Don’t know why I always show up as Guest. ???
Well, in case you didn’t guess, I am the ‘guest’. Couldn’t figure it out until just now.
anima/guest, I’m not a big fan of organised religion either. However, you cannot paint all members of a certain religion with the same brush. For example, buddhism and hinduism are both very open minded religions, in their pure form. However, when it becomes corrupted, when dogma sets in, and the corrupt few begin to use it as a weapon for their own ends, any religion becoms oppressive.
The Hindu extremists in power in India at the moment, are a perfect example of this, they use a religion with a core message of peace and tolerance, and pervert it into a movement dedicated to violence and intolerance. Even Buddhism, more specifically tibetan buddhism, has been used as an excuse for violence in the past. Even now, sects within tibetan buddhism are fighting each other over who the “true” dalai lama is.
Even The Church of Satan, who states that they shun the Christian idea of dogma, are split because they cannot agree!
Even Christianity, which you place with the “closed” religions, was originally incredibly liberal. Read the first three gospels. Now compare this to the gospel of John, and the Epistles. The Epistles, written by St Paul the Insane, after the death of Jesus, contains most if not all of the really oppressive stuff in Christianity. St Paul turned the gospel (good news) of Jesus, into a dispel (bad news) of himself. For that reason, 99.9% of Christians really should be labelled Paulites.
However, certain elements within christianity are stil very open-minded, the Gnostic movement in particular
My opinion is that it is much more useful, and fun, to create your own system of beliefs, which can change as you do, with each new experience. The little-known “Make your own religion” movement has been encouraging this for decades. If you have your own belief system, i refrain from using “religion” for the moment, it is much more flexible than if you follow one of the established one. The larger religions have become loath to change, they have become, immutable. You do not have that problem.
If we created God, then why? to giggle like a little school girl at how gullible people are?
to feel smart? to get power? how do we know there isn’t a God?
If God created us, then who or what is God? why create us? what would it/he/she want from us? how do we know that he/she/it is there?
…well don’t look at me…it’s not like I know 
From my observations, I think there is something greater then man. Theres more then the eye can see and the mind perceives. What is it? I don’t know, that’s why I’m studying philosophy and theology, to find out.
Study like the rest of us…You will come up short like the rest of us…
Are you the messiah?
HVD,
I like your new signature. Reminds me of Moulder’s phrase near the beginning of the movie when they are on the roof top (from movie ‘X-Files’)
Take care,
Thanks Magius, but i cant take the credit. That phrase was written by a very talented actor/writer called Patrick McGoohan. He created a TV show called The Prisoner, where he plays a recently resigned secre agent who is kidnapped and placed in a surreal Village (called The Village) He is always referred to as Number 6 )the prisoners are graded in terms of importance) and is interrogated by Number 2, who changes each episode. the phrase in my sig is 6’s line after he is given his number. The series is basically a treatise on the importance of individuality and anti-authoritarianism.
I recommend you check it out, DVDs on Amazon.com
pardon my…ummm extremely late reply… youngdude, was your last post a reply to mine? sometimes I get confuzled when everyones talking to everyone and my head explodes…but eerr any ways just wanted to say intresting comment, and no I’m not the mah whatever ah, atleast I don’t think so 
I’m sorry this is off topic, but that silly, dumb brute has more unlikely flashes of intelligence that must be repeated:
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Bart or Lisa asks why an amusement park the family is visiting was built in such a bad location. HOMER: Because they’re stupid. That’s why everyone does everything.
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LISA (paraphrase): I’m not giving up on my [vegetarian] beliefs. But I was wrong to ruin your barbecue. I’m sorry, dad. HOMER: It’s okay. I used to believe in things when I was a kid.
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Tour guide glowingly explains the Springfield newspaper was founded by Johnny Appleseed, who “roamed the country founding newspapers”. HOMER: If he’s so smart, how come he’s dead?
oops, it was actually Johnny Newspaperseed, a pun off the other.
another stroke of intelligence by Homer…
“If something is hard to do, then its probably not worth doing”
Anima stated:
So religions and all other supposed biblical texts and scriptures aside, we really don’t know anything about God, especially given your quotes. I liked Ghandi’s one especially. So we are left with an undefined label that we write as ‘G-O-D’. So isn’t it safe to say that there is a higher power, one of which we don’t know anything about, other than that we have this feeling that there is more to life, there must be something more out there, or that there is a higher consciousness? Any which way you pick from these, to me, is a thousand times better than any religious explanation because it doesn’t confine you, doesn’t claim you MUST believe or else. You are free to think, theorize, study, reason, etc and either come up with your own view or just agree to not know.
Anima stated:
My answer to you is, that God was around when our universe was created, if it was created, nor was GOD around for billions of years after. God appered as a concept around the time that we began to communicate with each other with really basic language skills as primitive humans.
Pangloss stated to Anima:
Anima responded to Pangloss:
Pangloss is right, I didn’t agree that the universe was created. I said that the popular theory amongst astro-physicists is that the universe expands and contracts. Despite that, even if the universe was created that does not in any way shape or form validate GOD. Ofcourse there may be something that might have created the universe, but why is it automatically GOD? What if there is something that created that something that created our universe? What will that be then? A Super-God?
What’s your take?
A genius once said,
“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”
Albert Einstien
This is my first post here, and I got interested in the subject because I am a little confused about my beliefs right now. I’m pretty sure I believe in God, but someone before touched the fact on how did he get here(that makes me wonder.) I’d like to believe in God, I was brought up to believe that way. Many great leaders and philosophers have ruled and lived by a god. The fact that we created God could be very true, but what happens when you die then? Do we just not excist? Think about that, our minds can’t really contimplate not excisting. Have you ever tried not thinking, it doesn’t work.
I take the side that we created God and that God was created in result of looking at what it would mean for God not to exist.
Religion in reality, is a philosophy, with questions, problems, and proposed answers. So then, the original question would obviously have been, why are we here. This then arose two ideas, one being a god or gods created us. Others then looked at the possibility that this may not have been and we may have been an accident or an event of science. This would mean that we were in this infinite universe, only one of many people on this planet and who knows how many more outside it. This would then mean that we were in actuality nothing, and totally insignificant, and would furthermore mean that there would be no life after death, just eternal non-existence. Depressed, intimidated, and scared of this, people began creating religions and deities to try and add significance to human existence. This was the beginning of religion verses atheism and existentialism in its atheistic form.
All in all, to me God is alive. Not in the literal sense, but in the sense that human emotion relies on the existance of God or some kind of higher devinity. Most people need a “crutch” (not meant to be condescending) of some sort to lend their burdens to. To most, it really doesn’t matter of God exists or not, its the fact that they have something to blame, to ask for help, to cry out to in need. No, I dont think that God is a real being, I beleive he was created by the human race for two reasons, one being more sinister than the ohter. God nowadays is humanities’ crutch, God in earlier days was humanities’ ball and chain. God may have been created as a means to keep people who possesed little understanding of the world under control i.e. a kind of law. All of the punishments listed in the bible for disobeying “God’s” rules and all of the promises given for loyalty to “God’s” rules may have been nothing more than a means by which to scare early man into living a life by the rules of another.