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Ask HN: When and why did you start believing in God?

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21–30 of 103 posts

Re: Ask HN: When and why did you start believing in God?

#21
Grew up in the faith, but never made it my own. I fell away for some years after I left home, with psychedelics, and ‘free’ sexuality before I realized that I had been desperate to fill an emptiness and the find answers to the plaguing questions that plagued me of who I was and what I was for and why I should continue living. It took a night of experimentation in witchcraft to snap me to the realization that if there WAS a god, maybe it was possible that it could be the God that came to be with us as man. “If he is there, if he is all powerful and loving, then surely you will let me know you are there, that you are Truth, because that is what I have been searching for“ was the essence of the prayer that night and the rest is history. I have an M.Sc. in the earth sciences. I loved learning previously about the beautiful and intricate interplay of factors across discrete systems in our physical world and, from the start of my reversion, I have looked for something that I can’t accept in the teachings of the Catechism of the Catholic Church that is logically inconsistent or incoherent within an all-encompassing view of reality, physical and otherwise… something I can unequivocally view as bullshit so that I don’t have to believe it, so I don’t have to impose upon myself everything that would be entailed if religion were indeed all true. Instead, The book has instead been wonderfully illuminating and found it to be a great primer for learning about the spiritual and human side of our metaphysical reality.

Regardless of religion, creed, or motto, it is human to seek the truth and understand it.

Re: Ask HN: When and why did you start believing in God?

#23
post #21

Grew up in the faith, but never made it my own. I fell away for some years after I left home, with psychedelics, and ‘free’ sexuality before I realized that I had been desperate to fill an emptiness and the find answers to the plaguing questions that plagued me of who I was and what I was for and why I should continue living. It took a night of experimentation in witchcraft to snap me to the realization that if there…

I’m all for the truth, or even anything resembling the truth.

You can choose to study physics, or sociology, or how the human body works, or the mind, and how to fight diseases etc.

Questions bigger than that seem too big to me, but if trying to find an answer to those questions makes people feel good and/or live good lives, why not?

Re: Ask HN: When and why did you start believing in God?

#24
post #3

Using his name instead of his title/position helps. https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Psalms-83-18/

It is my understanding that we don't really know how this is pronounced and that this is just another instance of the Tetragrammaton [1] that is normally rendered as LORD with a few exceptions like this. This could just as easily be Yahweh instead of Jehovah.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetragrammaton

Re: Ask HN: When and why did you start believing in God?

#25
post #13
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Occam's razor ("Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity")? I mean, God, isn't one enough? Honestly, it's too much for me!

In nature everything has a opposite or opponent. That would make at least two.

Show me the opposite, or the opponent, of a black hole.

Re: Ask HN: When and why did you start believing in God?

#26
post #19

For me it was that the implications of atheistic materialism contradicted basic empiric knowledge. Atheistic materialism is an onthologic monism, the ultimate implication of it is that nothing can be defined since everything is a continuum. yet we can discriminate concrete objects and things. No essence can be defined in Mat-Ath, When I was an atheist I argued that the essence of things can be defined in their compos…

> the ultimate implication of it is that nothing can be defined since everything is a continuum. What does this even mean?

That entire post, run through ChatGPT, gets summarized as “WOO!!!!”.

Not sure the fourth big bang was necessary.

Re: Ask HN: When and why did you start believing in God?

#27
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of divine simplicity, the absolute maximum of perfection logically excludes the possibility of more than one. if there were two gods, they would have to differ from each other in some way. But a being that is pure act (without any potentiality) and absolutely simple (not composed of parts) cannot have any accidental differences. They could only differ in their very “whatness” (essence). However, if they diffe…

If you need a god to explain where the universe came from, induction would like a word with you

My understanding of God is not “one more thing in the universe that explains an earlier thing.” It is closer to God as the ground of being itself: the reason anything exists at all, including matter, energy, spacetime, causality, and whatever laws describe them.

Re: Ask HN: When and why did you start believing in God?

#28
post #2

Why the limitations to one God?

Because of divine simplicity, the absolute maximum of perfection logically excludes the possibility of more than one. if there were two gods, they would have to differ from each other in some way. But a being that is pure act (without any potentiality) and absolutely simple (not composed of parts) cannot have any accidental differences. They could only differ in their very “whatness” (essence). However, if they diffe…

Couldn't you suppose these gods had the same one-many property as the Trinity and say that it's whole essence is perfect?

Re: Ask HN: When and why did you start believing in God?

#30
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Show me the opposite, or the opponent, of a black hole.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_hole

I said show me, not point me at a hypothetical entity with no known pathway to reified existence.
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