Dear Belly,

<<my thoughts on starting this thread was to talk, and even learn , about why some do need a God. And some never will.>>

According to the Bhagavad Gita (7:16), there are four types of people who approach God:

1. Those who seek refuge from the sorrow and suffering experienced in the world.

2. Those who who see God as a means to fulfill their worldly ambitions.

3. Those with the desire for knowledge, including philosophers who seek to understand the phenomenal world.

4. Those wanting to to attain complete unity with the Divine.

Belly,

There's no need to be so sensitive. Obviously most of us operate from an egoistic standpoint. I'm forever getting into scraps around here trying to defend my point of view......I was just musing on Yuyutsu's approach.

Buddhist sages maintain that real happiness can be found somewhere beyond the ego - beyond the attractions of the sense world, in detachment.....all worth pondering.

"Now an interesting exercise: as an aggregation of quantum probabilities, should anything stop you from hopping along with the respective atoms from one brain to another?"

Yes.

Specifically, the lack of the aggregation would stop the hop.

Belly, I think for many people the answer might be:

'Thanks to religion you'll never have to confront the eerie silence of the heart of your being, until you're lying terrified on your deathbed.'

(With acknowledgement to Mitchell and Webb)

Having been at many, many deathbeds over the years WmTrevor, I can attest that the mention of God or religion was made in only about half of the patients.

The ones that didn't had no more frightening a death than the religious ones.

Yes, Suze, it occurs to me that most of the fear would be "before the deathbed"...and that on the deathbed itself one would be more likely to embrace a type of calm and acceptance.

Tonight we had a Thanksgiving meal, courtesy of my daughter and her American husband. They had it last year with just the two of them, but I liked the idea so much they included all of us this year. No religion there at all, just a family get together. It's pretty well non-commercialised in the US, compared to Christmas (except maybe for turkeys and cranberry sauce)

Tony Lavis thanks for your sarcastic suggestion of “ghost power”.
My point was that “energy” may not be purely *physical*.
We, living with sensory perceptions, only see the energy that exists on *our* plane.
Does that mean no other plane exists?
What do you “see” when you dream? An apparently real world. How many “other worlds” might there be?

“subjective existence”?
You're the subjective one. Because *you* have never experienced anything supernatural, you state it isn't “real”.

Gulliver's Travels? Facetious. Nobody claimed this is real, including the author.
Mystics experiencing a “revelation” may indeed filter that through the subjective mind, simply because otherwise it would be incomprehensible.
The source inspiration is still real.
You like Belly, are confusing the anthropomorphic interpretation with the original source.

“Dogs exhibit an amazing amount of variation”

Because *we* created it, just as we created our species' differentiations.
Not animal species in the wild. All males the same, all females the same. Look the same, behave the same.

Belly “God is our invention, not me and you, but wise if not nice men from our past.”

Why suspect an evil intent? Because of the abuses of *later* generations?
The original “inventors” may have been 100% sincere in their desire to share their insights, but knew their mystical visions would be beyond the average person, so “invented” simpler anthropomorphic symbols to help people understand.
Being an educated, intelligent person, one would think you could see *past* the symbolic imagery and see the “truth” underneath.
But no, you only see the form and reject it as false.

“Why so many Gods?”

For precisely the reason I was stating about our impossible-to-unite species.
Each cultural/ethnic ancestry developed their own expressions of these “essences” and gave them different names, just as they created different forms of language.
You may as well ask, why so many languages?

Suseonline “It's not atheists... but people from other religions!”

Well, excuse us for having our own heritage!
I wonder how many Islamic, Hindu or Buddhist symbols would be removed because a minority of remnant colonial Europeans in Asia were “offended”.
My guess: none.