{"id":3945,"date":"2021-01-08T00:25:56","date_gmt":"2021-01-08T07:25:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/?p=3945"},"modified":"2021-01-08T00:26:09","modified_gmt":"2021-01-08T07:26:09","slug":"thoughts-on-the-existence-of-god-or-many-gods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/spiritualreligious\/thoughts-on-the-existence-of-god-or-many-gods","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts on the existence of God (or many Gods)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So, from time to time I like to ponder this one &#8211; and remember, Christians, there was a period where I could have been put to death simply for writing this essay, for the crime of blasphemy, which I think argues more clearly than anything I could down here that your religion has a definite evil bent, at least as implemented on Earth.. but I digress..<\/p>\n<p>Is there a God?<\/p>\n<p>The existence of the universe doesn&#8217;t provide any argument either way. Lots of religious folks will say &#8220;The universe must have a creator&#8221; but when you ask &#8220;Who created God&#8221;, they look at you blankly. If God could have always been here, so could the universe. The rigid mathematical nature of the universe tells us very little as well &#8211; it&#8217;s clearly something that could have bootstrapped itself, as is human life. We&#8217;re not intended, apparently, to determine from our environment whether there&#8217;s a God (or many) or not.<\/p>\n<p>Well and good. My strongest argument for there being a God (or hopefully many, since one would probably have been driven insane by being the only one of their kind) is that it doesn&#8217;t really make sense to me that humans would be the biggest and smartest things around. My second strongest argument is that WWIII hasn&#8217;t happened yet. <\/p>\n<p>Arguments against God, or at least any God with any kind of morals you&#8217;d want to hang around, include everything from nuclear weapons to the proliferation of religions claiming to be the only one and claiming all adherents to other religions are &#8216;less than&#8217; to the incredible cruelty of nature itself &#8211; and you can make interesting side arguments such as we&#8217;re in a video game, a experience to try when we get tired of perfection, a situation intended to encourage us to learn, etc. I can&#8217;t clearly rule out the existence of God based on anything I&#8217;ve seen thus far. I have seen things that argue in my opinion either for God or for many-worlds hypothesis. <\/p>\n<p>My opinion is there are probably many things bigger than we are, angels, Gods, you-name-it. Whether they&#8217;re even aware of us is questionable &#8211; are we aware of individual cells in our body? How about dust mites? But, that opinion is subject to change when new information arrives.<\/p>\n<p>My additional opinion is that pretty much all the religions of earth have bugs. I don&#8217;t buy that I want a complete lack of attachments, so I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;m cut out to be a bhuddist. A lot of the horrors of the Bible make me want to run screaming, and a lot of the horrors modern Christians commit &#8211; especially telling people &#8220;If you don&#8217;t believe the same thing as I do, you are going to Hell&#8221; &#8211; with the side note that that&#8217;s okay with them and they think you deserve it &#8211; have similar problems.<\/p>\n<p>(As per always I must disclaim &#8211; I have met Christians who seem to understand what love is, and who don&#8217;t think my final destination is eternal torment because of the complex set of beliefs that I have. They&#8217;re just alas in the minority thus far.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So, from time to time I like to ponder this one &#8211; and remember, Christians, there was a period where I could have been put to death simply for writing this essay, for the crime of blasphemy, which I think argues more clearly than anything I could down here that your religion has a definite [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3945"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3945"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3946,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3945\/revisions\/3946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}