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Forums → WEPR → Is us believeing in God sort of like the Greeks believing in Zeus?
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I think we can compare the two. Who knows? Maybe in another thousand years, Christianity, Islam, etc. will all be school subjects, sort of like Greek Mythology is?
Is it possible that religion changes drastically over the times?
- 118 Replies
im mixed relion with karma and greek gods so yes to answer your question yes
Obviously it's monotheistic, after what he said. And he said elsewhere he's catholic. Christian. So everything's alright with the replies.
If we observe history it is quite clear that the belief in a deity of any form is comparable to any other similar belief, and in that Zeus worship is similar to Yahweh worship, or any other theistic practice.
I would consider that as all other previously dominate religions have fallen by the wayside then Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, Hinduism, and all other major world religions will follow suit, it's only a matter of time.
For those of you who contend that without religions that morals will disappear let me ask you this. If there is no God to forgive your sins, and you must be accountable to everyone around you for your own actions alone and actually make an effort to alleviate your guilt from misdeeds as opposed to simply praying it away would you be more or less motivate to be a decent human being?
Personally I find that I have been more open minded, more forgiving, more empathetic, more considerate of others since I realized that I had to do a lot more than go to confession or get on my knees and telepathically talk to a sky fairy to be forgiven for my misdeeds, and I would contend that the same holds true for many of us who do not have a theistic faith which offers forgiveness.
If you asked any devout believer of any religion if their religion was real than you would get the same response with the same amount of conviction. obviously, yes.
I think this article might spark a little side debate in this topic. It seems that a lot of posts are bring up the future of religion. So...read ahead:
From Stephan Hawking
God is dead," declared Friedrich Nietzsche, but few listened or cared. "It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going," announced Stephen Hawking last week, and it was picked up by the world's media. For over 20 years earlier, the world's most famous scientist had ended his phenomenal bestseller A Brief History of Time with the arresting conclusion that "If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then we should know the mind of God."
Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? Why this particular set of laws and not some other? It is these "ultimate questions of life" that Hawking's now sets out to answer, with the help of the American physicist and science writer Leonard Mlodinow, in his fascinating new book The Grand Design (Bantam, £18.99). Philosophers have traditionally tackled such questions, while most physicists have stayed well clear from addressing the "why" of things and concentrated instead on the "how".
Not any more. "To understand the universe at the deepest level," says Hawking, "we need to know not only how the universe behaves, but why." He believes that "hilosophy is dead" because it failed to keep up with the latest developments, especially in physics.
For it is possible to answer these questions purely within the realm of science and without resorting to God. And the answers hinge on a candidate for a theory of everything called M-theory, "if it indeed exists", the authors admit. Unfortunately, no one seems to know what "M" stands for; it could be "master", "miracle" or "mystery".
The story of M-theory could be said to begin with the desire of physicists to unify and simplify. Just as ice, water and steam are different manifestations of water, in 1864 James Clerk Maxwell showed that electricity and magnetism were likewise different manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon â" electromagnetism. He managed to encapsulate the disparate the behaviour of electricity and magnetism into a set of four elegant mathematical equations. Using these equations, Maxwell was able to make the startling prediction that electromagnetic waves travelled at the speed of light, approximately 670 million miles per hour. Light was a form of electromagnetic radiation. Maxwell's unification of electricity, magnetism and light was the crowning achievement of 19th-century physics.
In the 20th century, to go with gravity and electromagnetism, physicists discovered two new forces â" the weak, which is responsible for radioactivity, and the strong that binds together, for example, the nucleus of an atom. They believed that these four forces, which appeared so different, would be reunited a single all-encompassing theory of everything.
With exception of general relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity, it's possible to "quantise" the other three forces, since quantum mechanics deals with the atomic and sub-atomic domain. In effect, we have three trains running on the same-sized track.
Unfortunately, Einstein's gravity train was running on a completely incompatible track. Yet the impulse for unity and simplicity is so strong that theorists have pursued a quantum theory of gravity, without success, for decades. Then in the 1980s there appeared a new theory that looked promising â" superstrings.
The theory assumes that all observed particles are different manifestations of the same fundamental entity. According to the superstring idea, all particles previously thought off as little points are in fact not points at all but basically little oscillating bits of "string" which move through space. The different levels of "vibration" of these strings correspond to the different particles.
Superstrings vibrate in 10 dimensions. But we don't notice these extra dimensions because they are curled up into a space that's infinitesimally small. Alas, it was discovered that there were at least five different string theories and millions of ways the extra dimensions could be curled up â" an embarrassment of riches for those who hoped that string theory was the longed for theory of everything.
As others despaired, the American physicist Ed Witten led the way, beginning in the mid-1990s, in showing that the different string theories and a theory called "supergravity" were all just different approximations to a more fundamental theory: M-theory.
"M-theory is not a theory in the usual sense," admits Hawking. "It is a whole family of different theories, each of which is a good description of observations only in some range of physical situations. It is a bit like a map." Faithfully to map the entire earth, one has to use a collection of maps, each of which covers a limited region. The maps overlap each other, and where they do, they show the same landscape.
M-theory needs 11 space-time dimensions and contains not just vibrating strings but other objects that are impossible to visualise. The extra space dimensions can be curled up in a mind-blowing 10 to the 500th different ways, each leading to a universe with its own laws. To get an idea how many that is, Hawking and Mlodinow ask the reader to imagine a being capable of scanning each of those universes in just one millisecond and who started working on it at the Big Bang. Today that being would have only have scanned just 10 to the 20th of them.
This plethora of universes, the multiverse, explains what appears to be the mystery behind the remarkable coincidences that have fine-tuned natural laws to make our universe habitable for us. With so many universes, it's a lot less remarkable that there is at least one in which conditions are Goldilocks-like: just right to have given rise to us, since we exist it gas to be this one. This is the anthrophic principle that effectively says that things are the way they are because they were the way they were. From here, Hawking goes on to argue that "Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing."
"'Think of an expanding universe as a surface of a bubble," writes Hawking. "Our picture of the spontaneous quantum creation of the universe is then a bit like the formation of bubbles of steam in boiling water. Many tiny bubbles appear, and then disappear again. These represent mini-universes that expand but collapse again while still of microscopic size. They represent possible alternative universes, but they are not of much interest since they do not last long enough to develop galaxies and stars, let alone intelligent life. A few of the little bubbles will grow long enough so that they will be safe from recollapse. They will continue to expand at an ever-increasing rate and will form the bubbles of steam we are able to see. These correspond to universes that start off expanding at an ever-increasing rate."
Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing; why the universe exists, why we exist. God is surplus to Hawking's requirements.
Why are the fundamental laws as they are? The ultimate theory must be consistent and must predict finite results for quantities that we can measure. There must be a law like gravity and, for a theory of gravity to predict finite quantities, the theory must have what is called "supersymmetry" between the forces of nature and the matter on which they act. "If the theory is confirmed by observation," says Hawking, "it will be the successful conclusion of a search going back more than 3000 years."
"Yet in the history of science," he admits, "we have discovered a sequence of better and better theories or models, from Plato to the classical theory of Newton to modern quantum theories. It is natural to ask: Will this sequence eventually reach an end point, an ultimate theory of the universe, that will include all forces and predict every observation we can make, or will we continue forever finding better theories, but never one that cannot be improved upon?"
Though Hawking is probably being rhetorical, Russell Stannard, a former professor of physics at the Open University, looks at the unanswered questions of modern physics in his book The End of Discovery (Oxford, £14.99). Stannard believes that eventually, but he doesn't know when, fundamental science will reach the limit of what it can explain. On that day, the scientific age, like the stone age and the iron age before it, will come to an end. He believes that not only technological limits, but maybe humanity will have reached the limits if its mental capacities to unravel the nature and workings of reality.
Stannard takes readers on a tour of some of the deepest questions facing science: questions to do with consciousness, free will, the nature of space, time, and matter. He covers much of the same terrriority as Hawking and Mlodinow, and points out that to understand the subatomic world, scientists depend of particle accelerators; but to understand the very smallest units of nature, it has been calculated that we would need an accelerator the size of a galaxy.
In A Brief History of Time, Hawking said that a scientific theory "may originally be put forward for aesthetic or metaphysical reasons, but the real test is whether it makes predictions that agree with observations". As they have waited for the next generation of particle accelerators and experiments, the research of physicists from superstrings to quantum cosmology has had a tendency to take on a metaphysical character in recent decades.
So maybe philosophy isn't as dead as Stephen Hawking thinks. For those having a difficult time wrapping their head around "spontaneous creation", he has this tip: "If you like, you can call the laws of science 'God'."
While your bringing up the future of religion, I just happened to watch a video on the subject...
What do you think of when you think of Jupiter? 
But he was a Roman god. To the Greek, he was Zeus. Now he is dead, and we think of the planet when we here his name.
Mercury, to the Greeks he was Hermes. That stuff in thermometers? Mercury, also known as "quick silver". If I remember correctly, that is a brand of under armor. At least he still gets a planet.
In the future? Maybe we will find a planet and name it "Yahweh" or "Allah" or any of the other modern gods. Probably it will be a brand of cars as well.
what does the question mean when it says is "us" believing in god? can we only comment if we believe in whatever "G"od this refers to?
what does the question mean when it says is "us" believing in god?
Looking at the OP I would guess "us" is in reference to those who believe in the Abrahamic religions.
can we only comment if we believe in whatever "G"od this refers to?
Most of the comments here have been from atheists so yes you can comment if you don't believe in this particular sky daddy.
I'm not an atheist! And I say Yup, exactly the same. Maybe not as much fear of lightning strikes, hopefully fewer Minotaurs... but yeah, basically the same deal.
Well, Zeus was apart of a bunch of gods that helped him alot. Most religions today believe in one God and one God only, like mine. The idea of one all mighty powerfull God is a better idea to grasp than a whole bunch running one Universe.
Except for buddhism which has no God, and hinduism which has multiple Gods, both of which are major religions.
sorry for only reading to this post but I must say this
They do not "Cut and Paste" I AM Christian
Flag
Actually, its exactly alike. The Christian god IS Zeus, just combined with a bunch of other gods. The old time Christians cut and pasted from other religions to get there stories.Almost every story in the Bible can be traced to a religion that was before it...
They do not "Cut and Paste" I AM Christian
Really? I don't suppose you've studied any other religions which influenced Christianity then. Let's list a few then:
1) According to an ancient Christian tradition, Christ died on MAR-23 and resurrected on MAR-25. These dates agree precisely with the death and resurrection of Attis.
2) Early Christians initiated converts in March and April by baptism. Mithraism initiated their new members at this time as well.
3) Early Christians were naked when they were baptized. After immersion, they then put on white clothing and a crown. They carried a candle and walked in a procession to a basilica. Followers of Mithra were also baptized naked, put on white clothing and a crown, and walked in a procession to the temple. However, they carried torches.
4) At Pentecost, the followers of Jesus were recorded as speaking in tongues. At Trophonius and Delos, the Pagan priestesses also spoke in tongues: They appeared to speak in such a way that each person present heard her words in the observer's own language.
5) An inscription to Mithras reads: "He who will not eat of my body and drink of my blood, so that he will be made on with me and I with him, the same shall not know salvation." In John 6:53-54, Jesus is said to have repeated this theme: "...Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day."
6) The Bible records that Jesus was crucified between two thieves. One went to heaven and the other to hell. In the Mithras mysteries, a common image showed Mithras flanked by two torchbearers, one on either side. One held a torch pointed upwards, the other downwards. This symbolized ascent to heaven or descent to hell.
Furthermore, St. Augustine even declared that the worshipers of Mithras were followers of the same god, YHWH, just called by a different name.
Now, some similarities between Jesus and Horus, the Egyptian god of the Sky, War, and Protection:
List of similarities part 1
List of similarities part 2
What we must remember is that Christianity is based on Judaism, and due to the enslavement of the Jews by the Egyptians for many, many years it was inevitable that some aspects of Egyptian mythology found their way into Judaism, and then Christianity. Furthermore, at the time Christianity became popularized, many of the early practitioners were under the rule of the Roman empire. The dominate religions at the time were several forms of paganism, most notably Mithraism.
Also, here's a list of saviors who were descended from heaven, took the form of man, and proved their divinity by various miracles and works. Also, many of these characters were said to have been born of virgins and died by crucifixion.
Chrishna of Hindostan, Jesus of Nazareth, Budha Sakia of India, Salivahana of Bermuda, Zulis and Orus of Egypt, Odin of the Scandinavians, Crite of Chaldea, Baal and Taut of Phoenecia, Indra of Tibet, Bali of Afganistan, Jao of Nepal, Wittoba of the Bilingonese, Thammuz of Syria, Atys of Phrygia, Xamolxis of Thrace, Adad of Assyria, Deva Tat and Sammonocadam of Siam, Alcides of Thebes, Mikado of the Sintoos, Beddru of Japan, Hesus or Eros and Bremrillah of the Druids, Thor of the Gauls, Cadmus and Adonis of Greece, Hil and Feta of the Mandaites, Gentaut and Quexalcote of Mexico, Universal Monarch of the Sibyls, Ischy of the island of Formosa, Divine teacher of Plato, the Holy One of Xaca, Fohi and Tien of China, Ixion and Quirinus of Rome, Prometheus of Caucasus, Mohamud or Mahomet of Arabia.
sorry for only reading to this post but I must say this[/quote]
They do not "Cut and Paste" I AM Christian
[quote]Flag
Actually, its exactly alike. The Christian god IS Zeus, just combined with a bunch of other gods. The old time Christians cut and pasted from other religions to get there stories.Almost every story in the Bible can be traced to a religion that was before it...
You flagged the post because you disagreed with it? Not agreeing and putting up your own argument is one thing but trying to censor others is something else. That post is on topic and follows the rules here, so there is no reason to flag it for that. So it would seem you only did so just to censor what it was saying, which as Walker pointed out was more or less accurate. In other words don't try and censor your opposition again!
Fortunately I'm pretty sure flagged posts are reviewed manually rather then automatically deleted.
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