Jonathan H. B. Lobl

I don't suggest it. The world might not end. Then what?

Thank you.

At the risk of coming off as a pig -- I've had the experience of attending church services, looking up at the pastor in the pulpit, and being stunned by her beauty. No, I didn't say anything.

The Natural Order is real. Nature is real. The Universe is real. Sky Daddy? Not so much. We are talking about what can be proven. It makes a difference which god we are looking for. The questions that we ask, matter to the answers that we find.

If new information becomes available, I am ready to reevaluate. In the meantime, I will draw my tentative conclusions, on the information which is available. Not on the hypothetical information which might become available.

A real scientist is always ready to say, that he doesn't understand the results of an experiment. This is how science advances. Real scientists enjoy results that were not expected.

It was Dan who said "need".

I think that there are enough real things to be afraid of, without inventing them.

The Universe is a layered mystery. It does hurt my head. Still, fascinating.

Feel free to correct me. I thought that you were a Pantheist. Very different from a Monotheist. That means that your God is part of the Natural Order -- while the God of Monotheism is Supernatural.

To my understanding -- that's all it is. My understanding -- Loki personifies the Chaos of entropy. His title is "mischief maker". He spreads disorder. The mighty Thor personifies a different type of chaos. He is the chaos of storms and battle. Their stories tell us how the different types of chaos work together. In one story, Loki helps the Storm Giants steal Thor's Hammer. In the next story, Loki helps Thor steal his Hammer back -- in a way that humiliates Thor in the process. The old gods are complicated. Much more so than they are generally understood.

For me, one of the oddest parts of the Bible is the command to forget Amalek. In current idiom -- "Remember to forget Amalek". Of course, when people hear this for the first time, they ask -- "Who's Amalek?". But for the command to forget him; Amalek would have been forgotten thousands of years ago. Deut. 25: 19 19 "Therefore it shall be, when the Lord thy God hath given thee rest from all thine enemies round about, in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee for an inheritance to possess it, that thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget it." It seems that there is more than one way to leave a legacy.

The need for something to be true -- does not mean that it is true. Some needs are not met.

I have had some time to think about this. Real things are knowable by objective means. Imaginary things are not knowable by objective means.

Long term, we are all forgotten. Think of all the animals you ever knew. Dogs and cats and everything else. Who remembers them? Such is life.

It's a thought. On a more practical note -- If God is hiding, the result is the same as God not existing. The God that you're considering is the same trickster God -- that the Young Earth Creationists worship. The world was created 6,000 years ago, with false evidence to make it seem billions of years old. It sounds silly when they say it. I don't want to emulate that kind of thinking. I also prefer not to make excuses, for the total lack of evidence, for God's existence. I leave that sort of task for the apologists.

True enough. Objective knowing about God is not possible. At least, not in the way we that know that water is H2O. Whether you know anything about water or not, water is knowable. That is the problem. That brings us back to unknowable. The kind of subjective knowing that you're describing is not useful. Perhaps inspired, but not useful.

Yes. Which goes to my point. What is legacy and what is living on? The theme of this thread.

True enough. But is that legacy? Is that living on?

It will be a long time before the world forgets Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao Tze Dong, etc. I'm sorry. The nasty memories also endure. Maybe better than the good ones. For instance, Fleming who discovered Penicilin. A great man, but what else do you know about him? How vivid is he in your imagination? How vivid in your mind is Louis Pasteur, the great chemist who identified the bacterium responsible for Anthrax? Do you know anything about Dolores Krieger?

Most of the time, people are not looking for deep meaningful connections. Just off the top of my head -- a bus, movie theater, locker room, ........... It's not that we are avoiding Human contact. Most of the time we are quietly going about our business.

Are you suggesting that God is Knowable? Without fraud or illusion? The world's best kept secret? I'm going with probability. If such proof existed, someone would have revealed it by now. Or do you really think that the God believing world is HIDING evidence? Maybe you think it's a closely guarded secret -- hidden away by a super secret society? Or a crazy old hermit? What are the odds that such explosive information is being hidden? They would be rubbing our faces in it -- if it existed.

It's a philosophic point. That some things are both unknown and unknowable. Mostly God. If God's existence is unknowable, then nobody knows whether or not God exists.

Your meaning is more clear. No. If our good deeds live on after us -- then so do our bad deeds. For much the same reason. Thoughtless acts of mindless cruelty and indifference have their own causal chains.