Believing Outside the Box

this is Newsweek, isnt it? a world-wide website! i didnt know i was on air. it was just a section in washingtonpost, for i come daily! i dont watch the box but listen to radio. am i believing out of television?

the CAndidate French Citizen in Spanish Colombia, for six years, sometimes chained onto a tree for 24 hours one whole day, reminded me St Augustine of Trees.

ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/augustine.html

Algeria, France, VAtican, Christropher Columbus, Rome. are the practises in Mexico from St Augustine?

The religious acquire their beliefs in the environment they grow up in.
Once acquired, it's sustained by groupthink and the comfort it affords;
especially regarding fear of death and dying. Believers of most faiths
expect everlasting life.
That the fear of death is a reason why believers believe is clear from
their claim that there are no atheists in foxholes. It says 'when you're
scared enough you'll believe,' which says that religious folk cling to
their faith out of fear of death, and that they see atheists as stupid fools
for pretending to be brave enough not to need God or religion.
To be 'god-fearing' is held to be virtuous, when it's just as irrational as being scared of ghosts.
I am not afraid of being dead one day. I was dead for billions of years before I was born,and it didn't bother me at all. So I say to believers, give up your fear. You have nothing to be afraid of. Give up your childish notions of gods and angels etcetra. Death is as natural as birth; and is our inevitable end, so you might as well get used to it. So stop panicking and praying to invisable skygods. There is nobody up there. Just enjoy life and be nice to people.

Gods are in the mind, not in the sky.

Atheists do not believe in a universal spirit. Atheists are the folks who don't believe in anything supernatural; that includes gods.

I think you supernaturalists who believe in gods and devils and things are bothered by atheists, because they stand outside the groupthink and therefore threaten it. That's why so many millions have been tortured and murdered over the centuries for not believing in what they were supposed to believe. Not for fun were they burnt and drowned during the Inquisition, but to preserve the sacred groupthink.

Today Religions no longer have that kind of power. If they did I am sure they would use it with all the savagery of ancient times. Out would come the thumb screws, and the knives to urge repentence on atheists, or death.

Instead they try now to redefine atheists, Believers are being told that there are no real atheists, because they pray too; and, by extension, praying is Good (because there really is a god).

What hooey! Only fools pray. Only the deluded and the indoctrinated pray.
The ones who believe there is no one to pray to,and therefore do not pray, are known as atheists. If they pray they are not atheists, but fools.

You probably don't have much to support, "Monotheism appeared out of nowhere more than 600 years before the birth of Christ" and neither do those from whom you got it.

I expect the little Zuni children are just as confused when they see human sacrifice where the human sacrificed to God is God's son. I wonder how many of them worry their parents will sacrifice them should a volcano erupt or something. The notion that monotheism dates 600BCE is equally ridiculous as sacrificing God to God unless there is more than one God.

The God of monotheism is a man, the son of God. The father of the son of God is the son of God, except for the first God who was the son of god. It's entirely too simple a process for complex thinkers educated in misunderstandings to carry it back to a first son of God and find out which god fathered the first son of god. It's no more ridiculous than atheists believing in God.

Where would we be if there was more than one God? The answer of course is at war for God is a man holding the office of God and not a supernatural being. God is an office like president and there can be but one of them at a time. When a second appears like Jefferson Davis appeared around 1861 there's war.

There can be but one God while there are many gods. God has the gods on His side else the war is lost. The God that loses the war shall be cast into hell and known as a Devil along with all who follow the would be God. The losing God is a Devil while His followers are devils. Strange how all that happens in the natural world seems to have been duplicated by invisible beings in the supernatural world.

There's still that nagging aggravating question. If angels can't be shot why do they have shields?

Gods are men who rely on gods to win wars with competing Gods. Trinity God becomes perfectly clear when that truth is finally understood. Today the trinity is -Billy God the father, Franklin God the son and the holy spirit gods with whom they communicate so they can tell us what God wants.

Think about it. What God or god wants is the question. What God wanted and got for His efforts telling us what god wants is a mansion in the smokey mountains where He was recently visited by candidate McCain. Spelled with the upper case G, God is a man while with the small g, god is a supernatural being.

Where one finds money one will find God. Scum always form on the top of the gravy. I wonder if the Zuni children ever pray to Jesus that their gold robbed by the Conquistadors and now in the possession of the pope will be returned to them.

Let's see. Popes are men in contact with God, spelled with a cap G because one member of the three divine persons was a man named Jesus. Some say that Jesus was a son of God while other say He was not. There were many sons of God. How could Jesus have been born the son of God and not be God? Only the firstborn son of God is God. Did Jesus have an older brother?

yesterday, an authority drove our attention to Kamchatya the Russian Coast State in PAsific Ocean, the land of blue whales and brown bears, 7.5 magnitude, of throat, 648 kms down the surface, my primary school record number.

Lord in England have asked the laws of islam integrated into laws of Kingdom for justice to be fair, yes this is humanity. every man of heart would ask and offer this.

now the further step we may take is to exhibit the linguistics for comprehension and to keep the science and wisdom public.

any muslim, because Ahmet prophet was son of Abraham, educated by a Christian teacher, Son of Uncle of His life-long Wife, may go to China to have the wisdom

may read the Bible, may read the Old Testament, may educate their children with the love of Elders, Saints

Quran and Islam shall be cleaned from war-fare measures that have been invented to educate and to keep the folks in army. they shall be cleaned according to Feng Shui.

if Iraqians knew the language of USA, there would not be any death, and sure there shall be less every day, as the wisdom spreads wider and wider into every cell of humanity on Earth.

i shall present to You with Feng Shui, President Bush
i had with computer science to His Holiness Pope Benedictus

Iran does not have any wisdom of Egypt
any nation from Asia should meet Egypt to be civil, to comprehend

at first i was with Feng Shui and ARchangel Raphael,
but i was confused with mythology of Northern Iraq Summerians
and suffered much, there was water in my ears

every counsellor, like a psychiatrist, or Chinese
knows the dynamics of language of nature and human.

every counsellor, first talks to the owners
learns the history of the house, from the land to architect and workers.

then counsellor collects every bit of personal life treasures
like a big picture, learns how the goods in the hoıuse have been attained
counsellor teaches at first what he does, and explains

in this HAll of Mars, i shall talk with MArshall
at first, from the movies as far as i watched, Americans were insane
they were talking about a heaven that was nowhere

then i learned from Bible and Old Testament
millons of people were martyrdom in this land of heaven,
from Greece Australia England Canada France Germany
Russia Turks Kurts Turkmen Mongolians Bulgaria Israel Summeria Hittitians.

oh i said, they shall be in heaven, and others shall come here
allright, i said, count me in,
either in Hell or Williams Bush will, i shall be a doctor with medicine.

in Bursa is astronomy, Egypt, mathematics
in Aydin is wisdom, science, logarithm

every counsellor first informs, educates, protects the owner of the house
as the house is healed so are the inhabitants and dwellers, and the body as a house

FEng SHui is Wind and WAter, Inspiration and Emotions
Feng SHui is the tiniest instrument for the heaven that Americans are wise of.

in way Sion, as it is in Psalms, that Condaliza Rice is proud of, there must be education,
there must be protection, there must be professional comprehension.

but first there must be a global education, at first for Asians with Egypt and China.
this is Hall of MArs, this is MArshall, from Generals to every Element of Union and Community.

this morning there was a classical music, yesterday is the day that Bonapart was in Austria, from Beethoven Philadelia and Verdi of Hope of Slaves

this is why i write. it is not an invasion, it is health, of house and for tranquility.

It has been well said that one should not be so open minded that one's brains fall out. This is a good admonition to those who, for example, pusillanimously declare themselves agnostics when the only rational alternative to belief in the existence of supernatural beings can be atheism.

This is because the basis of belief in the existence and gods and goddesses is no different from that for belief in pixies, namely legend and credulity; and the grounds for entertaining the thought that something might exist (footprints, fur snagged on fences, grunting in the night, actually seeing the creature in question bounding up a hillside) require much better and more consistent supports than the pre-scientific fictions invented by our ancestors to explain what they did not understand.

People forget how strong the belief in the Little People was until quite recently - they were a feature of things well into Victorian times and even later. They were blamed for much, such as missing pins and curdled milk, the lights seen on the marshes,and various aches and twinges suffered by old ladies. As reason diffused its happy light over the Western hemisphere, courtesy of the growth of literacy in those same times, belief in pixies and their ilk faded.

But superstition has strong talons; a lady of Cork, literate and generally sensible, was once asked whether she believed in leprechauns, and replied, "I do not, but they are there anyway," thus beautifully capturing the spirit of agnosticism in all its faint-hearted fence-sitting tendentiousness; for it is premised on the fact that since no one has proved that X does not exist, X might exist, as if this in any way followed, and as if responsible and disciplined intellectual endeavor does not show the fallacy of thinking that, for example, the fact that no one has proved the non-existence of Tolkein's Hobbits means that they therefore might exist in some Middle Earth after all.

Still: it remains important to be open-minded, though with a readiness to subject what is offered for our intellectual assent to stringent evaluation by the light of probability and experience. These two latter are indispensable servants of thought. They explain the difference between the assiduity with which some seek the Loch Ness Monster, while no such expense of cameras and microphones, boats and planes, bearded researchers and photojournalists has ever clustered around the possibility that a woodland grove might be the scene of moonlit pixie parties. For the idea of large marine beasts has a plausibility endowed by whales and manatees, while the idea of antique such beasts has its plausibility from sharks and coelacanths, both of them survivors from hideous depths of zoological time.

Oddly, it is the credulous who are the least open-minded. They accept dogma, and dogma closes - even indeed punishes - enquiry thereafter.
Voltaire says that he honors the man who seeks truth, but despises the man who claims to have found it.
The saying touches the essence of the difference exceedingly well, and should be the motto of anyone who aspires to intellectual honesty.

An atheist who prays is not an atheist.
Atheists don't believe in gods, or anything supernatural, and think that praying is very silly because there's nobody up there to take your call.

I am an atheist and have atheist friends; we giggle at the idiocy of prayer and belief in superstitious mumbo jumbo.

An atheist who prays makes as much sense as a vegetarian who eats meat. The behavior cancels out the label.

Quite my opinion too. If there is any good to come out of the breaking down of narrow, competitive religious dogma, it is that all paths lead to the same end...some overriding Purpose to life. Call it what you will, it is the Prinicple upon which all life rests. Better to be open to new perspectives, and perhaps not miss the return of the Teacher expected by all major traditions. Many now say this
Teacher has already come, and that His presence in the world increases the energy of Love in the world...bringing all people together whether they are comfortable with that or not.
http://www.share-international.org

Smile, 3 separate Gods? Sorry, no. Three persons, one God. Now, the LDS thinks differently about this, but nearly all Christian adherents believe there is only one God. As do Muslims and Jews. The God of Abraham is one.

That the pueblos of NM converted to Christianity and maintained their customary kiva worship demonstrated that there was no real conflict between the Great Spirit whom the native Americans worshiped and the Christian God. Native Americans treatment of their dead was also strikingly similar to the respect for the dead that Christian Catholics and many other mainline Christian religions maintain--i.e., the "Communion of Saints."

The movement in the last third of the 20th century to shuck hundreds of years of Christian belief among the Pueblos gained somewhat of a foothold, but the truth is that once God adds a people to those he has chosen, he does not take back that grace. So despite some anthropologists' full-court press to "restore" native beliefs, an honest look at Pueblo worship practices demonstrates that their faith remains strong--and usually among the most humble (which is not to say weak or ignorant) ones.

You left this out:

Christianity is itself a belive in polytheism, because it it based on a belief in 3 separate Gods -- the Trinity.

Jesus is less powerful that the "Father" God, because (as one example) he thought the end of the world would be during his term on earth....

But yes, the Catholics also added on belief in saints which operate very much like a pantheon of lesser gods and goddesses from the pagans....

I am an atheist and do not believe in a universal spirit. Like other atheists I don't believe in anything supernatural, if that describes the 'universal spirit' that you refer to.

The atheist credo is that there are no gods of any kind.