Dear Paul,

YES.

In broad terms, you got it right!

While I could dissect your description and point out some nuanced inaccuracies, you got the big picture correctly and made me very happy this morning.

Thanks Yuyutsu,

To stand up and declare; "THERE IS NO GOD", would get one branded an atheist, when one actually means there is no God in the physical sense. Like I believe "God" exists within each and everyone of us, and is inseparable from us, which is an abstract concept and very difficult to explain. The majority of believers are unable, or willing, to explore a difficult abstract concept of "God". Most believers are comfortable with God as a physical or spiritual being separate from oneself.

Possibly Jesus was trying to explain himself as "God" in the terms I have presented, but it was a "bridge to far" for his followers and disciples and when he was no more, they simply continued believing in God as a physical and spiritual being, with Jesus added into that mix as part of that continuing belief in God.

I think Buddha understood the abstract concept of "God" 2 short YouTubes about 14 minutes in total, Buddha and God or no God..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9GXI_9DXF0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpcnxrIDhjM

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Dear Paul1405,

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As Wikipedia puts it :

« Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to explain the origin of life or the universe. They tend to derive morality, ethics, religious laws, or a preferred lifestyle from their ideas about the cosmos and human nature. According to some estimates, there are roughly 4,200 religions, churches, denominations, religious bodies, faith groups, tribes, cultures, movements, ultimate concerns, which at some point in the future will [probably become] countless. »

Nobody knows if there are any gods or even a God. Apart from Buddhism which has not adopted the god hypothesis, each religion has its own concept of a God or gods.

Here is what the Australian Buddhist monk, the Venerable Shravasti Dhammika, has to say on the question :

http://www.buddhanet.net/ans73.htm

There is very little conversion from one religion to another. The growth or decline of each religion depends almost exclusively on the fertility rate of its population. Religious affiliation is more often a question of inherited social and cultural identity than of the personal conviction of the individuals that make up the population.

It is interesting, Paul, that you should quote the Buddha as having said :

« the ultimate goal for us is the attainment of "enlightenment" … »

I, personally, had an experience like that several years ago. As I recollect it, I had first heard of God when I was 5 years old at Sunday school, a year before primary school. I was so impressed to learn of this mysterious, invisible character called God with all his invincible, magic powers, I have vivid memories of it still.

My parents had me baptised when I was a few months old. I was later confirmed as a Christian and served as an altar boy for many years. Some of my close friends were Bush Brotherhood ministers of the Church of England. One of them was my religious instruction teacher at primary school.

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He later became bishop, then archbishop, and was elected primate of the Anglican Church of Australia where he served for 10 years before retiring. We have remained very close friends all these years and, no doubt always will be.

My interest in the mysterious and fascinating figure of God never left me and I was determined to get to the bottom of the mystery. I spent most of my spare time researching the question with the expectation that I would eventually become convinced that there really is a God of some sort, whether physical, spiritual, or otherwise.

Exactly the opposite occurred. I had what I can only describe as a revelation that hit me quite unexpectedly. I experienced a sense of fulfillment, of enlightenment – what I imagine the sort of elation a scientist might experience when he makes a major scientific break-through of some sort :

I realised that it was the survival instinct that nature had attributed us with that prompted primeval man to conceive of the existence of supernatural spirits (powerful, invisible gods) that animated nature and caused awesome and sometimes terrifying and destructive natural phenomena. This conception which we call religion allowed them to plead with the gods (prayer) and make offerings and sacrifices, including human sacrifices, scapegoats (the forebears of Jesus), to placate them and obtain their indulgence.

In other words, as they had no other way of defending themselves from severe droughts, floods, bushfires, lightning, earthquakes, volcanos, and the occasional terrifying meteorite, etc., religion was conceived as their only possible strategy for survival in which they fervently placed all their hopes and faith.

Though we have no way of knowing precisely when all this occurred, it is estimated that mankind separated from our common ancestor with the chimpanzees about 7 million years ago and that anatomically modern humans appeared in Africa approximately 300,000 years ago, which gives us a rough indication of the time scale for the origin of the god concept.

In the absence of any further evidence, I consider that all the rest is pure speculation.

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