Vastness
Bluelight Crew
Fuck it I'll answer this question how I want to because it's late, I'm high, everyone else seems to be doing it and why should OP have a damn monopoly on discussion in this forum.
I'm not talking about Yahweh, obviously, but "God" to me is a supernatural being, or rather a force of nature, that created the universe. I don't believe in any distinction between the idea of a "conscious creator" or just sheer causal determinism, the distinction is illusory and the argument is ludicrous to me.
On that basis, love is arguably an archetypal ideal of the height of what it is to be a conscious being, Buddhists figured this out some time ago with their conception that compassion for all beings is the route to enlightenment, I was going to say "happiness", but that is itself an attachment that a strict adherent to Buddhist doctrine would probably dismiss as meaningless, as illusory as sadness, pain or suffering. Given that love and compassion seem to be in a sense synonymous with the highest states of consciousness we are capable of experiencing (by which I mean - typically we are happiest as living beings when we are in love, have some kind of attachment to someone, or even something, whether it be a hobby, a goal, an object...) it stands to reason that there are dimensions of love and boundless joy that we cannot conceive with our limited mortal minds. Unless you believe that the human mind is the height of conscious experience, and there is nothing that could possibly have a greater consciousness above it - which to me there seems little reason to believe - and I am speaking of cosmological, pan-dimensional scales here - the buck doesn't stop (presumably) at our experience of reality. It would be inconceivable to me if there was not an entity somewhere, traditionally "conscious", in a way that we understood it or not, with access to levels of experience that far exceed our own, Given that love is a dimension of human, animal, biological experience, I'd be surprised if allegories of love and compassion did not exist and manifest across time and across worlds. It would be very easy for me to bring this discussion back to the "God is existence, we are all god" idea, but I'll try to remain a little more focused than that.
Given that love exists at all it is presumably an allegorical representation of an archetype of something in greater reality with some purpose to existence or it would not exist at all. Of course there could be worlds or realities that resemble hells, of unimaginable suffering, but I tend to think these would be less sustainable, temporary aberrations on the surface of eternity, because those beings who could choose to die would, and any beings who did not share such a desire to inflict suffering would (presumably) feel some obligation to interfere at some point, even if that interference took aeons,
Could this universe have been constructed by a loving god? Absolutely. However we cannot actually know this for a fact, because the creator of the universe is a force that is currently, possibly, permanently, beyond our comprehension. This being the case it's not possible to assign an absolute measure to the level of suffering in the world because we have nothing to compare it to. We should all try to make the world a better place than yesterday - but we don't know if we've been dealt a good hand or a bad one because right now, the poker room of consensus reality is empty except for us.
When we put down pets that we love to end their suffering, or rip bandaids off children to shorten their suffering, we are trying to minimise their suffering but they may have no conception of this and the animal that everyone loves with a malignant tumour who is incontinent and can hardly walk, see or hear, may not want to die, may experience great fear in the unfamiliar smells and sterile environment of the hopefully compassionate veterinarian who has hopefully done all they can - they have no understanding of reality, really, and neither do we - they might like nothing more than to be chilling at their home in a cushion or a basket or whatever, their illness and pain forgotten while in the grip of fear... Christ, I do apologise for that sad and fortunately imaginary tale, at least for me, but the point is that more powerful beings may inflict suffering on us for reasons that we cannot hope to understand. They might not particularly love us on an individual level - but they might act out of love.
The neuroscientist who decaptitates dozens of mice a day, having drowned them, asphyxiated them, and injected them with potent neurotoxins, before flash freezing them to slice their brains apart probably does not love these mice. The mice certainly do not love her. But the life of every mouse plays a crucial part in the story of this branch of eternity, and one day hopefully none of them will have to suffer and die so that human beings can continue their march to either a bright and prosperous future or cataclysmic ruin. In either case - the outcome is irrelevent. Life on Earth is a statistical datapoint on the great hyperdimensional graph of eternity, and if humans fail perhaps some other sentient species further down the line will pick up the light of conscious experience and the promotion of love and compassion.
These stories are all very human, and actually not relevant, but I tell them as a soft introduction to my main point, which is that in my view that some kind of experience of being is an intrinsic property of reality, and as such the distinction between living beings and rocks is almost as illusory as the distinction between a baby and... oh, I dunno, something not like a baby, I'll resist making an offensive joke. So if conscious experience is an intrinsic property of reality then love may be too. Emotions are but a flickering pattern that dances accross the surface of our minds. We feel it as love, sometimes. Could the turbulent currents of fusing plasma in a star give rise to sensation and allegories of emotion too? One might say a star has nothing to love, but everything does, which is the experience of being itself.
So cliffnotes - yes, a loving being could have created the universe. Did this happen? We have no way to know. Could a malevolent entity have created us? Maybe, we still have no way to tell. How much love is there? Probably a lot more than we can conceive of. Does the idea of god being love set a low bar for love? Not really, it depends on your conception of god. IMO god is the universe and possibly something outside of it, and as such we are all both a part of god and avatars of that god. Love is an archetypal high point of conscious experience which might be an indicator that to be more loving and compassionate to all will bring us closer to god, by which I mean, closer to true reality, whatever that might be.
I'm not talking about Yahweh, obviously, but "God" to me is a supernatural being, or rather a force of nature, that created the universe. I don't believe in any distinction between the idea of a "conscious creator" or just sheer causal determinism, the distinction is illusory and the argument is ludicrous to me.
On that basis, love is arguably an archetypal ideal of the height of what it is to be a conscious being, Buddhists figured this out some time ago with their conception that compassion for all beings is the route to enlightenment, I was going to say "happiness", but that is itself an attachment that a strict adherent to Buddhist doctrine would probably dismiss as meaningless, as illusory as sadness, pain or suffering. Given that love and compassion seem to be in a sense synonymous with the highest states of consciousness we are capable of experiencing (by which I mean - typically we are happiest as living beings when we are in love, have some kind of attachment to someone, or even something, whether it be a hobby, a goal, an object...) it stands to reason that there are dimensions of love and boundless joy that we cannot conceive with our limited mortal minds. Unless you believe that the human mind is the height of conscious experience, and there is nothing that could possibly have a greater consciousness above it - which to me there seems little reason to believe - and I am speaking of cosmological, pan-dimensional scales here - the buck doesn't stop (presumably) at our experience of reality. It would be inconceivable to me if there was not an entity somewhere, traditionally "conscious", in a way that we understood it or not, with access to levels of experience that far exceed our own, Given that love is a dimension of human, animal, biological experience, I'd be surprised if allegories of love and compassion did not exist and manifest across time and across worlds. It would be very easy for me to bring this discussion back to the "God is existence, we are all god" idea, but I'll try to remain a little more focused than that.
Given that love exists at all it is presumably an allegorical representation of an archetype of something in greater reality with some purpose to existence or it would not exist at all. Of course there could be worlds or realities that resemble hells, of unimaginable suffering, but I tend to think these would be less sustainable, temporary aberrations on the surface of eternity, because those beings who could choose to die would, and any beings who did not share such a desire to inflict suffering would (presumably) feel some obligation to interfere at some point, even if that interference took aeons,
Could this universe have been constructed by a loving god? Absolutely. However we cannot actually know this for a fact, because the creator of the universe is a force that is currently, possibly, permanently, beyond our comprehension. This being the case it's not possible to assign an absolute measure to the level of suffering in the world because we have nothing to compare it to. We should all try to make the world a better place than yesterday - but we don't know if we've been dealt a good hand or a bad one because right now, the poker room of consensus reality is empty except for us.
When we put down pets that we love to end their suffering, or rip bandaids off children to shorten their suffering, we are trying to minimise their suffering but they may have no conception of this and the animal that everyone loves with a malignant tumour who is incontinent and can hardly walk, see or hear, may not want to die, may experience great fear in the unfamiliar smells and sterile environment of the hopefully compassionate veterinarian who has hopefully done all they can - they have no understanding of reality, really, and neither do we - they might like nothing more than to be chilling at their home in a cushion or a basket or whatever, their illness and pain forgotten while in the grip of fear... Christ, I do apologise for that sad and fortunately imaginary tale, at least for me, but the point is that more powerful beings may inflict suffering on us for reasons that we cannot hope to understand. They might not particularly love us on an individual level - but they might act out of love.
The neuroscientist who decaptitates dozens of mice a day, having drowned them, asphyxiated them, and injected them with potent neurotoxins, before flash freezing them to slice their brains apart probably does not love these mice. The mice certainly do not love her. But the life of every mouse plays a crucial part in the story of this branch of eternity, and one day hopefully none of them will have to suffer and die so that human beings can continue their march to either a bright and prosperous future or cataclysmic ruin. In either case - the outcome is irrelevent. Life on Earth is a statistical datapoint on the great hyperdimensional graph of eternity, and if humans fail perhaps some other sentient species further down the line will pick up the light of conscious experience and the promotion of love and compassion.
These stories are all very human, and actually not relevant, but I tell them as a soft introduction to my main point, which is that in my view that some kind of experience of being is an intrinsic property of reality, and as such the distinction between living beings and rocks is almost as illusory as the distinction between a baby and... oh, I dunno, something not like a baby, I'll resist making an offensive joke. So if conscious experience is an intrinsic property of reality then love may be too. Emotions are but a flickering pattern that dances accross the surface of our minds. We feel it as love, sometimes. Could the turbulent currents of fusing plasma in a star give rise to sensation and allegories of emotion too? One might say a star has nothing to love, but everything does, which is the experience of being itself.
So cliffnotes - yes, a loving being could have created the universe. Did this happen? We have no way to know. Could a malevolent entity have created us? Maybe, we still have no way to tell. How much love is there? Probably a lot more than we can conceive of. Does the idea of god being love set a low bar for love? Not really, it depends on your conception of god. IMO god is the universe and possibly something outside of it, and as such we are all both a part of god and avatars of that god. Love is an archetypal high point of conscious experience which might be an indicator that to be more loving and compassionate to all will bring us closer to god, by which I mean, closer to true reality, whatever that might be.
well OK then Mr Black Kettle, not sure what you thought I was ranting about, I thought my words were calm enough, but I guess that it's easy to read text in whatever way you choose to in your head. I'll kindly inform you that in my own reality I wasn't ranting, so you can apply this correction to the perceptual filters of the reality you yourself inhabit.
I wish you the best anyway, I hope you don't take my occasional harshness to be indicative of ill will of any kind.