How Do You See God?

[Gooding]

So how do you know he won't be merciful to you afterlife?

That's a good point. What is there to an afterlife for us? Do we struggle in the Savage Garden ( what I call life in general.. if you read Ann Rice's Vampire Chronicles, you'll see it's a favorite term of the Vampire Lestat) and then after we died, does a wind or some kind of cosmic current take our consciousness to another realm where our Creator awaits?

[Gooding]

DarkSecret, I ask these questions with all gravity and with no pat answers to dole out to you. I thank you for your serious consideration of these questions.

[Gooding]

Very well. My take on the whole thing is that knowledge is nothing to be afraid of, but it is something to be embraced. Faith shouldn't close one's mind, but open it up to discoveries to delight and boggle the mind and confound the imagination. I think all life is sacred, that everything has something to offer everything else. I'm not as eager to kill spiders as I was once, for example. Spiders have their places and it's not for me to deprive such a valuable arachnid of its life because I think it's gross. The universes will continue to expand, maybe at just the speed they need to keep it going. Would I eat meat? Absolutely. If that's what its bred for, I'd absolutely enjoy the food, in gratitude that I was provided with such fuel to keep me going. In my thought that all life is sacred, I must dispense with any racialist notions that my life is more important than the life of a person of darker hue simply because he has darker hue. Socially, culturally, I might be compatible ( or perhaps not) with such a person, but that depends on judgments gleaned from previous experiences. Life can also be brutal and arbitrary. How do I reconcile that with the idea that life has a holy interconnectedness? Well, one can say that " brutal" and " arbitrary" are themselves human terms that are used when we have negative experiences, or negative things happen to those close to us. It would be nice if life were just shits and giggles, but then, how would we discover our own capacity for growth? The Savage Garden can be very savage indeed, but part of our strength as humans is our ability to adapt. We do what we must to survive as long as we can. We console ourselves with the thoughts and feelings that somehow, everything will balance out in the end. You know what would have happened if our universe had an equal, balanced measure of matter and anti- matter at its forming? It would have obliterated itself. My point is that balance isn't always beneficial.

[Gooding]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaorJbSNW_0

[Gooding]

Bump #1

[Gooding]

This was a good thread. Thank you all for contributing and giving me, at least, some good insights. I've gleaned two lessons from the last several days: #1: Knowledge should never be feared, but embraced and #2: a true faith should be capable of opening minds to new possibilities, not shut them off from them. Thank you so much for these lessons.