I was going to call this thread "An idea about the nature of 'God' and how it can be explored and explained while still retaining faith", but thought it would be too long.

Anyway, so I was just sitting here, doing absolutely nothing, and a thought on the nature of “God” flashed into my head which I quickly wrote down and although it’s probably rubbish, may have been thought before or is rather insane sounding to some, I thought I’d share it here because it might make for an interesting discussion.

I was told that you can’t believe in the bible until you truly choose God. What I mean is that beforehand, it looks like it’s just an ancient text, afterwards, it’s a “letter from a distant lover”. Perhaps, then, I think, the Bible doesn’t matter at all, but it’s the feeling, the experience of God, that matters and this feeling/experience is something universal that may or may not refer to an actual deity, and that this feeling, whether or not it is God, is a way bringing people together and sorting their lives out. So the texts, possibly stating many truths of the human condition, are manmade, possibly under the influence of this experience of God, and it’s up to the individual to pick what happens to be the right text to guide them in life. Of course, it’s also possible that you simply pick the text/religion that you were predominately culturally surrounded by.

As an interesting experiment to see the universality of this experience, Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological method could be used. A group of people could be collected from various religious and cultural backgrounds, taught the method and then use it to have a description of the essential essence of this experience, these essential essences and the stuff that is contingent and not essential can be examined to show to what extent they rely on the cultural and religious backgrounds.

And the beauty of this idea is that it leaves room for faith (which is something I feel is very important), because this experience of God people talk of may be caused by an evolutionary gene, by God, by some sort of mental process or many other things.

EDIT - I just realized I didn’t go into detail on Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological method, but I don’t think it’s too important to the discussion and can easily be googled.

I didn't say you couldn't "believe in" the Bible...I said you can't understand it without the influence of the holy spirit.

I feel it is very necessary to be accurate on this point.

I didn't say you couldn't "believe in" the Bible...I said you can't understand it without the influence of the holy spirit.

I feel it is very necessary to be accurate on this point.

And I maintain that Xtians are the last people who should be allowed access to the bible.

Then all too often 'understand' means to bend and twist the written word to suit dogma (what I usually refer to by the scholary term 'arse raping the scripture').

And I maintain that Xtians are the last people who should be allowed access to the bible.

Then all too often 'understand' means to bend and twist the written word to suit dogma (what I usually refer to by the scholary term 'arse raping the scripture').

While you and I can agree on this point, it doesn't change the fundamental point I was trying to make, which is that from a relationship-based level (the purpose of Christianity), it is impossible to understand the Bible without the spirit.