Oh God, lets talk about God.

[Doctor Cringelord]

The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named is not the eternal name

 

[Flâneuse]

My short answer to the God question is “probably not, but I don’t know for certain.” I like to speculate about it, and about what God's nature is if it actually exists, but I currently have no reason to believe any of my speculations correspond with reality. I try to be open-minded and if I ever hear a convincing reason why God's existence is more likely than its non-existence (or think of one myself) I will reconsider. Based on the evidence I've seen, I believe the most likely explanation of God/the supernatural is that it's merely a part of human imagination that developed to help us deal with our fears of death, existential aloneness, and cosmic insignificance. It also seems like humans have long turned to supernatural explanations to attempt to answer questions for which we don't have natural explanations, but I think the more we find out the more it suggests that everything has a natural explanation.

I'm okay with life having no objective or inherent meaning (in fact I find it freeing that we create it ourselves). Though I keep trying to accept death as the inevitable flip-side of life, I am occasionally deeply freaked out by the idea that everyone is just another impermanent part of nature and that after death we are nothing more than bodies that will decompose and be recycled in nature. I kind of want to believe there's some immaterial, eternal part of me that will live on, but I also don't want to believe something just because I want to believe it so I'll keep trying to simply make peace with mortality. ...Now I'm getting off topic. I'm done.

 

[Lark]

Of course God exists.

The question is what is meant by any talk of God and what difference does it make?

 

[Typh0n]

Honestly I think that god(s) that people used to believe in (pre-abrahamic) are archetypes that represent general principles in our minds. People project those things outward and see those principles reflected in nature, in phenomena. Thus gods can be more or less benevolent or malevolent, based on what aspect of our psyche they represent, and what aspects of the psyche are considered valueable to society at a given time. A deity can be associated with several phenomena, and not necessarily the god of said phenomena ; for example it is often said Zeus was the god of thunder in Greek mythology, because for some reasons he became asociated with thunder and lightning,but more correctly, he is paternal/male authority symbol, also a moral authority. Thor in Norse mythology also ruled over thunder but had nothing to do with Zeus in terms of his role. Zeus would be more like Odin, but Odin was an enabler of human beings, Zeus was an enemy of humans...I'm getting sidetracked now, but yeah, basically, the gods are best understood as principles in our psyche. See Platonic forms.

So in that sense I can believe in the divine, but I guess that means the divine is inside us, not without.

 

[Qlip]

I have the god thing all figured out to my satisfaction, it was decades worth of work. My main point of view is that if God exists, ze is pretty secure in zirself and probably doesn't really need a populace to worship zir or follow weird clues to some sort of hidden answer, or rely on some crazy-eyed leader to hand the answers down. And ze would be pretty cool with us people working with whatever senses and sensibilities that we possess to understand the world. If that isn't the case, what we have here is a case of demi-urge on our hands, a supernaturally powerful creature, but not the origin of moral order.

 

[Rambling]

I can see where you are coming from, I have been conflicted with that same thinking process when it comes to the main man in heaven. But honestly Reality is defined by what a individual believe, because it is THIER reality. Not by what exists.

Oh, dear oh dear. 'There is no absolute truth' is ITSELF an absolute truth....go read Francis Schaeffer. Or, easier, Chronicles of Narnia. Or easier still, the Gospels. Christianity claims a historical fact of resurrection from the dead...start there. Not with relativism wrapped up as absolutism...

 

[Mole]

We can only believe in a God when we are in a trance, when our critical faculties are asleep, and when we are suggestible and believe whatever we are told by authority figures.

And interestingly in a trance our critical faculties go to sleep, and one of our critical faculties is our sense of humour. And when our sense of humour is asleep we see nothing funny in worshipping Ganesh, the God with the head of an elephant, and we see nothing funny in worshipping the Trinity, the God with three heads.

And they hate anyone laughing at their Gods, and Islam provides the death penalty. They hate us laughing at them because it wakes them up from their religious trance. They are compelled to move from the warm comfort of their religious trance and experience cognitive dissonance which is emotionally painful. No wonder they demonise us.

 

[Duffy]

My rationale isn't particularly unique. I tend to agree with Dawkins.

 

[Avocado]

Nah, more like let's say 'treat your neighbor as you would treat yourself' is a pretty good principle to abide by. Just because those words are ascribed to Jesus(God in Christianity) doesn't mean the principle is invalid even if the God belief might be.

One does not need to be a Christian to walk the path of what many might consider a "good Christian - minus the belief in a supernatural being"

The Buddha said "consider others as yourself" 500 years before Jesus. If one really examineshow morality works, it is based on a social contract we all implicitly follow by being part of society. Anybody who thinks deeply on morality can see this. The whole god hypothesis simply obfuscates morality and leads to some morally questionable behavior. I personally believe there is not god, but I'll admit that a deistic, non-interventialist god may be possible. That said, if a diety does not care about our universe or its workings, why is that diety more worthy of worship than gravity or matnetism? The diety described in Christianity, on the other hand, has traits that contradict each other and prove the document to be existentially irrelevant. The Bible is one of the few things I can confidently say is false, since it comes back as gibberish once you analyze the text in its entirety. That is why I am an Agnostic Athiest, despite being quite gnostic in my rejection of the Christian claim.

 

[Avocado]

Oh, dear oh dear. 'There is no absolute truth' is ITSELF an absolute truth....go read Francis Schaeffer. Or, easier, Chronicles of Narnia. Or easier still, the Gospels. Christianity claims a historical fact of resurrection from the dead...start there. Not with relativism wrapped up as absolutism...

1+1=2 is an absolute truth, thus there is an absolute truth.

 

[Rambling]

1+1=2 is an absolute truth, thus there is an absolute truth.

No, that's an axiom.

 

[Avocado]

No, that's an axiom.

Then define absolute truth.

 

[Lark]

Anyone familiar with negative theology? I've read more about it recently than I have in about ten years and I find it pretty interesting, I dont read a lot of the pop atheist books because they are remarkably like the evangelical literature which its often a response to, I kind of feel like theism and atheism in that sense are two sides of the same bad penny or opposing wings of the same plague sea gull.

Negative theology seems like one possible escape hatch.

 

[Rambling]

Then define absolute truth.

Not hugely difficult...this is just one sample explanation, but Google is your friend...

Is mathematics an absolute truth? - Quora

 

[Rambling]

Anyone familiar with negative theology? I've read more about it recently than I have in about ten years and I find it pretty interesting, I dont read a lot of the pop atheist books because they are remarkably like the evangelical literature which its often a response to, I kind of feel like theism and atheism in that sense are two sides of the same bad penny or opposing wings of the same plague sea gull.

Negative theology seems like one possible escape hatch.

Like, shading out the sky *behind* the seagull.../dry>

 

[Avocado]

Not hugely difficult...this is just one sample explanation, but Google is your friend...

Is mathematics an absolute truth? - Quora

Is mathematics an absolute truth? - Quora seems to prove that axioms can be proven wrong. However, Euclid was likely referring to a 2 dimensional plane, and thus we can modify the axiom to be only true on a 2-dimensional plane without a curve across the 3rd dimension. That seems to me, though, that a limited human mind cannot find an absolute truth even if obe does exist since we could never prove it is absolute. The best we can do is heuristics.

 

[Avocado]

 

[Typh0n]

[MENTION=18694]The Wailing Specter[/MENTION] I'm honestly freaked out now. Why did you have to post that meme?

 

[Avocado]

[MENTION=18694]The Wailing Specter[/MENTION] I'm honestly freaked out now. Why did you have to post that meme?

Well, the Muslim festival of Ashura is a time in early November when "God instructs" parents to take a knife and cut up their children to please "the one true god".



At first, the parents force the children to participate, but soon...




The children begin enthusiastically carving themselves up to please the personal god they believe is real and instructing them to self harm.

 

[Forever]

[MENTION=18694]The Wailing Specter[/MENTION]

If I were you, at least do a trigger warning and a spoiler.