Wade T. Smith wrote:
>
> >I'd like you to try to get through a day without
> >hope, belief, or faith.
>
> I do it constantly, but I'll fess up to a smidgen of hope now and then....
>
Pffffft! Wait a minute here... I doubt the fact that people have
invented these gods means that they exist just as much as you do.
However, trying to go through the day without faith is like trying to go
without air.
"Faith in God" and "Faith" are two separate things. By living in today's
industrialized society (I assume you do, since you're emailing us),
there are countless things that prove your faith with each and every
action. You have faith that your car can stop once it's going 60
mph/kph, for example (or that the bus you're riding in could likewise
stop). If you truly didn't live with faith in anything, you would be
impotent to exist in a society where a person cannot live a
self-sufficient lifestyle unaffected by the actions of others.
To steer this back toward the existance of God question-- religion has
taken many forms throughout the ages; in societies such as those of the
Native Americans, religion served to explain phenomena in nature. In
Western Civilizations, religion served to govern the masses and help
keep order. The two belief systems were radically different. Native
American beliefs are looked at as "folklore", while the Christian belief
system reads like law doctrine, complete with the John 3:16 loophole for
last-minute conversions.
Today's God is staring you in the face; it's sitting in your gas tank;
it's coming through your wall outlets. Science is our religion, and
technology our God. Our god manifests itself daily in everyday events,
just as god manifested itself in the other belief systems of other eras.
Just because we've substituted the TV schedule for the sunrise doesn't
mean we're any more superior to those other faiths.
Religion is a reaction to the environment. The reason the former
religions are falling apart in industrialized society is because the
belief structures aren't well suited for the environment (any more than
a roman priest's belief system would fit in with the Apache tribes).
A creation presupposes a creator-- even this idea is subject to
scepticism, but it's the closest thing in the category of religion which
we could call "fact". Everything else that we make up about this creator
is complete conjecture, and based on our experiences, environment, and
society.
We have faith in our technology-- 500 years from now, who's to say what
our God will be?
Tedlick Badkey
-- Wholesale Slaughter Enterprises http://slaughter.net mailto://tedlick@slaughter.net "70%, I can live with the smell..."