Posted on 07/01/2002 3:05:21 PM PDT by Lennon
I could say "None of us have any way of knowing, if there isn't, so be it."
...and which one of us will be sorry if we are wrong.
I don't think they should have any effect on what you or anyone believes. And forcing people to NOT say "under God" by ruling it unconstitution is doing just that.
And the answer of course.. is NONE.
Which is why all of these rants regarding the Pledge of Allegiance miss the true point of the issue.
The issue isn't the Pledge. It is compulsory funded government education factories, which are inherently socialistic entities, which force people to pay for the advancement of ideas they may not share or approve of.
Get government out of the school business, and allow people to keep their own money, and purchase the education that THEY desire for their own children.
Do this, and the pledge issue (and countless other sources of animosity and strife over control) become irrelevant.
Wrong on both counts.
Buddha is not God, since true Buddism has no personal God. (most Buddists recognize God, but that's another story).Buddha is not a prophet, since by definition a prophet is one sent by God.
Buddha was a seeker of truth and unity with a higher power.
Jesus, on the other hand, is a prophet to Muslims, but the one and a half billion Christians consider him God incarnate.
Similarly, Zeus was a God, but later philosophers recognized a higher GOD. Vishnu is an immanation of God, and all the other millions of Hindu Gods are immanations of God.
a closer analogy, one used by many New Agers, is that Jesus is to God as Krishna is to God.
Go back to college and learn comparative religion before you discuss the subject.
While writing this, I was trying to come up with some good analogies because I knew people would rip them apart. You did miss one, however, Allah is actually the Arabic word for God, and not the name of God.
At any rate, the analogies are irrelevant if you understand that none of them equate God.
Oh, and BTW, I've never been to college so it would be a bit hard to go back, but I do know a bit about comparative religion. Oh my, someone actually learning out side of school...
While it's reasonable to state that we finite creatures do not have the independent capacity to reveal the infinite to ourselves, it is nonetheless entirely logical to presume that if a supreme being possessing intelligence and personality exists, such a being would not only be able to, but likely would, reveal himself to the lesser beings he has created. And that's exactly what many of us believe has happened as recorded in various religious writings. Then it becomes a matter of investigating specific incidents and determining whether the accounts are credible or not. In any case, it's an intellectually lazy argument to say "nobody can know," and sit back on one's ego.
And of course, aside from the matter of a personal god revealing himself, there is an abundance of inferrential evidence found in the complexity of natural processes which we observe. Chaos is not so clever. Those determined to inexplicably put man in the position of being the biggest and best intelligence in existence will jump through countless flaming logical hoops and circular scientific arguments in order to achieve that end, so any evidence of a greater being not only is, but MUST be dismissed.
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