h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Ok people, off we go....

Did we come to a conclusion yet?

Well, here's one. What if God isn't dead, but is playing a massive Ainsly Harriot joke on us. Maybe in a few years time, we'll go to church because of some deep programmed urge and there we will have to watch as God shows us hilarious clips of us sinning.

It would be a good test of faith, after all, if he feigned death in order to see who really, really, really believed in him. Just takes the reasons for there being no miracles argument a bit further.

True, in fact, all the 'Fake' miracles could be set-ups. God, standing at the alter, saying 'Remember the statue that cried milk, here's how we did it', then a behind the scenes look at it.
It could be scary, you don't know if the heaven-cam is on you.

That would be awful, having a Penn & Tella (However they spell it) show up of the loaves and fishes trick. Though I would be rahter keen on knowing how to do the water into wine stunt, that was rather good. And some of Moses's were particularly good party pieces. I have a feeling the heaven-cam's been on me for years. I'm sure I can hear sniggering coming from somewhere!!

Come to think of it, the concept of ONE ALMIGHTY GOD is relatively recent, who's to say that the Greeks weren't closer to the truth or those Friendly Buddhist people?

Maybe there is one God but he has a multi-facetted personality (being all things to all people) thus allowing us to believe what we like, 'cos we're too insignificant as individuals to matter.

I'll drink to that! Oh, and it's "Penn and Teller", I do beleive. And they do do a great trick with a stone that bleeds... nothing miraculous, but a great bit. Now, if we subscribe to the "Heaven Cam" theory, wouldn't the world just be like one big "Truman Show"? Which is scary because it means we all have something in common with Jim Carrey... oh well.

No, of course he's not dead!!
I saw him not half an hour ago, munching his Pedigree Chum with added marrowbone and stuff.
Mind you, that was just before Mary took him out for a walk so I suppose he may have been run down by a bus, abducted by Aliens, caught E-Coli poisoning or something and died since then...
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No, I'm sure I heard him bounding back in just now..
So I can say without fear of contradiction... DOG IS ALIVE!!
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Oh, you meant GOD, dearie me, this dyslexia is getting worse...........................
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Come on dear, time for your ECT

Hi folks!

I'd like to invite you to join my cult, or do what I did and take someone else's cult and make it up all over again. I worship Eris, the ancient Greek Goddess of chaos (which people are calling complexity these days because it sounds nicer, but it's really chaos).

My cult is based on silliness, and I wish I had my Principia Discordia with me, but here's the basic gist of things, as demonstrated by an interview between the Greater Poop (which I believe to be a news rag) and Malaclypse the Younger (who I believe to be a silly person and therefore a prophet).

The Greater Poop: Is Eris true?

Malaclypse the Younger: All things are true.

GP: Even false things?

M2: Even false things are true.

GP: But how can that be?

M2: Don't ask me, man. I didn't do it.

The Principia is full of great stuff like this. There are 5 rules to live by, but I can't remember all of them. There's pretty much 5 of anything to an Erisian. Two important things are that we may partake of no hot dog buns (for according to the doctrine of the Original Snub, Eris took solace in a hot dog bun for five days), and we are to partake joyously of a hot dog on Fridays. I don't partake joyously of hot dogs at all, so I'm a bad Erisian. Still, since She cares about what I do approximately as much as she cares about the spin of any given electron, I feel pretty vindicated in my lack of hot dog partakage. I will refuse hot dog buns on the basis of my religion, though.

And it is in fact "Penn and Teller" : )

I think you're in the wrong forum... this is the NON cult spin off of the original "Is God Dead" forum, the Cult spin off is at http://www.h2g2.com/A180802 , but everyone there is already in a cult and we eat kumquats for a week every fourty two thurdays... I don't think we have a vew on hot dogs/ buns quite yet.

I think it's fair to say that god is a concept not a person isn't it? And can a concept be dead? Or alive come to that.
And Nilchi or whatever you sound uncannily like a certain Discordia I met a while ago... he had an Eris thang going too...

Three thousand years is recent? That's older than Buddha (c. 500 BC) or the Homeric tradition (c. 800 BC)!

But on another tack, this discussion reminds me of something:
(Palinesque voice) - Oh yes, the Judaeo-Christian Yahweh. What's wrong with it?
(Cleesian Voice) - I'll tell you what's wrong with it. It's dead, that's what's wrong with it.
(Palinesque voice) - No, no, it's resting, look!
(Cleesian Voice) - Look my lad, I know a dead deity when I see one and I'm looking at one right now.
Et cetera (but not necessarily Lisa)

Question: if God by his/her/its very nature is unknowable, how would we know if it was dead or not?

Also, if God was to have surrounded us all, would we feel it when he died. Surely, there must have been a feeling of morid distress at his passing, that feeling you get in hospitals and funeral parlours. Is there arecording of a global day of misery, a day when everyone felt low and down. Seeing that there is supposed to be God's warmth, did we all feel cold as well.

Didn't they call it the 20th Century?

See! See!

Merkin has an indisputable intimation that the 20th C. is more unpleasantly cold due to the death of God, and as Nietzsche sez "We killed him. That is our single greatest accomplishment."

Anyway 3000 years is quite recent compared to all the shamanic spiritualist stuff that was going on before it.
BELIEF in *stuff* has existed for a long time before a belief that there was controlling deity behind all the *stuff*. The Greeks and the Buddhists just had different theories, more recent or not.

According to Nietzsche, we, the human race killed God by innovations in Science and technology, and spending too long on the toilet thinking about how we could prove he didn't exist. This led to doubt creeping in amongst a large amount of the population and absolute faith became well nigh impossible.

In the absence of the absolute faith of the majority, God decided to call it a day and.....

Oh fudge. DNA did all this already. "Man went on to prove Black is White and promptly got killed on the next Zebra crossing" or words to that effect.

Ergo, this whole conversation is pointless and I think we should resolve other great unanswered questions (which I will think upon) or go to join the cult.

You're right that belief in stuff goes way back, but belief in stuff also goes way forward. Man (or at least Western Man) has killed his Judaeo-Christian God and replaced Him with the God of Science and Technology. Instead of credo, soul, good & evil, we (well, scientists anyway) now worship instruction manual, molecule, positive & negative. It could be said that the Universe is their god. And members of the scientific community can be just as dogmatic as any priest.

Faiths, whether they be in God, gods, spirits, come and go, tailored to the particular needs and wants of the masses, amended to accomodate the reality of the present.

I just have one question. Not to be all negative and everything, but are all of you really atheists or are you just partaking in this conversation for the logistics and entertainment of it? Because if none of you really believes in God, this is a pretty sorry world indeed.

Joke: Did you here of the insomniac dyslexics agnostic? He stayed up all night wondering if there really was a Dog.

Weeeeeelllll, I think I'm an atheist. I'm yet to be convinced about the merits of agnosticism. I have my doubts.

I mean believing in God is all OK for those that do, but if you don't, like me, there's not much that's going to persuade you (and vice versa).

I started the conversation way back when because I thought it was one of those questions that people ought to be asking themselves with the whole millenium thing on the cards. It has been entertaining along the way, but thats hopefully because we're all reasonably well-informed, literate people with a sense of humour.

Part of my question was aimed at finding out if people thought we should be looking for a new belief, a new way of looking at things, given the widespread lack of faith. That's not to be offensive to those who DO believe, but an increasing number don't and my curiosity demands, where do we go from here?

Nice gag!

Hey, good point. I belive that there is some force behind it all, but is it God? I don't know. I do know that to look after everything must be toughso he must outsource a lot of work and if that is the case, who gets the contract for stuff. Maybe its not God thats dead, but the contractors in charge of our project.
It does have to be said that there is a frame of atheism here, I suppose. But to say whether this forum is for entertainment only would be wrong, there is a form of belief going through it. Its that belief that creates the feeling that you see in the text. Maybe this is a way of getting the questions out. I know that personally I have a few issues with belief, why do all relgions feel that they have to control thier followers, what is the difference between cult and religion and what does (or even did) God belive in.
The truth is that this is a very sorry world. If wars can start over nothing more than which way God is, then mankind has no hope. More wars are started over relgious belief than any other, and its normally because one man thinks his beliefs are better. Even in a small country like Ireland, this faith, for want of a better word, has broken families, communities and destroyed lives. I am not about to say that its about time man lived peacefully with man, that will never happen, but its about time that man realised that faith is individual, one mans view is another anti-view but, so what, I like pizza, if someone else doesn't, I wouldn't go mocking his choice or kill him is he didn't understand the greatest of my pizza. True, my pizza has many toppings and is warm to me, it gives me dilemas and morals, it shows me that life is a circle and that sometimes you have extra cheese and sometimes you get anchovies, but its my pizza, I take what I get and live the life I lead.

I believe there is far more to life than meets the eye, that there is much still to understand about this world of ours, let alone what exists elsewhere in the universe. who knows what beings may exist on other worlds, after all we're still finding strange beings in our own oceans.

But no, I do not believe in a Judeo-Christian God. See Christianity forum for some of my many billion reasins why.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that 1) he didn't exist at some point (in whatever form), or 2) that he is now an ex-omnipotent being.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand, why would us not believing in God mean that this is a pretty sorry world? After all we're happily chatting about the important (and totally unimportant) issues of the day, while in the time it's taken me to write this another 200 people have been slaughtered somewhere on this planet in the name of God.