Harry Haller Ji,
I understand that you have faith and you truly believe existence of God to be an absolute fact.
The issue is that the reasoning you put forward can also be applied to existence of many other things like unicorns and Santa Claus if faith is the only criteria.
For example someone can say "If you look deep within yourself, you will find Santa Claus,. You will know it is Santa Claus as deep within you there is a pool of light and information, and it is never wrong, now for me this is absolute fact, not rhetoric"
I just took your comments and replaced the word God with Santa Claus.
The person putting forward the above reasoning would also have faith in the existence in Santa Claus but that wouldn't really give any credibility to his claims. Then why do we have a different set of rules to judge the claims that God's existence is a fact whereas Santa Claus is just make believe!
Skepticji,
My dear wife has asked me to post a thought, not to argue or debate with you, for this, she feels is not an argument or a debate with any winners and losers, more, as far as you are concerned, a practical life or death situation.
You are searching at the moment, and searching hard, and we all owe it to ourselves to try and assist you in this search as best we can. It IS a life or death situation, for on the one hand you have a living life, and on the other hand you have a living death. Her thought is simple, look up the word love in the dictionary, read the description, and see if these puny words can sum up the feelings you have for someone you love, for a father to look at his baby, or my mother doing path and crying tears of joy. I would imagine they cannot, and all the words and all the proof in the world is not going to encapsulate the feelings of one gursikh when they are spiritually connected to the almighty.
I have shared your fears and doubts myself, it was only a few weeks ago that my tag changed to sikhism, and even now, I refuse to believe in a white haired god sitting in the clouds, sikhism validates my belief that god is everywhere and in every living thing. In every dog, person, tree, flower, yet to me , it is not a thing I can touch or prove, it is even more simple than that, it is the truth in my heart. Wherever you find truth in its shiniest manifestation, there you will also find god.
But these are just words , just like santa is just a word, but if you were to have faith that santa stood for all the truth in the world, then you would find him in your heart too,
I am not perfect, the path is long and can be difficult. But again, something my wife said yesterday, is something I must take on board. I have a huge lust for life, for food, for intimacy and information. I think that just about covers the things I lust after, everything else bores me. We took the dogs out in the pouring rain, the dogs were having a great time, and I noticed how my wife seemed to share the joys and delight of the rain filled expedition,. I on the other hand did not, I was hungry, and all I could think about was food, bologna sauce, chorizo, and mince. You still exist, my wife mused, in a state of lust, be it thinking about it, doing it, or remembering it, you are like a plane being passed from one traffic control to the next, when will you enjoy what is happening to you now, look, talk to the dogs, they are desperate for your attention and your love, look at alfie rubbing himself against you, I looked at alfie, all i saw was chorizo, however, although I found it hard to forget the chorizo, the one thing I was very aware of, was that those words were truth. They were not owned by my wife, they belonged to god, they were gods words as indeed all eternal and constant truths were.
To search for the truth as you are is commendable, but you must learn to listen and not ignore, for that is a big folly, although possibly not such a big folly as knowing what the truth is and still being unable to latch it to your heart in the way I seem to keep doinganimatedkhanda1
