PatrickG Posted October 8, 2011 Share Posted October 8, 2011 The first time that I heard the term "sentient being" was in the movie "Transformers". I'm interested in the term, and how it can be used for both a theist and an atheist. I am a theist and "feel" that there is good reason to believe in God. In another thread someone quoted: All intelligent faith in God has behind it a background of humble agnosticism. -Harry Emerson Fosdick I "feel" connected to whatever God is. I "feel" that I am a part of God, and that God is in me, as me(inner dialogue). I go with my gut on this, becaue of the results that this belief as yeilded in my life. I never feel alone. I always have a "counselor" in time of intelectual need. I feel that I can be helped in the right direction when I don't know the way. I was a Christian. I am now an exChristain because I think that the Bible is an archaic spirituality, that no longer serves my theological palette. I have outgrown Christianity. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Super Moderator florduh Posted October 9, 2011 Super Moderator Share Posted October 9, 2011 I am a theist and "feel" that there is good reason to believe in God. Either there is good reason or there is not. To "feel" there is a good reason means you haven't found a good reason. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DesertBob Posted October 9, 2011 Share Posted October 9, 2011 The first time that I heard the term "sentient being" was in the movie "Transformers". I'm interested in the term, and how it can be used for both a theist and an atheist. I am a theist and "feel" that there is good reason to believe in God. Is there a question, here Patrick? I'm no sure what you're getting at. "Sentience" is defined as "awareness". Some people use it in a more limited way, where self-awareness is required, not just any old kind of awareness. So my dog would have some self-awareness, and you or I presumably would have a lot more. What this has to do with feelings about God, I don't pretend to know. Help me out here. Are you suggesting that self-awareness would be god-awareness, if god is within us? If so I would just say I don't sense god in me. I have some connection to the universe but not a mystical one. I just exist within it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deva Posted October 9, 2011 Share Posted October 9, 2011 I haven't seen "Transformers". How did they use the words "sentient being" in the movie? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Noggy Posted October 9, 2011 Share Posted October 9, 2011 In ethics a sentient being is described as something that can be aware of its own pleasure and pain. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PatrickG Posted October 9, 2011 Author Share Posted October 9, 2011 I am a theist and "feel" that there is good reason to believe in God. Either there is good reason or there is not. To "feel" there is a good reason means you haven't found a good reason. Feelings are a good reason to me. I trust my feelings more than anything else. "Know thyself". I'm just thinking that in modern society, some things are ignored, and not taught well, or understood about our spirituality. Christianity takes away individual inspiration and replaces it with book knowledge, and rather then being led by your own spirit, follow a book, and teachres, and pastors. There is know real relationship taught.........our taught well at least. Spelling and wordage is not checked as I am using my phone to post. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Super Moderator florduh Posted October 9, 2011 Super Moderator Share Posted October 9, 2011 Feelings are a good reason to me. I trust my feelings more than anything else. Feelings play an important role in human affairs, but they should never override facts and evidence when making decisions. If I have no real information to go on, I must go with my feelings. What that actually means is I'm guessing and hoping for the best. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hereticzero Posted October 9, 2011 Share Posted October 9, 2011 Sentience is in the eyes of the researcher! The further an animal is removed from our way of reasoning and logic, the closer the animal comes to being our dinner. Comparing animal behavior to human sentience only gives us a result of our own thinking. How do we know what animals really think about? Is lack of self-awareness proof of lack of sentience? I don't think so. I know too many humans with their heads stuck so far up their own asses I would be in error to assume they were sentient. How can you outgrow Christianity, and the bible, and not outgrow a belief in the same Christian god? God is on everyone's side. All religions pray to a god, the religions that have one. How do you know you pray to the right god? If the bible told you what god to pray to then how can you pray to the Christian god if you no longer believe the bible is true? We are the divine of the universe. When we pray to our own gods, we pray or contemplate on the divine in ourselves. If we do works of evil, then the divine in us is evil. When we do good works, we show the divine in us is good. We all have a level of benevolent character that gives us compassion towards others and gives us the will to fight for what we believe to be a just cause--just like everyone else on the planet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hereticzero Posted October 9, 2011 Share Posted October 9, 2011 Going by instinct or a gut feeling is the product of intuition based on experience, not that our feelings are more reasoning than our brains. That gut feeling one gets comes from past experience of the same problem. You've honed your intuitiveness without knowing it. A gut feeling based on a new experience may be the incorrect path to take and sound reasoning skills trump gut feelings without experience every time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MichaelS Posted October 9, 2011 Share Posted October 9, 2011 While I don't dispute your feelings, I think that attributing them to a connection with "god" is a mistake. I have a hard time believing that my feelings connect me with god any more than my feelings connected me with that cute girl on the volleyball team back in middle school. The difference being here is that there hasn't been any outside evidence to completely dispel you of that feeling. Feelings are good because they allow us to bond with one another, but they aren't necessarily reciprocated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rev R Posted October 9, 2011 Share Posted October 9, 2011 I haven't seen "Transformers". How did they use the words "sentient being" in the movie? "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings." ~ Optimus Prime 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PatrickG Posted October 9, 2011 Author Share Posted October 9, 2011 What this has to do with feelings about God, I don't pretend to know. Help me out here. Are you suggesting that self-awareness would be god-awareness, if god is within us? If so I would just say I don't sense god in me. I have some connection to the universe but not a mystical one. I just exist within it. Yes. For me, knowing God is in the self awareness. My faith is from the inside out. You say that you don't sense god in you, but you do have an inner dialogue. For me this where God communicates. I have developed this faith for years.........as a Christain, and find it to be a beneficial part of my life. I do think that I could probably change my thinking to NOT see God in the inner dialogue.....but why? It works. It seems to come down to choice. I Choose to see God in my innner dialogue. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PatrickG Posted October 9, 2011 Author Share Posted October 9, 2011 In ethics a sentient being is described as something that can be aware of its own pleasure and pain. Interesting. I am sure that I am mixing up philosophy, theology......ethics.....and a hodge podge of stuff. I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. -Thomas Jefferson Where did Thomas Jefferson get the "free and moral agent" line from? I figure it must be from a philosophical line of thought.....but I don't know where. I wish I had time to study philosophy just a bit. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PatrickG Posted October 9, 2011 Author Share Posted October 9, 2011 Feelings are a good reason to me. I trust my feelings more than anything else. Feelings play an important role in human affairs, but they should never override facts and evidence when making decisions. If I have no real information to go on, I must go with my feelings. What that actually means is I'm guessing and hoping for the best. Yes.....and in time after going with your feelings and getting results from them you now have experience. That is how faith works. When you put faith into practice, and get the results of that faith, now you have experience. When you get a good result, you make your experience into practice wholy for your own benefit. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PatrickG Posted October 9, 2011 Author Share Posted October 9, 2011 Feelings are a good reason to me. I trust my feelings more than anything else. Feelings play an important role in human affairs, but they should never override facts and evidence when making decisions. If I have no real information to go on, I must go with my feelings. What that actually means is I'm guessing and hoping for the best. Yes.....and in time after going with your feelings, and getting results from them, you now have experience. That is how faith works. When you put faith into practice, and get the results of that faith, now you have experience. When you get a good result, you make your experience into practice, wholy for your own benefit. Hey give me an edit button........please. Got one......thankyou! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PatrickG Posted October 9, 2011 Author Share Posted October 9, 2011 How can you outgrow Christianity, and the bible, and not outgrow a belief in the same Christian god? I think that all religion taps into the same "god source", mixed with their culture, experience, traditions, religion, time period, ect, ect.......... Man is spiritual, and religion is man explaining his spirituality. God is on everyone's side. All religions pray to a god, the religions that have one. How do you know you pray to the right god? Because there is no wrong god. It is all the same. Man explaining his spirituality. If the bible told you what god to pray to then how can you pray to the Christian god if you no longer believe the bible is true? We are the divine of the universe. I learned my spirituality while in the Christian religion. I stay spiritual and drop the religion. It is that easy. I agree that we are the divine of the universe. When we pray to our own gods, we pray or contemplate on the divine in ourselves. Yes. If we do works of evil, then the divine in us is evil. No. When we do good works, we show the divine in us is good. Yes. We all have a level of benevolent character that gives us compassion towards others and gives us the will to fight for what we believe to be a just cause--just like everyone else on the planet. Yes. Thankyou. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PatrickG Posted October 9, 2011 Author Share Posted October 9, 2011 Going by instinct or a gut feeling is the product of intuition based on experience, not that our feelings are more reasoning than our brains. That gut feeling one gets comes from past experience of the same problem. You've honed your intuitiveness without knowing it. A gut feeling based on a new experience may be the incorrect path to take and sound reasoning skills trump gut feelings without experience every time. True enough. I do believe that we can use reasoning ,concerning our spirituality. of course we can......right? It is sound reasoning that has kept me believing in God, while dropping Christianity. It is not reasonable that God whould have to kill in order to forgive, and have a relationship with mankind. It is not reasonable to me that Jesus would come back to fix the worlds problems.................................................................The worlds problems are ours to fix, with God as our help. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DesertBob Posted October 9, 2011 Share Posted October 9, 2011 You say that you don't sense god in you, but you do have an inner dialogue. For me this where God communicates. I have developed this faith for years.........as a Christain, and find it to be a beneficial part of my life. I do think that I could probably change my thinking to NOT see God in the inner dialogue.....but why? It works. It seems to come down to choice. I Choose to see God in my innner dialogue. I don't see any reason to make up different words to say the same thing less straightforwardly. My inner dialog is my inner dialog. Call it God, or oogah, or koozbane, it matters not. A rose is a rose. My inner dialog does not enlighten me or save me from my troubles in life, which makes me even less willing to label it god. It is mostly useless prattling. That's probably why eastern thought prefers to shut it up with meditation techniques. I have grown tired of talking to myself; it leads nowhere other than perhaps in circles. That's because I don't have enough verified data, enough perceptual equipment, and enough intellect to fully process the environment I find myself in the middle of. No one does. The universe is way too big, and we are way too small. What I have learned to do is live within my limitations, and find a kind of freedom within those boundaries. When I try to operate outside the scope of my power to meaningfully and sustainably influence things, I become frustrated and unfulfilled. Christianity taught me that with god anything is possible. Unbelief has taught me that with Bob certain things are possible, others are not. It's a more sane way to live, in my view. Yeah, I miss the grandiose dreams and schemes of my Christian daze, but at least with this lower level of expectations I have the chance to be pleasantly surprised once in awhile. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PatrickG Posted October 9, 2011 Author Share Posted October 9, 2011 While I don't dispute your feelings, I think that attributing them to a connection with "god" is a mistake. I have a hard time believing that my feelings connect me with god any more than my feelings connected me with that cute girl on the volleyball team back in middle school. The difference being here is that there hasn't been any outside evidence to completely dispel you of that feeling. Feelings are good because they allow us to bond with one another, but they aren't necessarily reciprocated. If there is a power, a god, a great spirit, a universal soul, and there seems to be a longing in mankind for this, then how else would we communicate with it? Spirituality seems to be a learned experience that satisfies something deep in the soul of mankind. If you learn to know how the Spirit reciprocates, and find it to be part of your experience, why reason it away? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Super Moderator florduh Posted October 9, 2011 Super Moderator Share Posted October 9, 2011 If you learn to know how the Spirit reciprocates, and find it to be part of your experience, why reason it away? Wow, that's a lot of assumptions! Just a thought on one of them - assuming there is an actual "spirit" doing wondrous things in you, could the mere light of reason scare it away? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PatrickG Posted October 9, 2011 Author Share Posted October 9, 2011 If you learn to know how the Spirit reciprocates, and find it to be part of your experience, why reason it away? Wow, that's a lot of assumptions! Just a thought on one of them - assuming there is an actual "spirit" doing wondrous things in you, could the mere light of reason scare it away? Sure...........if it is not "real", I don't want it. For me it is real. I am all for "shaking what can be shaken"; whatever is left, is truth.........for me. I'm pretty sure that we don't all come to the same conclusions on what truth is. Truth is in the moment. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Super Moderator florduh Posted October 9, 2011 Super Moderator Share Posted October 9, 2011 The phrase "why reason it away" has a familiar ring. The trick Christianity uses to retain some otherwise clear headed individuals is the admonition to always have faith in their god in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Reason is not to be trusted in matters of faith in the fantastic. If a belief can be reasoned away, it should be because that means there is no valid basis for it. Truth is in the moment. That is merely a current belief. Truth is always truth whether recognized or not. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PatrickG Posted October 9, 2011 Author Share Posted October 9, 2011 If a belief can be reasoned away, it should be because that means there is no valid basis for it. You said that better then I. I agree. Truth is in the moment. That is merely a current belief. Truth is always truth whether recognized or not. I am willing to learn that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eugene39 Posted October 10, 2011 Share Posted October 10, 2011 For me it is real. That - right there - is your answer. If you like reading, a book that I found to be very interesting is "The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality" by Andre Comte-Sponville. Obviously, he doesn't believe that spirituality comes from God, but he is the mildest atheist that I've ever come across. He doesn't beat up on people who do. In all actuality, neither side has proof. How do you like your eggs when you go out to a restaurant for breakfast? Is there proof that that is the best way? No, absolutely not. It is a product of your own consciousness. Does God exist as a product of our consciousness? I think so. Personally, I'm cool with Florduh being an atheist, and you being a theist, and I have my own thoughts on it that are completely different than both of yours. Probably not worth much, but that's my 2 cents. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PatrickG Posted October 10, 2011 Author Share Posted October 10, 2011 For me it is real. That - right there - is your answer. If you like reading, a book that I found to be very interesting is "The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality" by Andre Comte-Sponville. Obviously, he doesn't believe that spirituality comes from God, but he is the mildest atheist that I've ever come across. He doesn't beat up on people who do. In all actuality, neither side has proof. How do you like your eggs when you go out to a restaurant for breakfast? Is there proof that that is the best way? No, absolutely not. It is a product of your own consciousness. Does God exist as a product of our consciousness? I think so. Personally, I'm cool with Florduh being an atheist, and you being a theist, and I have my own thoughts on it that are completely different than both of yours. Probably not worth much, but that's my 2 cents. Thankyou. So a sentient being can have a rational atheism, or a rational theism. Both theism and atheism have some faith involved in them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts