1 result for (book:deavf1 AND session:886 AND stemmed:god)
[... 7 paragraphs ...]
Now: In the beginning, there was not God the Father, Allah, Zoroaster, Zeus, or Buddha.1
[... 5 paragraphs ...]
Atoms perceive their own positions, their velocities, motions, the nature of their surroundings, the material that they compose. [Your] world did not just come together, mindless atoms forming here and there, elements coalescing from brainless gases—nor was the world, again, created by some distant objectified God who created it part by part as in some cosmic assembly line. With defects built in, mind you (with some humor), and better models coming every geological season.
The universe formed out of what God is.
[... 6 paragraphs ...]
That kind of an event simply cannot fit into your concepts of “the beginning of the world,” with consciousness arising out of matter almost as a second thought, or with an exteriorized God initiating a divine but mechanistic natural world.
(Pause.) Nor can this concept fit into your versions of good and evil, as I will explain later in this book. God, or All That Is, is in the deepest sense completed, and yet uncompleted. Again, I am aware of the contradiction that seems to be presented to your minds. In a sense, however (underlined), a creative product, say, helps complete an artist, while of course the artist can never be completed. All That is, or God, in a certain fashion, now (underlined)—and this is qualified—learns as you learn, and makes adjustments according to your knowledge. We must be very careful here, for delusions of divinity come sometimes too easily, but in a basic sense you all carry within yourselves the undeniable mark of All That Is—and an inbuilt capacity—capacity—to glimpse in your own terms undeniable evidence of your own greater existence. You are as close to the beginning of [your] world as Adam and Eve were, or as the Romans, or as the Egyptians or Sumerians. The beginning of the world is just a step outside the moment.
[... 5 paragraphs ...]
A. God the Father. There’s no way to assign any reasonably accurate date to when God the Father created all things, as described in Genesis, the first book of the Bible. (The Biblical account of Creation makes evolution an impossibility.) Nor can the date of Creation be arrived at by counting the Bible’s lists of generations, as given in the Old Testament, since these may well be incomplete.
B. Mohammed (A.D. 570?-632), the Prophet of Islam, stressed the uniqueness of the god Allah, whose name was already well known in pre-Islamic Arabia.
[... 1 paragraph ...]
D. Zeus was the supreme god of the ancient Greeks, who worshipped him in connection with almost every facet of daily life. He was the son of Cronus and Rhea, and the husband of his sister Hera. The Romans identified Zeus with their own supreme god, Jupiter, or Jove.
[... 3 paragraphs ...]