Where do babies come from?

[assisigirl]

I have had a week of it, satanists turning the heat up, islamists talking Allah up, and atheists carving God up.

Answer me this please. Where do babies come from?


Surely to God if he is testing us and judging us and observing us then he must at some stage have thought us up. How does that work. How does your God make people like you up. Explain this to me and you will have an admirer for life.

Does God abstain from the manufacturing/design process so that he can concentrate on quality testing??? I'm honestly baffled!

[Star]

Storks.

[dianaiad]

I have had a week of it, satanists turning the heat up, islamists talking Allah up, and atheists carving God up.

Answer me this please. Where do babies come from?

Oh, I raised five children; the knee-jerk response to THAT one was half-way typed before I came to my senses.

Surely to God if he is testing us and judging us and observing us then he must at some stage have thought us up. How does that work. How does your God make people like you up. Explain this to me and you will have an admirer for life.

When I was a missionary, waaaaay back when, you would have been instantly classified as a 'golden contact!" (grin)....although I was pretty young at the time and might have missed the slight hint of sarcasm going on there....

Briefly put, we are His children and we are here to grow up, make our own mistakes and learn from them. More like boot camp than kindergarten, but....there you are.

But then I'm a Mormon; I have all sorts of weird beliefs about this sort of thing. For instance, that we lived, as spirits, before our births and chose to come here. Informed consent and all that: that we have free will and are responsible for our own choices and how they affect us, and others--

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:

(Intimations of Immortality....Wordsworth, who was most definitely not a Mormon but who, in this verse, captured more about our beliefs than he could ever have known).

Ok, perhaps that's a little too serious, but it's how I feel about it, and you asked.

[assisigirl]

Hi dianaiad, thank you for your response. A religious belief should be able to explain this simple question and you have offered your explanation which I respect. Let's get some other answers.

dianaiad: This intrigues me greatly.You state:you would have been instantly classified as a 'golden contact!" (grin)....

I have been to Salt Lake City. I allowed two mormon missionaries to pray in my sitting room once and I have to say that during their prayer I felt ' something'. My sceptical self kept looking for a micro wave device of some kind. What part of the OP made you identify me as a 'Golden Contact'. Am I susceptible to mormons and if so why??? Was I just imagining that I felt something. I cannot think of a reason I would do this?? Never happened me before ever dianaiad. You seem to have the inside track, help me here, dianaiad.

[dianaiad]

Hi dianaiad, thank you for your response. A religious belief should be able to explain this simple question and you have offered your explanation which I respect. Let's get some other answers.

dianaiad: This intrigues me greatly.You state:you would have been instantly classified as a 'golden contact!" (grin)....

I have been to Salt Lake City. I allowed two mormon missionaries to pray in my sitting room once and I have to say that during their prayer I felt ' something'. My sceptical self kept looking for a micro wave device of some kind. What part of the OP made you identify me as a 'Golden Contact'. Am I susceptible to mormons and if so why??? Was I just imagining that I felt something. I cannot think of a reason I would do this?? Never happened me before ever dianaiad. You seem to have the inside track, help me here, dianaiad.

A 'golden contact' is someone who is willing to listen, take things seriously, honestly investigate, and is willing to give our faith an honest try on our terms. By that, I mean...if we ask you to read, think about, and then PRAY about whatever it is, you actually will.

This doesn't mean that you will convert--only that you will give us a whole hearted listen.

I'm not going to tell you that what you felt was "the spirit," or "the Holy Ghost telling you that this is true." May have been. May have been simply that you appreciated the faith of those two young missionaries and reacted to that. Or, as some atheists will tell you, might have been heartburn.

I don't know if you are a believer or not...Catholic? Your name seems to indicate that. If so, and you are a believer, you know what that feeling was, because you get it whenever you have a 'truth moment,' or a sudden feeling that, hey, this is right, this is good...this is true.

I have a deeply strong belief in my own faith; that God lives, that He loves us, that what I believe about Him is as close to Truth as anything out there. We say, in our faith, that 'we know the church is true." We don't mean 'absolute knowledge' when we say that, but rather belief so strong that we wouldn't act any differently if we DID have that absolute knowledge. Many other theists have that same level of faith in the things that they believe to be true, and insofar as they agree with us, they are right.

It's up to you to go mining for that truth, wherever it is found, and hold onto it, and build on it, and increase it.

[ttruscott]

I have had a week of it, satanists turning the heat up, islamists talking Allah up, and atheists carving God up.

Answer me this please. Where do babies come from?


Surely to God if he is testing us and judging us and observing us then he must at some stage have thought us up. How does that work. How does your God make people like you up. Explain this to me and you will have an admirer for life.

Does God abstain from the manufacturing/design process so that he can concentrate on quality testing??? I'm honestly baffled!

All people are spirits. All spirits made in GOD's image were made at the same time a looooong time ago, pre-earth.

When some of these spirits joined HIS church by a true free will decision, then rebelled against HIM by a true free will decision but losing their free will by becoming addicted to sin, HE then created the pysical universe and earth precisely for them to live pre-programmed (no free will) lives to learn to break their addiction to sin and become holy.

This pre-programming includes every bringing together of parents and every conception for each spirit who needs exactly what this pairing and life would give him/her to be redeemed.

If this doesn't anwswer, I misunderstand the question..

Peace, Ted

[assisigirl]

Peace Ted, Keep them coming.

Ted: reminds me of the Adam and Eve dynamic but different. Mortality is hardly free will, I agree with you there. thank you for your reply.

[McCulloch]

Does God abstain from the manufacturing/design process so that he can concentrate on quality testing?

There is no evidence whatsoever that any supernatural being is involved in the conception, embryonic and fetal development or birth of humans.

All people are spirits. All spirits made in GOD's image were made at the same time a looooong time ago, pre-earth.

What is a spirit? How do you know that our spirits pre-exist our birth?

[assisigirl]

Hi Mc Culloch, When I seen your name on the thread I was packing my bag for Rambling Rambling land. I am glad that you regard this question as a sincere enquiry, open to opinions.

In truth, Mc Culloch, it would seem to me that you have contributed little here. You state:What is a spirit? How do you know that our spirits pre-exist our birth?

When you say 'conception' do you mean as I do in the OP ie man visualized by God in advance of his/her being.

There is a tangible feeling of uniqueness and being within a person that could easily be defined as spirit. The uniqueness could be dismissed as a heredic combilation but many many millennia of peoples have reverered the unique quality of the individual person. Hence a spirit that seems more than human and is best assimilated in the mystic. What do you think McCulloch. I am the kid who gets given to the other team here. Am I shooting the breeze.

[Divine Insight]

Answer me this please. Where do babies come from?

I think most educated adults know where babies come from. They come from the sexual union of a man and a women. Or to be more precise, they come from a fertilized human egg which begins as a single cell and divides many times growing to become what we call a 'fetus' and eventually growing to become a baby.

Now you may say, "Well of course that's where the physical body of a new baby comes from, but what about the baby's soul, where does that come from?"

Only the existence of a 'soul' would require questions concerning a God concept. And so then the question isn't so much "Where do babies come from?", but rather, "Where do souls come from?"

This is actually a different question.

Because God isn't created "babies" then. Instead God is simply choosing which "fetuses" (that are clearly created by humans) he would like to place a soul into.

In other words, some babies are still born. Does this imply that God did not place a soul into that fetus, and baby? Why would a God bother placing a soul into a fetus that's going to be still born?

This same question could be asked about babies that are born with extreme genetic deformities, genetic diseases, inseparable Siamese twins, etc. Why would a God who places souls into fetuses bother placing souls into fetuses that are going to have extreme hardships or disease?

And of course this can be carried much further. Why would a God bother placing a soul into a baby of a rape victim? Why not let that fetus be still-born, or simply not allow any eggs to be fertilized in the first place?

Why place souls into babies that are just going to end up being born into an extremely abusive environment or abusive parents? And why not allow some good people to have babies at all when they are clearly trying to do this?

Why place a soul into yet another baby that some woman is having in a third world country when her existing babies are already dying of starvation?

So the question of "Where to babies come from?" when applied to a God is a highly provocative question. If the God is creating the souls of babies how does God go about deciding which babies he should place souls into?

And if all babies have souls automatically, then would God really have anything to do with creating souls? It seems to me that if all babies naturally have souls then it's humans who decide when to create yet another soul.

When I was in my teens I actually vowed that I would never be responsible for bringing new live into this world. I would love to be a parent, and I was certainly willing to consider adoption of an existing "soul". But I was not about to create a new soul myself. Especially considering that I could not guarantee the safety or fate of that soul, either in this life, or any potential afterlife.

So in that sense I make a conscious decision to not create a soul.

Some may claim that I do not have the ability to create a soul, but I most certainly have the ability to chose to not create one.

To me this is a paramount insight.

Consider the following:

Surely to God if he is testing us and judging us and observing us then he must at some stage have thought us up. How does that work. How does your God make people like you up. Explain this to me and you will have an admirer for life.

Does God abstain from the manufacturing/design process so that he can concentrate on quality testing??? I'm honestly baffled!

Forget about judging the poor soul for a moment and turn your attention to the responsibility of the creator.

I, a mere moral man, refused to create a new soul for the following reasons:

1. I could not guarantee the safety or fate of that soul.

2. I could not guarantee that I would be there to personally mentor this new soul.

I could die before I had a chance to properly tend to the mentoring of this new soul. I also could not prevent the soul from being adversely affected by all the nasty things I saw around me in this world. Like the greedy, selfish, competitive, commercial-driven society that we live in.

3. I could not guarantee that the new soul would be healthy, nor could I guarantee that it would never become inflicted by some nasty disease or other extremely painful suffering or injury.

4. I could not guarantee that it wouldn't be drafted into a war. When I was a teenager young men were drafted into wars whether they liked it or not.

In short, I, a mere moral man, refused to create a soul that I could not properly protect, mentor, and guarantee the safety of.

So now let's turn back to this supposedly all-righteous highly moral God who apparently places souls into babies that are going to be born into extremely harsh and violent situation with potentially no mentoring at all, or even worse yet, they may be born into situations where they are negatively influenced by truly nasty peer pressures, or other cultural pressures that could cause them to live very unproductive, bitter, and ultimately self-destructive lives.

Why should a God not be at least as empathetic and compassionate as me, a mere mortal man?

Why should a God create souls when he will not be there in-person to see to it himself that they are properly mentored and protected from harmful influences, disease, and all manner of disgusting things like wars, etc.?

If I refuse to create a soul under those circumstances for reasons of morality, then why should a supposedly all-moral God be doing that?

Moreover, the reason I refuse to create a soul is precisely because I'm not omnipotent and therefore cannot guarantee all the things I deem to be morally important.

However, an omnipotent God should have no problem at all proving everything that I've suggested.

He should be able to provide excellent in-person mentoring to every soul he creates, ("in-person" does NOT mean rumors about some guy who was nailed to pole thousands of years ago). That does not constitute "in-person" mentoring.

He should be able to provide a safe environment. At least a safe enough environment where the souls he creates could fend for themselves under the guidance of this proper mentoring.

And things like wars, greed, crime, and all the ills of the world today would never exist if the creator would have simply done this with every soul he ever created.

Because every soul would have then been properly mentored and there would be no crime, war, or greed.

The only reason any of those things exist in the first place is because this God has been creating souls for eons and not property mentoring them.

You may say, "But what if the souls refuse to be properly mentored?"

Well, duh? If a soul cannot be properly mentored by the creator himself, that soul should be consider to be a "Defective Soul" (i.e. mentally ill)

If God is the ultimate healer he should be able to heal that mental illness.

Also, if God was created half-decent souls in the first place they would be sick to begin with.

If a soul is mentally ill, it can only because the creator of that soul created it to be mentally ill.

And someone who can't be taught good moral values would certainly qualify as being considered to be "mentally ill".

So God is without excuse to ever create a single soul that can't be property mentored.

To be unable to do so would be a flaw in his own ability to created dependable souls.

And if that's the case, that brings us full-circle. What's he creating souls for in the first place if he can't even create good ones?

Wouldn't that already be irresponsible?