Just for us believers (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, February 06, 2012, 15:32 (4652 days ago) @ xeno6696

MATT: I cannot have empathy and sympathy for something so distant, abstract, and so completely different from my own existence. [...] God does not need empathy or sympathy from me. [...] I am incapable of discerning what is coming from me and what is coming from God. Because I cannot make that distinction, I cannot, therefore, conclude that God exists.-I'm looking forward to Julia's response, as Matt has brilliantly summed up a feeling which I'm sure many of us have. I would only add that the world as I see it is so filled with beauty and ugliness, kindness and cruelty, wealth and poverty, altruism and egotism, love and hate that I cannot find any reason to suppose that it works along lines other than those that we create for ourselves or that impersonal Nature creates for us. A relationship with God can only be a relationship with what we imagine God to be, and the world we live in suggests to me that God may himself be a mixture, may be indifferent, may be absent, or may be non-existent. -Matt: [Buddhism] defers unanswerable questions [...] and focuses on developing yourself and your capacity to love.-I think the focus on love is what you, Julia and I may have in common, but it raises the whole question, not of God needing love from us but of whether we need his (imagined?) love. Your experiences and mine, Matt, suggest that we don't, but it's clear from Julia's website and posts that for her, God's (imagined?) love is inspirational. It will be fascinating to see what she makes of all this, although I'm sure neither of us would wish to question the reality or the admirableness of the effects created by her faith