I Don't Believe

[skepticSikh]

Observe that you made an absolute statement. If nobody can understand god, then even the gurus never understood god.

Use your words carefully...i doubt you ever meant that...

[Balwinder Singh]

I don’t think any of us truly believe, if we did we wouldn’t be here. We try to understand and make sense of it all. The fact that you think about it and are in an undecided state, or a state of confusion implies an unsettled mind, which is the best thing for those you truly want to know because you have not settled for what you have been programmed for, this is great. :nihungsmile:

On very similar lines Galib said a beautiful sher:

"Tere vadhee (promise) pe jiyee hum, to yeh jaan jhhooth(lie) jana,

ke khushi se mar na jaate agar eetbaar hota"

You are very right when you say "which is the best thing for those you truly want to know because you have not settled for what you have been programmed for, this is great "

I liked your post.

[Balwinder Singh]

Observe that you made an absolute statement. If nobody can understand god, then even the gurus never understood god.

Use your words carefully...i doubt you ever meant that...

If one can understand God then God is smaller than him/her as then God can be contained in his/her mind.....

You can only experience God....i think

[skepticSikh]

there are true believers; blind, hapless, illogical, sometimes poetic...

then, there are skeptics; counterintuitive, rational, independent, sometimes egotistical...

Nobody's right. It's your choice to believe or to try and find it out. In the end, we will never know...

[Balwinder Singh]

there are true believers; blind, hapless, illogical, sometimes poetic...

then, there are skeptics; counterintuitive, rational, independent, sometimes egotistical...

Nobody's right.

What is your defination of being "right"?

It's your choice to believe or to try and find it out. In the end, we will never know...

Dont give up before starting the journey. There must be something that the blessed few like Guru Nanak, Kabir, Jesus, Gautam Budha, Mahaveer found. They also told the whole humanity to search for that eternal bliss....there must be "something" my friend....and its in you.

[skepticSikh]

that "something" is satisfaction and contentment.

What i mean by right is knowing the objective truth. And there's no question about quitting here; even if we cannot know everything, we will be curious to the end, won't we? So we will always journey. And the journey, supposedly, ends with contentment, which you can sidestep and find in religion....

[Guest Akirtghan]

skepticSikh, did you read this before? :D

The difference is that I understand what air is....cos I will say things like the air smells good/bad...but with God I don't have that...I don't know what God is in the first place...

double dilemma

the only way you know what air is because you have experienced it. the concept of god, is also an experience, and the irony is that one can only experience it, it cannot be showed by another.

if you don't believe, it means you haven't experienced it. if you haven't experienced, you don't believe. see where this going.....

[kullykhalsa]

well said, god cannot be described( as there are no words to describe him), he cannot be contained within your mind, god is everything,everyone,everywhere, all around you is god, it would be called faith if it was proven by science, i would say just go and keep learning, questioning god etc will never get you anywhere!

bhul chuk maf :D

[skepticSikh]

i did read that, but do you know that there actually is a part of the brain that controls our "out of body" experiences? Scientists have actually been able to stimulate that region and artificially induce an out of body experience. and do you know that there's even another part that is the "religious" part, so to speak, that makes us want to be loyal? It probably made evolutionary sense to have it, because it meant that the old tribes were unified in their beliefs and felt one.

don't believe me?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-body_e...le_explanations

Olaf Blanke studies

There is now an ongoing research project into the neuroscience of OBEs being undertaken by Olaf Blanke in Switzerland[3]. This line of research acknowledges the experiences as reported by the subjects as valid. That is, people really do feel as if they have left their body. However, researchers have found that it is possible to reliably elicit such experiences by stimulating regions of the brain called the right temporal-parietal junction (TPJ; a region where the temporal lobe and parietal lobe of the brain come together). Blanke and his collaborators in Switzerland have explored the neural basis of OBEs by showing that they are reliably associated with lesions in the right TPJ region[4] and that they can be reliably elicited with electrical stimulation of this region in a patient with epilepsy.[5] These elicited experiences may include perceptions of transformations of the patient's arm and legs (complex somatosensory responses) and whole-body displacements (vestibular responses), all of which are commonly reported in OBEs.[citation needed]

and here's a good explanation from a scientific point of view of our biological need for religion:

Dr. de Waal, who is director of the Living Links Center at Emory University, argues that all social animals have had to constrain or alter their behavior in various ways for group living to be worthwhile. These constraints, evident in monkeys and even more so in chimpanzees, are part of human inheritance, too, and in his view form the set of behaviors from which human morality has been shaped.

Many philosophers find it hard to think of animals as moral beings, and indeed Dr. de Waal does not contend that even chimpanzees possess morality. But he argues that human morality would be impossible without certain emotional building blocks that are clearly at work in chimp and monkey societies.

Dr. de Waal’s views are based on years of observing nonhuman primates, starting with work on aggression in the 1960s. He noticed then that after fights between two combatants, other chimpanzees would console the loser. But he was waylaid in battles with psychologists over imputing emotional states to animals, and it took him 20 years to come back to the subject.

He found that consolation was universal among the great apes but generally absent from monkeys — among macaques, mothers will not even reassure an injured infant. To console another, Dr. de Waal argues, requires empathy and a level of self-awareness that only apes and humans seem to possess. And consideration of empathy quickly led him to explore the conditions for morality.

Though human morality may end in notions of rights and justice and fine ethical distinctions, it begins, Dr. de Waal says, in concern for others and the understanding of social rules as to how they should be treated. At this lower level, primatologists have shown, there is what they consider to be a sizable overlap between the behavior of people and other social primates.

Social living requires empathy, which is especially evident in chimpanzees, as well as ways of bringing internal hostilities to an end. Every species of ape and monkey has its own protocol for reconciliation after fights, Dr. de Waal has found. If two males fail to make up, female chimpanzees will often bring the rivals together, as if sensing that discord makes their community worse off and more vulnerable to attack by neighbors. Or they will head off a fight by taking stones out of the males’ hands.

Dr. de Waal believes that these actions are undertaken for the greater good of the community, as distinct from person-to-person relationships, and are a significant precursor of morality in human societies.

Dr. de Waal sees human morality as having grown out of primate sociality, but with two extra levels of sophistication. People enforce their society’s moral codes much more rigorously with rewards, punishments and reputation building. They also apply a degree of judgment and reason, for which there are no parallels in animals.

Religion can be seen as another special ingredient of human societies, though one that emerged thousands of years after morality, in Dr. de Waal’s view. There are clear precursors of morality in nonhuman primates, but no precursors of religion. So it seems reasonable to assume that as humans evolved away from chimps, morality emerged first, followed by religion. “I look at religions as recent additions,” he said. “Their function may have to do with social life, and enforcement of rules and giving a narrative to them, which is what religions really do.

however, i do not say that u shouldn't believe in god. I think that if it makes us moral, religion is innocuous.

[Balwinder Singh]

that "something" is satisfaction and contentment.

Thats what everybdy is looking for. "Satisfaction" or "tripti" as some people say. Its hard to get my friend. Its better search for yourself now and what is your purpose of life. Dont get satisfied by the answers by others (relegious people) ...search yourself....find yourself. Cuz ur gyan will be yours....it will not be borrowed by the "others".....it wont be like "quoting" gurbani again and again...it will be like understaing gurbani in your own light.....its very blisful.

What i mean by right is knowing the objective truth. And there's no question about quitting here; even if we cannot know everything, we will be curious to the end, won't we? So we will always journey. And the journey, supposedly, ends with contentment, which you can sidestep and find in religion....

The curiousity you are talking about is the beauty of this path....of this journey. Everything is so strange...so fresh.... thats the beauty of this journey.

Religion doesn't give contentment....do you think all relegious people are content?