What if someone else came in and said Brahma was the Ultimate Reality?
I would probably correct them and say that "Brahman" would be more accurate.
My point is that there are many different religions, and many different deities that people believe are "the Ultimate Reality". In light of all this, how do you know that Christianity (let alone Orthodox Christianity) is the correct religion, and that the God of the Bible is "the Ultimate Reality"?
Our faith is not one that was brought about through reason, but revelation.
Reason is the way we make sense of things. Without reason, all you would have is blind faith and dogma.
We have understood God the same way for thousands of years.
Just because many people believed in something for many years doesn't make it factual. For example, people believed for thousands of years that the Sun orbited around the Earth, until Copernicus came along.
There is no problem, because God exists.
"Does God exist?" is the very question we're trying to address. We don't know the answer to this yet.
That is the God we believe, and so we can without doubt say, "Only a fool in their heart says there is no God.".
I think with my brain, not my heart.
There is no debate about the existence of God.
There is. Namely, this one.
This is true. I however, did not say that there is no time. God acts within time, obviously, but at the. same time God exists outside of time. That is why we say we are not pantheists, but panentheists.
The creation itself marks the beginning of time. That is why we say God is "pre-eternal". In a temporal sense, there isn't anything before time. Yet, God's existence preceeds time, and time itself is contingent on God.
The problem is, I demonstrated in my previous post that there was time before the creation (otherwise there would be no universe).
God's interaction with the universe is through His Word and Breath, or his Son and Holy Spirit. The Trinity itself has a great deal to do with God's relationship to creation. God acts in creation because God through the incarnation took the form of creation. The incarnation effectively unites the two very different natures of divinity and creation into the single hypostasis of The Son. All power originates with God.
This is basically Aquinas' Unmoved Mover. The problem with that is that one of its premises states that all things that move require a mover. Since God moves, God would require a mover, according to the premise. There are three cases that stem out of this. Either:
- It leads to infinite regress,
- It contradicts its own premise, or
- It commits special pleading
Mankind was made in the image of God. Part of what this means is that we have free will. More specifically, the ability to misuse the divine energy that God graces with us. If God so willed, He could have made us automatons. Instead, God has shared part of His divine nature with us.
If God is omniscient, then it is impossible to have free will, since He already knows what you are going to do.
What is evil? It is nothing. On the last day, when the light of Truth fills all of creation, and all will be revealed, illusion will cease to be, and evil right along with it. Everything will be revealed as is. That is why we say that the fires of hell and the light of heaven are the same thing. To those who identify with what defiles them, it will be hell as they are shown who the really are. To those who abide in The Eternal Way, The Light of Truth will be their heaven.
Some claim that hell is seperation of God. It is more accurate to say that hell is rejection of God. Whether one rejects God or not, there is no escaping God, who is everywhere present and fills all things. It is even written, "Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there."
Firstly, this assumes that there is a heaven and hell.
Secondly, how would, for example, babies being born with birth defects, of no fault of their own, be an illusion?
