Gustav Bjornstrand wrote:It does not make sense to me that there would be any entity that would be SEPARATE from all that is.
Actually, to push the parameters of thinkable thought, one might start from the First Impossibility, which is really a contradiction in terms since there is no other possible possibility: Existence itself. That existence
exists. That there can be existence. That it arose. That we have a platform of Being. These are meditations that will forever be impenetrable. If one does not come up against wonder, it is possible that one is more or less dead. All notions of divinity arise out of that. But it would be wrong to say that man confronts incomprehensibility and then projects onto it (though the imagination does this, certainly). Men in their confrontation with the incomprehensible plunge the depth of their being as perception-organisms and attempt to give utterance to what they understand.
If one focusses on the fact of existence - as both an exercise of reason, or rational contemplation, as well as a contemplation that can involve the whole self - one comes face to face with a magnitude impossible to process. That existence exists, for the Rishis of ancient India for example, was the beginning of their meditation, their plunging in to the strangeness of it all. The dawn, the sky, the sun, the wind, the word (vak): these were all seen as parts of or manifestations of an eternal force: Brahman. Incomprehensible, impossible to fathom, eternal. It was the aspect of the eternal which seemed to have the most psychological power. They also conceived (in imagination, obviously, or in 'vision' if you wish) of infinite numbers of 'worlds' and the Sanskrit term is 'loka'. A loka is a zone or a centre which functions according to a set of rules and laws (rta). So, they set to work defining this particular loka: the earth-realm. What is very interesting about their system is that it is linked to material reality and so the 'metaphysic' they define is not 'separate' in the sense that lovely Lacewing has surmised.
The Jewish Yahweh is a local and a tribal god of a people with limited imagination (in comparison to the vedists, for example), and so the characteristics of the Christian god has taken that blush. Both a slave-driver, a literally psychotic and changeable personality, as well as a deliverer, this god-image is a radically different god-definition than say the vedic one. In this sense the god-concept of this Tyrant Yahweh came into conflict with the European (Indo-European) and pagan notion, which is also similar to that of the vedists, of a divinity that is eternal, incomprehensible, and whose imagination fixes on the natural
manifestations of god such as water, fire, air, sun, star, woman, man, beauty, love, peace, time, birth and death.
One of the things I note in watching people here go through an absurd rehearsals of their near total ignorance of the evolution of ideas, and the breadth and depth of philosophy and theology, is that they are in essence in a battle against a specific dogmatic religious structure that they bitterly resist. But even that 'thing' itself they have no comprehension of, in any sense that could be taken seriously ... by anyone!
