Jaden wrote:
Well religious people generally believe their God to be a loving one. To most people, a religion that suggests God thinks killing is okay is a false one.
You have to keep in mind that the "teachings of God" is not something that comes exclusively after the belief. People look at the teachings to help them decide if they want to believe in God in the first place.
So could God change his mind? Not really.
First off, God won't suddenly say "killing is okay" because God doesn't say anything. So, he can't really change his position on the matter. Perhaps Christianity is an example of a change in God, but it created a new religion. Then there is the fact that God changing his stance on an issue denotes imperfection. God is supposed to be perfect and absolute. Yes, the New Testament does completely contradict the Old, but the fact that people deny this blatent reality proves my point stronger.
To think God can't be imperfect is the origin of most misinterpretations in religion.
It is not a contradiction that a perfect God is imperfect. Contrary, if he wasn't imperfect then he would lack imperfection; hence he could not be perfect (how could something perfect lack something?) In the same way you can explain why there is relative world when God is absolute.
A perfect and absolute God is eternal energy AND eternal consciousness AND eternal being (if he wasn’t a being he could not be absolute, because the absolute must include everything relative and in the relative world there are beings)
As such he includes limited energy (the origin of matter), limited consciousness (the origin of the soul) and limited being (the origin of creatures).
The creation is an inescapable consequence of the creator, nothing else.
Infinity in time and space is the imperfect image of eternity beyond time and space. Since God is perfect and absolute, he never changes in his entirety. Hence the creation must be a "zero-sum game" in time and space. This is why there is Duality and Karma, i.e. for every action there is a corresponding reaction (actio = reactio) in the spiritual and in the material world. And, for the same reason every action and reaction in the spiritual world must have corresponding action and reaction in the material world (in metaphysics it is said that the world is shaped by the consciousness) because otherwise the absolute would change.
You can explain everything (science, metaphysics, the core of all pristine religions) with this approach except the fact why the creator exists. But the same goes for materialism which can't explain the original existence of energy/matter either - either way you have to believe.
It is not God's task to prove his existence. It's men's funeral to see the proofs that are already there. As human beings we have the privilege of free will. We can choose what we want to believe or even if we want to believe. It is easy to believe in materialism because most people do so. You can use Occam’s razor and say that materialism is right because the only precondition is the existence of energy and everything else could be explained out of that (big bang, cosmology, life formation, evolution). On the other hand you can explain everything out of the existence of a perfect and absolute God too.
But we can also judge according to the fruits the materialistic world-view bears: destruction of the ecological balance, world-wide pollution, exploitation of animals and plants, cutting down of the rain forest, violence, profiteering, genocide, and so on. I personally don’t like this world with no real love and no respect for live and I don't think that a spirtual world-view would lead to the same result. Therefore I decided to believe in God (the absolute and perfect God, not one of the false Gods proclaimed by institutionalized religions). And after I started to believe, I found the proofs, got insight into "higher" coherences, experienced love and -finally back on topic- stopped eating carcasses; I just couldn’t do it anymore. If someone calls me a fag for this, I can live with that.