infinity and god

Never in doubt, my friend.

bm

Religious people go knocking door to door. I am talking about god. Religion is not god. Religion is god created in mans image and for mans will. Religion is man imitating god.

I've got no money on either horse, religion or God. Your assertion that the atheist needs the theist to deal with their own insecurities is bunk.

T
K
O

The great French mathematician and astronomer Laplace (1749-1827) did some ground-breaking work on the movent of celestial bodies, using Newtonian mechanics. There is a story, possibly apocryphal, that Laplace presented his work to Napoleon, who asked him where God fitted in.
Lapllace's reply was 'I had no need for that hypothesis.'

Lapolace's observation is a clear example of redundancy.God had no place in his account of the movement of the planets, not because he had proved God doesn't exsist, nor that God does nat have certain powers, but simply beacause there was no place for God in the system- God was redundant because the explanation was complete without him.

Amigo, given what you said about God and religion, shouldn't you replace theism, in your previous posts, with religion. Technically speaking atheists find their opponents (if you will) in theism specifically but practically speaking it's really all about religion which by it's organised, social nature has wider ranging results and impacts. How many angry, militant, theist bashing atheists would there be if all theists ever did was believe in a creator and said little or nothing more on the matter. Particularly if it was said or believed with a certain resignation about the difficulty in comprehending the infinite and feeling the need to place a lid, conception or personification on it. I guess that would be seeing the lid as a means to an end and not the end in itself though which can't really be said of those whose "god" discriminates against minority x, y or z. Then god is in the human sphere but apparently it's also removed from the human sphere whenever reasonable criticisms (of things in the human sphere) are made.



I almost want to agree with you here actually but if you don't mind me saying, I think the wording and initial base lines are wrong. You seem to be equating atheists as the hardcore, militant kind and the theists with the transcendental kind. Of course they come in all shapes and sizes don't they? The militant atheist I think can be giving god the edge and can be trying to beat something but I don't think it's any different to the fundamental theist, just from a different angle. They're both trying to beat doubt out of themselves, I guess that goes into self integrity and the like which others talk about here sometimes. Both are in a horrible battle with notions of self. In that sense I think atheists, some on this site, make some really genuine and fascinating criticisms of theism that shouldn't be dismissed just because they come under the umbrella of atheism as a label. I see religion as connected with self-realisation and consciousness. From my perspective if the key problem the theist and atheist can sometimes find themselves struggling with is a notion of self, religion should not be about defining a self that is in division with others but about a self realisation that is in relation to others.

Ashers, I am contemplating your post.

Yes, I am very messy but if I stop to do things proper I lose my train of thought. I clean them up later. My path is to seperate the theist from religion and demonstrate that the theist of religion is really an anti-god and that the altruistic atheist is actually godly.

I make (beleive it or not) intentional mistakes.

You're trying to make a moving target.

T
K
O

Can't happen. The ego will always be there. Ego makes humans competitive animals. It's the nature of the beast. That's why you have different football teams, different political parties, different religions and wars. Saying my interpretation of the Bible is better than yours is not religion, it's competition.

Amigo, I didn't mean to imply your posts were messy, I enjoyed them and the exchange of posts with TKO in general, it's why I posted. I think I understand what you're saying and where you're coming from though, especially with regard to theism in religion being anti-God sometimes.

xingu, what can't happen? A change of context? That's all I'm thinking about. The context God or religion finds itself in with relation to ourselves. I agree about competition but there are more and less healthy levels of it for the individual and those around them. When I say a self-realisation I'm just thinking of a re-orientation, a new perspective, I'm not thinking of the destruction or dissolution of the ego. If a person bases their whole identity on a conception of God or a particular religion, it's no surprise when they become an emotional wreck upon doubt which naturally leads to very large and well fortified wall being built up, none of which has anything to do with the "heretics", the outsiders in a literal sense, i.e. the specific people who happened to get too close to some religious lunatic, it has everything to do with an inward battle, everyone else just becomes a stereotype and I can't help but think it's because they don't just feel isolated and in competition with those around them but that their own existence depends upon an ever more vicious division being in place.

So in that sense I can't think of too many types of people in the world who are more self obsessed than religious fundamentalists and suicide bombers, they're like little children clinging to themselves for dear life. They needn't cling though. Not that I see much hope for fundamentalists but there you go.

Ashers:
"From my perspective if the key problem the theist and atheist can sometimes find themselves struggling with is a notion of self, religion should not be about defining a self that is in division with others but about a self realisation that is in relation to others."

Very good!!!

Hey JL, glad you liked it.

In a wider sense beyond the theist/atheist divide and just in terms of everyone I think I've come to see "others" as being not just people but objects of our perception, i.e. how we relate to our environment and current activity as a whole etc.

Ashers, your "wider sense" is what matters most, indeed it is the only thing that really matters. As Fresco reminds us, it is all about relationships. It is by means of--as an on-going consequence of--our relationships with all things that we come into existence. Imagine being in a vacuum with nothing around. We would quickly lose all (or see that we have no) meaning, including our identity and self.

...next stop infinity and God maybe. It makes you wonder about forced, solitary confinement in a little box of a cell. Or even just solitude in general, people adapt themselves to their surroundings constantly I think, re-orientating who I am relative to it all to maintain some semblance of consistency. You hear wondrous stories about solitude that's for sure, when it all breaks down.

The Web of Life...that is the name of a book I am reading at the moment, noted by Fresco himself on this forum I think. Fascinating reading anyway, if anything, I've really underestimated and under-appreciated the depth and heights to which inter-connectedness reaches. More and more of which the scientific community is apparently taking note of in it's own way.

At the same time--and this is very hard to think and talk about--ultimately there is no meaning. The Buddhists use the term Sunyatta in reference to the Void of Reality. When I talk about the meaning-generating nature of relationships, I am referring to the world as a linguistic phenomenon, as, what Post Modernists might call, a grand text of meanings (the anthropologists use terms such as culture and worldview). Mystics just remain silent. For them, as I understand them, all meaning is artifact coming with our efforts out of the Void of pure potentiality.

Yes meaning is a strange one isn't it. It's tough to talk about for good reason I guess but even when you're thinking in terms of Void, non-existence or emptiness it's difficult not to couch a feeling about this without separating it all out. I want to see the Void or at least I tend towards thinking of blackness and nothingness but in relation to me, like a blank sky. The truth is, or seems to be, much more mysterious than that. If the essence of it all is a web of dynamic, spontaneous and utterly holistic relations, an expression or meaning can' t be seen, ultimately anyway, within a finite set of static interactions with nearby neighbours. It IS as an expression of the whole but meaning as we know it, is dualistic, and does take some level of objectivity for granted. Outside of a specific interaction, holistically, you just can't pin things down, then you're talking about potentiality of being rather than being since potentiality encompasses all possible interaction.

That is so different from just envisaging a black space of some sort. I think that's why I like the term emptiness so much, it has a connotation of being and non-being at the same time due to our natural inclination of conceptualising empty space with respect to an object simultaneously. It's there...but it isn't !

I was wondering also, what do you think of, "existence before essence"? I like it on the one hand with respect to it's opposite, the idea most typically put forth of us being sinners by nature in the mind of God before we even exist. Is it just the flip side of another dualism though? I guess it depends in what context you place it in, existence without essence seems like our true nature, the Void of Reality. Is essence really another word for meaning in this sense?

A very rich post, Ashers.
I WOULD say that essence refers to meaning, and that "existence precedes essence" is the existentialist's way of saying that all meaning is the creation/construction of existing creators/constructors.

How do you respond to the buddhist Heart Sutra's dictum that "Form is (exactly) emptiness and emptiness (exactly) form"?

As you say, it's connotation is that of being and non-being defining each other (yin-yang?).

This is, despite appearance, not dualism.

Interesting, thanks. This non dualist aspect of the statement is what I was wondering about and hoping to hear. I was asked about the statement the other day and gave my thoughts on it that were naturally motivated by what one is without the other, the discussion was cut short and I wasn't sure whether the implication was that there can be an existing thing, the person, without the essence in which case it seemed just a reverse. I got the impression this was really a motivator for people to take charge of themselves, quite a practical statement in some ways.



Yeah, what can you say to that? Great stuff. These are the statements that capture your attention immediately. Much like Nirvana=Samsara I guess, the words and their distinction in the sentence/phrase imply a concreteness that belies that which they're representative of. I like what you've said in the past about language providing a snapshot or photo of the process of reality but it being process all the same.

Ashers, I find the equation, "samsara equals nirvana", to be most enlightening. I guess the same thing applies to "being equals non-being" in the sense* that all "things" exist not as fixed static BEINGS but as BECOMINGs. All things are continuously becoming something else, i.e., changing processes of self-extinguishing, while emerging as something else, which, in turn, is SIMULTANEOUSLY self-extinguishing (viz., the non-dualistic: "form is EXACTLY emptiness") while becoming something else, etc.... I love the Hindu metphor of Brahman (absolute reality) consisting of creative Vishnu (becoming) and destructive Shiva (extinghishing).

*there is also the sense that the concept of being implies its opposite, as do good/bad, hard/soft/ right/wrong, beautiful/ugly, etc..

Ashers, I find the equation, "samsara equals nirvana", to be most enlightening. I guess the same thing applies to "being equals non-being" in the sense* that all "things" exist not as fixed static BEINGS but as BECOMINGs. All things are continuously becoming something else, i.e., changing processes of self-extinguishing, while emerging as something else, which, in turn, is SIMULTANEOUSLY self-extinguishing (viz., the non-dualistic: "form is EXACTLY emptiness") while becoming something else, etc.... I love the Hindu metphor of Brahman (absolute reality) consisting of creative Vishnu (becoming) and destructive Shiva (extinghishing).

*there is also the sense that the concept of being implies its opposite, as do good/bad, hard/soft/ right/wrong, beautiful/ugly, etc..