If God exists, where is he? (Page 209)

Very true Zan. Deadwood South Dakota is well worth seeing for yourself. But it is totally transformed from what it was in the past.

Today it is a modern town with clean modern hotels and restaurants and streets. It is all about gambling today.

The history of Deadwood is so intense. It is said you can feel the past all around you there.

Getting to Deadwood is relatively easy today. You fly to Rapid City, and from the bus station there make your way to Deadwood which is 40 miles away.

We've got the Yukon here. The place is old but the history isn't.

When you visit, you feel on top of the world, that you've left civilization behind. You're on the edge of the land of the midnight sun; in summer, it's intensely hot yet there's a fresh, light smell in the air from the surrounding mountains and icy creeks.

Then you walk into Dawson City on the Klondike River; the same buildings, preserved in time, are as livable as during the Gold Rush. Surprisingly, most buildings have the original glass still in the windows and nothing is dusty.

You can't walk Main Street without visions of tough N dirty 19th century prospectors and loose women walking past. While the Rush was just a flash in the pan, men are still mining for gold in the area, even on Bonanza Creek, like stooping down to pick up a penny on the sidewalk.

The mind wonders how our predecessors got those furnishings up there when there wasn't a road in. (Mules, naturally, but something more) Here are the saloons, shops, the casino and Folies Bergère theater. They built that whole town in less than 3 years and it's still standing with nothing new added except flush toilets and electricity.

I wouldn't bother visiting a place that didn't make me ponder and realize how puny we are compared to those mavericks. They searched for gold, then gave it to us. That wouldn't happen without God.

With Deadwood it 'Gold'. The ownership of the Black Hills was the goal of a few prominent politicians in Washington DC. President Grant was most determined to get control of the land with the gold. But so were others.

In the end there was the fake Battle of the Little Big Horn. There was in sporadic ambushes and gun fights between first nation Americans, and groups of U.S. Cavalry moving into the district to enforce American control over the gold.

Custer may well have been killed. But if you go over the statements of the Army Officials who supposedly found his body, they make sense at all. Also they just left his body covered by some dirt, not even buried.
Sorry zan, but that makes no sense at all. One theory, is that Custer, now a very rich man Indeed with his share of the gold mines, retired to San Francisco.
Truth be told, we just have no idea. But to American patriot's, Custer will always be enshrined as a American hero. Stood bravely with a gun in each hand, fighting to his last bullet.

A more likely story was told decades later by a native worrier. He recalled how a relative had told of how some Braves had ambushed a small group of American cavalry. They shot them from the bushes. One of the Americans was dressed differently from the others. And the natives thought him someone important. Anyway, they stole his valuables and threw him in some scrub.

Thus ended General Custer.

Nobody liked Custer. His prime objective was to become the President of the United States by any means possible.

People will believe propaganda until someone shoots first. Custer didn't fight bravely; he'd over-reached yet still kept shooting while fully surrounded. There was no place to run and no Indian who would let him. While surrendering to a bunch of angry Indians wasn't very appealing, he saw that they weren't taking prisoners anyway.

No one can deny that justice was done that day.

Interesting thoughts by you zan. But frankly I doubt if we will ever know what happened that day. As said, despite Hollywood and American propaganda writer's, there was no battle of the little big horn that day. Just bloody little shuffles over the landscape between natives and cavalry. So Custer could have been killed anywhere. No one actually saw him killed.

A big help in trying to pin down Custer's last hour's was his buck skinned jacket he wore. But it turns out a few officers had such jackets, and Custer may have took his off due to the heat.

The story of a native woman beating Custer to death with a rolling pin is almost certainly fake.

According to some researchers, the reason that Custer's body was never found, which gave rise to stories of him not dieing at the battle. Was because Custer was shot riding across the little big horn river. He is said to have tumbled into the river and floated away'.

Truth be told zan, we just don't know what happened.

Chron, Custer's body was found and identified by soldiers from the relief column of the cavalry. His body was stripped naked, except for socks, but not mutilated. He'd gotten two bullet wounds - one to the left chest and one to the head.

Tribal women fought that battle alongside their men. One of their women was credited with knocking Custer off his horse. You can believe that because all eyes were on killing the leader ASAP. They weren't stupid.

He was buried on the battlefield; a year later, the soldiers came back and transported his remains to Westpoint, where they were re-interred. Yes, there is talk they could have misidentified his decomposing body; however, the grave was marked and nobody in a battle dies identically.

Look at the locality and environment - hot, dry, and barren. The only wildlife there are birds, insects, and snakes. An exposed body would mummify once the maggots are done with the organs; it would take many years for the bones to break down. Anyone who says there was no intact skeleton left after 1 year is telling a fish story.

Bullet damage would be an identifier. They say the shot to his head was in the temple........hmm, ever so precise. Suicide after the chest wound?

A lie can't be covered for very long.

So where is God now? Is he back on his cloud or is he orbiting a sun in a remote corner of the universe? Guess nobody knows and few care as long as they can fight over the answer.

why does any theist need to do anything more than announce they 'know'?

"I know god exists":
"I know god loves such and such"
"I know god created the universe".



the funny part of all that is - they actually have no dea what they ACTUALLY know - and... literally every single part of it is nothing more substantive than fuzzy feelings.. that, weirdly enough, they think only believers have ever experienced.

...psst, they haven't , intellectually honest people have them too, it's just that those people are not insecure, dishonest and incompetent enough to pretend it's a god

Ghost, God is beyond the Universe.... in a higher dimension, but nothing we could describe. That's none of our business anyway. What we've always known is He's omniscient and omnipresent. We can see a sign of Him in every created thing.

Baha'u'llah says:
"To every discerning and illuminated heart it is evident that God, the unknowable Essence, the Divine Being, is immensely exalted beyond every human attribute, such as corporeal existence, ascent and descent, egress and regress. Far be it from His glory that human tongue should adequately recount His praise, or that human heart comprehend His fathomless mystery. "

He is, and hath ever been, veiled in the ancient eternity of His Essence, and will remain in His Reality everlastingly hidden from the sight of men. "No vision taketh in Him, but He taketh in all vision; He is the Subtle, the All-Perceiving.

The door of the knowledge of the Ancient of Days being thus closed in the face of all beings, the Source of infinite grace, according to His saying, "His grace hath transcended all things; My grace hath encompassed them all," hath caused those luminous Gems of Holiness to appear out of the realm of the spirit, in the noble form of the human temple, and be made manifest unto all men, that they may impart unto the world the mysteries of the unchangeable Being, and tell of the subtleties of His imperishable Essence."

"God is beyond the Universe.... in a higher dimension"

I've often wondered what people think they mean when they say 'in a higher dimension'.

I mean, it's meaningless even to people who study these things - they're a mathematical construction of an idea.


... when people say 'god is in a higher dimension', it seems they're simply stuffing their made up god into some incomprehensible made up thing that they've asserted we can't interact with.. and therefore, god can't be interacted with.

which seems fine - but .. it's still a complete fabrication.

So God is somewhere else, where he can't be blamed for all the things that go wrong here on planet earth. So what's the point of him? Does he exist so priests can swan around with their own stories to tell?

the problem of evil - yet again..

i have.. no idea... why these theists still don't have an answer for this problem..

i wonder if it would help if I prayed... ?

G-d created evil and gave us the choice to either perform evil or reject it. It’s that simple.

The origin of evil, and evil in people are two completely different things. Humans are basically trash. They are trash because their DNA is warped after the garden of eden incident. They will always be thieving, lieing, perverts etc they have no choice. Their entire DNA is permanently damaged. However, original Evil is difficult to pin down. We just don't know where it began.

It began at Creation. Adam and Chava were given simple rules in the Garden and they violated one. They forfeited their right to stay there and were consequently punished. We all know the story.

If God created everything, as we're told he did, then he created evil.

Evil never began with two low IQ gardeners in Eden.

Jesus states in John 'Satan was a murderer and a liar from the beginning', Satan's beginning was long before Eden.

We just have no idea where evil came from. God cannot create evil. Even god cannot do that. So how Satan and evil got together, who knows.

I thought God could do anything. Are you saying that's not true?

G-d created everything including evil. Read Isaiah.

So God has the Devil inside him. Good to know.

Nice twisting of words. There is no devil. He gave us a choice. Free will. Choose life.

No Devil? How disappointing.

Sorry to shatter your misconceptions. Had to be done. You’ll be ok.

Isaiah 45:7 -

“Who forms light and creates darkness, Who makes peace and creates evil; I am the Lord, Who makes all these.”

Pretty clear cut.

If you believe what the book says.