Xenophanes' Protest Against Anthropomorphic Religion

[PhilosopherFromDixie]

Howdy folks. Here's a video that I thought that you guys would like. Basically, it's an analysis and extension of Xenophanes' negative theology.

Do we have any fans of Xenophanes on the forum?

[yt=Xenophanes' Protest Against Anthropomorphic Religion]KwUZQ6DAd8k[/yt]

[Harbal]

Do we have any fans of Xenophanes on the forum?

Doesn't look like it.

[uwot]

Do we have any fans of Xenophanes on the forum?

Doesn't look like it.

I dunno. I quote a bit of Xenophanes from time to time:

But mortals suppose that gods are born,
wear their own clothes and have a voice and body.
Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black;
Thracians that theirs are blue-eyed and red-haired.
But if horses or oxen or lions had hands
or could draw with their hands and accomplish such works as men,
horses would draw the figures of the gods as similar to horses, and the oxen as similar to oxen,
and they would make the bodies
of the sort which each of them had.

It makes the point that man makes god in his own image, rather than the other way round. Horses and cattle too.

[TSBU]

[seeds]

Do we have any fans of Xenophanes on the forum?

Doesn't look like it.

I dunno. I quote a bit of Xenophanes from time to time:

But mortals suppose that gods are born,
wear their own clothes and have a voice and body.
Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black;
Thracians that theirs are blue-eyed and red-haired.
But if horses or oxen or lions had hands
or could draw with their hands and accomplish such works as men,
horses would draw the figures of the gods as similar to horses, and the oxen as similar to oxen,
and they would make the bodies
of the sort which each of them had.

It makes the point that man makes god in his own image, rather than the other way round. Horses and cattle too.

Good stuff there uwot.

(Note: extremely speculative and fanciful metaphors ahead...)

I realize that theistic propositions aren’t very popular around here, however, from my own Panentheistic/Berkeleyanish perspective - a perspective that views the universe as being the mind of God, I often use the following image...



...to highlight how utterly impossible it is to visualize God’s actual form from our present vantage point.

To slightly paraphrase something I have written elsewhere, to me, the image or idea of a watermelon filled with the seeds of itself, represents the near perfect metaphor for visualizing God and the universe.

Because once you are able to perceive our relationship to God in the perhaps odd, yet completely “natural” context of our minds being the encapsulated potential of becoming like the “fully fruitioned” reality of God’s mind...

(a reality that momentarily contains us now like seeds within a melon)

...then some of the deepest mysteries of life begin to make sense.

I am talking about mysteries in astrophysics and quantum physics, to the concepts in the world’s religions, right down to the often proclaimed instinctive feeling that somehow God is “present” throughout the entire universe. That in some strange way God is everything and everything is God - including the suns and the planets and the very bodies we inhabit.

Yet, how can that be?

How can God encompass all reality as we know it when (as Xenophanes protests) all of our conceptualizations of God always seem to picture him as resembling one of us – thoroughly confined and limited?

Well, that’s because all of our images and models of God are the result of a “seed’s” perspective from within the “Big Melon” himself (see this fun illustration http://theultimateseeds.com/Images/48%20page%2077.jpg).

With nothing else to go by, we seeds imagine our progenitor as looking like one of us. Because, as a seed, we are completely oblivious to the fact that the very “pulp” in which we are suspended (which includes our seed pods), is all literally a physiological component of the living essence of the ultimate life form we are each destined to become like.

Furthermore, to understand why it is so difficult to recognize what is going on here, realize that we are operating at a similar level of “unconsciousness” relative to our present “prenatal” situation (enveloped in God’s living essence) as we once were as fetuses enveloped in our mother’s living essence.

Just as it was when we existed within the darkness of our mother’s womb, we are totally unaware of the higher level of consciousness, and the higher dimensional reality of the outer circumstances of the Being that presently contains us.

As we stare into the closed bubble of the universe, we are not privy to the outer and overview of our Ultimate Parent.

We cannot peer beyond the all-encompassing boundary of God’s mind (that metaphorical “rind wall” in the image above) to see what he really looks like on the other side of the wall, looking back at him in the transcendent context of the “garden” (true reality).

All we can see right now is other “seed pods” and “pulp” (remember, extreme metaphors here).

Therefore (and especially in light of the fact that one of the world’s main religions has proclaimed that God has created us “in his image”), anthropomorphizing God into resembling us “seeds” seems to be an unavoidable misunderstanding of our present and temporary situation.

(As an essential accompaniment to the above, see this post here - viewtopic.php?f=11&t=19613&start=75#p275779)
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[uwot]

Good stuff there uwot.

Thank you.

(Note: extremely speculative and fanciful metaphors ahead...)

And thank you for the warning.

I realize that theistic propositions aren’t very popular around here...

Personally, I have no problem with theistic propositions; it's religious dogma I don't care for. As for your extremely speculative and fanciful metaphors, I think you can ground them in some reasonably sound physics. Assuming that there was a big bang (you can call it a moment of creation, if you will), and assuming that the universe is actually made of some 'stuff', then whatever that stuff is, atoms and hence we, are made of it. That being so, we know that this stuff has an extraordinary capacity for expansion and that even tiny bits of it contain enormous amounts of energy. If the entire universe suddenly disappeared, leaving just one fundamental particle, then without hindrance, it might well do pretty much what the original piece of big bang stuff did and grow into a universe. Whether big bang stuff was created by some panentheistic god, or actually is god*, is beyond physics; but either is a workable hypothesis.

*I used to tell my children a story, the essentials of which are: Once upon a time there was a teeny-tiny dot. The teeny-tiny dot was everywhere, it was everything and it knew all there was to know. But as there was nowhere to go, nothing to do and nothing to know, the teeny-tiny dot became bored and blew itself up into a universe.

[Greta]

Good stuff there uwot.

Thank you.

(Note: extremely speculative and fanciful metaphors ahead...)

And thank you for the warning.

I realize that theistic propositions aren’t very popular around here...

Personally, I have no problem with theistic propositions; it's religious dogma I don't care for. As for your extremely speculative and fanciful metaphors, I think you can ground them in some reasonably sound physics. Assuming that there was a big bang (you can call it a moment of creation, if you will), and assuming that the universe is actually made of some 'stuff', then whatever that stuff is, atoms and hence we, are made of it. That being so, we know that this stuff has an extraordinary capacity for expansion and that even tiny bits of it contain enormous amounts of energy. If the entire universe suddenly disappeared, leaving just one fundamental particle, then without hindrance, it might well do pretty much what the original piece of big bang stuff did and grow into a universe. Whether big bang stuff was created by some panentheistic god, or actually is god*, is beyond physics; but either is a workable hypothesis.

*I used to tell my children a story, the essentials of which are: Once upon a time there was a teeny-tiny dot. The teeny-tiny dot was everywhere, it was everything and it knew all there was to know. But as there was nowhere to go, nothing to do and nothing to know, the teeny-tiny dot became bored and blew itself up into a universe.

I agree. Pantheistic and panentheistic ideas have much more going for them than the deities made in our own image.

If we are looking at the deity - or anything, for that matter - from the inside, we would expect to see innards rather than the total form, an obviously inaccessible perspective, other than mathematically. We can't expect to see anything in the cosmos that seems intelligent any more than a cell could "see" anything as "intelligent", other than other cells.

[seeds]

Personally, I have no problem with theistic propositions; it's religious dogma I don't care for.

I’m not sure how one can have no problem with theistic propositions while simultaneously having problems with religious dogma.

Isn’t religious dogma simply the formalization of theistic propositions?

As for your extremely speculative and fanciful metaphors, I think you can ground them in some reasonably sound physics.

Indeed I can, uwot.

Not intending to promote a theory here (who am I kidding, of course I am ), however, for most of my adult life I have been trying to demonstrate how our minds are literally the embryonic replications of God’s mind (the universe), hence the “seed/melon” metaphor.

And it is through the implications of physics (more specifically, quantum physics/quantum theory) that an extremely important parallel can be inferred.

For it seems that just as our thoughts and dreams are composed of a fundamental (holographic-like) essence that is capable of being shaped into absolutely anything imaginable,...

...likewise, so is the fundamental essence that underpins the holographic-like structures of the universe.

To the astute metaphysician, quantum investigations have revealed that universal matter seems to be nothing more than an extremely advanced and ordered manifestation of the same infinitely malleable substance that we wield and shape within our own minds.

So forget about the complexity and mystery of that which we call “atoms” as we attempt to reverse-engineer matter, and instead, focus on that one key parallel between the inner dimension of our minds and the outer dimension of the universe (again, God’s mind – in whose image our minds are created).
_______

[seeds]

[......]
Whether big bang stuff was created by some panentheistic god, or actually is god*, is beyond physics; but either is a workable hypothesis...

I agree. Pantheistic and panentheistic ideas have much more going for them than the deities made in our own image.

If we are looking at the deity - or anything, for that matter - from the inside, we would expect to see innards rather than the total form, an obviously inaccessible perspective, other than mathematically. We can't expect to see anything in the cosmos that seems intelligent any more than a cell could "see" anything as "intelligent", other than other cells.

That’s an excellent point, Greta, and a good alternative parallel to my melon analogy, especially when you consider the fact that each individual cell of a particular host entity is imbued with the potential (in the form of DNA) of replicating the host.

And as it applies to the theme of this thread, if the cells of the host entity were somehow sentient and self-aware, they would no doubt anthropomorphize (cellpomorphize?) the host as resembling themselves.
_______

[osgart]

God is alone in his infinite existence jamming on his guitar piano and horns as god can play as many instruments at once as god wants. And when you die maybe you can wrap on the door of god and be the first to tell god to share the peace.
And god will laugh and say i didnt know other life existed. And what you thought godself was angry.
Than you will be the first to hear unfathomable music. Than tell em about earth and the big bang. And god will say yeah i thought something dropped.