What is this god of which you speak?

[Synapse]

There is god as a myth, mythology is godless, godless mythology is god centric, egocentric gods manipulate the universe.

Chinese whispers are assumptions too...

But then the universe is godawful, you can't breathe out there without a space suit. God could be an intricate solipsism that wants to treat sophism with tea, I can't help you, I think I used to drink agnostic wine or tea, I just forgot which fence I spring from, gestation is a lemon like the back of a pregnant universe with monkey magic appeal.

 

[Friend]

No, but thank you. I just want to know what god is today. Jesus is dead and the oldest religions in the world don't consider him god (and never have) anyway. I'm not disputing whether we should try to live our lives in a manner consistent with the way the man lived his life, but that's really a separate question. I'm interested in the existence of god/gods.

Point taken. I am not a Christian, but Jesus the man does intrigue me and I believe in much of what he talked about as far as practical living. However, Jesus as the Son of God truly is another conversation entirely. If you want to stay on the topic of god, I would like to join in on this if I may.
I am not one of those people who claim to have direct insight from God or anything like that. I just have to go by what I feel. In my feeling, morality and ethics seem to validate some design. Would you say that morality is something above basic biology. By this I mean that the brain chemistry we act upon may not need morality to operate efficiently. However many people live morally principled lives in order to form better relationships. This seems to be a "higher" purpose. What do you think? Does this indicate god in any way?

 

[juggernaut]

I can certainly see the appeal of this position, and I think it is one that many people find compelling. Unfortunately, for me, the reproductive ecology model in conjunction with what anthropologists refer to as "collective action" answer the question of where morality comes from equally well. As soft-bodied primates we rely on each other for survival. We must work together. It's how we're made, biologically. Keeping this in mind, we can see the necessity of developing certain "moral" positions. We can't successfully "run amok" as individuals. Every single moral position we maintain works to promote our survival at the species level. Even altruism, the one behavior that many people of faith like to invoke as a counter-example to this position, works to promote the survival of H. sapiens as a species. We cannot be okay with hurting one another or being entirely selfish because, if every one of us worked this way, we would be done for in a few short generations. The necessity of moral paradigms is very much a biological phenomenon, just like the drive/need to love. I definitely agree that it isn't basic biology however. The mechanisms are very complex and cannot be understood (or understood well at least) simply by invoking a single, one-dimensional model.

 

[wildcat]

Rather than rehashing all the same old arguments against the existence of a god, how about those of you who believe that a god/gods exist tell us what exactly is in your head/heart/gut/arse/whatever when you think about god? This word "god" has no real semantic content for me, so when I hear people talk about god I find myself wondering about the (Fregean) sense of the word. What does "god" pick out for you? I'm not at all interested in hearing about the greatness of your god or what your god does for you. I want to know what it is. I know many of you who have a belief in a god are familiar with the arguments against its existence so, if possible, please try to avoid the jargon that you know will cause the atheists around these parts to jump on your case(s).

How many gods do you want? Where do you live, in ancient Greece?
The multiple gods were abolished long ago. St. Paul did a wonderful job.

God is one and only a he drives a car. He lives in Stepford. He votes Republican.
His grandfather was in the Klan.

I think this was the essential.

 

[ADISCIPLE]

Anyone know anything about Maitreya?

 

[cheerful-pessimist]

Answering without referring to any particular deity or religion:
"God" is the perfect completeness that all humans strive to achieve. From the dawn of time, people have wondered if there was a start to the universe and how it came about. Many religions say that before creation, there was nothing, or only one perfect something. That one perfect something is "God." Supposedly, from it came everything. It was a One that split into a Many.
From a psychological point of view, humans suffer a similar fate. Theoretically, newborn children are perfectly whole and do not have egos, superegos, ids, shadows, etc. As they grow up, however, they develop all those things, and their conscious mind is separated from their unconscious self. The ego, the conscious mind, is only a very, very small fraction of the Self, the One.
Humans realize that they are not whole and that the universe is not technically whole, assuming it had a beginning in some perfect nothing or something. That gives birth to "God." "God" is the Whole, the One, the lost perfection that is somewhere in the world and in us. It's the collective unconscious of the whole human race and the theoretical reason things are the way they are. It's the spirit that people believe must be in everything. It's something we use to answer questions we don't consciously know we have.

 

[Jaguar]

It's the collective unconscious of the whole human race and the theoretical reason things are the way they are. It's the spirit that people believe must be in everything. It's something we use to answer questions we don't consciously know we have.

Pleased to see someone who speaks my language.
Welcome to the group.

 

[Amargith]

To me, they're an inspiration. A rolemodel if you will. A guide. Much like a wise man giving you the confidence and knowledge you need to get through life, guided by their wisdom.

 

[Jaguar]

Anyone know anything about Maitreya?

Is that why your user name is ADISCIPLE--
A disciple of Maitreya?

 

[Prototype]

God?... Hmm... What a wonderful theory!

 

[Grayscale]

my thoughts--most people have already decided whether they believe God exists emotionally, discussions like this are only a matter of reinforcing that decision in their rational mind. high rational intelligence can easily lead to pride, or believing that because we know relatively more than other humans that we know everything. it is this rejection of the notion that we aren't to be omniscient or omnipotent that causes us to close our minds to other perspectives or information, true or false as it may be... we desire to know everything, it follows that that is what we would tell ourselves. however, if we hypothetically consider the existence of an omniscient and omnipresent being, wouldn't our place, as limited in our knowledge and abilities, be below such a being? and yet, we discuss the existence or lack thereof with other humans, our equals, so that such a thing can be considered comfortably in a way we can control and understand. it's foolish to think the thoughts of you or I are anything but entirely inconsequential to reality, truth, the existince or non-existence of an omni-being. that is why approaching the issue from an entirely rational standpoint will come up short, with nothing to say conclusively one way or another. im aware this is a difficult suggestion to swallow, to accept our limitations.

let's say we are detectives arriving at the scene of a murder... do we have to know the perpatrator's hair color, the model of the firearm, the exact time of arrival to say whether the body in the middle of the floor means someone was killed? if we put aside our personal desires, whether they are for God to exist or not, wouldnt the aftereffects still remain in the present without a need for empirical proof of how? perhaps we are looking in the wrong place... yes, the creation of earth and space, fossils and how life developed, and modern physics can explain portions of the details of how we are, but this is a binary question, a question of the obvious, and the answer should be equally so obvious.

so why is it not so obvious to us? this is why it is a question of emotion, of human nature and our motives first before it is a question to be approached rationally. for us to ask "is there a God?" is presumptuous to such an extent that only humans could be, it would be more enlightening to ask what we are doing now and why. so to answer the question of whether God exists, i have instead another question: why do you think you want to know? because that is one that would all have the answer to.

 

[juggernaut]

Just a quick thing, before I run off for a bit... I honestly appreciate the time and energy you all have put into your responses. I may not understand or agree with most of them, but I do like getting real feedback on this topic. Thank you.

 

[Grayscale]

Thank you.

mizz crankypants my ass!

 

[Son of the Damned]

To me, God is just a word. Nothing more, nothing less.
Personally, I don't believe in any sort deity,spirit, guiding force, or supernatural phenomenon. From what I've seen and experienced, the universe is a place where very strange things happen for no adequate or obvious reasons. I don't see any reason to believe that anything is in control of the universe, so i don't.

And I'm happy with that, because it lets decide my own path and choose my future. Any meaning that life has for me is self-invested. I choose to invest meaning in a meaningless world. and nothing could make me happier.

 

[Son of the Damned]

To me, God is just a word. Nothing more, nothing less.
Personally, I don't believe in any sort deity,spirit, guiding force, or supernatural phenomenon. From what I've seen and experienced, the universe is a place where very strange things happen for no adequate or obvious reasons. I don't see any reason to believe that anything is in control of the universe, so i don't.

And I'm happy with that, because it lets decide my own path and choose my future. Any meaning that life has for me is self-invested. I choose to invest meaning in a meaningless world. and nothing could make me happier.

 

[thisGuy]

i believe that we are all a part of him and that we are made in his image. i believe that he is true doer and nothing would exist unless he didnt meant it to. i believe that reality is nothing but a delusion that god put us here to help us understand and mature. mature in order to dwell deep into our own consciousness and make ourselves able to comprehend the great power of god and the spirit and the intuition that make up the very atoms of this universe.

i believe that he is the one and the only true source of energy. all science has done is realize and, in some cases, harness that energy as seen fit in humans' current state.

i believe in god. i believe in human will. i believe that through self-realization, i can find god. all i gotta do is look deep enough.

i think evolution will eventually prove the existence of god...but when that happens, evolution, being the fairly abstract concept it is, will be given the credit for all that happens...after all, god wont exactly wave his hand and go "come my children"...wheres the fun in that

if you want to do some homework, there is an excellent book. "Autobiography of a Yogi" - Paramahansa Yogananda.

Autobiography of a Yogi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Blank]

let's say we are detectives arriving at the scene of a murder... do we have to know the perpatrator's hair color, the model of the firearm, the exact time of arrival to say whether the body in the middle of the floor means someone was killed?

I think that's a very good analogy; however, I would like to point out that you've already provided a reason that the body was there for a reason. In a logical argument it's something like:

If A, then B.

I think an analogy which would match reality better would be that there is a dead body. You don't know how or why the person died, but your job is to figure it out.

In the first example, you're indirectly arguing that there is tangible proof that (If God exists, he would be the murderer, the body would represent reality or something of the sort...) a person murdered another person, creating the body. In the second example, my example, which I think follows the human situation, it's that we see the evidence of a body (reality,) and we have to discover the cause of that body's existence, whether it be from murder (God) or natural causes (Big Bang, a simulation, whatever...)

NOTE: I'm not saying that God is a murderer. It's just a metaphor.