A personal relationship with God.

True. I understand that. But, I'll call it source. We are the source. We are it. Through education and practice, we learn to allow the source to work through us, move forward, do the work. But, the source is there in all of us, just there. It's called love. Is that any cornier than God.

I am familiar with the concept of "being part of God". However in ontological terms, a "personal God" implies an ontological separation of "self" and "God". Once we move the argument towards "God as holistic consciousness" then this makes nonsense of all "dialogue with God" or "worship of God". And perhaps more importantly, it also raises epistemological questions about the requirement for a "source" or "origin", thereby rendering the very concept of a "God" potentially redundant. But since this negates the "psychological security" function of belief it tends to be rejected by the majority who do not have the mental capacity to deal with it.

Let's imagine the system God-man as a car engine. Like in combustion, God just shoots out energy in random directions, without any plan. And man is like the structure of the engine, through which the energy flows. God is blind energy and man is a blind machine. However, when the blind energy flows through a blind machine, the system may acquire a direction. Systems with a more complex structure, like computers, robots or biological systems, can regulate the flow of energy in more complex ways.

More than what?

I can imagine sauropods with three legs and an eye, working on quantum physics..

A dialogue with God could be likened to Jungian individuation. A person taps into the holistic consciousness, which is actually a diffused and vague consciousness, or the unconscious (as Jung called it), and acquires certain mental and physical structures. It is the interaction between analytic and holistic consciousness. The attitude of "worship" could be substituted with "appreciation".

More complex than a car engine in my example.

Then God is a quite a simple system, QED..

Ultimately even simpler, the sub-Planck nothingness from which everything emerges.

That's a bit sniffy fresco. How come you didn't respond to the suggestion that atheists have palliatives as well? Like being sniffy.

If you had responded we could then compare the social functions of the various palliatives like belief and superior sniffiness.

Well... there's no real outcome whether we have the capacity to deal with it or not is there? So it doesn't matter?

1. Atheists do not need palliatives, and if they have them at all they certainly don't involve the "life after death" variety common to most theists.
2. An appreciation of " holism" requires the mental capacity to transcend traditional logic (as in quantum non-locality for example), or to put it another way, to transcend the notion of a "thing-in iteslf". Since, according to Piaget, not all adults are capable of traditional logical thinking (about "things") anyway, it is hardly "sniffy" to discuss mental capacity.

BTW,

I didn't respond because as I have told you before , you are in my "ignore file". If this means I miss some of your infrequent intellegible responses, so be it.

I have just looked up Jungian individuation and it seems to correspond with "ego-transcendence" found in Eastern religions. The technical question when discussing such transcendence is whethether "Self" (capital S) is a level of "higher consciousness" on a progressive ladder towards "the Absolute" (aka God) or whether it IS "holistic consciousness" per se. Neither situation involves the concept of a "personal God" in the traditional sense.

Ah!! You use the Ignore function do you old boy? That speaks volumes for a debater.

And declaring my posts to be unintelligible is the crassest form of debate outside of clubbing.

Do you think this majority of people with inadequate mental capacities by your standards should be allowed to vote? If you do you accept government by inadequate mental capacities.

I think you are lost in a miasma of technical terms which few people either know or care about. Ignore is a walled in position. A sort of barricade.

I was not referring to God as a person though but what a dialogue or relationship with an impersonal source can look like. It is like tapping into the unknown, dancing with the unknown and dealing with the mental and physical effects thereof. God in the sense of the source of the universe can hardly be regarded as a person but his manifestations - beings that are sentient and intelligent "enough" - can be regarded as persons.

A dialogue between the intellect and the will.

As the intellect does not exist in evolution it is hard to see how intellectual approaches can be brought to bear upon it. It is pure will.

Is it possible to be any more specific than 'mental capacity'?

Why wouldn't intellect exist in evolution?

Assuming it could have sends the mind skittering.

I didn't say it couldn't have and I used the word evolution to denote the Darwinian canon. I know it can be extended outside of that. Within it common sense sees no trace of intellect given our perceptual capacities. Outside of it the limit is unknowable.

The subject of a personal relationship with God is a fraught one. It is difficult to distinguish between a genuinely felt one and a well performed one undertaken for some subjective purpose similar to that well performed performance of the "happily married" man which one sees daily when the wife is in the vicinity or someone who reports back to her, or might do, is.

It is useless to say I am cynical because I have been on trips to big scale sporting events with a large number of "happily married" men. With the lads and 200 miles from home and pissed up.

I have also been in various establishments with a lot of "happily married" men sat at big desks with a bevy of much younger typists and stenographers and whatnot scurrying about in short steps on their high-heels on account of the tight skirt which is a device for reducing the working efficiency of a woman from a male point of view.

I may have been just unlucky to have found the particular bunch of "happily married" men that I did but there were a large number and a high proportion of them who turned out to be capable of behaviour that shocked a simple young innocent such as I was: and over which I deem it polite to draw a veil of discretion.

And all these men were very fond of displays of how "happily married" they were and one went so far as to make me turn away in disgust. But it convinced many or at least they acted as if it had convinced them.

It is an interesting question as to what would signify a genuinely felt personal relationship with God without a suspicion of it being a performance. An unsung nurse out in bleaker parts of Africa tending to the sick possibly. A musical composition. The Royle Family.

Germaine Greer accused Mother Theresa of putting on a performance. I wouldn't do that. And Florence Nightingale is under arrest. Some say that the Pope is performing. One can perform as a tax-cutter. Or an isolationist. An artist. Anything. Just choose it and learn the lines and there you go. Then down to the pub for another ding-dong with a performing bail-outer.

Maybe the question is self-defeating in the sense that those who have a genuinely felt personal relationship with God wouldn't understand it in the unlikely event of them ever having to consider it. A Can-can girl, say.

And, as it seems, there are and have been many, uncountable, genuinely felt personal relationships with all sorts of Gods. Fractions of Gods even.

Saying it is "our" God comes a bit close to recognising Him.

Litewave,

I take "personal God" to imply an athropomorphised "other" with whom a "dialogue" could be meaningful. Diffuse or holistic concepts of a "spiritual essence" do not seem to fit the bill.

PQ,

I don't see how we can avoid "mental ability" etc in a discussion of transcendence. As Gurdjieff said to his acolytes, "there's no intellectual slumming here!".