Out of body religious experiences

[Rhabbi]

I'd say you've done all the cardinal sins of religious contemplation.

Your first mistake is in your groupings. The error is in assuming we have covered all possible versions of deities already. Even if we have reached the conclusion that there exists a lone intelligent omnipotent being, all today's religions could still all be wrong. You can't line up Islam and Christianity and compare them and from this draw the conclusion that because one doesn't seem to work for you the other does by default.

I admit that my groupings are simplified, and even biased. For one thing pantheism is not the same as polytheism.

To be honest with you monotheism is not even the grouping that appealed the most to me emotionally or intellectually. I preferred a form of solipsism that Robert Heinlein proposed in Stranger in a Strange Land and The Number of the Beast. Multi-person solipsism basically says that the universe is a big joke that we all agreed to play on ourselves.

Not sure how this would fit into the other classifications, but it is the one I was most comfortable with. Trying to keep up with all the ramifications of this theory is always a challenge, and actually ends up with Christianity as a subset thereof.

Second fault is that you assume that if god is good then....well...erm... How could you possibly reason about how a being more intelligent judges and values on moral issues? Let alone a omnipotent. You didn't think that an omnipotent being might have thought of stuff you haven't, did you? It's as if humans is god's pet project and he can empathise with us. Can you empathise with a spider? It's too dumb for us even to try. You don't think that an omnipotents concept of good and evil might be different from ours?

What makes you think I don't accept that? This is a challenge I always present to others, in Christendom we call it putting God in a box. I do not attempt to define what is indefinable by my standards, this is one reason I can accept suffering as part of a larger plan, one that I do not fully understand.

...and then this compulsion to connect this all powerful omnipotent god with the Bible or any religious text! Why even try? What possible evidence could you or anybody come up with to make it even meaningful? What makes you think that anybody in any way have got it even almost right. Let's say for sake of argument that there really exists an all powerful and good omnipotent god, and it speaks to people. Let's also for sake of argument assume that some of those people that know the truth of god have put pen to paper to write about it. They're humans!!!! Humans fuck up and interpret things in ways that aren't true just to fit their world view. Not out of spite or evil, but just out of being human. You also missed the option that Jesus might have been only partly right.

I'd say that the Bible itself proves how people misinterpret. As we all know Jesus didn't write the Bible. The Aryan Bible, Ebionite Bible, Koptic Bible, Donatist Bible and Tawahedo Bible are all major Christian Bibles that all pre-date the Vulgate Bible and all have more in common with each other than with the Versio Vulgata. The Vulgate Bible was quite a radical edit. They're all Christian Bibles, all are the word of god but they're also all different. The Aryan one kept all the angel wars parts which creates a radically different world than the vulgate.

We have the problem of context. In the time around the birth of Christ it was common practice to create myths about kings and emperors which were identical to that of the birth of Jesus. When Julius Caesar was born it was said that a star appeared above his villa and foreign astronomers visited. There's accounts of all the old kings and emperors performing miracles. Witnesses of it was extremely common. This practice even included famous athletes. Nobody believes today that the Mediterranean was any more full of miracle healers than any other period in history. As far as I know all historians agree on that Julius Caesar was just a normal person, even though he was considered a god during his lifetime.

The context tells me that the point of writing in the Bible that Jesus did all the miracles and how he was born, wasn't to say that he had supernatural powers, but simply to emphasize that he really was the new king of the Jews and that he had a normal birth as expected of a king. Which one of the two theories is in your opinion requires the smallest leap of faith? It's also quite possible that Jesus was only a narrative trick. A mythical figure in order to frame a story around. A story with profound implications which may very well have conveyed the truth in an effective way, but none the less a story.

It's quite possible to argue that all the various religions of today are all the result of this omnipotent being talking to people but because of humans doing what humans do best, misinterpret, we've got a plethora of religions of which all are utterly and completely wrong.

Also you must never forget that any action of any beings more powerful than us will always be interpreted by us as actions of an omnipotent being. We don't know better. But just because we can't see that beings limits doesn't mean they aren't there.

I am going on the admittedly biased assumption that if God exists He wants us to know it. I do not think He wants or needs our worship, but unless we were a school project that got tossed into the back of His closet, He did have a reason for creating us. I just assume he wants to communicate that reason. And, yes, I know this is anthropomorphizing, but I am human, and that is what we do.

It is nice to run into someone that knows enough about the various ancient bibles to at least discuss them. I am not trying to defend the Vulgate here though, mostly because I agree that Jerome was biased in his translation, and I consider a lot of what he did to be indefensible.

Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

This is a thought I grew up with, so yes I have considered it. This still does not rule out the existence of God.

Even if your epiphany was genuine and you really did see the real and existing god you made it perfectly clear that alternatives you allowed yourself to chose between were pretty far from a complete list of possible variations on monotheism.

You really don't think that you chose Christianity because of social or emotional reasons? It was all detached logical reasoning?

Never said it wasn't. We are all products of our culture, something that anthropologist contend with every time they study another culture. the only way to really learn about a culture is to grow up in it, but then all the conditioning becomes so ingrained that we tend to think of it as instinct. I admit to my bias, and am always willing to look at any argument to examine my position and learn.

BTW C.S Lewis faith hinges a lot on morality, (ie Moral Law) being universal. Since it isn't then CS Lewis faith is based on an erroneous conclusion. So much for that. I find it annoying with people who behave like they're masters on a subject in which they're amatures and ignore what all the people doing serious research into it is saying.

I agree with this, which is another reason that I declined to offer a logical proof of God's existence. Lewis made what He thought of as a strong argument for God's existence, but his underlying assumptions are currently being challenged. Nonetheless Lewis's journey from atheism to belief is not contingent on this argument being true, it is simply one of his attempts to try to define the indefinable.