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

if for the moment we assume that everything has a beggining and an end:

and we also assume for the moment there is a god(s): then who created him/her and what will happen when (s)he ceases to exist?

now if there is no god(s): then could the incredible coincidences that meant the construction of the human race be explained through science beyond reasonable doubt?

if things can be infinite- god(s), souls etc.. : then could there really be a place that could keep you happy for all time (and even when time stops) once you die, (as i for one get bored of things after a while, so once you'd done everything, what is there left,

finally if things are infinite and there is also a place of "Hell" and you had been bad enough to deserve to go there, then would you be punished,? as you have been doing the devil's bidding on this world so would'nt he reward you?

Math thanks I'll go with those thoughts too.

I don't suggest that NDE is the only way to meet a 'guide', but there seemed a difference in that experience to my feeble attempts to recreate the situation. (Except for the death bit )
I'll try to list my differences in my experiences.
If only for scientific purposes.
BTW way death ..high blood pressure in labour, given a drug I was allergic to - a derivative of Curare (spelling?) a muscle relaxant, called scoline NOT an anaesthetic. supposed to paralyse for a minute, but my body 'think's it's curare and goes into complete paralysis for a number of hours. This info also for the scientist.)

In a 'recreation' I feel that I may 'leave' the scene at any time.
In NDE I didn't
In recreation I feel that I am in control of the 'event' and conjouring up a 'guide' It is something I am DOING, In NDE it feels like something being DONE to me.
In recreation, I feel that the guide is saying what I want ultimately to hear.
IN NDE everything came as a surprise, new information was passed on.
In recreation I come away from the experience the same person
In NDE experience I came away with the feeling that I had 'died' to myself and here was a completely new and different person.
In recreation it was easy to convince myself that what was happening was my 'imagination'
In NDE it wasn't.
the a few words it was 'beyond the imagination' (seen on the back of a superman comic aged 6 and struggled to imagine, fruitlessly, soemthing beyond imagination

Feeling quite dislocated from 'myself' I actually began to feel that I was 'living the' 'wrong' life !!!!!
I even considered that it was possible that during the NDE I had somehow crossed over into a parallel universe or something odd like that.

now look I'm bearing my mad thoughts to you all and it will only hit me later that I've put these thoughts up on the WWW.
I'll break out into a cold paranoid sweat until I remember . no one knows who I am
the other weird thing that has been happening to me lately is......... Well my ex husband died young and unexpectedly, last year and to be honest Im certain he's hanging around the place.
Y'know strange goings on that are hard to explain, without resorting to "It's only my imagination (as if imagination could be an 'only)
IT feels really risky to talk about these things anywhere, because I can hear "Bring on the pyschotopic drugs". in the back of my social conditioning
but it's as if he has become my guide and it's not a matter of wish fulfillment in terms of the loss of a loved one. Our divorce was not amicable.
I'll shut up now
love from ;

The Ice Cube

(Funny that in a way. when I woke up from NDE I WAS covered in Ice cubes and only allowed to satisfy my raging thirst with an ice cube!

z

"if for the moment we assume that everything has a beggining and an end:"

I only share my experience I don't try to change yours.

My experience suggests there is no beginning and there is no end, but there is change, so your suggested assumption would rightly 'screw' up the meaning I take from that experience.
It's a bit like saying something like "If for the moment we can assume that a car has no wheels, how does it move?"
Do you understand?

As for being bored in the 'ever after.' This thought comes from your feeling that you will enter that state in your pyshical body with all it's wants and needs. We are all (mostly) at a stage in our development where we crave constant 'entertainment'
You will not be this way when you 'move' on.
You will lose your physical body and it's wants and become the same stuff that God is made of. You will become the the collective conscious of the creator.
That spark inside the flesh survives, but changes.
There is nothing boring about this experience.
The whole idea of the pysical body is to experience physical things, which cannot be learnt from in the spirit state ( I hate these terms with their difficult cynical connotations)
The whole idea of experience is that you do not 'remember' that you are part of God. Lives teach you to recall this.
In the happily ever after, you will ultimately remember, through many lives lived , how to create your own Universes.
Does this sound boring?

Alji,

I am not sure you are actually interested in references, but I will tell you what the Scripture says.

"Neither is their salvation (from sin) in any other name, for their is no other name given under Heaven by which we must be saved."

Jesus said, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no man comes to the Father but by me."

As deliverance from sin is only found in Jesus Christ personally, and not in any other religion, even mere religion about Him, all adherents of any other religion will be lost, as there is no deliverance from sin anywhere else. Sin is the issue. If you do not get delivered from sin when the justice of God falls against sin it will fall on you.

Matholwch,

Having been away for a day I have some catching up to do.

There is no debate. The Maker, Owner, and Sustainer of Heaven and Earth has spoken, and that is the end of the matter, for all time and eternity.

I concede that there are many who think that if they only deny and defy Him sufficiently long enough that He will cease to exist, and that their religion/belief system will become 'true', and God will not bother them.

This is a bit like someone deciding to cast themselves off the roof of a hundred story building denying the existence of the laws of gravity. They are fine for a while, and can say to those who jumped with them, and those that they pass at office windows, on the way down, that gravity does not exist, and that their belief is correct.

For some time they are in comfort, and are happy. The fact that nothing has happened to them for some time makes them feel very secure.

Then they have a meeting with the pavement.

Z,

There is a Heaven, and there is a Hell.

There is a power which all inherit, called SIN. God does not hold you responisible for having it, or inheriting it. But the penalty of sin is death. No sin will enter God's presence.

Man cannot pay the price for sin himself, and survive it. Someone else had to come and pay for him, who was not Himself infected with it.

God sent His Son to pay for us. That work is done and dusted. Now all have to find Jesus Himself to receive the benefit of that work.

All deserve to go to Hell, as that is the repository of all who did not come to Christ and get delivered of sin in their lifetime.

Come Judgement Day all who are in Hell, in Heaven, and on Earth still alive, will stand before Jesus Christ, who will then have taken up His role as Judge (He is saviour at the moment, to all who will come to Him).

Of those who died without Christ who came from Hell, NO questions are asked. A check is made of the Book of Life to see if their name appears there. It does not, of course, and Jesus says to them, "Depart from me ye cursed into the lake of fire prepared for the devil and his angels." (The devil and his angels are already in there.

There are no rewards in the lake of fire as the devil, and all with him will be suffering eternal destruction.

It is only those who died in Christ who will be judged and rewarded according to their works, good or bad.

Hassle,

When the Bible speaks of death there it means what human beings refer to as death,ie separation from ones body.

Justin

Egon,

Well, to use a loose analogy, I know my mother, and I can speak authoritatively about her. If someone denied her existence I could just push aside what was said, and tell the person who said those things that they were a liar.

The same is true of all real Christians. They KNOW the Lord Jesus Himself, and have heard Him speak to them, just as it says in the Word of God. It is no use you trying to convince them otherwise.

The Church of England em masse is not Christian, no. But about 3-5% of them are real Christians, and are my brothers and sisters in Christ, God bless them.

Never mind my dogged insistence. It is God you have problem with. He is the one who is bigotted in your view, and you are not going to move Him. I only serve Him.

Alji,

I do not have a church to name. I am a member of the house chuch movement, and a member of the Fellowship of Evangelistic Ministries.

Justin

Jordan,

I am ancient, lad, ancient.

I use I.E., and you cannot do bold and italics. I know all the tricks you list but they do not work on this board.

Justin

Justin
If there is "no debate," why are you here in the illusory debate?
Puzzled

Where was I after that distasteful interruption.


Is anyone else here concerned that this kind of rant could really upset some people who haven't lived long enough to know it as wicked lies?
I call them lies because they have absolutely no logic for me and if I believe anything I belive God to be logical in conclusion

Hmmm Talking about the horrors and cruelty of a wrathful , god set on punishing people for being exactly the way HE created them;
Fundamentalism is the real evil in the World. Those who set themselves up as the only Voice of God (in capitals of course) create such havoc and destruction.
Back to the plot.

Here’s how my ‘spirit guide’ works.
Take it as fact or fiction as you wish
I’m writing it for no other reason than I want to.
I was writing to one of the threads on this site round about September 11th
The site was something like ‘911 why and how.’
During the course of the week, the word Babylon kept cropping up. Newspapers, websites.
You know once you notice the same thing re occurring you tend to be alert for it happening again.
Randomly and unusually I saw an episode of Stargate, someone called Daniel had been captured by an alien who wanted him to translate some ancient Babylonian text, written on the wall.
Next evening I randomly switch onto the National Geographic channel .
I’ve never watched it before and there’s this program about the building of Babel, the whole story about Nebucadneza,.
You know that the random selection of a TV program can be as coincidental as the throwing of the dice
there's some thing about debauched feast and writing appearing on the wall that cannot be deciphered until Biblical, as apposed to TV, Daniel is called in to tell them that basically their civilisation has had it.
I’d seen the same message in different format within 24 hours which seemed relevant to a current conundrum.
So I’m watching a computer reconstruction of the building of Babel when it hits me in the form of a ‘vision or image’
The tower of Babel, the World trade Centre.
The World Trade centre was selected , not because of it being a financial centre point, but because for fundamental Islam the building of a tower represents an affront to God (it doesn’t to me you understand and I don’t believe God believes so either)
A symbol , to them, of Western arrogance if you like.
This is how that literal bible meaning thing can get you killed.
The World Trade centre also a place of multi culture where many languages were spoken from different peoples of the world.
America had not seen the ‘writing on the wall?”
I already knew all these facts stored somewhere in my brain, but it felt as if I was being shown how to be aware of what lies beneath.
The message from Islam, not God, by attacking the Towers was "Your civilisation has had it." Manmade symbolism that you might have to think about before you 'get it'

Later I saw another program about two wealthy Princes from Saudi, both racing to build the tallest highest sky scraper in the capital. Each trying to out do each other in magnificence.
My first thought was that both these towers are targets for the same thinking that believes towers are an affront to God.
Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practise being the only one to know the word of God.

Hasslefree,

Jesus said "Go into all the world and preach the gospel unto every creature..."

The Truth of Almighty God is not for use in the blasphemy of debate.

Justin

Justin- your mother is a physical being. Your God is an abstract concept. if I said your mother didn't exist, you could just show her to me and say "look, there she is". You can't do that with your God.

Matholwch, you didn't follow the link. The area of the brain was discovered by using buddhist monks.

Alji

I see you are all very interested in knowing the answer, so here it is:
Yes, I am real.

Justin so I'll ask you again, why are you in this debate?

Egon,

I did say that it was a loose analogy for that reason. However, you are right in some senses as I could not show you God. I don't really have to though, as you are going to meet Him soon.

There is an interesting point here too, that all the Christians known to me hear me say a lot; that God's power must once again be present among His people. He does still heal people. I have prayed for some to be healed, and they were, and others who were not. But other miracles too. That would settle it. But you still would not beleive, as saving faith is a gift of God and you cannot work it up yourself.

Justin

Egon

Here's my mother she gave birth to me. Easy
But the father isn't such a sure thing, you know he exists because here you are. But what about surrogacy?
You can't show the father, but you know he has to exist somewhere purely by the evidence of your own creation.

Bother didn't mean surrogacy, meant AI.