Death is the end?

Discussion in 'Faith, Devotion & Formation' started by Aidan, Mar 30, 2018.

  1. Aidan

    Aidan Well-Known Member

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    Today , and not for the first time., I was overcome by a fear , what if atheists are right and there is no God or afterlife ? What do you do to overcome such doubts? What makes you believe in God and the afterlife?
     
  2. anglican74

    anglican74 Well-Known Member Anglican

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    Does it have to do with the recent crises coming out of the Vatican?
    I have known some hardcore Roman catholics who concluded that if Pope Francis disproves Catholicism, then it must mean that the Sacred Scriptures weren't valid after all
     
  3. PotterMcKinney

    PotterMcKinney Active Member Typist Anglican

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    I believe Jesus lived, lives now, and taught the resurrection of the dead. If there is no such thing, well, I guess I won't care much. But as surely as I look to Christ and his teachings, I believe just as surely in the resurrection he promised.
     
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  4. Aidan

    Aidan Well-Known Member

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    No. Thankfully the pope is neither the church nor the faith. He may walk in the shoes of the fisherman today but he is far from being the first to do so and hopefully not the last.
     
  5. Anglican04

    Anglican04 Active Member Anglican

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    Death is not the end, it is the door to eternal life. Will we really accept the belief that we have no created and definite purpose in life? That we may be lawless without consequence? Is it truly a wise decision to do get as many worldly pleasures as we can, get as much money, fame, partners, vacations, and after all that we just die? After all, that's atheist theology 101.

    The godless atheists claim their beliefs come from solely science, yet evolution has no scientific proof, nor a logical explanation. Let us remember it is they, who teach that nothing comes from nothing.
     
  6. peter

    peter Active Member

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    For my money, the existence of God can be proved by simple logic. Descartes wrote "I think therefore I am". Well if I know I exist, then I know I was created. And if I was created, then so was everyone else. And if everyone was created, someone did the creating. Was all this made by blond chance? I don't believe that for a moment. There is a God because we all exist to consider the question!
     
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  7. Aidan

    Aidan Well-Known Member

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    I like your ontological argument friend
     
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  8. PotterMcKinney

    PotterMcKinney Active Member Typist Anglican

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    Somehow, this simple explanation is better than any argument Descartes gives in the Meditations! i just never liked it I guess :D
     
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  9. Visita

    Visita New Member

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    I believe in God because the existence of God is philosophically compelling, even if not provable. We know that nonmaterial things exist. The laws of mathematics are not just inventions of humans, but perfect and eternal. We can contemplate them and make crude representations of them in the physical world, but the laws themselves are not physical, not subject to decay or error, not limited to any time or place. They seem to come from a higher realm of existence.

    Consciousness and qualia are also nonmaterial. They seem to arise from physical interactions in neural tissue, but are themselves not physical, not made of particles or waves. I suspect they are also a higher order of existence, and our nervous tissue and sensory organs only represent this higher order. (Indeed, different arrangements of nervous tissue seem to create different levels of consciousness.) If our consciousness is the representation of something else, an image you might say, what is it an image of? Is there a perfect, eternal consciousness, not subject to decay or error, not limited to any time or place? I think so. We see the concept of the imago Dei all the way back in Genesis 1, and I think it's still useful.

    Is there any reason to suspect this eternal consciousness, of which we are images, is the God of the Bible? Right off the top of my head, and this is relevant to your inquiry, I think of 1 John 4:7. God is love. I don't think nail-me-to-a-cross love can be explained by evolutionary psychology. I think it's points to God. Love is also inherent in the idea of the Trinity and the creation of the universe. So we've got the idea of an eternal consciousness, unbound by time or place, completely aware of everything, and one of its properties is love. To me, that's a pretty compelling idea.

    As for the afterlife, I don't fret about it much. Working out the logistics of it can be fun, but it's just speculation. Eternal unbound love is waiting for us.
     
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