Paranoid Android
Active Member
What convinced you to be religious and BELEIVE in God/Gods/Higher Power ? What convinced you not to follow the heresy of Atheism ?
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Religous People: What Convinced You To OBEY and BELEIVE In A God/Gods/Higher Power ?
- Thread starter Paranoid Android
- Start date
Paranoid Android
Active Member
Yes. But a lot of people were convinced to embrace the heresy of Atheism. What kept you from embracing that heresy ?
My study of the paranormal and the teachings based on the eastern/Indian spiritual wisdom tradition.
My study of the paranormal and the teachings based on the eastern/Indian spiritual wisdom tradition.
Once upon a time, Quintessence was a college student who read in a book the word "pagan" during one of his/her homework assignments. Looking at that word, s/he realized that although they'd seen this word before, they didn't quite know what it truly meant. S/he first consulted a standard dictionary (an actual book no less), and, finding this unsatisfactory, proceeded to dig further. This was the beginning of a long and fruitful journey where Quintessence essentially learned that all the things they had been taught about god were wrong. Or rather, that they were extremely limited and not at all representational of that idea as a whole. In particular, Quintessence read a book that basically said "if you could design god, what would it be?" It had never occurred to Quintessence that this was allowed, much less that his/her answers to that question were already well-developed and valid theologies. And why should it have been? Nobody ever taught him/her that god could be nature and its various aspects, or that all those Pagan gods could still be honored in the modern day. There was only one god, and that was the god of the Bible, and nothing else was even worthy of consideration. This, Quintessence learned, was completely wrong. Quintessence proceeded to unlearn everything s/he had been taught about what god is, and started from scratch. Thus, s/he was not "convinced" to "believe" in anything, but rather, engaged in an act of discovering the things s/he held sacred and deified all along... and gained the ability to call them what they were: gods.
So yeah. What convinced me to quit being an angsthiest (yes, I was one of those, sadly) for most of my childhood and teen years? Actually bothering to learn about religion and theology, and in particular, that gods are whatever you choose to deify.
arthra
Baha'i
I went through a stage where I didn't believe in God for awhile many years ago... I had rejected the "god" of my previous "idle fancy and vain imagination".. After a good deal of searching however I discovered the reality of the Divine and learned that God speaks to us through His Messengers and Prophets. So what is required is an earnest search and investigation:
"O My brother! When a true seeker determineth to take the step of search in the path leading unto the knowledge of the Ancient of Days, he must, before all else, cleanse his heart, which is the seat of the revelation of the inner mysteries of God, from the obscuring dust of all acquired knowledge, and the allusions of the embodiments of satanic fancy..."
(Baha'u'llah, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah, p. 264)
Yoshua
Well-Known Member
Hi Paranoid,
It is because I believe that God is the only one who can change and transform people into a new self--a new creation, a person who lived with Christ in the path of righteousness.
2 Cor. 5:17
17. Therefore if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.
People are born insecure so why follow the heresy of Atheism? It is better for a person who can lean on to a someone, who is friend and God.
John 15:13-14
13. "Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.
14. "You are My friends, if you do what I command you.
Thanks
Paranoid Android
Active Member
We have to come up with a way people won't become atheists. It's sad to see somebody transform into an atheist, live like a zombie. That's what they seem like to me. Atheist zombies wondering down the street, there brains no longer working. The worst thing is them spewing their atheistic propaganda to whoever is not prepared to hear and refute there dangerous religion.
Paranoid Android
Active Member
Well, you can have any religion you want.
My wants are dependent on the aforementioned wiring of my brain. In this case, I'm naturally a polytheist.
It's been a long process of unlearning the Western conceptions of god, religion, etc. And I find it difficult therefore to respond to the assumptions implicit in your thread title and OP. The spirits don't command (and thus I don't obey). Instead, we are engaged in a respectful (mostly) relationship. I stopped "believing" in "God/Gods/Higher Powers" when I realized that I am in no position to judge between a deity with powers over--for example--a solar system, a galaxy, or the whole universe. They may or may not exist, but I don't experience them. I do, however, experience spirits, some of whom are smaller/less powerful than me, some are more or less comparable in size/power to me, and others that are much larger/more powerful than me. Most of them I don't directly interact with, but I try to acknowledge and respect them. Others may consider the larger/more powerful to be gods of one sort or another, but for the time being, I don't do deities. The spirits that exist are kin, relatives related through our common presence/experience of the now and here.
I stopped being atheist when I realized that there is no way for humans to truly KNOW the Western ideal of a monotheistic deity, nor to truly know there is not one. So I became an agnostic. But I've had experiences that fit with the presence of other-than-human persons in the environment in which I live, so I "believe" and practice the existence of my other-than-human and human kin.
Unveiled Artist
Veteran Member
This is kind of a weird question; because, I am atheist because I don't believe in deities. It is not heresy, it's just stating the opposite of what a theist believes.
I don't know if I'd call the Mystic Law (The Law behind the Buddha's Teachings) a higher power; but, since we devote ourselves within the Mystic Law, for this discussion,I'd say it is.
The Buddha's teachings just makes sense. I didn't need to "learn it" or study it to know it is true and I live it. We are a part of the Mystic Law (or the Law of Causality); no one can get away from how their causes influences ourselves and others. So, Belief in a "higher power" was not something that I fell into; it was a revelation.
I guess one can say the Laws of nature are a higher power. However, I am with Quin. in the belief of deities being each aspect of nature--sun, moon, starts, and so forth and that within each and (in my belief) with each person as well, we All have spirits (Spirit of the Sun, Spirit of the Moon, etc). I don't see them one over another; and, I do find, if they are called "higher power" they are so because they take care of us. I don't call the spirits deities because defifying nature doesn't make too much sense. If we are a part of everything and everyone, what is there to deify?
Common sense convinced me to believe in the Buddha and live within the Law of Causility, interconnect with spirits of my ancestors, and interconnect and revere nature. Common sense lead me to understand the Gohonzon as a part of me (a written scroll with the Law written on it). The deities on the scroll represent each aspect of our lives.
It just makes sense and the interconnection is with everything and everyone, that there is no reason to deify anything; hence, there is no such thing as God.
Atheism isn't a heresy. It's just saying, based on the above, there is no such thing as God (if there were, how can one disbelief it).
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Desert Snake
Veteran Member
///
You're conflating theism with your own ideas of what theism means. It's a subjective belief that you are presenting, not an actual ''this, or that'', scenario. So, in that sense, using the word theism is a fallacy.
ie ,
''people give presents on x-mas''
''I am against holidays''
''therefore Jesus isn't real''.
That's crude, but I think it illustrates the problem in your comments.
you also contradicted yourself, somewhat, in that you state you do not believe in deities, then go on to describe the type of deities you believe in/?/ confusing.
You're conflating theism with your own ideas of what theism means. It's a subjective belief that you are presenting, not an actual ''this, or that'', scenario. So, in that sense, using the word theism is a fallacy.
ie ,
''people give presents on x-mas''
''I am against holidays''
''therefore Jesus isn't real''.
That's crude, but I think it illustrates the problem in your comments.
you also contradicted yourself, somewhat, in that you state you do not believe in deities, then go on to describe the type of deities you believe in/?/ confusing.
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I can't not believe in gods and other supramundane powers and spirits. Like @Riverwolf said, it's how my mind works. However, I can't believe in one supreme God. I'm a semi-hard polytheist, that just feels right to me.
Harmonious
Well-Known Member
At first, it was about the customs my parents followed. We went to synagogue sometimes, especially on the holidays. We kept kosher at home. We observed some of the holidays.
Passover is particularly impressive, because if you read the Passover liturgy, it refers to God taking the Jews out of Egypt, but focusing on the idea of "feeling as if WE were the ones who left the bondage of Egypt."
It made sense to me. I was a kid, and my parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles obviously believed this. So I guess I did, too.
My journey to becoming Orthodox is a rather convoluted one, including a bout where I refused to learn Hebrew (I was between 5 and 11), and demanded that "I HATE tradition!" (I was 8, my grandfather had died, and I wasn't allowed to go to the cemetery because Sephardic women (never mind kids) didn't go to the cemetery upon burial. After the funeral was a different story, but it didn't help when I was 8.)
I remember believing that God existed, although I didn't "get it," for any real value of that.
My simple, childish belief growing into a serious conviction, and to believe it necessary to obey God for more complex forms of obeying was an evolution that happened over a number of years, coalescing into actual reality of firm belief when I convinced my parents to send me to a Yeshiva (read: parochial) high school.
There was no one thing that did it. It was a number of things over a long period of time. I'm not entirely sure HOW it happened. I only know THAT it happened.
leibowde84
Veteran Member
I think that atheism is merely the prudent/reasonable position. Why do you refer to it as heresy? That is merely a subjective judgment, right?
I don't think anything convinced me. It was more of a finding a faith and liking what I heard about it and following it.
I took it as being ironic. It could be heresy to many orthodox religions.
leibowde84
Veteran Member
I would say that is unreasonable/irrational. But to each their own I guess.