B
BlueBeard
Guest
Is this a "zoo" topic? Absolutely. All zoos are people, and this is a problem many of us people have.
See, younger zoos, I don't have birthdays anymore -- I have "countdowns." So this is on my mind a lot. After this life, what's my next great adventure? Or is there one....
(Sorry, my atheist and agnostic friends. I might not have left you room to comment in this thread, given its topic).
Well. I used to be such a piously religious man. Oh, I was the church's biggest believer. Long since lost my faith in the church, but I'm struggling to maintain my faith in a god. I think it was much, much easier 2,000 or more years ago to believe. The world was flat. It had a dome over it with pinholes that were stars. And rain came from it somehow. All was good.
To be the creator of that and all beneath it would be a huge sign of just how powerful, just how omnipotent that god must me. But... it was fathomable. It was a plausible enough a story, though a stretch of the imagination.
Damn it all to hell -- in our infinite quest to "know shit," we discovered just how vast the universe was, how insignificant our world, much less the creatures that inhabit it. No, we're *still* trying to discover how vast it is. But what we've learned so far is astounding.
Astrophysicist (and atheist?) Carl Sagan demonstrated just how insignificant we are, our Earth is, in his “Pale Blue Dot” description of the planet: a photograph showing the Earth as a tiny dot, about 1/10th of a pixel in size, suspended in the vast emptiness of space.
So... now... to believe in a single Creator is to wonder, "What the heck? Why the hugely unnecessary "backdrop" for our itty bitty existence? Is the god of *us* the god of all *that*?
We are an invisibly infinitesimal speck of dust in a solar system that can't really be detected in the Milky Way, much less the vastness of the universe -- or universes. I walk out to my dirty old pickup truck and imagine it this way. There's that truck. In a driveway. In a city. In a county. In a state. In the contiguous United States. On a continent. On a globe of continents. And somewhere near the rear quarter panel on my truck, just above the dent above the chrome on the fender, is a clot of dirt. And in that clot of dirt clings a single, tiny little grey mote of dust. And on the mote of dust... live 7.5 billion beings, not counting the uncountable other beings of different species.
And there is one, solitary Creator in charge of all of this -- and he not only knows but cares for each of those 7.5 billion beings and will judge them when they die, deciding if they live with him or go to hell.
I'm lost.
Tell me, are you lost, too? -- Or how do you still have faith in a god, given all of that?
See, younger zoos, I don't have birthdays anymore -- I have "countdowns." So this is on my mind a lot. After this life, what's my next great adventure? Or is there one....
(Sorry, my atheist and agnostic friends. I might not have left you room to comment in this thread, given its topic).
Well. I used to be such a piously religious man. Oh, I was the church's biggest believer. Long since lost my faith in the church, but I'm struggling to maintain my faith in a god. I think it was much, much easier 2,000 or more years ago to believe. The world was flat. It had a dome over it with pinholes that were stars. And rain came from it somehow. All was good.
To be the creator of that and all beneath it would be a huge sign of just how powerful, just how omnipotent that god must me. But... it was fathomable. It was a plausible enough a story, though a stretch of the imagination.
Damn it all to hell -- in our infinite quest to "know shit," we discovered just how vast the universe was, how insignificant our world, much less the creatures that inhabit it. No, we're *still* trying to discover how vast it is. But what we've learned so far is astounding.
Astrophysicist (and atheist?) Carl Sagan demonstrated just how insignificant we are, our Earth is, in his “Pale Blue Dot” description of the planet: a photograph showing the Earth as a tiny dot, about 1/10th of a pixel in size, suspended in the vast emptiness of space.
So... now... to believe in a single Creator is to wonder, "What the heck? Why the hugely unnecessary "backdrop" for our itty bitty existence? Is the god of *us* the god of all *that*?
We are an invisibly infinitesimal speck of dust in a solar system that can't really be detected in the Milky Way, much less the vastness of the universe -- or universes. I walk out to my dirty old pickup truck and imagine it this way. There's that truck. In a driveway. In a city. In a county. In a state. In the contiguous United States. On a continent. On a globe of continents. And somewhere near the rear quarter panel on my truck, just above the dent above the chrome on the fender, is a clot of dirt. And in that clot of dirt clings a single, tiny little grey mote of dust. And on the mote of dust... live 7.5 billion beings, not counting the uncountable other beings of different species.
And there is one, solitary Creator in charge of all of this -- and he not only knows but cares for each of those 7.5 billion beings and will judge them when they die, deciding if they live with him or go to hell.
I'm lost.
Tell me, are you lost, too? -- Or how do you still have faith in a god, given all of that?
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