If you prayed to something you don't believe in will he listen?

[Slyhunter]

I admit it I'm weak. I want there to be someone who will cover for me when I screw up. I want someone to hold me up when I am weak. I want someone to fix me when I'm broken. I want someone to take charge of my life so I can spend it playing games and arguing politics while not having to worry about the damn bills.

Bible, Quran, Talmud, Mormon book, etc. Only one of them can be the book of truth. The others are full of lies and deceit. But which one? The logical answer is none of the above.

 

[TheOldSchool]

Say a prayer to anyone who might be listening. Who knows?

But trust in yourself.

 

[Slyhunter]

Say a prayer to anyone who might be listening. Who knows?

But trust in yourself.

I'm bi-polar, I trust I'll screw things up.
Every time I try to make things happen I fail. If I jump on someone else's band wagon and don't get greedy by staying on too long I succeed.
Every time I get a big head, someone hits me with a sledge hammer.
Every time I feel good, confident, strong, someone beats on me and knocks me down.
I don't trust myself. I've got a record of my bad choices.

 

[BULLDOG]

I admit it I'm weak. I want there to be someone who will cover for me when I screw up. I want someone to hold me up when I am weak. I want someone to fix me when I'm broken. I want someone to take charge of my life so I can spend it playing games and arguing politics while not having to worry about the damn bills.

Bible, Quran, Talmud, Mormon book, etc. Only one of them can be the book of truth. The others are full of lies and deceit. But which one? The logical answer is none of the above.

That pretty much depends on where you grew up.

 

[ding]

I'm bi-polar, I trust I'll screw things up.
Every time I try to make things happen I fail. If I jump on someone else's band wagon and don't get greedy by staying on too long I succeed.
Every time I get a big head, someone hits me with a sledge hammer.
Every time I feel good, confident, strong, someone beats on me and knocks me down.
I don't trust myself. I've got a record of my bad choices.

 

[ding]

I admit it I'm weak. I want there to be someone who will cover for me when I screw up. I want someone to hold me up when I am weak. I want someone to fix me when I'm broken. I want someone to take charge of my life so I can spend it playing games and arguing politics while not having to worry about the damn bills.

Bible, Quran, Talmud, Mormon book, etc. Only one of them can be the book of truth. The others are full of lies and deceit. But which one? The logical answer is none of the above.

Why is the logical answer be none of the above? They all seem to have the same central theme at their core.

 

[TheOldSchool]

Say a prayer to anyone who might be listening. Who knows?

But trust in yourself.

I'm bi-polar, I trust I'll screw things up.
Every time I try to make things happen I fail. If I jump on someone else's band wagon and don't get greedy by staying on too long I succeed.
Every time I get a big head, someone hits me with a sledge hammer.
Every time I feel good, confident, strong, someone beats on me and knocks me down.
I don't trust myself. I've got a record of my bad choices.

Everybody has a record of bad choices. Start listening to the people you trust, who are asking you to make the hardest choices. Spiritually, you won't find any answers. But maybe enough courage to help with those choices.

 

[ding]

But trust in yourself.

I wouldn't.


"...There are telltale symptoms by which history gives warning to a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, a decline of the arts or a lack of great statesmen. Indeed, sometimes the warnings are quite explicit and concrete. The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.

But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive. You can feel their pressure, yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?

How has this unfavorable relation of forces come about? How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present debility? Have there been fatal turns and losses of direction in its development? It does not seem so. The West kept advancing steadily in accordance with its proclaimed social intentions, hand in hand with a dazzling progress in technology. And all of a sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness.

This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very foundation of thought in modern times. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world in modern times. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was born in the Renaissance and has found political expression since the Age of Enlightenment. It became the basis for political and social doctrine and could be called rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the pro-claimed and practiced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of all.

The turn introduced by the Renaissance was probably inevitable historically: the Middle Ages had come to a natural end by exhaustion, having become an intolerable despotic repression of man's physical nature in favor of the spiritual one. But then we recoiled from the spirit and embraced all that is material, excessively and incommensurately. The humanistic way of thinking, which had proclaimed itself our guide, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man, nor did it see any task higher than the attainment of happiness on earth. It started modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend of worshiping man and his material needs.

Everything beyond physical well-being and the accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtle and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any higher meaning. Thus gaps were left open for evil, and its drafts blow freely today. Mere freedom per se does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and even adds a number of new ones.

And yet in early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted on the ground that man is God's creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding one thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual be granted boundless freedom with no purpose, simply for the satisfaction of his whims.

Subsequently, however, all such limitations were eroded everywhere in the West; a total emancipation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming ever more materialistic. The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even excess, but man's sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistic selfishness of the Western approach to the world has reached its peak and the world has found itself in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the celebrated technological achievements of progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the twentieth century's moral poverty, which no one could have imagined even as late as the nineteenth century.

As humanism in its development was becoming more and more materialistic, it also increasingly allowed concepts to be used first by socialism and then by communism, so that Karl Marx was able to say, in 1844, that "communism is naturalized humanism."

This statement has proved to be not entirely unreasonable. One does not see the same stones in the foundations of an eroded humanism and of any type of socialism: boundless materialism; freedom from religion and religious responsibility (which under Communist regimes attains the stage of antireligious dictatorship); concentration on social structures with an allegedly scientific approach. (This last is typical of both the Age of Enlightenment and of Marxism.) It is no accident that all of communism's rhetorical vows revolve around Man (with a capital M) and his earthly happiness. At first glance it seems an ugly parallel: common traits in the thinking and way of life of today's West and today's East? But such is the logic of materialistic development.

The interrelationship is such, moreover, that the current of materialism which is farthest to the left, and is hence the most consistent, always proves to be stronger, more attractive, and victorious. Humanism which has lost its Christian heritage cannot prevail in this competition. Thus during the past centuries and especially in recent decades, as the process became more acute, the alignment of forces was as follows: Liberalism was inevitably pushed aside by radicalism, radicalism had to surrender to socialism, and socialism could not stand up to communism.

The communist regime in the East could endure and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who (feeling the kinship!) refused to see communism's crimes, and when they no longer could do so, they tried to justify these crimes. The problem persists: In our Eastern countries, communism has suffered a complete ideological defeat; it is zero and less than zero. And yet Western intellectuals still look at it with considerable interest and empathy, and this is precisely what makes it so immensely difficult for the West to withstand the East.

I am not examining the case of a disaster brought on by a world war and the changes which it would produce in society. But as long as we wake up every morning under a peaceful sun, we must lead an everyday life. Yet there is a disaster which is already very much with us. I am referring to the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness.

It has made man the measure of all things on earth — imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now paying for the mistakes which were not properly appraised at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.

We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. It is trampled by the party mob in the East, by the commercial one in the West. This is the essence of the crisis: the split in the world is less terrifying than the similarity of the disease afflicting its main sections...."

Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn -- A World Split Apart — Commencement Address Delivered At Harvard University, June 8, 1978

 

[Pogo]

I admit it I'm weak. I want there to be someone who will cover for me when I screw up. I want someone to hold me up when I am weak. I want someone to fix me when I'm broken. I want someone to take charge of my life so I can spend it playing games and arguing politics while not having to worry about the damn bills.

Bible, Quran, Talmud, Mormon book, etc. Only one of them can be the book of truth. The others are full of lies and deceit. But which one? The logical answer is none of the above.

"Will he listen"? Of course not. By definition if he doesn't exist, "he" can't listen.
----- But that doesn't mean it won't work. If you create a thoughtform you send energy into the universal subconscious. That could have an effect regardless of "his" nonexistence.

Tangential thought, because this always occurs to me --- why is this entity a "he"? And who is the female that makes him a "him"?

 

[TheOldSchool]

I wouldn't.

Better than trusting a potentially non-existent being that will never answer you

 

[ding]

Tangential thought, because this always occurs to me --- why is this entity a "he"? And who is the female that makes him a "him"?

"God, in Himself, contains both masculine and feminine. If God possessed no feminine nature, then that would mean that women contained a nature that was completely outside of God. How could God create something which He Himself did not contain? Some might say, God doesn’t have an evil nature, but evil exists. No. Evil is merely the absence of good. Evil is not extant, just as cold is the mere absence of heat, and darkness is the mere absence of light. Femininity on the other hand is an extant nature. Femininity is NOT the absence of masculinity. Femininity is an existential reality unto itself, and therefore God contains it in Himself." paraphrased from Ann Barnhardt

The One About WHY PRIESTS CAN ONLY EVER BE MEN | Barnhardt

 

[ding]

I wouldn't.

Better than trusting a potentially non-existent being that will never answer you

He always answers us. You just don't understand His language. Despite what you believe His Law of Compensation never sleeps. It is always pruning us.

 

[TheOldSchool]

He always answers us.

Sure. He/She/It always answers, if you pretend nothing ever happening is somehow an answer.

 

[ding]

Say a prayer to anyone who might be listening. Who knows?

But trust in yourself.

I'm bi-polar, I trust I'll screw things up.
Every time I try to make things happen I fail. If I jump on someone else's band wagon and don't get greedy by staying on too long I succeed.
Every time I get a big head, someone hits me with a sledge hammer.
Every time I feel good, confident, strong, someone beats on me and knocks me down.
I don't trust myself. I've got a record of my bad choices.

Everybody has a record of bad choices. Start listening to the people you trust, who are asking you to make the hardest choices. Spiritually, you won't find any answers. But maybe enough courage to help with those choices.

When the Jews were defeated by the Babylonians, they didn't believe that the god of the Babylonians was greater than their God. They asked themselves what it was that God wanted them to learn. Bad choices are like that. Despite what you may believe there are moral laws just like there are physical laws. It is just that when one violates a moral law the consequences are not immediate like when one violates a physical law. But that doesn't mean there is not a moral law. God is a Master Craftsman, He will continually bring us back to our mistakes until we learn from them.

 

[ding]

He always answers us.

Sure. He/She/It always answers, if you pretend nothing ever happening is somehow an answer.

See post #14.

 

[Pogo]

Tangential thought, because this always occurs to me --- why is this entity a "he"? And who is the female that makes him a "him"?

"God, in Himself, contains both masculine and feminine. If God possessed no feminine nature, then that would mean that women contained a nature that was completely outside of God. How could God create something which He Himself did not contain? Some might say, God doesn’t have an evil nature, but evil exists. No. Evil is merely the absence of good. Evil is not extant, just as cold is the mere absence of heat, and darkness is the mere absence of light. Femininity on the other hand is an extant nature. Femininity is NOT the absence of masculinity. Femininity is an existential reality unto itself, and therefore God contains it in Himself." paraphrased from Ann Barnhardt

The One About WHY PRIESTS CAN ONLY EVER BE MEN | Barnhardt

God's a hermaphrodite?

Man, I thought the politics forum had some leaps............

 

[ding]

Tangential thought, because this always occurs to me --- why is this entity a "he"? And who is the female that makes him a "him"?

"God, in Himself, contains both masculine and feminine. If God possessed no feminine nature, then that would mean that women contained a nature that was completely outside of God. How could God create something which He Himself did not contain? Some might say, God doesn’t have an evil nature, but evil exists. No. Evil is merely the absence of good. Evil is not extant, just as cold is the mere absence of heat, and darkness is the mere absence of light. Femininity on the other hand is an extant nature. Femininity is NOT the absence of masculinity. Femininity is an existential reality unto itself, and therefore God contains it in Himself." paraphrased from Ann Barnhardt

The One About WHY PRIESTS CAN ONLY EVER BE MEN | Barnhardt

God's a hermaphrodite?

Man, I thought the politics forum had some leaps............

Laughing leads to crying.

 

[Pogo]

He always answers us.

Sure. He/She/It always answers, if you pretend nothing ever happening is somehow an answer.

Or if you pretend that everything that is happening was orchestrated by some giant invisible snail.

 

[TheOldSchool]

Say a prayer to anyone who might be listening. Who knows?

But trust in yourself.

I'm bi-polar, I trust I'll screw things up.
Every time I try to make things happen I fail. If I jump on someone else's band wagon and don't get greedy by staying on too long I succeed.
Every time I get a big head, someone hits me with a sledge hammer.
Every time I feel good, confident, strong, someone beats on me and knocks me down.
I don't trust myself. I've got a record of my bad choices.

Everybody has a record of bad choices. Start listening to the people you trust, who are asking you to make the hardest choices. Spiritually, you won't find any answers. But maybe enough courage to help with those choices.

When the Jews were defeated by the Babylonians, they didn't believe that the god of the Babylonians was greater than their God. They asked themselves what it was that God wanted them to learn. Bad choices are like that. Despite what you may believe there are moral laws just like there are physical laws. It is just that when one violates a moral law the consequences are not immediate like when one violates a physical law. But that doesn't mean there is not a moral law. God is a Master Craftsman, He will continually bring us back to our mistakes until we learn from them.

What did the Jews ask themselves when their population dwindled to just 14 million worldwide, surpassed by the religions of many other "Gods"?

 

[BreezeWood]

I wouldn't.

Better than trusting a potentially non-existent being that will never answer you

He always answers us. You just don't understand His language. Despite what you believe His Law of Compensation never sleeps. It is always pruning us.

.

He always answers us.

you've become plural, or more that one person hears the same voice.

do they ever entertain an audience than just one person ...