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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Philosopher who wrote (11333)	4/14/2001 3:06:42 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

People kneel down and pray to many many Gods. Is that proof they all exist? Or is it proof that something exists which many people call God and some don't? And is that thing that exists inside humans, or is it something that is humans and something else, or is it something that is outside of humans? When you see to people speak to each other, even if you can't hear, you can watch communication take place. It helps that speech (sound) is only a very small part of communication. Much of the communication is carried by non-verbal language. When you see people pray you do not see the other communicator. It's more like watching someone on the phone watching people talk to their Gods. Are they talking to a live being? Are they talking to a recording? Are they imagining the conversation? Are they pretending? All things are possible. I have been in Mosques in the Middle East, to the Wailing Wall in the Holy Land, and the Church of the Annunciation, and I walked the stages of the cross. I've been to the Dome of the Rock, and St Peter's in Rome at Vatican City. I've been to Buddhist temples in Korea and Thailand and seen Shintoism in Japan. I've been to the Greek Orthodox churches in Greece, and gone to all manner of services in this country (the US) including Jewish, Lutheran, Baptist, Southern Baptist, Catholic. Protestant, Episcopalian, Greek Orthodox, Mormon and Unitarian, among others. I've watched all sorts of people kneel down. In watching them I've always been impressed by their simple being, being alive, being present together, by their common humanity, and never by whatever supernatural force they were communing with. Perhaps for me that is the vibration, life, and to a lesser extent humanity. Steven and I have been all around the world. We've been lucky. We've seen a little bit of everything I think. I don't know what you've seen. But after seeing everything, I am impressed by people's desire to commune with something but not with the something they choose to commune with (for the most part).

To: The Philosopher who wrote (11333)	4/16/2001 2:35:40 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 82486

You have been exposed for many years to a society that responds to the unknown (to you) stimulus of the existence of God. Do you therefore have a fairly good idea exactly what God is, and do you believe that God exists on the basis of the response of other people to God? A deaf person totally unacquainted with sound but with a modicum of scientific training would very quickly deduce that non-deaf people communicate using patterns of waves produced by organs based in their necks. They might not experience these wave sets as "sound", and they might not describe them as "sound", but they would be able to verify that specific wave-form patterns exist, can be created, and elicit varying responses. The "stimulus" of God is not only unknown to me. Neither I nor anyone else has been able to produce any evidence suggesting that any such stimulus exists at all. Observation of religious patterns and the development of religious belief, on the other hand, suggests strongly that people have created Gods to fill their own needs. This is a very believable idea, and in the absence of any recordable stimulus that could be attributed to a God, it seems the simplest explanation for the social phenomenon we call religion.