aperson,
You have probably seen me post this quote before, but it is still my favorite description of God.
Quote:When I ponder, what God is, I then say: He is the One in contrast to the creature, as an eternal Nothing. He has neither a foundation, a beginning nor state; and is of naught, save only of Himself. He is the Will of the Abyss. He occupies neither space nor place. From eternity in eternity in Himself He comes to be. He is like or similar to nothing, and hath no particular place which He inhabits.
This was written in the seventeenth century by Jakob Boehme, a German mystic who published many essays but was actually a simple farmer.
What do you think of Boehme's description?
Boehme's description is just another riddle. But for my part, as I understand what he's saying, I am in agreement.
But there's nothing supernatural about god. If you think there is then you have misunderstood the concept.
Ashers,
I respect your beliefs, but the God you are referring to is a deistic God. I do not believe that is God, and for the purposes of this discussion, neither should you. I believe that is nature. We already have a word for it - why add another? The God I am referring to is the mainstream, monotheistic God. People wanted clarification of this, and hope I gave it to them, and you.
By my cryptic comment, I meant that that poem ignites emotion. Emotion clouds logic, which is what we need most in this current time. Religion is founded on emotion, and so prevents people from seeing the truth. I could write a speech about God which brings tears to the eyes, but that would not make its content any more valid.
wandel,
It's just more fire. While it is certainly a beautiful description, it does not give us any greater insight into what God is. I admit that I cannot easily find the solid definition in there, but I hope that that is because it is so cryptic, not because I am stupid. Can you give me a solid definition derived straight from that text, with no outside influence or interpretation? I think you will find it difficult too.
Similar to nothing? Does that mean he is non-existence itself? Forgive me, but is this just a poetic way of saying that God doesn't exist?
Boehme did believe in the existence of God. To me, Boehme is saying that there is no adequate way to describe God. God is the "Will of the Abyss".
wandeljw wrote:There is also the view that God is simply beyond human comprehension.
Then god might be in good keeping with some of the more bemusing posters on A2K.
I like the Boehme quote too, those German mystics at it again !
Seems like classic non-dualism to me, the language is particularly evocative but for a purposeful reason I think. The "will of the abyss" is a great example but I think it's meaning is that of form equals emptiness. How can there be will in an abyss, how can two such seemingly distinct labels be equal? For me the key is in what relates them. It's all about concepts and words and their nature/limitation. To me it sounds like Boehme is saying, essentially, God is the "nexus between being and nothingness". The same nexus as that between all opposites. My understanding of that is that we perceive being and nothingness in relation to each other, we see space between objects. Also the mystics usually talk of two understandings of God or ultimate reality. Firstly that experienced in meditation and secondly the notions above, the absence of opposite. To me the first is a sense of union with perception, when self is transcended. The sense of distinction flows away and I'm left with a non-identifying perception of present phenomena. To give that some perspective I've tended to see say a chair in front of my as existing with respect to myself as a user or as a table it stands next to. When the chair is just observed without catergorisation it's neither an existing chair in the sense of relating to the objects noted above but neither is it perceived as a non-chair object or something in contrast to chair. This is my attempt to relay some feelings of it, the quote above just made me think. This would be when some "perceive God", I suspect.
This ^^ is just my understanding (or lack thereof) though, I hope I haven't confused too much!
aperson, Deism is a broad area but my understanding of it excludes me I think, as long as we're talking about
a deity, a creator, whether or not it intervenes. Even if you think I'm equating God with nature, I'm not, nature is just another label to contrast things against. I take inspiration from Buddhism and the east in general, also read say, The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley, I think that's a wonderful book. Your point about the Tao te Ching quote and it's emotive quality is very fair but I do think it's the responsiblity of the reader to not necessarily get carried away with something in particular because of the emotional wave it may evoke.
Ashers
I have not read that book.
What I have read is "A Brave New World" obviously by the same author, in which, if I recall correctly, God manifests himself as an absence. Unusual concept.
Depends how you view things. Do the drug makers or growers carry no blame, and does the "responsibility", as you put it, lie in the users? Certainly they both carry some blame, but I would not place it all on the users. In fact I am tending towards saying that 95% of the blame lies in the makers. It's the same thing. The author obviously wants to inspire potentially dangerous emotion in his readers. Emotion is the sword of religion. Rationalization is its shield. May we bear neither.
wandel,
I stand my ground. Nonsensical riddles. Will of the Abyss? Have you ever heard anything so meaningful, and yet so meaningless?
Chumly,
Of course.
Hmm...
God is a word with no clear definition.
As such, it is a useless and meaningless word.
Take any word... Look at this sentence:
"From the statue in the square, walk one mile south to reach the bus station".
Now, if the word "south" was similar to the word "god" in that it had no clear definition, that sentence would be meaningless, and my repeated use of the meaningless word would be annoying.
So, if you ask me what god is, here's my answer.
It is the unknown factor that some people use to compensate for their emotional and intellectual shortcomings.
I like it, I like it.
The thing is, I think when I say, "The religious God," everyone knows what I mean, but they just don't want to admit it. It's the sort of thing you can't easily explain, but you understand anyway. It's like, every small child knows what a face is, even if they don't know the word "face". We know what God is, we just don't know an adequate definition.
Yes, everyone knows what you mean.
But one man knows that you mean the grand papa governing from his realm above, looking down on us.
Another knows that you mean the unexplained aspects of the universe. Some term devised to convey the whole image that our perception indicates.
Another man knows that you are deluded and not worth listening to.
Then there's a guy who knows that you are talking about an invisible force that gave birth to everything.
Get my point?
The term god is useless and meaningless.
Cyracuz wrote:The term god is useless and meaningless.
For a presumably "useless and meaningless" word, millions have died and immense wealth has been accumulated and/or dissipated.
Re: God is a position, not a being
aperson wrote:Today I attended a philosophy and theology day which covered a range of issues including bioethics and what it is to be human.
One of the speaker talked about the death of God (though I suspect he is a theist of some variety). He suggested that we have become post-human, or human, or non-human. At any rate, we have changed. And this, he said, was due to the death of God.
He provided three ways in which God has died. 1) In the death of the manifestation of God (Christ). 2) In the fall of Christendom. 3) In the rise of technology. I will focus on the third, and what I believe to be the most valid way.
He suggested that science and technology have killed God in their respective areas (understanding and power).
I think this not to be true.
I think that humanity is a position, as is God (which hence forth I shall refer to as Godliness). Humanity is a position that human kind has occupied for many millennia (when we started to occupy it is a different story). Godliness is a position that has not previously been occupied. We instead, created a being to occupy that position, namely God. God is a filler. God is, in more than one sense, a God of the gaps. God filled the position of Godliness.
Now that we have technology and are able to manipulate our environment and our body, to the extent that the two have become intertwined. We use tools to extent the natural capabilities of our bodies. Using a car allows us to move at speeds that we are not naturally capable of. Some of us use glasses to improve our eyesight. One could even say that, in the use of items such as computers and calculators, we have extended our minds beyond the physical limits of our body.
The point is that we are moving out of the position of humanity.
What position are we moving into? Godliness. We are becoming Gods.
Now that we are partially occupying the position of Godliness, we see that we don't need something to fill it anymore, and we realise that the filler, God, was nothing more than a filler. We are beginning to see that, there was no God there in the first place, and at any rate, we don't need one. We are our own God. God never died. He was just never alive to start with.
So in conclusion: humanity and Godliness are positions, not beings. We are moving out of the position of humanity and into the position of Godliness. In our shifting we are realising that God is and always was non-existent. We never killed God.
Yours ever faithfully (in the best sense of faith),
aperson
I SAID IT BEFORE AND I WILL SAY IT AGAIN GOD IS NOT "ALL POWERFUL", HE IS THE "MOST POWERFUL".
so i have to agree.
humans are in fact becoming "gods".
OH NOEZ BLASPHEMY
Chumly wrote:Cyracuz wrote:The term god is useless and meaningless.
For a presumably "useless and meaningless" word, millions have died and immense wealth has been accumulated and/or dissipated.
The term itself is meaningless. The concept, on the other hand...
At any rate, it makes you wonder,
why??.
God will be our downfall if we do not eliminate it from the minds of the innocent, that or global warming...
OGIONIK,
Glad to see a like minded person around her. As they say, great minds think alike. Then again, so do not-so-great minds...
Cyracuz,
I suppose. I think the problem is that there are so many possible meanings. It has become useless due to the introduction of these. One concept on its own is simple, but add them all together...
God, I've been using a lot of ellipses lately...
aperson, supply and demand, I could never draw a hard line between them, certainly not 95% on makers, that seems to imply, get rid of them and you've got rid of the problem. They exist for a reason. Besides just as drugs aren't bad in themselves, neither is religion, these things never stand alone, it's always about how people relate to them or over/mis-use them. I agreed with your issue regarding inciting negative emotions through religious texts but only with very specific usage. I.e. some religious writings are written to incite emotion in a general sense, some religious writings are written to stir the reader for all the wrong reasons, but the coupling between emotion and religion in a global sense is not nearly as strong as far as I can see, not in the "potentially dangerous" kind. I could be wrong though.
Take the Taoist quote, from what I understand of it and it's origins, a form of insight is hoped to be inspired. Emotion may jump out at you when you look at it but not for me. It's poetic because of it's paradoxical nature and the paradoxes are, I think, supposed to throw the logical mind out of sync (not so the reader is open to nasty, old emotion) but because the logical mind categorises and draws lines between things. The text, I think, is driving at integration instead. I guess the issue I really have is that for dealing with the problems stemming from religion, rationalisation just doesn't cut it. If the issue of religion was understood in terms of individual emotions in a logical, systematic way, rationalisation works well in a pair for combatting it. The reason it doesn't cut it as far as I can see, is that beliefs as peoples attempts to frame themselves in terms of the world are much more fundamental that that, are notion of self near demands it. That's also probably why God is such a troublesome word, using it to "compensate for their emotional and intellectual shortcomings." or to represent the black hole that is the inexpressible about life means a rational attack so often, and you've seen this on this very site, falls flat on it's face.
I do appreciate these topics and the attempts to discuss it all though, don't get me wrong, these are just some of the problems as I see it.
I've been thinking about the "God spot", namely the need for the divine, having read "Angels and Demons" by Dan Brown. I suspect that, in order to solve the problem of religion, one has to, yes, remove religion, but also replace it with something harmless. I read an article a while back about a ex-wrist-slitter (now commonly known as an emo), who when she felt upset, would tidy her room. If we could divert the need for the divine to another area, or in other words, fill the God-spot with something else, then the problem of religion would be solved.
It is possible to have an un-filled God-spot. I do, and I presume so do you, and all other atheists. Occasionally I have been tempted to fill the gap, but after a couple of years of atheism (it seems like forever to me) I have learnt to fend of these temptations. I don't seem to have suffered any side-effects, though I can't be sure.
Of course, back to the drug dealers: obviously we can't remove the people who use the drugs, but we can remove the source of the drugs. Such as it is with religion. I think what you're implying from your comment that problem may not have been destroyed, I have dealt with that in my first paragraph (sorry, I'm writing a bit un-chronologically).
Yes, everyone says that "religion itself isn't bad, it's the people that's the problem". I'm sorry, but I am tired of this argument. Take cocaine. It is not evil in itself, right? But does it not cause evil? On a purely philosophical level, cocaine is not bad at all, but on a more practical level, it is bad. There's no denying it. It causes bad, even if it is not bad itself. And, as with emotion, as we discussed earlier, cocaine drives people to do bad. Furthermore, if you take the fact (at least, I think) that we have no free will. It is not the people's decisions anyway. It is all very well saying that people choose to use or mis-use something, but that something influences people to do so. So it is with religion.
By emotion, I do not so much mean that, but more, irrationality of thought. Does that clear things up for you? Emotion is not that terrible, but when it overcomes logic it can inspire irrationality of thought. This is what religion does best. This is why science and religion are enemies. Science is rationality; religion is irrationality.
Cyracuz wrote:chumly wrote:For a presumably "useless and meaningless" word, millions have died and immense wealth has been accumulated and/or dissipated.
Yes, isn't it a shame?
Yep it would seem that way on the surface! But the question is open as to the effects of non-religion on man's societal / intellectual / artistic / scientific / technological growth from an historical perspective.
One might well ask: would there have been something worse than religion, had there been no such thing as religion in an historical context?
After all, man's imagination and ignorance would not have been curtailed in this non-religious scenario, and non-religion in no way assures a higher level of rationality in and of itself.
