The Republic of Heaven

Some people think HDM is the devil, since it kills God and all that...Do you believe in God, and did HDM have any affect on your views?

I think HDM affected me alot, personally, but I was walking down the atheistic path already, so it's not like it turned me from a Catholic into a Satanist, or something...

I used to describe myself as atheist, but now that I've read HDM and done "research" on PP and stuff, I think I'm the sort of atheist-agnostic he describes himself as being.

I do believe in *a* god, and HDM didnt effect it for many reasons.

Mainly because I see them not killing god, but setting him free. He didn't want to "live" in a casket.

To clarify...

I believe that you cannot prove the existance of God with the facts we have right now, and there is much more evidence against it; maybe there is one but we can't know for sure from the evidence we have. I'd rather believe there is none.

HDM didn't effect my belifs no matter what my mom thinks. I have a question do you think about to going chruch? Becase the only use I find in going is to pray for those to need it. I would rather go out and help people instead off seating on my butt and listening to sermons.

I believe in God... although I agree with Pullman that those claiming to be religious don't always actually practice their religion. I have a very loose outlook on God... don't know how to describe it, really... sort of that if you're a good person/live your life to the fullest (HDM influence there), you'll be rewarded. I don't know about the whole hell thing though... that's my biggest question in regards to religion... I just can't see how God could banish his creations to a place of eternal torture...

Goig to church is very important. (you can tune me out if you want, I get that a lot. "You would say that, you're a Pastor's kid") You never know when someone will need you there..

HDM didn't change my believes at all. I've trained myself very well to seperate the fact from the fiction when I'm reading. So it didn't take much effect on me.

i don't know what i believe in. i'm definitely not an athiest, because a world with nothing like destiny, or a god, or something that not neccessarily controls everything, but something that's supernatural, that's just there, for our benefit, eg. Dust. a world without something like Dust would be an empty world. sure there'd still be purpose to life, but it'd be boring. the whole connection to the rest of the world in one way or another... like what mary malone was talking about.

before i read the last book of his dark materials, i didn't really pick up much on the anti-religion aspects of tgc and tsk, but maybe i was too young. i read tas after i started going to church, but it didn't really change my view, but i think it allowed me to organise them more. i've never really believed in sin, so i could never really believe in God or anything, but before it'd be particular things i wouldn't believe in, like specific things Christianity was against, but the whole innocence and experience, i never even thought of that until i read hdm.

If God is all forgiving, why is there a hell...?

I agree mostly with Soup and Merlyn. I consider myself agnostic as well, but I can't fight fourteen years of conditioning to just deny God. My hands still fold into the prayer gesture whenever I get into bed; and I start saying Dear God every night, but then cut myself off when I remind myself that there is no God So I guess I still believe in Him, or Her. My views have been touched by HDM; I sort of believe in a God of Dust. I absolutely hate the Catholic Church. (not the people! The institution!) I think I must have been killed by the Inquisition in a past life or something! They're just so....restricting. And the Bible is so obsessed with maintaing innocence! Let me ask you something:
If you tell a little girl, say six or so, not to eat this yummy chocolate cookie, this really good, delicious chocolate cookie, and then leave her and the cookie ALONE in a room together, what do you think would happen?
There's the basic story of Adam and Eve. Eve got left alone with the cookie, so to speak. Who the hell does that? What kind of a God would do that? If God's "all knowing" wouldn't he know thats what was going to happen? Hell, I'm a teenager from -America- and I knew that was going to happen.

Religion sucks.

Agnostic here.

I'd be too freaked out not to believe in something.
I actually have a tougher time believing in after life.
I really hope there is something because trying to imagine the feeling of not exsisting really hurts my head...

Ever think of something that you can't really experience?
Such as thinking about not exsisting.
You can't really do that, since you wouldn't exsist and thats not a feeling.

odd...


I'm babbling again!

Wouldn't the feeling of non-existance be mirrored by dreamless sleep?

Just another thing to add: I do believe in the moral teachings of most religions, just not with their institutions. I guess I agree with Pullman there again, "it would be great if the Church followed Jesus's teachings" (or something along those lines).

Well, I already had my "beliefs" figured out before I read HDM...

I base most of my views on what evolution has come up with...mainly that things that work, stay around. When I say this I'm not just talking about life...in fact, life is a rather small part of it. You see, recently they have found that for our universe to exist at all, it had to have certain "features" (for lack of a better word...) when it came together. The thing is, the chances of a universe having these "features" is so small, that you'd think it'd be impossible for us to exist! The trick is...Evolution! Simple and obvious: the universes that didn't work, collapsed and ceased to exist...the ones that didn't...well obviously didn't collapse! So the only way we could be here at all is if our universe had those "features"!

Sorry about the rather long ~*pineapples*~...I'm in one of those moods...

So anyway, our purpose is to survive since the things that didn't try to survive didn't survive.

I don't think there is a god because there is absolutely no proof...

Now, for those who would be very disappointed if there were no point but to survive...
There is another instinct that seems to have helped us survive...that is to explore. Now I find it obvious that we don't know a lot about just how stuff works...and the stuff we do know is really interesting! It's clear to me that there could be and are all sorts of things that would be easily more interesting then something static like god! The exiting thing about science is that it's always changing...they keep finding really cool stuff! For example: there's some cool stuff about how black holes might actually "bend" space all the way "down" so that it creates a "tunnel"...think about all the other strange things about black holes, like the fact that they occasionally send off huge amounts of energy for no apparent reason...maybe this is a result of...who knows? I hope I live long enough to find out...

Science rules.

I also hope i live to see some amazing discovery (i.e. mars colonies, meeting alien civilizations, who won the election of 2000...)

I'm crossing my fingers that the crashing of the Columbia won't affect anything. I'm pro-NASA where a lot of politicians these days aren't.

Oh well.

Yeah, both Columbia and Challenger were the result of politics deciding things that only scientists should decide.

NASA's going to launch their two mars rovers in the next couple months! They should get there by the end of the year! Just hope everyone used the metric system...unlike that one other time...

And also that they don't crash it in a large canyon...

Gabrobot wrote:I don't think there is a god because there is absolutely no proof...

And yet... I find it hard to believe that consciousness/sentient life, or just life in general could spontaneously happen... I think that evolution/science was just the tools God/whatever you want to call him/her/it used to create the universe.

Uh, here's a kind of essay I wrote when I was bored:

The Psychopathology of Religion

For those of you who don’t know, psychopathology basically means a type of madness. If you think that it’s a bit extreme, I point out how it’s amply justified by history. Imagine that you’re an intelligent extraterrestrial, concerned only with verifiable truths. You discover a species which has divided itself into thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of tribal groups holding an incredible variety of beliefs about the origin of the universe and the way to behave in it. Although many of them have ideas in common, even when there’s a ninety-nine per cent overlap, the remaining one per cent is enough to set them killing and torturing each other, over trivial points of doctrine, utterly meaningless to outsiders.

How to account for such irrational behaviour? A famous philosopher (Lucretius if you’re interested) hit it on the nail when he said that religion was the by-product of fear – a reaction to a mysterious and largely hostile universe. For much of human prehistory, it may have been a necessary evil, if our early ancestors had no faith the hopeless reality of their banal existence would have surely crushed them - but why was it so much more evil that necessary, and why did it survive when it was no longer necessary?

I said evil – and I mean it, because fear leads to cruelty. The slightest knowledge of the Inquisition makes one ashamed to belong to the human species… The Church authorised the great misogynistic witch hunts to extract ‘confessions’ from thousands of harmless old women before it burned them alive, the Pope himself even wrote an approving forward for one infamous witch persecution book.

But most of the other religions, with a few honourable exceptions (eg-the early form of Buddism), were just as bad as Christianity. Even in the 21st century, little boys are kept chained and whipped until they’ve memorised whole volumes of pious gibberish, and robbed of their childhood and manhood to become monks…

Perhaps the most baffling aspect of the whole affair is how obvious madmen, century after century, would proclaim that they – and they alone! – had received messages from God. If all of the messages had agreed, that would have settled the matter. But course they were wildly discordant – which never prevented self-styled messiahs from gathering hundreds – sometimes millions – of faithful adherents, who would fight to the death against equally deluded believers of a microscopically differing faith.

Most of humanity has been insane, at least some of the time. There’s never been anything, however absurd, that countless people weren’t prepared to believe, often so passionately that they’d fight to the death rather than abandon their illusions. To me, that’s a good operational definition of insanity.



Believe it or not, my beliefs were almost exactly the same to HDM some time before I read it - I was even quite annoyed that PP had stolen my thunder...but then I realised how cool it was that he shared my beliefs and that here was someone who would fight for them.

I really, really hate the idea of a 'God' and a spirit/soul living on, it degrades our importance right here and right now, if the soul lives for an eternity than the time spent alive is piddling in comparison, so what does it matter what we do in that short time-span?

IF God exists, then I'm pretty confident that everyone in the world would go to hell, but if I don't and I go to 'heaven', then God is going to have to answer some serious questions - or I'll beat the crap out of Him

I'm an agnostic. I think that there are some things that can be explainded "truthfully" in more than one way or cannot be proven.

For example, God could have created the universe about 5,000 years ago, but weather or not (insert divine pronoun here) did, it can be shown that the way things are is accurately predicted by hypothesising that that was not the case. Hence, even if Creationism were true, you could show that the astrophysical theories that say the universe is 15 or so billion years old give useful answers to certain questions.

Note that this ambiguity is restricted to the way things are in some unobservable place/time -- either in the past or the future or far away -- with one exception, which I'll talk about later. Therefore, I think that one can prove that the world does not rest on four elephants which stand on a turtle which stands on a larger turtle ad ifinitum, but the existance of an afterlife or prelife cannot be determined (until, in the case of the afterlife, it enters one's shere of observation).

The exception to the above rule is the case of verifying the mental experiences of others. Simply put, I believe that this can never be accomplished. While one may show that someone has brain damage in a certain area or that they have a history of overactive imagination, one cannot prove (or disprove) that, say, God is speaking to them or that they feel "happy."

i don't think i could ever believe in pure evolution, instead of creation. creation on its own is pretty hard for me to believe, but evolution is how species developed through mistakes in dna replication. mistakes that seemed to be benefitial to the species were kept. i need to believe that there's some divine force in the universe guiding this.

reading his dark materials, seeing Dust as a divine force... that was cool. it was concious, it wasn't empty, it wasn't something telling us what to do... but it was superhuman, supernatural, like <i>above</i> us somehow. the divine force i need to believe in, it doesn't need to be a being like God is supposed to be, or like any human, with a physical, mental, emotional, body... just conciousness that like Dust, is attracted to good things, like tolerance, learning, et cetera... all the things PP mentions whenever he's defending his books.

Merlyn wrote:

Gabrobot wrote:I don't think there is a god because there is absolutely no proof...

And yet... I find it hard to believe that consciousness/sentient life, or just life in general could spontaneously happen... I think that evolution/science was just the tools God/whatever you want to call him/her/it used to create the universe.

Ah, but if we were not conscious then we wouldn't know that there was any conscious life. The universe is easily big enough for many many planets to develop life over time...most of them eventually become conscious. Now, only the conscious life forms will realize that they're conscious, but the only reason is that they know this is because they are conscious.

Okay I'm not sure if I got that right...I'm still a bit tired...

[Edit: I'll try again:

Okay, first...evolution is not a tool! I already pointed out that evolution is simply what happens when some things don't survive and others do. It doesn't even need to include physical changes! In fact, some scientists are starting to suspect that the dinosaurs died out because their environment changed, but they didn't change their behavior. Evolution can be seen in many forms...for instance, people with better education usually get better jobs (I know this may not always be the case, but that's not my point), so people with better education will survive better then those without. There are computer programs that show evolution with little dots on the screen, which represent the "beings"...hell, when I was doing stuff with robotics, I came across this guy's site which showed a simple program for a Mindstorms robot that would run on the computer and control the robot. The robot would send sensor information back to the computer and the computer would tell it what to do. Now for the interesting part, when the robot would run into an object, either a right or a left bumper would be pressed. The computer program would come up with random motor movements until the bumper was no longer pressed. The program would then store the motor moevement information in a "brain" file on the computer. The next time that bumper was pressed, it would just do what was stored in its "brain"...in this way, it learned how to move around without getting stuck on a wall. Now, you could set up two robots that have to learn how to survive in their environment. Then you would see evolution in process also!

In addition to the above, science does more to disprove the existance of a god then to prove it...science seems to explain things fine on it's own, I don't see the need for a god to get involved here either. Now my whole point here is that science and evolution can opperate fine on their own, I still don't see any proof of god...a god might have used evolution and science to create and control things, but I don't see proof that this is a requirement.]