Define God

Thats nice.

>>/> Knock, and the door will be opened for you. ... Search, and you will find!

Oh, Bible quotes. Genius. If the Bible says it, it must be true, even though it contridicts other parts of itself and other sacred texts which are equally as valid (the validity being minute indeed).

Knock, and the door of the 'Knowledge' will be opened for you. ... Search, and you will find the everlasting 'Truth'!

If "God" created all then how was "God" made/created? I can define "God" for you! Greedy Old Dirt bags! It is simply a form of control through lies and manipulation. The people feeding you these lies want power and money. Any of you try to prove to me that "God" exists and i will come right back at you with why you are wrong...simply put, unwash your brain and start living in reality.

Welcome to the forum.
Thanks for your opinion.
Care to flesh it out with some reasoning?

A question from the bemusing Mr. Kettle Black!

Of course the word "god" has become loaded. The literalists have hijacked and monopolized the word, at least in the western world. Here, god usually has connotes something that has an objective reality, "out there." To me "god" is a subjective perception, something you experience day to day whether you're aware of it or not. This is probably very "Zen" though I don't profess to be a Buddhist.

Unfortunately, if god is a subjective perception then answering the question, "Do you believe in god?" makes no sense at all. Yes, no, or I don't know are meaningless. I know that concepts of god are impossible and that the intellect is completely useless in the spiritual quest; that's one thing the seeker must ultimately understand or else the spiritual quest can never end and one becomes involved in a perpetual, frustrating cycle that must be resolved if one is ever to have any peace of mind.

I understand that what I am saying is not widely accepted in the Western world, though, I believe, it is more acceptable in the East. Most of us are indoctrinated as children into religious concepts, and it is very difficult to overcome this indoctrination. Most people reared as fundamentalists or literalists either remain so or become athiests, one extreme or the other, and neither is a solution. One must become radical in that case, not radical as in "extreme" but radical as in going down into the underlying meaning, examining the "roots." In that case religious myths and symbols are seen as metaphors to the experience.

To those really interested in this subject I suggest reading some Joseph Campbell, the mythologist. One of my favorites is, "The Power of Myth," the transcrips taken from a PBS show of the same name with Campbell and Bill Moyers.

Hi chumly! How ya been!
Wanna pepsi?

Errr. . . . Speaking of logic. . .

Thanks for a well rounded input, Coluber

I say that I am an atheist because the notion of a God that is separate from me makes no sense to me. On the other hand I am willing to say that, as I see it, there is ONLY God, nothing separate from God including you and me.
Good points, Coluber.

Hi JL! Haven't heard from you in a long time.

It always befuddles me when I have to do jury duty the question pops up on the questionaire as to religious preference. I forget what I have put down, but athiest is misleading, and though it's appropriate in relation to a literalist's view of god, that's not enough for me. I'm not going to play into the hands of the simple-minded just to satisfy a bureaucrat.

I had a conversation with a very pleasant Jehova's Witness devotee who knocked on my door. When he asked me if I was religious, I replied that I was but that I couldn't explain it. Yet I'm not so pretentious that I claim to have some great, mystical knowledge. Nature is nature, and if you can reach the point of being in awe of it a lot of time, then what else is there?

This nature . . . this orrganized energy, so to speak.

Could it have intelligence?

The Hebrew name for God, Jehovah (or Yahweh), means 'He who causes to become'.

Nature is intelligent; the universe is intelligent. To think that there is a mind that is creating all this not only disparages nature, it is also anthropocentric. We have to just let go and be in awe of the whole process. Looking for a first cause is a process of the ego trying to substantiate itself. I think trying to conceive of a god with an objective reality--or any god for that matter--is a trick the intellect, as ego, plays.

Pardon my presumptuousness, Coluber, but I think we belong to the same (non) church.

Not looking for first cause. It is presumptuous to assert that time and causality are linear.

The issue is not one of "linearity" but one of "closure".

Statements such as "the universe is intelligent" imply the existence of a bounded "thing" - the universe to which we ascribe "a property" - intelligence. But in order to make such a statement we mentally "stand outside" such a boundary...i.e. take a transcendent position. The philosophical problem here is that we as "nature" cannot logically "stand outside ourself", so we are left with an ineffability principle sometimes termed "spirituality" in which all words like "god" or "nature" become ontologically deconstructed/meaningless. We are then left with the usage of such words as pragmatic tokens of contextual social exchange, rather than representations of an independent "reality" (spiritual or otherwise).

Are you saying that because we are part of the universe, we are unable to know it?

No, he's sayin' you god boys is goofy.