Nor does it mean your criteria are right, obviously. If your criteria and their criteria are contradictory, clearly someone is wrong, if not all of you.
That is true, someone is wrong.
If God doesn't care if we believe in him, and he imposes no negative afterlife repercussions on non-believers, okay fine. Then this whole conversation is sorta irrelevant.
So, are you saying that the only reason it would be important for you to believe in God would be because of what might happen to you in the afterlife if you don’t believe in God? This certainly is a consideration, since the afterlife is forever whereas our life on this earth is very short and temporary.
I do not know that God imposes anything negative on people in the afterlife, what we will have in the afterlife is what we have become by way of our character and spiritual growth, since all of who we have become goes with us. Better than me trying to explain it in my own words, this short video explains the Baha’i view of heaven and hell, and you can ask me any questions you might have after you watch it.
Trail: that's a self-imposed limitation on God's part, is it not? Is he not all powerful? Did he not create us/the universe? If so, he chose to create a situation to prevent himself from directly communicating with us.
Which for the 8th time, is...absurd, friend. And is 100% his choice and his fault.
It is not a limitation on God’s part; it is a choice God made because God does not
want to communicate directly with ordinary human beings.
It seems absurd to you because you think God should do this because you want God to do this. But that does not mean it is absurd. You just are not getting what you want so you call it absurd. That is psych 101 stuff, and I do it myself, all the time, when I perceive God is sitting on his ***.
The thing is that even when I get angry at God and scream about Him as I did last night, I am
aware that I am the one with the problem, because I am not All-Knowing or All-Wise, so I cannot know as much as God as to why this suffering exists and is often allowed to go on unabated. It does not seem right to me so I go searching for answers. That is why I wrote that thread I wanted to post entitled “God and Suffering” but I have been too busy to post it yet. I keep saying, maybe today, and then something else happens. My life is a veritable mess.
So, since we are not going to make an All-Powerful God do what we
want Him to do, we have three choices:
1. Complain about it
2. Try to understand the ways of God
3. Forget about God altogether
I do #1 once in a while but then I move on to #2. I wish I could do #3, but given all the evidence for God’s existence I do not consider that a wise choice. So you could say that God has me right where he wants me and now I am challenged to find a solution. But it is really not that because it does not matter how much I scream at God; I cannot hurt God, and anything that God wants is for my own benefit, not for His benefit. I only know these things because Baha’u’llah wrote them. Otherwise I would be up the creek without a paddle.
Because there are so many things we cannot know about God, it is good that we can know a few things about God.
I do not understand why anyone would ever want to hear from God directly or see Him, but there are indications from NDEs that is what happens after we die, the Being of Light. After that, we do not really know what happens; God might go back into His cave.
So you actually have better communication skills than your own deity. And yet you think your deity created this whole situation by design. Again, that's...say it with me now...
I could understand why you would think that if the Bible was all you had to go on, because it is like an unmapped swamp, impossible to navigate and understand. The Qur’an is much easier to understand but now we have the Writings of Baha’u’llah so we do not need the older scriptures. I cannot say you would understand the Writings of Baha’u’llah if you read them cold, but we also have the Writings of the appointed interpreters of the Baha’i Faith, so one way or another there is something we can read and understand.
The question is: Why are words on a page not good enough? I get it that those are not proof that God exists to you, but if you came to understand and accept that is the only way God communicates,
and why, then maybe it would constitute proof, or maybe not.
What does the age of a religion have to do with whether you should give it up? It's irrelevant if your religion started 5 minutes ago or 5 millennia ago. You should give up your religion if you dont have rational reasons/strong evidence to believe it's true.
I agree, we should not just believe in a religion just because it is new. We should only believe in it after we have investigated it and have determined that it is the truth.
But it does matter if the religion is really old because those older religions do not contain the message that God wants us to have in this new age; so by clinging to them as most people do, that precludes them getting the message for this age.
And your religion is no different in that regard.
It wouldn’t be any different, if the reasons people believed in it were emotional. I cannot speak for other Baha’is, only for myself, and I know my reasons are not emotional. If I could follow my emotions I would be an atheist.
I was not brought up in the Baha’i Faith, most people of my generation weren’t. I had to research it and determine if it was true or not, after I discovered it. I was not even looking for a religion or for God at that time, I was not a believer. I was attracted to the Faith because of its teachings. I left God standing outside the door until the last six years, and He is usually still standing out in the cold.
Then God is not all-powerful, and yet he chose to create this silly situation where his ability to communicate would be limited to middle men.
The caveat is that once we belief in God, God can communicate to our minds, if we let Him in. That is what prayer and meditation are all about. What God
does not do is communicate a Revelation that later comes to be established as a religion to anyone other than the Messengers, because they are a protected Source since they were pre-selected by God to receive that revelation.
But we cannot have a conversation with God where God talks back, like Moses at the Burning Bush, because God is far too exalted to lower Himself down to this level.
“And since there can be no tie of direct intercourse to bind the one true God with His creation, and no resemblance whatever can exist between the transient and the Eternal, the contingent and the Absolute, He hath ordained that in every age and dispensation a pure and stainless Soul be made manifest in the kingdoms of earth and heaven.Unto this subtle, this mysterious and ethereal Being He hath assigned a twofold nature; the physical, pertaining to the world of matter, and the spiritual, which is born of the substance of God Himself. He hath, moreover, conferred upon Him a double station. The first station, which is related to His innermost reality, representeth Him as One Whose voice is the voice of God Himself.....The second station is the human station, exemplified by the following verses: “I am but a man like you.”” Gleanings From the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, pp. 66-67
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