I notice numbat that you can only 'truely' refer to your seven year self using past tense language. Even your attempt to futerise your seven year old self only makes sense when qualified with:

"have once been seven years old".

Philo if 'God' is everything (omnipotent, omnipresent and indivisible) God is EVERYTHING, including each and everyone of us, period.

The fundamentalists have created god in their own image - with the predictable limiting results- 'my god is better than your god'. Not believing in a big daddy god is not wrong or evil and any who cast judgement on those who disbelieve in a singular god are merely revealing their own inadequacies as mature beings.

If god created the universe and everything, then god is energy; energy is our foundation it is the stuff of which we and all around is created, god/energy is within us; it is us.

As K£vin stated "The only 'truth' is that everything is in constant change and flux."

To remain fixated on past events such as the bible, the accuracy of which we can never be sure of, is to stagnate.

One truth I can state with absolute confidence: "There will be change".

Change is opportunity.

How we deal with it is up to us.

Welcome Luigi,

Strange not to have come across the disevangelism of Marx and Nietzsche in your philosophical readings. In the history of ideas Marx's 'opium of the masses' and Nietzsche's 'death of God' intellectually laid the groundwork for Bolshevism and National Socialism, neither could have existed without those two anti-Christian screeds.

You'll remember the Bolsheviks murdered tens of thousands of priests and destroyed thousands of Orthodox churches – communists in the Spanish civil war murdered over six thousand priests. Theres no denying the anti-Judeo Christian character of these movements.

Religion most certainly makes people much better or, sadly, much worse. If I fight against you and am doing God's will but I die, then I still have hope because God's justice cannot be defeated, at Judgment Day my righteousness will ultimately prevail. You can see how great courage and self sacrifice as well as great evil can come from belief. Jesus on one extreme and suicide bombing muslims on the other. St Francis, St Thomas Aquinas, St Joan of Arc etc on the one hand and C16th Dutch Anabaptists on the other.

God gives us something to die for. This impulse can be perverted as in I slam, or it can find a home in Christ - who does not promise worldly success as Mohammed did, but his presence and love alone – the greatest experience of our life.

Secularism can't offer this, taken to its logical conclusion its highest teaching, I'd argue amounts to filling up one's life with as many distractions (Tocqueville's petit plaisirs) as possible before death. We aren't willing to sacrifice our lives (its simply not worth it) for abortion rights, access to pornography, gay marriage rights, and current popular culture. In London, where Islam is taking over, its clear how secularism just can't stand up to religion.

You have a big job trying to sustain the claim Jesus teaches no coherent morality. What is a coherent morality in your opinion Luigi - Kantianism?

Reading a modern person's self understanding into a 3500 year old story is not the way to understand the Bible Luigi

Both Nietzche and Marx are still highly regarded as important thinkers, and rightly so. If violent and narrowly ideological forces have misappropriated their works for their own purposes that's hardly surprising, it happens all the time - I've even heard serial killers claiming to be inspired by the music of the Beatles. However, I think the influence of intellectual writings on social and ideological movements is largely exaggerated, and certainly very difficult to prove.

As to the Spanish civil war, I believe the pro-Catholic side killed many more people than did the republican side, only some of whom were communists. Not that this matters, the point being that there's no evidence that getting or having religion makes you any more or less violent.

Secularism doesn't have a 'highest teaching', it merely claims that, in understanding this highly complex world we don't need to have recourse to a supernatural being. This is not a moral issue. Belief in a supernatural being won't help you decide what's right and what's wrong - you have to do that for yourself.

It is very easy to show that what morality the so-called Jesus character of the gospels preached is inconsistent, incoherent and piecemeal. All that is required is close textual analysis. Kant's categorical imperative is quite coherent, on the other hand, though I find it unconvincing, and ineffectual in practice.

There is no evidence of any Old Testament writings before about 2800 year ago, and scholars have generally put forward the writing of the old testament by several centuries in recent times. Homo sapiens, in its current state of brain development, has been living and getting along in social groups for about 150,000 years. In other words, Judeo-Christianity, that 'ole time religion' has been around for one fiftieth of the time that humans have been making moral decisions on this earth. What difference has it made? Hard to tell, but nobody could seriously argue that it has been significant.

Scout, Kevin hope this is helpful. Its part of the following essay.

CS Lewis 'Dogma and the Universe'

"How can an unchanging system survive the continual increase in knowledge? A mature scholar reading a great passage in Plato, and taking in at one glance the metaphysics, the literary beauty, and the place of both in the history of Europe, is in a very different position from a boy learning the Greek alphabet. Yet through that unchanging system of the alphabet all this vast mental and emotional activity is operating. It has not been broken by new knowledge. It is not outworn. If it changed, all would be chaos. A great Christian statesman, considering the morality of a measure which will affect millions of lives, and which involves economic, geographical and political considerations of the utmost complexity, is in a different position from a boy first learning that one must not cheat or tell lies, or hurt innocent people. But only insofar as that first knowledge of the great moral platitudes survives unimpaired in the statesman will his deliberation be moral at all. If that goes, then there has been no progress, but only mere change. For change is not progress unless the core remains unchanged. A small oak grows into a big oak; if it became a beech, that would not be growth, but mere change. And thirdly, there is a great difference between counting apples and arriving at the mathematical formulae of modern physics. But the multiplication table is used in both and does not grow out of date.

In other words, wherever there is real progress in knowledge, there is some knowledge that is not superseded. Indeed the very possibility of progress demands that there should be an unchanging element. New bottles for new wine, by all means, but not new palates, throats and stomachs, or it would not be, for us, 'wine' at all. We should all agree to find this sort of unchanging element in the simple rules of mathematics. I would add to these the primary principles of morality.