Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire How can we find out if God exists?

Damn, Gus.... He's tiresome enough with only Jesus in the mix. Throw in the Holy Ghost while you're at it.

Gonna be here all night anyhow.

Jesus never claimed that a person had to KNOW that Jesus was the agent that brought him to the Father. I repeat.... NEVER.

As far as Peter's statement, he is just repeating what Jesus already said.

Surely you don't believe that semantics play a role in salvation.[ You gotta pronounce it like this, Pedro...GEE_ZUS..not HAY-SOOSE, or you're still hell bound]

ah, indeed the Holy trinity. but how to allocate their relative degrees of importance for us humans who reside down here on the earth.

i know the followers of the YHWH seems to be having a challenge as we speak. we hear almost nothing about the holy ghost -holy spirit. but Jesus seems to be owning most the territory. and more power to him.

so, we've got a Trinity out there: Yhwh, the holy ghost & Jesus. a lot of churces support the holy ghost, but not many churches have holy ghost in their official, legal name. wonder why?

it's all worth further discussion, but it's difficult for me not to sound offensive when i begin to talk about the Trinity? are we going to make a 100 pages? would that be a record?

Thanks, Georgia Boy........ I'd forgotten that.

And Gus..... when I heard Billy Graham admit that he could not explain a Triune God but was forced to accept it, I decided that was explanation enough for me.

I've found nothing in the bible to contradict the idea that the aspect of the Godhead personified in Jesus has ALWAYS been the "agent" between God and man. He was not laying down some new rule when He made the statement Ringman is hung up on..... He was just introducing Himself as ALWAYS having been that One. [Before Abraham was, I AM]

That view clears up some of the foggy spots I used to have trouble with. Such as.... what about all those folks who lived before He came as the Messiah? He was dealing with them back then.That still, small voice Jim referenced as still active today.

I can envision Jesus looking at all the convoluted theology and explanations and yelling..."LOOK AT ME, DAMMIT.... IT'S ABOUT ME AND IT ALWAYS HAS BEEN ABOUT ME! THAT'S ALL YOU GOTTA KNOW."

AS, something to think about. I wrote a rambling reply to one of your posts 3-4 years ago and touched on this but didn't flesh out the thought.

For centuries western thought was controlled by a superstitious political organization as much concerned with its own power and enrichment as anything else. It subverted (to my way of thinking) the teachings of someone who had tried to change the thinking of another group of people with a long history of somewhat superstitious thought about their very fierce and all too human deity. Over the years this organization published a set of dogma, beliefs and ideas that Must Be Obeyed or one was cast out of the church and therefore forfeited one's reward in the afterlife. "This is the way the Universe is because we say it is and if you disagree you are inherently wrong because your ideas do not proceed from the very basis of our Universe as we have decreed that basis is." So there! And btw, we'll be burning you at the stake tomorrow while we pray for your soul.

Now we know how much this organization squashed investigation into the physical world around us - the Sun revolves around the Earth and it is blasphemy to think otherwise, cutting up dead people to study anatomy is evil, so on and so forth. But so much for that backstory.

Anyway, along in the late 18th century we saw The Age of Reason, which said if we can't see it, hear it, taste it, touch it or smell it then it doesn't exist. if we can't discover it by our five senses it doesn't exist. We have enlarged that to include artificial aids like microscopes and telescopes and such but the idea remains the same. That has led to an explosion of new information about our physical universe, the healing arts, all kinds of neat things. So much for that backstory.

Now here is where I finally get to the point - "if we can't discover it with our five senses it doesn't exist" - that to me seems as dogmatic, as much of a human point of origin as any religious dogma ever written. "This is the way the Universe is because we say it is and if you disagree you are inherently wrong because your ideas do not proceed from the very basis of our Universe as we have decreed that basis is." So there! Btw, relax, we won't burn you but will scoff at you.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying our physical investigations are wrong. Definitely not. But that unwavering foundation which leaves no room for anything else squashes any real investigation or acceptance into anything that can't be discovered by our five senses. What if there really is something beyond those senses and our scientific method is no more suitable for discovering it than using our ears to hear colors?

Now I'm not postulating the existence of a Superhuman being or anything anthropomorphic running the Universe, I think that is very short sighted and very, well, human of us. If there is a super all encompassing consciousness in the Universe it is so far beyond our understanding that anything we come up with isn't going to even be close - as a certain Jew of much contention mentioned. But what of things like karma, what goes around comes around, which most spiritual (let's get away from the word religious) teachers tell us is a real thing? It certainly can't be measured in the lab.


I'll deviate here and say that I think Jesus was trying to teach us how the Universe operates in ways his disciples just didn't get. They wanted a king to toss out the Romans, he said (as did Buddha and many, many others), you gotta quit hating on each other, it hurts you in ways you can't even fathom, it ruins the peace of mind (kingdom of heaven) that is your birthright. These things I'm teaching will let you have the peace that surpasses all understanding here and now and btw, here are some neat metaphysical ways in which the Universe operates and which you can use to your advantage. Unfortunately right after he left politicians with funny hats and long robes subverted that idea and only granted the peasants entry into the Kingdom of Heaven after they were dead, and only if they paid the proper homage and silver coin to "God's representatives on Earth" during their lifetimes. Nice racket they had going for themselves.



But back to the point. One must always be vigilant for superstitious ideas and sloppy thinking, but also one mustn't allow any dogmatic view of the universe to prevent honest and open minded exploration into all areas of it, including that which our senses cannot discover but which that lack of discovery or even ability to so discover should not automatically rule out. (If someone can phrase that last sentence less awkwardly, please do. )

"Faith" is an interesting topic to explore. I kind of have a scientific idea about how it works. I think our minds are far more powerful than we know, but our frontal lobes aren't where the power lies. An unquestioning belief, a calm and totally peaceful acceptance or belief in something - "faith" - activates things that the five senses are unaware of, gives us access to who knows? - maybe an energy of some kind that we currently call supernatural. It can heal sick people in ways scientific doctors cannot determine, it causes highly unlikely circumstances to come together - "miracles" as some would call them. Oh well, don't put too much stock in all that or start trying to argue with me about it, I could go on but when you get into the area of the metaphysical you quickly find yourself out in left field so maybe that's a topic for another meandering post.

Anyway, the idea that nothing can exist outside of our ability to discover it through our senses - which are merely organs delivering electronic signals to certain sections of our brains that interpret them - seems to me to be very short sighted (no pun intended). I'm reminded of a race of people who were born with no eyes intelligently discussing the impossibility of the brilliant colors of the Grand Canyon at sunset.




One last thing which is a question to you. It comes from my study of human nature, which I got into to find the secret of happiness and which led me to spiritual and secular teachers from all times - Lao Tzu to Buddha to Jesus to Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and Emerson and Tolstoy and Karl Jung and I could go on and on - but one thing I learned was that people don't attack things that don't threaten them - which is to say that don't threaten their egos. We don't try to hurt a cloud's feelings, we don't try to prove the grass is wrong because those things don't threaten our existence or more accurately our ego's existence.

So I don't say this to attack but merely as an observance, you are attracted to threads about god or religion like a moth to a flame. You are obviously well versed in the subject matter of physical science and history and great at keeping the argument in your arena but you seek to disprove the existence of anything outside of the five senses with a fervor that borders on, dare I say, religious. You've stated that you do this because you want to battle man's stupidity about this wherever you find it, but Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus (to use secular teachers) have told us that there are things we can control and things we can't, and you just make yourself unhappy trying to control things you can't. Other people's thinking, which they both specifically mention, is definitely something we can't control.

So, and again I say this with all deference and no intention to attack, I'm just curious what is it about all of this that would seem to threaten you? You need not answer that publicly, I simply put it out there as something to think about.