Discussion with God (Taken from bddcentral forum)

Scattered,

I agree that it makes no sense to give our assent to something we don't really believe or see as true. Nobody's asking you to do that.

People who believe in God do so because he is REAL to them and billions of other human beings. We experience God as living -- as able to affect our minds and hearts. God is not a far-off entity that we "believe" in.

You need to find out what religious belief is really about -- instead of clinging to the childish caricature you use to put it and believers down.

I didn't come to have faith until I had the PROOF I wanted. You can do the same.

But you cannot make pronouncements like the following ones you made and expect people to respect your mind: "We don't learn and grow because we are biological organisms that live, decay, and die where we return to the nothingness from which we came. A person undergoes extreme suffering for no reason whatsoever. There is no growth after death. There is nothing."

Anyone who says the above is presenting themselves as ALL-KNOWING, and we know you are not all-knowing, and we know that you know that we know you are not all-knowing. So saying stuff like "We don't learn and grow because we are biological organisms that live, decay, and die where we return to the nothingness from which we came. A person undergoes extreme suffering for no reason whatsoever. There is no growth after death. There is nothing." is really profoundly silly.

And have the decency not to condemn what you simply have not taken the time to try to understand. You have no clue about what religious belief is all about. You think it's simply wishful thinking because you are truly ignorant of the religious tradition of humanity. You refuse to learn anything and continually set yourself up with your inane pronouncements as being omniscient.

People who believe in God do so -- I will say this again -- because God has manifested Himself to them PERSONALLY. They are not believing in an IDEA that makes them feel good.

It's so annoying when people carry on with their distorted caricatures of religious belief and try to portray themselves as "reasonable" at the same time that they make pronouncements about the nature of reality out of the darkness of their ignorance.

Who are YOU, my dear, to say there is nothing but decay and death. Who the hell do you think you are? You didn't create all this, and therefore, you are TOTALLY IGNORANT.

So stop enlightening us with "what is" -- and learn a little bit about the TRUTH of what religious people actually believe -- not what deadbeat drug addicts tell you religious people believe. Read some ORIGINAL SOURCES and then come back here and tell me it's meaningless twaddle.

Educate yourself. You are obviously a smart person, but your statements are making you look like a fool.

Nobody here who believes in God says "There is this" or "There is that." What they do is BELIEVE ONE WHO HAS REVEALED HIMSELF TO BE VERY REAL - in fact more real than they are to themselves. They have a relationship with God. Do you know what a relationship is? Do you know what "REAL" is? Can you imagine what it is like to have a relationship with God, who makes Himself REAL to you -- more real than you are to yourself -- and you are NOT hallucinating????

Read about the saints of the Church; look into your own heart and see whether you have a soul in there or not. When God manifests Himself as REAL to you is when you find you (1) have a soul (2) know what "real" is and (3) feel that you ARE real, too.

God loves you, Scattered, and so do I. I am harsh with you, yes, but heck, I am human and I am not a missionary, so I have a crappy style.

We don't have to prove a damn thing to you. You just need to learn a little bit about the world and have some respect for the tradition of religious sensibility.

Surely you can't have lived this long without a sense deep inside you of infinite beauty and justice in the universe and within yourself. Where do you think that came from?

Who do you think people worship when they say they worship God? A little man in the sky? Such nonsense beliefs degrade you and anybody to hears you.

I regret that I have lost patience with you, but alas, I am a miserable sinner and I am giving in to the urge to scream and yell at you to show a little respect for what you know in your heart are much GREATER MINDS THAN YOURS.

Scattered said:

Fantastic post. I give up.

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Oh, no!! :shock: Not that, please not that!!!

Scattered said:

God has revealed himself to you. Does he speak to you? Do you have conversations? Do you sit down at dinner together and talk about your day?

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Later in your post you say you have been exposed to Christianity, but these questions and that statement do not jibe. For you to ask such questions, I am forced to conclude that whatever you heard about that was "called" Christianity was anything BUT.

Scattered said:

There is no way for you to make any pronouncements about the reality of God.

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And I don't. Believers tell you what is their experience. It is you who have made pronouncements that all there is to life is decay and death. You cannot find a statement of mine in which I say anything parallel to that about God being truly real. I talked about what believers believe only.

Scattered said:

I have no reason to hate religion or those who practice it. I have no reason to disrespect religion. But I also have no reason to believe in it and every reason to speak out against it when its used as an excuse to not face reality.

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I could not agree with you more, Scattered, but you do not know the full extent of reality. You can report that it appears to you that all there is to life is decay and death, but that's quite a different statement than the ones you've been making.

Scattered said:

I suppose that because I'm not a devout member of any of the religions that are being spoken of, or have taken the time to delve into archaic tomes of information, I have no right to make any statements about religion.

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I wouldn't agree. Most people who believe actually only have their personal experience and no book knowledge other than the Bible itself, if even that. It's just that making statements is tricky: When we say, "There is no God," what are we really saying here? We are saying, "I know everything there is to know about existence, and I am telling you there is no God." Now, nobody thinks you really mean that, but that is what in fact the statement, "There is nothing but....." says. In other words, when I "correct" you, I am not saying don't express your opinion; I am saying, for your own good (because frankly, many people will just refuse to converse with you rather than go through what I am going through right now -- it takes effort to write all this down), express your opinion as your opinion -- not as "the truth."

Scattered said:

I believe that I've been acquainted with christianity to be given the right to offer my opinion of it. I was forced into a belief that I then gave myself to. I prayed to God. He didn't answer.

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God always answers. That you and I may not like the answer is a different matter. You don't really expect God to give you everything you ask for, do you? Just like you wouldn't give a toddler something he thought was good but that really wasn't good for him, God frequently says No, and you interpret it as no answer. That's incorrect. He always answers.

Scattered said:

I saw desperate people around me praying and going to church and doing whatever was necessary to instill in them even the smallest amount of hope that God was going to protect them or grant them happiness.

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Protect them? From what? Being human and suffering what humans suffer? Find out what God really offers protection from, and then tell me he doesn't deliver.

Read The Problem of Pain, by C. S. Lewis and then please come back and talk about it, okay? I promise you that you will not be sorry, because it addresses these issues in a way that will be new to you and quite effective. C. S. Lewis knows the heart of someone with exactly your experience, Scattered, of early exposure to Christianity, and later leaving it. It's a very short book -- too short, actually.

Grant them happiness? What is happiness? Eighty-five years of no suffering? And then what? Find out what happiness really means, and then tell me he doesn't deliver.

Again, the book referenced above treats this and the difficulties of arranging the universe so that the rock doesn't smash my house but smashes someone else's. Imagine the chaos of a world where God was constantly intervening in the laws of nature. Read this book, I beg you!

Scattered said:

However, I have never seen anything come of it. When God doesn't answer your prayers or allows great injustice to occur then it is because "he works in mysterious ways." When something good happens then it is immediately attributed to God's grace. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand the role that religion plays in the lives of the desperate.

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I know exactly what you are saying and I have the same problem when I read a lot of comments people make; committed Christians struggle with this misguided and inaccurate way of talking about things, and the problem is exactly as you frame it, I think. It's the statements that attempt to "explain" the good that are misguided and inadequate. Whether something good or something bad happens to us, those things are on an equal footing with everything else that happens to us -- they are part of God's plan. Remember that God's plan for us (and I'm speaking without the "believers believe that" preface to my remarks, so please insert them mentally here before anything I say, okay, just to make it a little easier for me to get through this) is not limited to our time on this earth. Only the testimony of the Holy Spirit in our hearts can cause us to believe that, though. No human words can do it. No reasoning can do it. Only the action of the Holy Spirit working mysteriously in our depths can do it. What the Holy Spirit does is give us the gift of faith; because of this gift, we believe what we cannot see on the basis of the One who touched us in a place inside us that we didn't even know we HAD.

I was an atheist/agnostic most of my life (until age 35). I came to faith from zero exposure to any religious tradition. All this was new to me. I had no influences from my family; none at all. In my young adulthood I had only a hunger to understand "what was going on." I explored many different approaches to life before I actually "met" Christ. One of the most important books for me was Fulton Sheen's Life of Christ, which I recommend. Anything by Archbiship Sheen (who was the archbishop of New York City in the mid-20th century) is marvelous.

Anyway, we actually agree about this dissonance between the explanations for good and the explanations for bad things that occur to us. God doesn't give us what we ask for in prayer to make us "happy," in the way you and I conceive of "happy." Everything he gives is to lead us to the only true and lasting happiness -- Himself. And once we see Him as our only real happiness ultimately, everything he provides us with is viewed as a blessing -- even suffering, because it can make us more like Christ. Again, everything I've just said should be prefaced with "Believers believe that..." Thanks. :wink:

Scattered said:

But believe what you will. Have hope, I'm sure you're belief in God whether he exists or not is healthy.

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But you're quite right in questioning the healthiness of the belief that says, "God loves me and Christ died for my sins, so it doesn't really matter what I do." I hope you never stop pointing out the absurdity of such beliefs.

And you're quite right in condemning the belief that God hates anybody and sides with any particular group.

And you're quite right in objecting to the papering over of sins with political rhetoric in an attempt to justify doing evil.

I'm with you there, as I am sure are all committed believers of whatever religious tradition.

And you're quite right in looking askew at a God who some say rejects people if they don't believe precisely the "right thing" or belong to the "right church" or perform the "right ritual." All of that is bogus! Don't ever stop condemning those evil views.

In fact, the more you learn of Christianity, should you ever begin to study it in any detail, the more surprised you may become about how it in reality is nothing like what you were "taught" when you were young.

Do you know that the Catholic Church holds, for example, that even a person without explicit faith in Christ may in fact be saved? While Catholics do believe that Christ is All, it teaches what is actually contained in the Bible but rejected by many Protestants -- namely, that those that have not given conscious assent to his rulership but who strive to know the truth, to live a good life, and to be just and fair to others -- given the light that they have -- are not excluded from the Kingdom of God. At the moment, that includes you, Scattered. So no Catholic can reproach you in truth about your being "lost" or any such nonsense. Read the Catechism of the Catholic Church to see exactly what I am talking about.

Scattered said:

It gives you a reason to wake up in the morning and the hope of being saved from illness by an all loving being.

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I hope you're sitting down. :lol:

You are quite mistaken; if you are saying you think I believe God will save me from illness -- specifically depression -- you are totally and completely wrong.

I have never asked God to "save" me from depression or any other illness. Why should I, when he has provided the means by which these illnesses can be treated? I asked him for strength, yes, many times. I asked him to take away the fear, yes, many, many, many times. I asked him to give me the faith that I feared I had lost, yes, yes, yes, many times, too many to write "many" over and over to convey the number. I asked him to "Help me" many, many, many times. But to take away my illness? No. I was not ever near death, except when in some dark moments I thought about and quickly rejected killing myself. And even if I were close to death, I am not certain I would pray for him to save me if what my faith tells me is true -- this life is not the end of life any more than what we can see with our eyes shows us the full spectrum of electromagnetic radiation in the universe.

So, I must say an emphatic No! to your assumption that my faith in God has anything to do with my approach to depression/anxiety/DP. These are great evils and God has provided human beings who do his work on earth -- all the men and women who discover therapies, drugs, and other ways of overcoming evil with good are all doing God's work. They are all the hands and hearts of God on earth, whether they know it or not.

Scattered said:

Great. I'll shutup because I just don't understand the deep spiritual truths inherent in religion that are beyond my comprehension.

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I think you actually do understand them, Scattered. I really do think you do. I think you just have some stuff left over from an earlier time that you might want to reexamine.

Indeed, if I hadn't "heard" the Spirit "speaking" through you in fact, I wouldn't have bothered talking with you about these things. I hope you can see that I'm not "accusing" you of being a "closet believer" or anything, but suggesting only that I sense that you really do have a connection deep inside to "what's going on" and that it's not just decay and death.

But maybe I'm wrong. Bottom line: I didn't write to make you feel as if you should "shut up" -- I hope I've explained all that above, so please don't feel that was what I was after.

I found this just now, and it appears that at least this study showed no benefit to the prayed-for:

http://www.medpagetoday.com/Surgery/Gen ... ry/tb/1362

Personally, I don't know that any study will ever be able to show that "prayer works," and I would find that such a study would once again bring up an issue that Scattered and I danced around the other day. That issue is: Does an "answer" to prayer mean only that we get what we ask for, or does God indeed say "No" to our prayers (or to others' prayers for us) for reasons that we already know but refuse to accept?

In fact, the entire approach of this "study" is flawed in that it presupposes a very simplistic view of what prayer actually is. Prayer is not about getting God to do our bidding. Prayer is our asking God to strengthen us so that we can do his will. Prayer is about asking God to show us how to do HIS bidding, not the reverse.

In many cases, it is God's will that a person not recover from an illness, but that's not the same as saying God abandons the person. If death means union with God, death is better than life, ultimately. Not that it should be chosen *over* life while we live, but that "life on earth" is not the ultimate good.

I suppose that I think that scientific study of the effects of prayer are kind of silly in that they presuppose that an "answer" to prayer necessarily means the person recovers, when in the long term, what's really the absolute best for that person's happiness is union with God -- the truly good "end" that is desired by all believers.

Can 30 believers change God's mind about when a person dies? There are some who would argue that is indeed true, but I am not one of them.

Prayer is about transforming US, not about us transforming God.

Homeskooled said:

Dear Sojourner,
I'm afraid I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with your position on prayer. The Church is very clear that while one can ask for God to strengthen us, prayer is not just an exercise which is good for the soul and our moral fortitude, even if we are saying that we should pray for god to give us the grace of that fortitude. It is safer to argue a stance such as that, because when a prayer is "unanswered" it gives a believer a safe exit from the argument, but praying is all about storming heaven to persuade God. When a saint is canonized in the Catholic Church, the saint in question must have two medical miracles verified by outside institutions, and done through that saint's intercession. In this case, those who pray for the sick are asking the saint to intercede to God on their behalf. But more than that, it is a Catholic beleif based in very biblical foundations. Do you remember Christ's parable of the old woman and the judge? Eventhough he despised the woman and cared nothing for the problem she had, she was so persistent in asking the judge to rule in her favor that he finally relented "because of her persistence". This is how we are to pray to God as well - relentlessly, and with the hope that he hears and will answer it with a yes. That wont always be the case, but I believe a great deal of situations are morally neutral, and Divine Providence can use many different outcomes in a situation to the same beautiful end.

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OK, Homeskooled, I defer to you, because I am but a convert of some 23 or so years. Yes, I even thought of the scripture of the old woman and the judge when I was writing my post, and yet still made the error! I suppose I am not clear on where the two aspects of prayer meet or where they diverge.

Thanks for the correction. However, as you know, there are further problems with this that someone like me might have, such as "Does God answer my persistent prayer, but not yours?" "What of the poor person with no one praying for them?" So in my silliness, I resolved all those issues by pretending there was no reality of bombarding Heaven with prayer, even though I know that's Church teaching. I can't explain it, but all I can say is that your post is no surprise to me -- and I am very grateful that you took the time to respond. I'm sure you know what I mean when I say that I did think of that very scripture and of the admonition to "pray constantly" and managed -- probably because I was too full of myself -- to pretend that I was blissfully oblivious to the fact that I was sweeping what didn't agree with my theory under the rug. I hope you will call me on this type of thing if you ever spot me doing it again. Thanks a million, Homeskooled for writing!

Homeskooled said:

The Medpage Today study you pulled up was also the Mantra II study which Scattered quoted earlier. As Scattered pointed out, only high dose prayer along with relaxation techniques seemed to lower morbidity. The Harvard study which I have been prattling on about for some time was formed by a rogue Harvard doctor named Dr. Benson.

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Rogue? Aren't you talking about the "Relaxation Response" guy, who runs the Mind-Body place at Beth Israel?

Homeskooled said:

He practices there, and was first thought in the 1990's to be quite eccentric when he took up studies on prayer. His studies have been so thought provoking and well-organized, however, that he is readily granted funds by the NIH. His most recent study, the 800 pound gorilla of prayer studies, was wrapped last year. I believe it used something like 900 patients, and doesnt have the tabulation problems that previous studies did. Other famous studies, such as the San Francisco AIDS/Prayer study, used markers of wellness such as psychological well-being of those being prayed for. Most of the medical communtiy would like to see only objectively measurable standards of health used, because of the skepticism surrounding religious/medical studies. Its a double standard, however, as all medical trials and studies use psychological markers of well-being, from pharmaceutical trials to anorexia studies. Preliminary data has been published in medical journals , but none of it seems to have appeared online yet. The results are a mixed bag, but the preliminary studies seem to be highly favorable. I'm very excited about it, actually. If anyone can Google the results online, please let me know.

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I'd be happy to Google, but I need more particulars about these studies.