Can I ask this please to any theist, I am not really interested in atheists responses.

What do you believe is the point in God, what is his purpose for existing?

thanks.

Mortal man does not have the answer.

I don't know the answer to that question but I think people focus so keenly on the salvation question that they overlook we could be in only one stage (or step one) of his intended creation. I wouldn't be surprised if there are multiples steps in his creation but we have to focus on this one. For all we know he could be creating higher and higher levels of worlds. As we currently are and/or the next world might not even be his piece de resistance.

Life is a journey to be lived.... not a problem to be solved.

That is more interesting.

Thanks for the responses.

It's just that I am finding it difficult to find any purpose or meaning in my own life when I do not know the ultimate purpose of God's. I can quite happily just live my life without questioning it but what really is the point?

What ultimately is the point in doing God's work?
What is the point in going to heaven?
What is the point of helping others?

You can say for my own self being, I do naturally actively help others it's at the very heart of my personality but for what purpose really?

What is the point in being happy in myself?
What is the point in being happy at all?
What is the point in others being happy?
What is the point in doing good?
What is the point in love?
What is the point of being alive?
What is the point of anybody being alive?

These are all questions that I am searching an answer for. I will naturally always continue to believe and do good regardless but is it actually of any significance really or is it just an evolutionary characteristic which means by doing good there is a higher probability of the human species to exist?

Why do you care about God then?

Just had a thought pop into my head. What if it is all true, and there is a God, and he only wants people who blindly obey him, and are willing to do anything for him and worship him. And he's really not interested in anyone who isn't willing to submit 100% to him.

But what if heaven is not paradise. What if this earth is really bootcamp, and the successful candidates go to heaven for further training, to be inserted as frontline soldiers in some cosmic war God is fighting. He needs mindless devoted soldiers who will follow his every order in the great battle going on in the ether?

Food for thought...

In addition to spiritual benefits you do receive a personality integration benefit from developing your spiritual awareness its just not "copasetic" to talk about it because you run into dogma on all sides. But God wants you to experience the personal integration as well as the spiritual one or else why make it available to you.

I can't summarize it all at this point but Curt Thompson's Anatomy of the Soul is a good place to start.

A few quotes from his book:

"We live in a world that values knowing things."

"Knowing...brings power and influence. It is an activity that involves a primary subject (or person) thinking, feeling, or acting while separated from the idea, object, or person toward which his or her thoughts, feelings or actions are directed. This type of knowing is not so bad for facts. Not so good for people."


"From the emergence of the Enlightenment in the seventeenth century through the mid-twentieth century, "knowing things" became prized above all else. But not just any way of knowing. We have mostly valued knowing facts, knowing the "truth" and knowing that we are right."

"The left hemisphere (Thompson is speaking about the brain) is all about the past and future. It tends to systematically take in all the data that the right hemisphere is transponding to it through the corpus callosum and linearly, logically compare that to what is stored in its neurobiological history. Its focus is on "me" as distinct from the rest of creation. The left hemisphere, through, its ability to analyze, enables each of us to distinguish ourselves from one another in order to know who "I" am and what "I" want. We enjoy the idea of having a sense of individuality, of being a separate "me" - that is, until we begin to collect all of our emotional baggage that is uniquely "mine" and feel the separation of loneliness and isolation.

The left hemisphere, then, tends to be more dominant in situations in which we seek to "know" things. It separates us from the objects we wish to examine and analyze, which is critical if we are to interpret what we are experiencing. When such analysis is the dominant mode by which we encounter other people or God, however, joy becomes merely a defined concept. Love is something we know about but do not know. However, the right mode of operation enables us to open ourselves to be touched by God and known by him in such a way as to become living expressions of love. The integration of the left and right systems is required to experience being known by someone else."

Actually I'm thinking more about what Hardball47 wrote:

I do not think we can ever ultimately know the answer to any of those questions I asked. If there is a purpose noone is able to understand it, noone will ever be able to comprehend what it is. We just have to believe (hope really) that there is ultimately a purpose behind everything, that our good actions mean something and we will be rewarded. That when we die and go to heaven perhaps we might actually find out our purpose. We naturally want there to be meaning in our lives so we continue to believe there is, regardless of any logic or observation that suggests otherwise because we always need that hope to be there.

I'm starting to see that really, that is what faith ultimately is after you remove everything else blocking that view. Independent of any particular religion or any other actions. Nothing else really matters.

Well I'd say our current circumstances and abilities refute that notion.

Why do we have all these "gifts" if God didn't intend something better for us than puppethood?

Besides you can't realistically live in this world with any kind of higher quality of life from such a negativistic paradigm.

As a boy in a religious school, I was told that God's purpose is love. That God is love. That love is like having heaven on earth. gl

For this phase, the Earth phase, I would say God's purpose is to duplicate himself:

Gen 1:26 Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth."

So who was/is God talking to when he says "Us"?

I think "I" am a part of "Us".

And here I am.

This about it. We're put on this harsh world, filled with suffering. We're giving limited resources and expected to make do. We're constantly having natural disasters thrown at us. We're set up against each other. We are given challenge after challenge. Wouldn't the most logical purpose seem to be that we're being toughened up for some future task? Add in unyielding devotion and you've got yourself the basis for a pretty potentent spiritual army.

Just sayin....

Oh well...sounds like it is time to overcome...God must be the biggest overcomer in the world...maybe we are all his baby overcomers in training....

But God told us not to become this way...

I wish you luck in the upcoming battle! Sadly, I suspect I will not be drafted (maybe us atheists get used as spiritual cannon fodder?)

Instead of thinking material inequities disprove a loving God what if they confirm him?

I'm open to arguments. I have yet to hear a convincing argument that the extent of suffering in this world could be evidence of a loving god. I get that some suffering may be optimal, but the sheer amount of it, and uneveness of it makes it hard to rationalize it.

But please share

But then you need to question as I out-lied in my second post, what is the purpose or point in love, in happiness?

As said if there is purpose it means you cannot ultimately understand it. You can know what is right to do in terms of your believe but you can never know why it is right to do them. This is why you need faith that the good you do is correct.

I think often religion blinds people, both theists and atheists from what faith truly is. There are hundreds of religions, most with conflicting views. Many people have devoted there entire life, even died for their religion. But all religions cannot be specifically correct, in fact only one religion can possibly be exactly correct. So have those people whom are unlucky enough to have believed in an incorrect religion, who have devoted their entire lives to something that is incorrect just wasted their time? Was it all for nothing?

Or perhaps it does not really matter specifically what religion you believe, it is just faith that is important. Faith that there is a purpose behind it all and what you know in your head to be good is ultimately correct and the right thing to do. Religion shows people a way of live, it gives them a guideline for what the correct and incorrect way to live their lives is. Every single person interprets and follows their religion differently. You might say you are a Christian but I can guarantee you that your views on religion will not match up exactly with any other Christian in the world. You are really believing your own religion based on what you hold true as the correct values in life. And your own faith that there is purpose and meaning behind what you are.

I prefer to think of people as God's works in progress. Each person is an individual work of his.

Atheists on this board have poked fun at theists for "dualism" yet they engage in dualistic thinking themselves. To think undualistically is impossible at least without spiritual maturity. Every human being can see both good and evil happening to people. I used to think God couldn't commit evil because God is all good and can't sin. I still think that's right yet God can force evil to work to good purposes.

Stephen E. Jones explains that a mark of spiritual maturity is to no longer see dualistically but to see God as able to use both evil and good to serve an ultimate good purpose.

He also attributes the source of all evil to Adam's sin. Jones say "evil is the ultimate divine judgment for sin." Or evil is the result of sin or evil is a derivative of sin.

Quotes from Jones' Defining Evil and Sin:
http://www.gods-kingdom-ministries.o...ter.cfm?CID=21

You said:

Your example was this:

I do not see how your explanation has anything to do with showing that the great suffering on this planet is evidence of God's love.

I'm not sure I can show it to your satisfaction because I've only been pondering it in a dilettante way myself in the back of my mind for a year or two. I think you should ponder that question from the opposite perspective though before you pose an argument...but I suspect you won't get much out of it unless you seriously buckle down and read the whole bible and think of yourself as another one of God's children and experience some internal satisfaction from the notion before you take on this big a question.

Arouet and Splendour your discussion has very little to do with my topic. Can it pleased be moved to a separate topic.

You could see each religion as an expression of personality or of one person's reason dominating the spiritual experience of other people to foster development. You're not bound to stay within the rigidity of any one denomination...people just get scared about screwing up and think they have to observe rules rigidly...one of the whole points the bible makes is that the spirit is greater than the letter of the law (legalism). It doesn't mean you don't need a starting point though...everyone has to have a starting point.