Is it foolish to call God, “Father”?

[Gnostic Bishop]

It means plenty to my reality. It shapes the way I perceive everything, and thus, it shapes my reality. It alters every single day of my existence because this realization brings me a tremendous amount of joy and beauty. I could have a very different life if I had gone down a path that led me into fear, hatred and darkness (or in other words, fear).

Whoppe.
You are a part of the universe and so is everyone else. So your reality shapes your reality, as everyone else's does with them.

How does being a part of that reality get rid of whatever fearful thing you alluded to?

Regards
DL

 

[Gnostic Bishop]

^Could not have said it better Xorky



A counter logical claim DL. To know what we emerged from and what we actually are is surely at the heart of the spiritual quest...? It provides context, and not much else, true- but context can allow for more informed and reasoned extrapolation, assumption, musing and knowledge, it can provide comparison and indicate causal relationships where not much else can do so.

But as Xorkoth said, an understanding of our correct part in the universe and earth (and I mean that we are not outsiders/abominations to nature, but correct and 'expected' parts of it) can add meaning and joy to ones life; and that sort of positive only a madmen would reject. (I may very well have spent much of my life rejecting my spot in this fucking lunacy as have many here).

But then I oscillate between deciding that we are indeed outside of nature and almost unnatural back to understanding that we are part of nature, universe, void, matter, etc.

'Fucked if I know' is a relevant epilogue to all of my posts I think...

I hear you as to being a part of nature. We are but that fact does not seem to help the majority who are the religious and believers in fantasy, miracles and magic. Or at least that is the claim.

If push came to shove you would suddenly find many atheists in the church.

Regards
DL

 

[rickolasnice]

It's just a nice fact bishop, chill.

I also find evolution by natural selection, special relativity theory and Heisenberg's uncertainty principal to be strangely beautiful.

This idea is also beautiful (even more so if it turned out to be true)

NSFW:

/
Cosmological natural selection [edit]
Smolin's hypothesis of cosmological natural selection, also called the fecund universes theory, suggests that a process analogous to biological natural selection applies at the grandest of scales. Smolin published the idea in 1992 and summarized it in a book aimed at a lay audience called The Life of the Cosmos.

The theory surmises that a collapsing[clarification needed] black hole causes the emergence of a new universe on the "other side", whose fundamental constant parameters (masses of elementary particles, Planck constant, elementary charge, and so forth) may differ slightly from those of the universe where the black hole collapsed. Each universe thus gives rise to as many new universes as it has black holes. The theory contains the evolutionary ideas of "reproduction" and "mutation" of universes, and so is formally analogous to models of population biology.

The resulting population of universes can be represented as a distribution of a landscape of parameters where the height of the landscape is proportional to the numbers of black holes that a universe with those parameters will have. Applying reasoning borrowed from the study of fitness landscapes in population biology, one can conclude that the population is dominated by universes whose parameters drive the production of black holes to a local peak in the landscape. This was the first use of the notion of a landscape of parameters in physics.

Leonard Susskind, who later promoted a similar string theory landscape, stated:

"I'm not sure why Smolin's idea didn't attract much attention. I actually think it deserved far more than it got."[6]

Smolin has noted that the string theory landscape is not Popper-falsifiable if other universes are not observable.[citation needed] This is the subject of the Smolin–Susskind debate concerning Smolin’s argument: "[The] Anthropic Principle cannot yield any falsifiable predictions, and therefore cannot be a part of science."[6] There are then only two ways out: traversable wormholes connecting the different parallel universes, and "signal nonlocality", as described by Antony Valentini, a scientist at the Perimeter Institute.[clarification needed]

In a critical review of The Life of the Cosmos, astrophysicist Joe Silk suggested that our universe falls short by about four orders of magnitude from being maximal for the production of black holes.[7] In his book Questions of Truth, particle physicist John Polkinghorne puts forward another difficulty with Smolin's thesis: one cannot impose the consistent multiversal time required to make the evolutionary dynamics work, since short-lived universes with few descendants would then dominate long-lived universes with many descendants.[8] Smolin responded to these criticisms in Life of the Cosmos, and later scientific papers.

When Smolin published the theory in 1992, he proposed as a prediction of his theory that no neutron star should exist with a mass of more than 1.6 times the mass of the sun.[citation needed] Later this figure was raised to two solar masses following more precise modeling of neutron star interiors by nuclear astrophysicists. If a more massive neutron star was ever observed, it would show that our universe's natural laws were not tuned for maximal black hole production, because the mass of the strange quark could be retuned to lower the mass threshold for production of a black hole. A 2-solar-mass pulsar was discovered in 2010.[9]

In 1992 Smolin also predicted that inflation, if true, must only be in its simplest form, governed by a single field and parameter. Both predictions have held up, and they demonstrate Smolin’s main thesis: that the theory of cosmological natural selection is Popper falsifiable.

Etc etc

What do you mean "If push comes to shove you would suddenly find many atheists in the church"?

 

[Gnostic Bishop]

I imagine that this theory did not get too far because we cannot prove that a black hole pops out anywhere other than where it is. When we do prove that it does then this theory might have a chance. There are tons of theories out there today and theorists do not know which way to turn.

As to atheists in church, I think that that is mostly what is in the churches today but happily, the numbers are dropping quickly.
Many profess belief but as this clip shows, they are not there for the religion. They are there for culture and tradition and not belief in their inherited Gods.



Regards
DL

 

[rickolasnice]

I don't see how that video suggests that people aren't in churches for their religion but more so their cultures and traditions.

Sure, culture and tradition raises them to be whatever religion they are, but that doesn't mean their faith in that religion is any less real.

 

[Gnostic Bishop]

I don't see how that video suggests that people aren't in churches for their religion but more so their cultures and traditions.

Sure, culture and tradition raises them to be whatever religion they are, but that doesn't mean their faith in that religion is any less real.

Strange that you do not doubt the faith of those who did not choose a God but just inherited an old family God.

Aberrant conditioning and peer pressure, that is always working on sheep, should be all I need say.

Regards
DL

 

[rickolasnice]

Do you have any evidence or reason to believe that people only pretend to be religious to please their peers?

Because, after all, aren't almost all theists just regurgitating beliefs passed down from generation to generation?

 

[Gnostic Bishop]

Do you have any evidence or reason to believe that people only pretend to be religious to please their peers?

Because, after all, aren't almost all theists just regurgitating beliefs passed down from generation to generation?

The only evidence I have is public knowledge and my own personal experience being raised Catholic until I had the ability to choose to think morally.

And yes, theists just have old worn out Gods whose morals we have rejected already rejected and would never live under.

Regards
DL

 

[Gnostic Bishop]

Oops.

 

[Dresden]

If there is no other God but God, and He is the Creator, then it is fitting to refer to him as 'Father.'

 

[Gnostic Bishop]

If there is no other God but God, and He is the Creator, then it is fitting to refer to him as 'Father.'

Even if that God has his son needlessly murdered?

Why give a label of honor to such a prick of a God or father?

Would you call Hitler a friend of Jews?
That is a near perfect analogy.

Regards
DL

 

[Tromps]

Would you call Hitler a friend of Jews?
That is a near perfect analogy.

In what way?

 

[Gnostic Bishop]

In what way?

That referred to the O.P.

Regards
DL