by many people, and in many different ways, even in the stars and the earth.
But that is not why I believe.
But that is not why I believe.
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1)yes and 2)yes and no
Other basis's are the association of practitioners and the historic tradition that they fall in (IOW you have saintly persons and their scriptural commentaries)
So you are a creationist then, correct ?
Do you believe in dinosaurs ? Do you believe in evolution ?
My religion doesn't have a religious text. Rather, Wicca has traditional practices and beliefs established by precedent, and maintained by consensus.
Multiple gods and goddesses, yes.
Personal experiences, reading about the experiences of other polytheists, and to some degree, gut intuition.
Possibly. But, to me, it's one and the same. I view the gods as permeating physical existence almost like a pantheistic force. So, in a way, they are nature and the universe.
I don't always believe the experiences of others. I take it with a grain of salt sometimes. But I also sometimes give people the benefit of the doubt.
What I try to do is find the things in common among others' experiences that I read and hear about. In that, there may be a modicum of truth.
eace:I'm not a christian, if that's what you mean
sure
they usually make a guest appearance around the tail end of kali yuga
in the sense of one phylum becoming a different phylum, no.
No problem with milky sapped plants giving rise to other milky sapped plants (by golly there's even evidence - of the classical empirical variety - to support it) ...
I attended jury service some years ago and there was a wiccan in our group. One of the questions we were all asked was whether we were OK swearing an oath on the bible. She of course said no and there then ensured a long open discussion of why not and what was a wiccan and what book would she swear upon, at which point she said they did not have any such books. The judge paused for a while and said - would you agree to just assert you will tell the truth?
It just seemed a very bizarre, heated, but amusing incident.
It just seemed a very bizarre, heated, but amusing incident.
If she said "no" it should have just ended there and the Judge should have immediately asked her to simply swear and oath to the court to tell the truth. There should not have been any query as to why she said "no" to swearing on the bible, as that is entirely irrelevant to her ability to swear an oath.
jpapp,
Yes.
Common sense forms the basis of my belief in God.
I gain more understanding of that basis through religious texts.
jan.
Yes.
Common sense forms the basis of my belief in God.
I gain more understanding of that basis through religious texts.
jan.
Yes
Not sure to tell you the truth. People can come to believe that a God exists from viewing what exists around them and dwelling on their own being.
But the scriptures i believe are the Words of God are the basis of my belief in the God of Abraham. That is to say a Specific God. Not a general conceptual belief in the existence of “A” God but the belief in a “Defined” God.
All Praise The Ancient Of Days
In that sense, even your average atheist physicist is a creationist too.
:shrug:
In short, the material world is but one contingent eternal potency of god (another one is the living entity, and another is the spiritual world ... but to mention a few).
So the idea is that you have eternal living entities moving between eternal worlds (according to their desire) that are orchestrated by an eternal personality.
Since the material world is all about accommodating desire that is contrary to eternal nature, its very foundation is change. This means that not only living entities are required to change their bodies to experience different terms of existence (aka reincarnation through a range of species of life, from the microscopic to the gigantic) but also that the universe undergoes change as well. Just as we are all too familiar with the cycles of day and night, months and seasons (all of which offer unique circumstances particular to their environment .... for instance its difficult to grow tomatoes in winter, but it serves as a great opportunity for many other plants to go to seed), there are greater cycles that govern the universe.
So just as winter could be defined as a period for things being mostly non-manifest, there are universal periods that see things enter into a non-manifest stage (ranging from partial to complete devastations)
here's a link to yugas
http://www.salagram.net/cycleOages.html
(however there are greater cycles that even yugas appear in, but there's probably no point in discussing them at the moment)
not really since no living entity (not even milky sapped plants) have the capacity for independent existence
I don't have any problems with (some) aspects of microevolution (there's even reference to it in scripture, how the physiology of organisms changes according to the yuga its appearing in).
The notion of one phyllum giving rise to a different phyllum (the greater topic of macro evolution) is simply a theory based on correlation.
Even in terms of methods of evidencing the claims of evolution, it is split in two general camps, so it doesn't seem practical to discuss it in terms of "totality".
Well except for the part where they don't believe the universe was created.
All that pixie dust is getting to ya.
Yes.
No. The Bible is a guide to understanding God more than it is proof of his existence. So I suppose the answer is "partially." Just personally, the bible amounts for about 25-30% of my belief in God.