The religious are not an ethnic group. And if you think their ideas should be protected then the same principle applies to the ideas of those who reject religion. If you have any other complaints, you can start a feedback thread or send a PM but your comparison is invalid. — Baden
No, it's not true. That's been established as far as I'm concerned. Nothing racist was said. The accusations were false. As for the rest, read what I wrote and stop being a drama queen. Or if you must, take it to the other thread. — Baden
Albert Einstein's religious views have been widely studied and often misunderstood. Albert Einstein stated that he believed in the pantheistic God of Baruch Spinoza. He did not believe in a personal God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings, a view which he described as naïve. He clarified however that, "I am not an atheist", preferring to call himself an agnostic, or a "religious nonbeliever." Einstein also stated he did not believe in life after death, adding "one life is enough for me." He was closely involved in his lifetime with several humanist groups. — Wiki Wiki Pedia
the question was really why our species came up with this idea. Some replies have suggested it may be part of human dna, the questioning part. Or it may have been used to understand disasters, or explain why we die, or maybe a mystical experience. I was trying to understand the early origins from pre history. It was maybe Zoroastrianism that first came up with a monotheistic God {this may have been a google search}. But irrespective I was looking for maybe answers that are not directly tied to religion. — David S
What does this mean for the different, and often conflicting, belief-systems of the religions?
It means that they are descriptions of different manifestations of the Ultimate; and as such they do not conflict with one another. They each arise from some immensely powerful moment or period of religious experience, notably the Buddha’s experience of enlightenment under the Bo tree at Bodh Gaya, Jesus’ sense of the presence of the heavenly Father, Muhammad’s experience of hearing the words that became the Qur’an, and also the experiences of Vedic sages, of Hebrew prophets, of Taoist sages.
But these experiences are always formed in the terms available to that individual or community at that time and are then further elaborated within the resulting new religious movements. This process of elaboration is one of philosophical or theological construction. Christian experience of the presence of God, for example, at least in the early days and again since the 13th-14th century rediscovery of the centrality of the divine love, is the sense of a greater, much more momentously important, much more profoundly loving, personal presence than that of one’s fellow humans.
But that this higher presence is eternal, is omnipotent, is omniscient, is the creator of the universe, is infinite in goodness and love is not, because it cannot be, given in the experience itself. In sense perception we can see as far as our horizon but cannot see how much further the world stretches beyond it, and so likewise we can experience a high degree of goodness or of love but cannot experience that it reaches beyond this to infinity. That God has these infinite qualities, and likewise that God is a divine Trinity, can only be an inference, or a theory, or a supposedly revealed truth, but not an experienced fact.
And so Jesus himself will have understood that experienced loving and demanding presence to be the God of his Jewish tradition, and specifically of that aspect of the tradition that emphasized the divine goodness and love, as well as justice and power. But as his teaching about the heavenly Father was further elaborated, and indeed transformed, within the expanding gentile church, it grew into the philosophical conception of God as an infinite co-equal trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
And so what we inherit today is a complex totality in which religious experience and philosophical speculation embodied in theological doctrine have interacted over the centuries and have to a certain degree fused. In the other great traditions the same process has taken place, in each case taking its own distinctive forms. For religious experience always has to take some specific form, and the forms developed within a given tradition ‘work’, so to speak, for people within that tradition but not, in many cases, for people formed by a different tradition. — John Hick, Who or What is God?
It means that they are descriptions of different manifestations of the Ultimate; and as such they do not conflict with one another. They each arise from some immensely powerful moment or period of religious experience, notably the Buddha’s experience of enlightenment under the Bo tree at Bodh Gaya, Jesus’ sense of the presence of the heavenly Father, Muhammad’s experience of hearing the words that became the Qur’an, and also the experiences of Vedic sages, of Hebrew prophets, of Taoist sages. — John Hick, Who or What is God?
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.