CoinCube,
I still do not see that it was God who influenced you to help the lady. It was you, not your God. You might think it was God, but the reality is it was you and only you who made that decision. You could have done the same thing if you contemplated your own life, the life of other people around you, or humanity in general.
People think the God helps them because it is a useful psychological self-help. It builds confidence in your actions.
It is like people who in survival situations believe that everything will be ok and survive, will actually increase the chances of survival.
Same goes for sick people, those who believe that they will get better (believers or Atheists) will actually get better without medical intervention. Some religious people will scream 'miracle', but the reality is that the body's immune system is helped when patients reduce stress.
The use of your psychological help (aka God) is fine if you need it, but it does not make him or her real.
Like I said before, many people who know that your God does not exist do a lot of good in their communities. It is not God it is people who do good things. I hope you understand that much.
BTW, there are also many people who kill or start wars in the name of (your or other) Gods. Do you remember George W. Bush conversations with God? Did you see what ISIS is doing? These people are convinced they are influenced by God, by the reality is they are doing what they are doing.
People are responsible for their good and bad actions. Only people, there is no God involved because God does not exist.
God is the product of an overactive imagination. That is all.
I think you would benefit from expanding your imagination.
Imagination is essential to problem solving and the current human condition is one of the biggest problems around.
Why Imagination is Essential To Problem Solvinghttps://medium.com/@mananhora/le-petit-prince-and-why-imagination-is-essential-to-problem-solving-6ff6b2b30eafToday, in trying to solve the world’s most pressing and challenging problems, we need to be able to see things in different ways. To go beyond what is obvious and visible. To imagine all the possibilities. Not just to come up with innovative solutions but more importantly, to first be able to correctly identify the problem, and be able to look at it in different ways. In trying to come up with new ideas to solve a problem or design a new feature for a product, a lot of people engage in ‘brainstorming sessions’, where you typically sit in groups, perhaps with a whiteboard, and try to come up with as many solutions as possible for solving the problem, which is great for generating new ideas. But I think before that, it’s important to spend time with the problem. As Albert Einstein once said: “If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”
‘The Slow Elevator Problem’…
Now, imagine you’re a landlord of an office building in New York in the 1930s. And the employees in the office complain to you that the elevators are slow in the building, and threaten to leave if nothing is done about it. Now this is a serious problem, you could end up losing your tenants if you don’t fix it. You’ll probably call your team of engineers and get them to come up with possible solutions to make elevators faster. But that’s not what this one particular landlord did when faced with the same problem.
You might think that the problem is that the elevators are slow, and the landlord should get better machines and make them faster. But is that really the problem? Or rather, is that the only way of looking at the problem?
Here are some other possible perspectives:
a)The tenants are not good because they complain a lot, so they should be fired.
b)The threat of leaving is the problem- if the landlord offers the tenants something else in return for not complaining/threatening to leave, it may solve the landlord’s problem
c)Or…The tenants don’t like to wait for the elevators. It’s the waiting, and the boredom that comes with having nothing to do while waiting, that’s the problem.
This is exactly how the landlord saw the problem. So he decided to install mirrors in the elevator waiting areas, to give people something to engage themselves with (admiring themselves in the mirror), whilst they waited for the elevators. And it actually worked. The installation of mirrors was made quickly and at a relatively low cost. The complaints about waiting stopped. Today, if you’ve noticed, it’s fairly commonplace to have mirrors outside elevators. And that, is how this practice started.
If we have a hammer, we tend to see everything as a nail, but it may not be a nail, it may be a hole in the wall, or a leak in the pipe, or any one of a hundred and forty six other things. We need to open our minds to see things differently. To go beyond the obvious. To use our creativity to think of different approaches and perspectives to the problem at hand. Had the landlord tried to make elevators faster, he would have ended up spending much more money and resources, but all he did was install mirrors and the problem was solved.
Lesson: Don’t try to build faster elevators. Use your imagination to get to the root of the problem before trying to fix it.
So what is the root of the problem? That’s a very big question but here is one way of framing it that I borrowed from miscreanity.
The optimal way to increase freedom for individuals is to allow and enable instead of control. A universal strategy is an essential foundation that
enables freedom. Without that, we have the situation that is developing now with varying viewpoints where some sets are progressing toward destruction. Competition can take place when there is room for growth but on a globally saturated scale, nobody wins.
Reproductive strategy is likely to become essentially irrelevant for humanity, possibly within our lifetimes. It seems inevitable that our existing biological bodies will give way to different forms that will carry us off-planet. Furthermore it is probable that we are expanding into a universe that is not empty. It will contain other life some older and much farther along then us some younger with the potential to become like us in time.
Allowing and enabling all individuals indeed all life to thrive in a constructive environment will become paramount.
What then is the protocol that keeps our freedom from becoming destructive? Of course, my thinking is that the protocol is outlined in the Christian bible.
If you disagree the onus is on you to genuinely solve the problem another way and the solution cannot be limited to yourself but must be be alive capable of propagating to others and able to sustain itself and grow. It is in your self interest to find a solution to the problem and to be absolutely confident and certain in your answer.
