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Hmmm. As I recall, someone pointed that out to you after you mentioned something about starting out with a clean slate.
They tried that with Jesus and Socrates but it didn't work. According to general understanding they were genuine successful trolls so had to be killed. There was no other way. As trolls they had nothing to offer supporting the dictates of Great Beast. They were starting quarrels or upsetting people, by introducing inflammatory, extraneous, or even alternative ideas. They even questioned experts. Jesus even irritated the Pharisees who were the genuine experts in spiritual matters. Jesus and Socrates didn't stick with the script created by the Great Beast. This was too insulting to be tolerated so they had to be killed. I sympathize with your needs but you are living in the wrong times. It is illegal to crucify or to poison wrong thoughts and ideas. Well you can't have everything.The best thing to have done is to completely ignore a troll who has nothing to offer than the ennui of Eternal Recurrence.
Yesterday I was talking to some street preachers in a cafe. We often get together, because they like me and I like them, beyond our obvious gap or schism of world views.Greta wrote: ↑Wed Apr 18, 2018 2:41 am This thread has been inspired by, firstly, chats with others about agnosticism and, secondly, by reading the over-sure statements of believers on this forum. Dubious had previously aired this thread's idea but I did not understand what he was trying to get across at the time. The penny has now dropped. Sorry Dubious; I was wrong and your idea was good, hence this return.
People speak about God as if the notion is obvious. In truth, we could readily dispense with the notion of God altogether and, in terms of understanding reality, nothing would be lost. We could simply consider what is without running it through the distorting filters of mythology.
Even if the universe is an all-infusive meta-mind, why associate it with a deity who started out as a childishly absurd anthropomorphism? Why not start with a fresh slate? The universe - a speculatively emergent meta-mind. Why isn't that that enough, given the limitation of an inside-out perspective? Blending a modern conception with ancient mythology can only serve to muddy the waters of inquiry, and that is certainly what has happened. Even an attempt to define "God" is fraught because no one agrees - and chaotic results in any given observation or experiment suggest a negative signal.
So the only promising aspects of theism lie in where there is commonality of beliefs. However, they seem to be few and those commonalities also significantly overlap with "secular" people's experiences and observations. Thus, any religious ideation that does not overlap with all other major faiths is necessarily culturally specific, of historical, not ontic, interest.
Today, the God of the Gaps is fashionable because all of the prior anthropomorphic forms were rendered ridiculous with increased understanding of nature's processes. So now God's most credible guise tends to be posited as the ground of being. However, many theists will disagree about what that means too. So why not simply call it qualia? Why add the personification? Is it not possible to feel tremendous love and gratitude towards the Earth, the Sun, the galaxy and universe - even to feel worshipful - without endowing it with a metaphorical grey beard and testicles?
When God is thought of as an it, everything changes, including the need to associate It with a middle eastern Iron Age war god. It becomes simply everything, The All, or rather, The All of Us, given our own infusion within the larger web of being.
Umm
I've always had a strained relationship with authority of any kind. Politics aside, I'm open to science telling me what can be said about the natural world, but telling me how the world is is outside its purview and way out of bounds. By the same token, I'm open to what all the religious traditions have to say, but I'll be damned if I'm going to let any of them tell me what I should or should not believe.“There is no trustworthy standard by which we can separate the “real” from the “unreal” aspects of phenomena. Such standards as exist are conventional: and correspond to convenience, not to truth. It is no argument to say that most men see the world in much the same way, and that this “way” is the true standard of reality: though for practical purposes we have agreed that sanity consists in sharing the hallucinations of our neighbours. Those who are honest with themselves know that this “sharing” is at best incomplete.”
It is hard to imagine a person who is completely unfamiliar with the concept of deities. I think it must stem from Sun and Earth worship. What would the utterly innocent make of this blinding light in the sky that warms them and either helps to grow their crops or destroy them? Add the Earth and its equivalent bounty and terrors and it would be hard to think of them as anything but gods. I personally do think of them in that way - what is more impressive to us than the Sun and the Earth? They are cores of systems in which we are embedded, seemingly with a role as change agents, like cosmic enzymes that trigger further emergences.-1- wrote: ↑Sat May 12, 2018 5:17 pmWhat I meant to say with this is that dehumanizing god and making it an it, albeit an it that contains everything in the universe, may be the end result today of a lot of thinking by Christian theologians, but their work had been prophecised in the New Testament.
Whether we need a god image or not for anything, is a clear answer for me: no, we don't. But at the same time I admit that the notion of god is not something entirely cultural; it is inherent in the human mind; let's say it's genetically passed down, to have a general idea what a god is. Nobody, like Greta pointed it out, nobody needs an explanation to see what a god is, no matter what cultural background they come from.
So; I believe that the god image is inherent in humans; it has served such strong survival tactics, that it became part of the genetic code; but humans with their mighty brain have figured out that we can do without god, and that's about the size of it, as far as I am concerned.
I don’t see any connection between the two. One is a tribal figure meant to coalesce a people into a nation; the other a comparatively late advanced philosophic edition of god proceeding from pantheism to upgrade god into a more modern version so as not to be wholly incompatible with science; in effect, diminishing the momentum of IT receding ever further. Panentheism is God eroding theistically and reappearing philosophically replete with its own dogmas.
As I understand it, that transformation, if it ever really happened, was a Christian one, hardly conceivable to Jews who were well aware the discipline imposed upon them by Jehovah. This was a god meant to be obeyed, not grant favors. The Jews are certainly not confused having invented him.
Understood within the context of Jewish history from the beginning, there’s very little to be confused about...at least not in that respect.
We’re all conditioned. No matter how much we attempt to refine ourselves there will always be the leftover nuggets of former beliefs and traditions in the form of practiced and presiding rituals; there is nothing wrong, untruthful or hypocritical about this. Until new ones emerge or old ones get amended (already happening), we should keep the one’s we have; they still perform an essential function even without the mandate of belief which once created it.Greta wrote: ↑Sat May 12, 2018 4:54 amSo, given that God's definition is as messy as one of Its definitions - love - I thought I could gain more clarity by cleaning the slate and start again, to imagine what I may have thought about all this without conditioning. However, I am conditioned and can't truly start afresh; there is always a small influence.
Not abstracted but as whole as can be. Spinoza's God is a name for ontological plenitude. Spinoza's God is reality itself aka nature itself. Spinoza's God is ineffable as it includes not only the temporally relative aspect of reality, and the eternal aspect of reality, (those two aspects which are available to us) but also other infinite and unimaginable aspects of reality.Spinoza’s god has nothing to do with any of this, his god being a genderless abstraction (as most abstractions are) belonging more to philosophy than actual theism. This didn’t make him popular among Jews or Christians and we all know what happened next.
That statement is prophetic. The God-concept gives the believer something towards which one can grow; secularism does not, at least as far as I can see.The human being cannot live in a condition of emptiness for very long: if he is not growing toward something, he does not merely stagnate; the pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity and despair, and eventually into destructive activities.
I agree but please note, I didn't say "abstracted" whose meaning is more akin to an amputation of something greater. It's the abstraction of Spinoza's god - compared to traditional theistic entities - which yields what you nicely phrase as "ontological plenitude", an ontology even science describes in ever more extreme abstract terms.Belinda wrote: ↑Sun May 13, 2018 8:30 am Dubious wrote:
Not abstracted but as whole as can be. Spinoza's God is a name for ontological plenitude. Spinoza's God is reality itself aka nature itself. Spinoza's God is ineffable as it includes not only the temporally relative aspect of reality, and the eternal aspect of reality, (those two aspects which are available to us) but also other infinite and unimaginable aspects of reality.Spinoza’s god has nothing to do with any of this, his god being a genderless abstraction (as most abstractions are) belonging more to philosophy than actual theism. This didn’t make him popular among Jews or Christians and we all know what happened next.
Absolutely not!
Add another "absolute" to the above statement.
I tried to simplify it for you! No need to thank me! 
Dubious wrote: ↑Sun May 13, 2018 6:53 amI don’t see any connection between the two. One is a tribal figure meant to coalesce a people into a nation; the other a comparatively late advanced philosophic edition of god proceeding from pantheism to upgrade god into a more modern version so as not to be wholly incompatible with science; in effect, diminishing the momentum of IT receding ever further. Panentheism is God eroding theistically and reappearing philosophically replete with its own dogmas.
That transformation was the resuilt of the transformation of "shoe-horning", as Greta put it. You say the same thing, but with a tone that the original claim was wrong. If it was wrong, you are wrong. (Neither of you are wrong in my view.)As I understand it, that transformation, if it ever really happened, was a Christian one, hardly conceivable to Jews who were well aware the discipline imposed upon them by Jehovah. This was a god meant to be obeyed, not grant favors. Well, the Jewish god DID grant a lot of favours in his time. Parted the red sea, threw manna from the sky, led the Jews to Canaan, invented the credit card transaction system, etc. Much like in Christianity and Islam, in Jewdaism there is a lot of give-and-take between humans and god, and there is a name for the preagreement: the covenant, the second covenant, and so on. The Jews are certainly not confused having invented him.
Understood within the context of Jewish history from the beginning, there’s very little to be confused about...at least not in that respect.
It was a Jewish Saga; Gentiles should have had nothing to do with it! It was a Jewish script belonging to no one else. So was the New Testament. Nobody Gentile had to do with it. St. Saul simply forced himself upon this pile of Jewish mavericks. Remember, they were the Chosen People which purposely excluded everyone else. All that changed irrevocably when Christians got involved...How did that change? It did not change at all. Jews are still God's chosen people, both by Jews and by Christian faith... this did not change at all but that’s another story with a pre-history of it's own in the form of Hellenism. Well... the Christians that got involved were each and every one of them a Jew, not a Christian. Christianity did not exist in the early days of Christianity... it was the Fish Party, and it was detached theologically and spiritually and officially form Judaism only several hundred years after Christianity was born. Even the god of the Christians was Jewish. Both the almighty and the biped. (I can't vouch for the Holy Ghost's ethnic origin. Nothing is said about that.)
Spinoza’s god has nothing to do with any of this, his god being a genderless abstraction (as most abstractions are) belonging more to philosophy than actual theism. This didn’t make him popular among Jews or Christians and we all know what happened next.
We’re all conditioned. No matter how much we attempt to refine ourselves there will always be the leftover nuggets of former beliefs and traditions in the form of practiced and presiding rituals; there is nothing wrong, untruthful or hypocritical about this. Until new ones emerge or old ones get amended (already happening), we should keep the one’s we have; they still perform an essential function even without the mandate of belief which once created it.Greta wrote: ↑Sat May 12, 2018 4:54 amSo, given that God's definition is as messy as one of Its definitions - love - I thought I could gain more clarity by cleaning the slate and start again, to imagine what I may have thought about all this without conditioning. However, I am conditioned and can't truly start afresh; there is always a small influence.
Very well put. If one is choosing his or her own theism, or system of belief, or object and practice of worship, then the atheists could really be claiming that religions are not true, they are subjective choices of individuals, and since two individuals' choices may differ, there is no absolute truth in religion.
“See that justice is done,
let mercy be your first concern,
and humbly obey your God.” (Micah 6:6-8 CEV)