yu..""looking for meaning and explanations,
has nothing to do with God."..

buggsy replying.."Actually,..it has everything to do with God."'

imust agree
god made logic..[logus]
the material world makes sense...
because material reason followed spiritual cause

how i hate that word..that subverts spirit..[spi-ritual]
ie ritual has subverted god..as jesu repeatedly pinted out
creed-al differences...are usually creed vairiables of ritual

that [rite]..also seems the root of the perversions
that sepperate us from good [god]...[rite right?]

bugsby..""I did not mention 'explanation of material issues'
,in fact if anything God is supposed to put meaning to everything, material and non-material.""

for an unbeliever..you certainly grasp the basics[sic]

""Your whole life
and existence in fact,""

is based on the simple fact
of gods prime causation
being factually based

but then we got lost

""not what just how you ate..[what]..for breakfast.""

you were going so well
so i will do the thing christ taught us to do
and ignore that bit of my brothers nakedness...and continue
with that i can comprehend...[makes sense of..if only in my mind's images made into words]

""God doesn't make sense,""'

i hate when we talk in different senses
god makes sense..once we get that
the very logic that makes sense
...is gods gift..to us

but i sense your using it..in a different sense
thus will simply take the sense..as suits my senses
and suport in a general sense..

the truth even from the mouth of babe..
[in the loving sense]

babe as in not yet tainted
by creed or greed

[recall mosus..AND all; the old ones
never left the deserts..ie didnt enter the 'holy land']

the kids alone
'got'..onto,..the promised land
and straight away..resorted back to the absurd rituals

absurd blood rite's
that serves demons

it dont make sense

""but is supposed to
make everything else make sense?""

which of course is a sign
[proof]..of god as cause

[cause it just makes sense]

[of all good sense-ability..]
truth..life
living loving good grace..mercy charity
and so much more...revealable..via our senses
if it feels good..its of god..[good]

Yuyutsu:"God is not there to feed your addiction
for having meaning and making sense."

remember charity
is mans highest virtue
does it make sense...no...but it fels good

bugsby said in reply..

""I don't have that addiction,
the religious people do.""

b...mate...
think about that one...again
the 'addiction'..was to meaning and sense..!

you think
thus you do seek...sense..
even if we dispute 'meaning'

""God is supposed to explain everything""

no..!

know god lets us chose..our own meaning
that we then may use..to explain anything
some accepting only that of the good sense
others accepting..just about any non-sense

""and give people meaning to their lives."'

no god gives us life
its up to us..to chose our lifes meanings

""Have you not been listening to the preachers?""

clearly we both havnt..!

preaching is lecturing/judging..ranting raving

when the call was to love neighbour
to help neighbour...

to teach
not preach

[thats just yet another
bad creed based rite..[ritual]
that got us into this mess...[i guess]

its we who in the end make sense of it

Bugsy,

There are probably only a handful of people, religious or otherwise, who are not addicted in some degree or another to meaning, sense and explanations.

Whatever your addictions are, crying like a baby "but God must feed my addiction, He must, He must!" is not going to change the fact that He won't. If you heard preachers claim so, then you must have heard the wrong preachers (who must probably be bent on money and/or power and/or sex).

The good news is that once you realize your unity with God, you will attain to absolute contentment - all your addictions will fade away, become irrelevant, so the idea of searching for meaning and explanations would probably just make you yawn.

OUG,

In the course of life, just obviously as we find our daily bread, we also come across some meaning and explanations. Wonderful, nothing wrong there, we cherish God's gifts - do praise the Lord for it!

The problem is that humans tend to be addicted to meaning, sense and explanations, they feel they cannot do without it, they kick and scream if they don't have it, or not enough of it, they make demands on God to do their will, not God's.

Yeah, ok I admit it, I guess I do have an 'addiction' (for want of a better word) to making sense.

But God was not invented to feed peoples 'addiction' to explanations, it was invented to soothe it.

You have just shown that with your own writings. I can see that your concept of God has certainly soothed your addiction for making sense.

Yuyutsu,

You refer to God as an entity - that is you assign ownership of will to God as in "God's will".
"they make demands on God to do their will, not God's".

I thought you maintained that "they" (as in men who demand) and "God" were the same thing - now you're intimating that God is separate owing to the fact that he possesses a will that is distinct from the will of man.

Dear Yuyutsu,
>>my definition of "exists" is more inclusive than yours (I think), because it includes mental/psychic phenomena as well as the obviously physical<<
You are right, in this context I understood under “exist”, objective existence, i.e. irreducible to “mental/psychic phenomena”, existence that we usually assign to physical entities (i.e. that can be investigated by science), and theists also to God, eventually other “spiritual beings”.

Here “irreducible” does not mean “completely outside of”, c.f. my earlier remark that “God created man” and “man created God” (more explicitly, man created anthropomorphic images or models of God that he/she often identifies with the ineffable God/YHWH/Allah) are just two sides of the same coin, (like e.g. the particle wave/duality).

There are other ways of interpreting the term exist, which refer neither to physical nor mental reality: in mathematics a solution to a given equation might or might not exist, and less trivially, the basic entities and relations of mathematics are believed to exist independently of our mental as well as physical world. There are many famous mathematicians (and also not so famous, like yours truly) referred to as realists or Platonists, who accept Roger Penrose’s three intertwined but distinct worlds: physical, mental and mathematical. (Penrose is apparently an atheist).

Well, I accept a fourth world, simply described as supernatural, also intertwined with the other three, “built around” the notion of an ineffable God who carries the cause/purpose of those other three worlds and is the cause/purpose also of Himself. Without my belief in the existence of Penrose’s “mathematical world”, what I know about (pure) mathematics would not make much sense to me. Similarly, without belief in such an ineffable God, what I know about the human condition would not make much sense to me.

>> this fails to explain why you tick the box "God exists" <<
Well, because if I ticked one of the other two boxes I would be counted as an atheist or agnostic which I am not, as I (and I think also the evaluators of the poll) understand these terms.