58 thoughts on “As If …”

  2. I agree it is hogwash. To deny reality and deprive yourself of the richness of this world just on the miniscule chance that you will be rewarded in the next life, yuck. Also think of what it would be like to have to suffer eternity in the company of and worshiping a deity you not only did not believe in but followed due to fear of punishment. What a horror to experience. So I would rather enjoy the fruits and thrills of this world, the grandness of the diversity, the expansive joy of each new science discovery and then end my existence afterward. I never want to be forced to commit acts I don’t believe in, to deny my self people who are not on an “approved believers list”. Thanks Nan. Hugs

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  3. Ah, Pascal’s silly wager.
    And, except for mandatory church attendance, I’m wondering what it looks like to live life as if there’s a god. . I certainly can’t tell ‘at a glance’.

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  4. I guess, then, that one must live life believing in ALL gods that are or ever were just to be on the safe side. You wouldn’t want to die believing only in the Christian god and then find out that the REAL god is Allah and you will burn forever in hell for worshiping a false one. Crazy!

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  5. So live your life by doing whatever horrible things you want because at the end of it you can apologize to the invisible man in the sky and everything will be great?

    Or live your life as if what you do actually matters, and you are personally responsible to your fellow human beings if you screw it up?

    Is that what they are saying amen to?

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    • IMO, if people actually lived their lives demonstrating the love that Jesus taught — whether they believed in a god or not — they would have no qualms about finding out after death there actually was one.

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      • Yes, but that would be inconvenient for them. There’s a great quote from Stephen Colbert:

        “If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.”

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        • Ubi, fantastically GREAT quote from one of my all-time favorite satirists! 😉

          Sadly, much of the American evangelical-fundamentalists and their church ministers and seminaries are NOW teaching a horrbily flawed theology called “ProsperityTheology” or the Prosperity Gospel. It is based on poor exegesis of the gospels — almost ignoring many passages and contextual meanings — and actually leans more heavily on Judaic exegesis of the Hebrew Bible. What do I mean exactly by “poor exegesis”?

          What leading ministers/preachers of Prosperity Theology FAIL to incorporate in their mass teachings are the complete historical contexts of 1st-century BCE to 3rd-century CE events of the Levant. To name just two paramount influencing factors of the time-period and region… 1) the Judeo-Christian apocryphal fervor of several upstart sects of Judaism of the time and their origins/purpose, and 2) within the political-social-economic arm (fist?) of the Imperial Roman Empire. BOTH of these factors can never be seperated! They go hand-in-hand. But Prosperity Theology/Gospel cannot coexist with the full historical picture of their particular golden-lined theology because it would mean everything they stand upon is completely… oh, what’s the world(?)… heretical. 😉 Hahaha.

          If the world “heretical” is too severe for their stomachs, then use grossly amputated.

          Anyway, Stephen Colbert’s technique works just as effective as my approach and explanation.

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        • Sorry! Forgot to name the exact ministers/preachers of Properity Theology in my comment above…

          E. W. Kenyon, Oral Roberts, A. A. Allen, Robert Tilton, T. L. Osborn, Joel Osteen, Creflo Dollar, Kenneth Copeland, Mike Murdock, Reverend Ike and Kenneth Hagin.

          It’s all bad contextual exegesis. Period.

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  6. Not hogwash, just juvenile. It depends on what you mean by “live as if there were a god.” If that means live humbly and charitably and by the golden rule, great. (You can do that whether or not you believe in a god.) If it means forcing your views on others–even if your view is the golden rule–and pursuing a Crusade or jihad, then not so great.What I like about that sign is that the poster is more conflicted than he knows. It beats ‘my country right or wrong’ for example.

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  7. It makes me sad to think someone will live their whole life based on a belief that is false. I guess it’s good that when they die they won’t learn the error they have made and feel the regret of a wasted life.

    But what a waste.

    ~AW

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  12. As paranormal-metaphysical sciences become more and more advanced, as they have been the last 20-years, more and more examined and scrutinized, and thus more and more understood… we are seeing that “the other side” is NOTHING like any of the Abrahamic religious notions of their afterlife.

    For anyone interested, this might be a good place to start researching and learning, listening while your preconceived biases are suspended… “Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman: Is There Life After Death?” Season 2, Episode 1.

    A basic-to-moderate understanding of Quantum Physics/Mechanics is essential to answering as well as asking the right questions for the best answers. I advise anyone who really wants to know about an afterlife (i.e. those not blinded by the placebo effect of “faith”) to become an amateur quantum physicists. The field is only going to answer more and more mysteries of life/existence! Guaranteed. 🙂

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    • What seems to be common among nearly all religions is the belief there is life after death. As the show indicated, it comes in many forms but the thought/idea/hope runs throughout tribes and peoples all around the world. It appears to be part of the human makeup to stave off the idea that our lives end.

      Human consciousness simply doesn’t want to let go …

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      • There are definitely compelling theories and “natural-scientific laws” that support the real possibility of an eternal neverending existence/cycles in various forms, e.g. the Law of Conservation of Mass/Energy in thermodynamics, one I am fond of. But what is becoming abundantly clear is that the afterlife isn’t anything close to what the Abrahamic religions teach. A 6th grader can figure that out when considering all of the data and evidence known today. Those who cannot bring themselves to honestly suspend their preconceived notions and bias, or suspend their familial-cultural influences on the matter, are guilty of the osterich head in the sand for the sake of “false relief” in this life.

        Regarding “common among nearly all religions“, I personally attribute that phenomena to the power of peer-pressure and assimilation resulting from thousands of years of a strong paleoanthropological biological and DNA need of “belonging” for mere emotional, mental, and physical survival. We see the exact same thing (relations) in thousands of other Earthly species of which we are very closely related.

        It appears to be part of the human makeup to stave off the idea that our lives end.

        Indeed Nan. What I find that soothes and aids this ailment is to fully embrace the fact that life and death can never be made unequal, unbalanced, much less separated. Accepting both equally liberates our anxieties over both. Hence, their magnitudes are either reduced, amplified, and certainly tamed so that the present, the here and now can be invigoratingly well-managed… TOGETHER! Hah! “Life plays and swims in paradox while the kill-joys go mad.” 😉

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        • I had a sort of light bulb type moment the other day when I realised where the concept of a fiery Hell comes from.

          Traditionally Hell is seen as being a hot place with molten lava inside the earth. It seems so obvious when you think about it that is based on Volcano’s.

          To suggest that a creator deity would reconstitute a human after death to give them some sort of ‘body’ that could feel pain and be eternal for no reason other than torment makes that deity into a monster many times worse than the most horrific human tyrant.

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      • Most, if not all, people I ask what they base their theory of an afterlife on, reply: “Look at what many persons have experienced. On the website near-death.com, scientific evidence seems to support, for example, that brain-dead people have NDE’s, and that persons born blind can see during an NDE.
        It is allright to believe other people’s testimonies, but isn’t there a limit, a personal decision where to draw the line? Because crossing it, I cannot avoid thinking that cognitive dissonance is involved- if I am using the correct term.
        .-

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        • I have heard so many conflicting reports on NDE’s i really don’t know what to think.

          I did read a comprehensive study in a Science Journal from 30 years ago (I only read the report recently before I threw the old magazine away). In that particular study they made three key observations:
          – not everyone had the experience;
          – the manner of near death did not seem to affect the experience;
          – the person’s religion did not seem to affect the general experience.

          My major observations are:
          1. we must recognise that near death is not actual death;
          2. whilst the general experience is not affected by religion, a person’s subsequent interpretation appear to be.

          My own suspicion is that it is to do with the goings on of an oxygen deprived brain.

          Significantly some non religious people who had a very ‘pleasant’ NDE did not suddenly decide they wanted to follow an existing religion, more likely they would become ‘spiritual’ in a very broad sense and say they no longer feared death.

          I have read a number of ‘Christianised’ NDE testimonies and spoke with a few Christians who claim to have had NDE’s. I suppose what I took out of it all was that there was no unifying factor I could identify.

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        • Probably the simplest answer related to the afterlife is people believe what they want to believe.

          However, re NDEs, there have been numerous (scientific and medical) studies that indicate these experiences are induced by physiological changes that can occur as a body/brain is shutting down. The fact that the person is presumed “dead” in some of the cases can be attributed to several things, one of them being medical technology has improved so much that people have literally been brought back from the brink of death.

          There is little doubt these people experienced “something,” but for me, those that tell of religious experiences are nothing more than wishful thinking.

          Here is an article that you might enjoy reading: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/the-science-of-near-death-experiences/386231/

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        • I had a near death experience once, but there was nothing religious about it. Like others have said I think it is the brains way of dealing with its lack of Oxygen or something. Hugs

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        • Thanks Nan I read the article on NDE’s.

          Ultimately I note that it remains an unresolved area of science, and given the difficulty in creating test conditions will remain a challenge to resolve.

          I was interested to note that most of the folk who experienced a NDE seemed uninterested in a scientific explanation. I wondered whether they really wanted it to be real and feared that science would spoil it for them, a bit like religion when you think about it.

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      • Some are growing up Scottie and some are simply too afraid to step OUT OF their comfort zones (group zones) to become more whole, alive human beings. Stagnation = extinction. Adaptation (evolution) = wisdom and fullfilment. Hugs for you too Friend. ❤

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    • Physicist Sean Carroll argued that based on the Laws of Physics there could be no afterlife, as such, as the consciousness was linked to the brain in our physical body.

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  13. For one, I can’t believe in something I do. To just “will” yourself into believing something seems ridiculous to me. More importantly, though, I always wonder how people fail to find the beauty and magic in life as it is. To die and return to the earth, to see the complexities of life rather than good and evil, and to wonder at the amazement of NOT being under the thumb of a white-bearded dude in the sky seems like a far better life to me.

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  14. “I always wonder how people fail to find the beauty and magic in life as it is.” I love that line. Indeed, that has to be my most prominent thought when speaking with the ‘spirit soaked’. Like, WHY do they need an invisible sky-daddy? What is missing in their lives? Thoroughly perplexing, it is. . . 😦

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  15. I think the main problem here is, that the statement in no way defines what God is. So if I define God as a non-personal God, who created the universe but is uninterested in the daily happenings and provides no punishment or reward system during their lives, then is that okay too? The nefarious part of this statement is that we have a known definition of what God is, or what God wants. I mean we have lots of people guessing, and in those guesses we can largely reject many of those things unproveable and matters of faith, and thus we can ascribe any character to God that we want (which is what we’ve already seemingly done) and that should be good enough. So MY God doesn’t care that I live my life as if there was no God, because my God is disinterested in how I live my life, or my God only cares that I continue to strive to do the right thing in order to give me post-life. We can make all these suppositions about what God wants. We can’t really prove that there is a God or commanded anything, so thus living your life by any self-defined God should be acceptable, and I think we can all agree that such a philosophy would be dangerous.

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