I do not understand why you have to compartmentalize biblical sayings into Christian or Gnostic Christian.
As you can see from that quote, if we see God’s kingdom all around us and inside of us, we cannot think that the world is anything but evolving perfection. Most just don’t see it and live in poverty. Let me try to make you see the world the way I do.
But I do not see it in that way and I did not see it in that way when I believed that God’s kingdom was…
I do not think that it is living in poverty to see a “real” world out there, the way that it actually is. But you do have the right to see it your way and I suppose that it is not such a bad way to see it, that is, if you actively help the world in some ways in its ongoing evolution.
Here is a mind exercise. Tell me what you see when you look around. The best that can possibly be, given our past history, or an ugly and imperfect world?
I do not think that I see either of those. The first seems to me to be an excuse ~ in other words, what choice do we have but to see things your way as things are as they are, (we cannot go back and change things) and as for the second, I do not see an ugly world but I do at times see extremely ugly people - man’s inhumanity to man - It is also a beautiful magnificent world but it is an imperfect world.
The fact that someone believes in God and believes that God is in the world and in people does not change that.
This is a poem which I wrote quite awhile back. It will give you an idea of what I see and how I see when I look around.
Candide.
"It is demonstrable that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; f
Obviously this statement is true though things might have been otherwise than what they are if we had made other or better choices or had been there when it would have been a good thing. But then again, who is to say. Too many so-called random things get in the way. But I do not believe that we are pre-destined.
or as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end.”
I suppose that I can go along with the first part here but as for the second part, I think that that is kind of looking at life through rose-colored glasses although I do realize that we need to live with hope.
But WHY must they necessarily be created for the best end? Do you think that God has it already all planned out? Would that make us puppets?
That means that we live in the best of all possible worlds, because it is the only possible world, given all the conditions at hand and the history that got us here. That is an irrefutable statement given entropy and the anthropic principle.
In other words, we are to accept our fate. We have no other choice. I wonder if we really take this as our philosophy, what part it might play in our sitting back and not doing much at all as far as a future goes. But I may be wrong here.
People who ignore evidence to believe in the supernatural are a disgrace to the human race.
Just to be sure, the “supernatural” here pertains to God?
Are you speaking of any evidence besides the Universe itself and its workings?
That may speak to the possibility of God but not necessarily to the actual reality of a God.
As for myself, I cannot be forced to take that leap from wondering and questioning and seeing possibility of ~~ to knowing or knowing definitively.
I suppose that I am just a disgrace to the human race. I can accept that.
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If you believe in the supernatural, it goes against your describing yourself as an agnostic.
As to the word god only being used to denote the supernatural, I guess you are not familiar with the many Emperors who named themselves god and their sons, sons of god.
In early days, god could not even be defined as anything other than a mystery. We should have stuck with that.
Stay in the real world. The supernatural one is for fools.
Regards
DL