Religion
Related: About this forumWhere is God hiding out?
I watched an interesting documentary about first contact with tribes living in protected lands in the Amazon. It was fascinating. One of the questions the anthropologist who engaged with them asked was where do you go when you die? The answer? To the Sky. Seemingly, even those who have had no contact with the major religious texts look to the sky for the afterlife. They are not alone, within living memory religious adherents, of all major (and many minor) religions, were of the opinion that God (the good) indisputably inhabited the vast blue expanse above the planet, whereas the Devil (the bad) hung out in the fiery, burning, desolate sub-terrestrial environ of a (sometimes flat?!?!) planet Earth.
This belief in reinforced in religious art and iconography, which for the last 500 years, has customarily characterised Gods and Demons as dwelling in the ethereal locale in or just above the clouds or the fiery pits of the centre of the Earth. Of course, in the 21st century we know that God does not literally inhabit the sky. Well unless you are a tribe who makes first contact in the last couple of years. We have planes that reach above the clouds and satellites that reach above the atmosphere. We have telescopes that are so powerful we can see far into remote regions of the universe. We have been to the moon, we have sent probes to Mars. We have not seen God in any of those places. Unless NASA is keeping the existence of God in the sky a big secret, there is no evidence of God in the place he traditionally inhabited.
So, where is God hiding out?
MineralMan
(147,334 posts)The deity gets created again and again in the individual. Religion just codifies one way of looking at it.
Gods exist in the human imagination. Where else?
littlemissmartypants
(25,027 posts)" I am."
If you dont act you are not convinced, for God in you is your own wonderful human imagination and God is always acting! You may be physically incapacitated, but you are forever acting in your imagination, who is God, the Father of your life. Neville Goddard
http://nevillegoddardquotes.com/how-to-feel-it-real-be-convinced/
zipplewrath
(16,685 posts)It could be hiding "in plain sight".
uriel1972
(4,261 posts)Keeping God and the Aliens to themselves lol.
Bretton Garcia
(970 posts)Ancients thought that invisible gods were everywhere, animating things. That is, making things - animals, trees, water, air - move. Making things happen.
But that would mean that gods, or the powers that make things move, that make things happen, are not above us in the sky But deep inside Nature.
That ancient view, animism, is in some surprising ways, compatible with science. Since all that might include, say, invisible atoms. Tiny invisible things, making things happen.
No doubt to be sure, modern science though is a very considerable improvement on these early roots.
And for that matter? This means that modern religions, with their "heaven" and so forth, are degenerate, and wrong. They misread their own animistic origins.
Whereas, ironically? Science is truer to the origins of religion. Even as it extended and improved on them, very considerably.
guillaumeb
(42,649 posts)You are welcome.