Why This Belief?

I would be very surprised if it was a majority let alone a vast majority that have sudden deep conversions. I think certain sects that emphasize emotions create "revival" atmospheres which lend themselves to strong experiences in the same way voodoo or any emotional cult does things. However I suspect most theists were simply raised up and their faiths developed over time. Catholics tend to be born rather than converted for example.lfen

Buddhism also deals with the infinite and eternal and the Buddha refused to say speak about whether a creator deity existed or not. Theism though very popular is not the only approach to these matters and though for centuries Buddhism was only in the east it is growing now in the European west by which I include the Americas.lfen

meaning? are you talking about language? symbolic systems? consciousness?If one is cryptic enough they become irrefutable simply because no one has a clue as to what they are talking about! You know, the sound of one hand clapping.lfen

Brian,Buddha founded a religion on an utterly different basis than the Abrahamic religions. I agree with you that he was in no sense a prophet. The core of his teachings were not revelations either but what he claimed he had personally learned and experienced and were things one could verify for one's self.I'm wondering though where you get that he taught there was no God? I'm going to have to give up my readings on the mythicist position on Jesus and go back to reading about Buddhism but it's my recall that Buddha refused to discuss or comment of the existence or non existence of a deity because he said it wasn't useful in the task of freeing oneself from suffering. I will admit, particularly to a Christian, that amounts to teaching there is no God, but it's one of the reasons I so admire the Buddha and think it one of the best religions in the world.Although I think the Abrahamic religions have all demonstrated strong tendenies to violence and I am frequently repelled by them on that basis alone I think I may admit to a greater exent than I've seen you do that they also have done good things, it's just that a very high price is paid for those goods things. Still I love the music of J.S. Bach and authentic gospel music.It may be not that God is evil or cruel, but that the incarnate aspect just loves good stories and good stories need conflict, antagonists, etc.lfen

I agree. I also agree that we as humans never "find" the theory of evolution, it "finds" us and so on and so forth. Yep. All we do is watch and see how it plays out lfen

What is the supernatural? Like people claiming to see ghosts, or see the future?I don't know of anything in the universe that is not "natural".lfen

You heard voices and the person you heard them coming from says that they didn't hear anything?This is an non ordinary, perhaps extra ordinary experience for you. I think that you extrapolate that to say it's not natural hence supernatural. But it's your brain that heard this and as voices. There are all kinds of non ordinary brain functions with NATURAL explanations for them.My mother told of being really angry once at all these little people that were running around in her car. Demons? You decide. She got home and had a fever of around 104 and was subsequently hospitalized with pnumonia. When her fever went away so did the visions.I'm not saying you had a fever. But the old explanation of supernatural was made before people knew anything about brain function. Our brains our very complex and occasionally do extrordinary things. Someone like Pat Robertson may or may not hear the Lord talking to them. Whether Pat actually hears voices or not he has discovered that merely claiming this experience is of great benefit to him. People pledge him money over the phone.We all get hunchs and sometimes they are right. It is also possible there are forms of communication that we yet barely understand but our lack of understanding doesn't make them supernatural, just unknown. Like the reports of the elephants that headed for high ground before the sightings of the tsunami.I understand that 2000 years ago supernatural was state of art understanding but I'm getting frustrated that you and others on this forum for emotional reasons cling to the warm fuzzyness of prescientific understanding. I feel the appeal also but what I won't do is limit my thinking and understanding of science to accomodate a desire to believe some tradition that appeals to me. I think one can believe something and realize that we believe it because it appeals to an emotional part of us without thinking that therefore that belief is true.lfen

A very dim one, dimmer than your bell it seems. I can't help anymore than saying, yeah, I might have come across that, I just can't remember.As a bonus I'll recount the derivation of my nickname. I like short easy to type nicks. For a few years I used "nelf" and then one day I tried to register at a site only to discover they had a nelf, so spelling nelf backwards and I was in like "flen". I was flen only a shortwhile when I found a site that already had a flen, so I swapped the first to letters and became "lfen". I've yet to come across another lfen. Try pronouncing it in a vaguely French way as L'fen. of course it's meaningless so a majority of people reading read a more meaningful ifen. Which I don't mind, but when you shortened the nick to If, which is okay I thought maybe I'd explain. I use lowercase "L" to avoid the shiftkey is all.lfen aka ifen

I think Meister Eckert got at a distinction between the manifest deity and the unmanifest deity that might correspond to the difference between Brahman who is the sole source and reality of all the forms He manifests one of which is the manifest deity Brahma.Once again my life is getting busier and I'm getting worn down by the simplistic insisting of the fundamentalists that only their way is right all others being demonic deceptions including all the science that can't find any evidence for demons which are great literary devices but extremely poor explanatory models. (Well, excepting that most fundamentalist tend to think dramatic literary devices are the best explanatory models and perhaps that is why they are fundamentalist and not scientists or philosophers?) So I'm not going to going into much detail at this point. Perhaps a bit later this summer if and when things slow down a bit.lfen aka ifen