if you mean salvation as SOLELY related to what happens to you after you die, i'm in complete agreement. how very Roman/Greco of the 4th century church, huh??
Let me restate that. Yes you can embrace an expanded view of faith. Following the "Can you have two religions" thread I think you could but in that sense you are seeking to create something new that is to an extent different from other the two faiths you were following. Consider that the the First Commandment is: Thou shalt have no other God but me. Is clearly a call to reject other faiths and abide by the one faiths. In many religions there is already a doctrinal emphasis on a singular faith. It goes futher than doctrine as the acceptance of a faith isn't just a belief in a diety but it is also the acceptance of a particular world view. If you accept a Christian worldview of the nature of man and God you will find it difficult to reconcile that with a Hindu worldview. For example a belief in the concept of the uniqueness of current existence, your actions, now determine whether you will be in Heaven and Hell for eternity cannot be reconciled with a belief in reincarnation and the idea that our current existence isn't unique. I agree with you that exclusivity of faith is something that has led to a lot of problems and I'm not dismissing sectarianism. In fact in my original post I point out that we are tribal and religion is one of those that divides. My point is why we choose one faith or the other. Clearly for someone like MadMax all faiths aren't equal and there is a reason for why he considers himself a Christian while I don't. We can't prove to each other in any definitive way which is right. MadMax can't prove to empiracally that through Jesus I will find eternal salvation and I can't prove to him that by following the Dharma he can avoid being reborn as a cow. In the absence of empiracal proof we have faith and that is individual to us. Obviously we can coexist and be tolerant of each other. We can even agree on a wide range of things such as the great glory of Roy Oswalt's fastball but when you choose a faith you are making a choice that one faith for whatever reason is the one for you.
Yep we'll have to do it sometime. I would ask Buddha to rep you but he tells me that rep points are only illusions driven by our ego.
Let me relate another Buddhist story. A young man wanted to make an old monk look foolish. He asked the monk, "Is it true way out in the far west there is Amitabha Buddha's paradise." (Some sects of Buddhism have a heaven concept where you can be reborn in a paradise supposedly in the West) The monk replied, "Yes that is true." The young man then said, "But since the World is round if you kept on going west wouldn't you come back to where you started?" The monk replied, "Yes, that is true." The young man thinking he had caught the monk in a trap asked, "How can both be true if going west you just come back to where you started?" The monk replied, "Both are true." and then he smiled. You could, and people do, study the affect of religious experience on the brain and I think there is a good argument that 'God(s)' is a function of our consciousness. As I said earlier as rational beings we will either seek God or create it. The idea though of God as being something that created the Universe and is both apart and beyond it though isn't a scientific question issue and can never be proven or disproven by scientific means.
I used to think this way. Now I don't. "No other god than me" is ambiguous. It must be. We do not, cannot, will not understand what is really "having god". As I said a long time ago in some other thread - I think you can find god in the unknown, in the beautiful mystery of the working, yet confounding universe. I don't think that's a deity necessarily - but who am I or you to say that's not really the "god of Abram"? For the record, too, there are many passages in the bible that can be interpreted to support reincarnation. And the concept of eternal hell and satan is actually not terribly well supported in the actual texts. Satan, for example, is pretty much completely made up thanks to St. Jerome's Augustinian discipleship, and the Manichean duality that Augustine was raised in. Similarly, evil is often written as "the evil inside you" or the "evil inside us" - not some crazed maniacal fallen angels that take fantastical joy in tempting and damning humanity.
Yes, Max, we all have heard your stories about when you met a Zoroastrian named Vilma and what she did to you. AND about how at the age of 9 you convinced Habermas that Jesus was the Christ...but then at the age of nine you told him you were joking just to mess with him. AND how at the age of 15 you invented a time machine to go back and tell Paul all of your ideas that he should write down in order to help him score with the late antiquity chicks (proto-Goth chicks dig the more introspective, yet preachy types). Seriously, get over yourself.
Just a note for the atheists that think science doesn't prove that God exists..... Abraham didn't follow the written scriptures of Judaism, Christianity or Islam; but rather he used SCIENCE by studying the stars, moon, Sun, etc. to come to the conclusion that there must be one God who created all of creation. I think even Einstein came to a similar conclusion without naming it a particular religion...feel free to correct me if I am wrong.
<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/2IlHgbOWj4o&hl=en&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/2IlHgbOWj4o&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object> Nuff said.
Radiofriendlyhead? Are you sure it wasn't Creed or Anberlin? More fitting for this thread ya big dork.
I'm not aware that Einstein came to any conclusions regarding the nature of God. The "God" he talked about was more of a personification of fundamental natural laws he, and other scientists, have been searching for. He talked about his pursuit giving way to a "religious feeling", but even an atheist could have that feeling -- when experiencing a great piece of art, for instance. Einstein was also very much a public figure, and it wouldn't have been in his interest to openly declare himself an atheist. So he used religious terminology to describe his passion for science. That's how I look at it.
I don't remember which program it was that I watched about Einstein, but I just remember them saying something to the effect that he came to the conclusion that the universe was too complex to have happened just randomly and that it's intelligent design can lead only to one conclusion which was that there was a God that created it all. I don't think he saw God as in "religion" that people follow today, but more of a supreme intelligent designer with a purpose that he didn't understand. Feel free to quote any specific reference that you can look up and find out about his views that will refute what I just stated, I haven't googled it yet. But I am quite sure that this is what the tv program said at least. I don't see how an atheist can have a "religious feeling", can you please explain that? "Religious" would include and mean that God has to exist, so how can one that doesn't believe God exists have a "feeling" which includes that He does? Any true scientist is more acutely aware than the general public of how faulty our scientific knowledge really is and that it is still in it's infancy. I have read of many scientists or learned people that study more than just Darwinism as compared to the story of creation in the Bible, and have come to the conclusion that the intelligent design aspect of the universe is undeniable......thereby proving that God exists to them; albeit that they are not in harmony with any particular religion. Most people that use science to claim that God doesn't exist seem to primarily focus on the issue of the creation story in Genisis verse scientific evidence, i.e. those that take the Genesis story as literal and thereby thinking that the humans have only been on earth for a few thousand years. While other religions and those that are Christian but who don't take the story as literal, but more metephorical, see evidence from scriptures which proves that the earth and humans have been around much much longer than a few thousand years and have also evolved, falling somewhat inline with what science has to say...thereby no conflict but harmony. Other scriptures also support the belief in other life forms in the universe as well...i.e. we are not alone.
What happened? Did you change your signature or did I mis-assign something I read? Someone (I thought it was you) was promoting a quote by another poster that was very harsh towards women in general. I thought it was you. I've been at the beach for three days and can't find it anymore.
Our scientific knowledge is not in it's infancy in terms of astronomy and physics. It's at the end. Outside of particle physics, there is no basic research being conducted anymore. And without new supercolliders, physics is dead. Even with them, there's a limit we're approaching. You see, to see smaller and smaller, we need more and more power. String theory for instance, can never be proved because the energy required to get to level exceeds all the energy of every galaxy put together. Furthermore, we can only see so far back into time because of limitations of the speed of light and the acceleration of space expansion. But more importantly, science can never be used to prove or disprove the existence of god - that's not what science is for. Science doesn't tell me that no personal god exists, common sense tells me that. There can not be any kind of "conscious" designer because consciousness implies the passage of time, and time had a beginning. So if god is conscious, god is limited by time, which means god was created with the universe, and could not be it's creator. So if there is a god, it's not anything like what people imagine - this god might not even know we exist. Scientists who say god must exist do it because they aren't just scientists, they are humans. Humans want to believe god exists, because it's comfortable. It's not rationale to believe god exists, when there is a lack of evidence to support that. But that doen't mean god does not exist. Look, there's a reason why they call it "faith".
