• Philosophy and Spirituality
    Welcome Guest
    Posting Rules Bluelight Rules
    Threads of Note Socialize
  • P&S Moderators: Xorkoth | Madness

[MEGA] God v.2

I agree that a word can have multiple meanings and uses. Word definitions shift over time and across cultures and subcultures, so it's kind of pointless to get irritated when someone uses a word to mean something that you don't use it to mean, or you aren't used to hearing it used to mean that. I agree that someone who's EVASIVE or won't explain their novel use of a word is very frustrating. But all you have to do usually is ask, 'What do you mean by ____?' and anyone who's not purposely trying to trick you will probably be happy to explain.

I see a strong preference for one set, precise definition for every word, and little patience with people taking liberties with the definitions of word, among people who work in the sciences. But what you must understand is that this is a conditioned preference that comes from a practical need in a specific field of work, much like former soldiers who fold their clothes and their bedsheets 'just so', because it's just what they're used to and just what feels right. It doesn't represent the way all language does or should work (That's a value judgement or opinion.). Outside of the practices of science and mathematics, it's not a standard you can reasonably hold people to.

Bottom line, in the larger world, a word means what people use it to mean.

Now, back on topic: The word 'God' comes from an Indo-European root having to do with invocation. The root of the word contains nothing explicit about a being in human-esque form. I highly encourage anyone to look up 'God' on dictionary.com -- many of the definitions do not explicitly favor this imagery in any way.

If you read up on the history and anthropology of world religions, too (or even just the history of religion in the West and the Middle East), I think you'll also find that conceptions of a Higher Power that are formless are anything but new or unprecedented. They may not currently hold as much popular sway as a grandfatherly figure who dwells above our world, but that's neither here nor there, if our argument concerns the existence of ANY higher power.

I think that if a higher power exists, it probably looks and behaves absolutely nothing like a human being or any other earthly creature. I don't doubt that a being with powers far beyond our human capabilities could be able to assume human form, if this suited its purposes, but that's not God's true form. If I'm speaking with someone whose concept of God is very concrete and anthropomorphized, I just tend to think that their hearts are in the right place, but they haven't given much thought to the nature of God.
 
I personally never, ever use the word "God" when talking about my beliefs. It simply carries with it waaaaay too much conotational baggage and will serve no purpose other than to make the conversation counter-productive.

But then again, dissociation from nouns has always been a useful tool of mine. Why, just last week I legally changed my own name!

Detaching one's passions from words can go a long way to make you verbally-invincible, or as close as possible.
 
>>But if someone was to say "well belief in God is the cause of a lot of suffering"
I would have to say "whoa, actually, it's institutionalised religions that have caused suffering, not belief in concepts of God." >>

but belief in God led directly to these organized institutions and gave them the moral courage, blind faith, that allowed them to commit such attrocities!

but of course i admit, there'd be violence with or without religion. just more systematized and more frequent violence if you have a centralized big badass church

@myname

awesome. it's weird how some people have a curious/intellectual spark and some don't. and it doesn't seem like it just appears, it seems to come really early or just in the genes*

* my advice to make the world a better place would be to have some babies. that way, you can cancel out some of the babies born from negative nancies.8)jk
 
Last edited:
Finally someone put this question mark on the table.

It would be incredibly amusing to ask the same thing to the stereotypical protestant lecturer, just to see his mind slowly fuck up in confusing contradictions caused by the chaos of his undiscussable faith finally collapsing onto his reason.

I as well rarely tend to use the word God cause it would rather confuse people and make me look like an incoherent fool, however I do have my definition of god even if rather different from the usual connotations.
This is one of the reason why I loved Feuerbach and his Alienation theory. Many people took him for grated since he was immediately put to silence by the church but he had the guts to say what he though regardless of the consequences.

In my journey through the mind I came to the conclusion that the universe always existed and always will, that however doesn't intrinsically mean that the universe is not mutable, it can take millions of shapes, constantly reacting, expanding and collapsing into itself for eternity.
The physical entity of God is the whole universe as we define it (or trying to define) and will always follow its strict rules that we know as laws of physics.
However in this universe there is life which unlike mindless chaos of matter it is gifted with free will and reason which through our physical means (i.e. our body and its actions) can have an incredibly big, although not immense influence on the destiny of matter.

The word of God however does not reside in chaos but rather in the never-ending dungeons of life and its capability of consciousness even if we are way too stupid and short lived to understand it fully and that is why we pas our knowledge to the next generation in the hope that they will achieve something more.
Many people might attack me for what I said or am about to say but I again started to believe in a parallel reality which is reason walking hand in hand with goodwill and justice (i.e. Ethics) since something to truly exist does not necessarily have to be concrete or physical like the rest of matter and its elementary components. Like Hegel said: "All that is real is rational; and all that is ", and even the sense of justice, even if still imperfect, is highly rational when taken from the right point of view.

So to make it short, IMO, God has two entities: one physical that will always follow its laws and the other abstract/spiritual that is for us to uncover yet.
 
but belief in God led directly to these organized institutions and gave them the moral courage, blind faith, that allowed them to commit such attrocities!
Click to expand...

I suppose that would be true for some... it's something I've never understood, as my spirituality has always connected me to love and beauty and a place far away from such things.
 
qwe said:
but belief in God led directly to these organized institutions and gave them the moral courage, blind faith, that allowed them to commit such attrocities!
Click to expand...

Not belief in God. Belief that they were justified in the eyes of God. People make up bullshit justifications for all kinds of messed up actions, and get really creative at finding sources of justification. Most of the most effective and popular of justifications I've heard used for intolerance, discrimination, and mistreatment have been entirely secular: allegations of uncleanly ways of living, accusations of cruelty and barbarity and therefore a lower level of civilization, scapegoating and stereotyping, throwing up one's hands and just saying 'you people' will never understand us OR we cannot fathom 'you people'.

There are deep and violent rifts in today's world between groups of people who share one popular religion, a common cultural heritage, and even a common language. There are serious tensions and animosities that remain in parts of the world that are largely irreligious -- Northeast Asia is a good example, or parts of the former USSR.

I just have a hard time seeing the historical evidence that blaming and excising organized religion for violence done in its name is really that effective in making the place less violent.

I don't deny that there are many places where levels of both violence and religiosity have declined at the same time. I don't deny that there are many places where both levels of violence and religiosity have risen at the same time. But I don't get the logical jump from this to 'Encouraging less religion will make society less violence prone'.

qwe said:
but of course i admit, there'd be violence with or without religion. just more systematized and more frequent violence if you have a centralized big badass church
Click to expand...

Yeah, I think that might be a problem with big institutions in general. They can move mountains -- and fling them at their enemies!
 
Not belief in God. Belief that they were justified in the eyes of God. People make up bullshit justifications for all kinds of messed up actions, and get really creative at finding sources of justification
Click to expand...
that's a really good point. however, still, one less set of messed up justifications gone from this earth wouldn't be a bad thing. religion tries to actively shape culture, throw it backwards in time, and it does so much damage culturally, spiritually, politically, economically, and individually
I suppose that would be true for some... it's something I've never understood, as my spirituality has always connected me to love and beauty and a place far away from such things.
Click to expand...
consider yourself more evolved (honestly)... but i just think you should save more of your support for spirituality, and less for religion. religion does do some good, but if you weigh its good against its bad... but for individuals sometimes, religion is great for them. though we can't discount the fact that it's all in their heads. then again, everything is just a holographic projection our brain creates anyway, maybe everybody is the same distance from the truth

basically i'm saying the concept of spirituality applies much better for humans than religion, and support for religion is sorta sad to see. then again, i would argue that religion came from spirituality in the first place. maybe it wouldn't be a bad thing if we didn't have too much of it (like "big gov" and "too big to fail")

maybe we just need to decentralize and free trade everything and allow an equilibrium to develop, with guidance and funds from a central global congress, uniting the planet in peace and eliminating everything that is too big to fail. but that's just me rambling politics..
 
^
The main difference between spirituality and religion in my eyes is that religion (in its ideal) implies a group of people exploring/worshipping the mystery of life together, and spirituality implies a personal exploration of meaning in an individual. I identify myself as spiritual but not religious probably because every religious group I have encountered are focused on tradition and their own exclusiveness, rather than the quest for meaning which most people face at some point in their lives.

I think you're right that once these groups of people become big enough to be institutionalised, that's when the focus probably does shift from each person's spiritual journey to the defining aspects of that group in particular. And an exclusive club sitting around discussing what makes it an exclusive club is boring, useless and usually problematic.

To me, good philosophical discussion regarding God/life/the universe with people who approach it with emotion and respect for others is the closest thing to the ideal of religious practice that I've been able to find.

I really liked your post, MyDoorsAreOpen :)
 
Thank you medical meccanica. I liked yours too.

It's just that, I'm not sure you can stop people from gathering for the purpose of sharing a common spiritual vision. No democracy can, that's for sure. People are guaranteed the right to gather and affiliate for whatever purpose they want. And more authoritarian social structures have been hit or miss with regulating religion and dictating where people can and can't gather and worship.

I'm like you, dude. I'm pretty DIY when it comes to spiritual matters. But not everybody is like us. Some people just prefer to leave the finer points of spirituality to somebody else they feel they can trust, kind of the way most of us don't make our own pizza, even though we could. Picking your battles in this life and all that.

All we can ask, I feel, in this day and age, is that religious groups have people working for them who adhere to the law of the land while working in these groups' service, and don't intrude upon the lives of the other people they live amongst while practicing what they believe. Most small, benign religious groups that have tied a community of people together, have succeeded by not bothering anyone or drawing any negative attention to themselves in the greater community.

I feel religious communities whose teachings and ways of life are very much at odds with or antagonistic to the local populations they live amongst, would benefit a great deal by being told, in the words of their own holy texts, why it behooves them to be a bit more considerate and loving.
 
ok medical_meccanica
sorry. now i see what you meant

still, i don't see the point of "allowing" a small group to use the word "god" when talking to each other because this group is used to different concepts of "god"

when someone creates a new object, he gives a new name to it, right?
he doesn't call it a spoon
because a spoon already has a very clear definition

so why do some people here absolutely want to use the word "god", which has a very strict definition for everyone following a classic religion, within the group of posters here, and outside of this group

it's totally counter-productive
as soon as you'll take the conversation outside of this forum, you'll be faced by people misunderstanding what you say because you're saying "spoon" when you actually mean "this invention that allows you to fly" (for instance)

we may be talking to ourselves right now, but if a new poster appears, he won't understand what we're talking about

and it will be the same as soon as someone will take this topic outside of this forum
(i hope some people intend to do so, because talking to the 10 same people is only fun for a while, and if the conversation only stays in this forum, the progression will be lost)

as navarone says in the last post, if someone uses "god" when talking about a different concept from the classical god, or says "spoon" when talking about a "plane", "it would rather confuse people and make him look like an incoherent fool"

Why, just last week I legally changed my own name!
Click to expand...
looking to work in thailand again? :)
don't forget the dye
what's your name now? (by the way, here it's very common. mainly if people consider that their name has given them bad luck. i met several people who did)
 
It's the feeling that drugs give you, when you're high, it almost feels like all of the positive religion based stuff is true, then once the high is off it disappears.
 
i agree that my spiritual spark came at a younug age (elementary age?) but once i took those mushrooms (and pot) that spark became a flame

the spirituality feeling isn't supposed to "go away", though. you might just be talking about drug symptoms lingering @kingdom
 
I had the spiritual spark at a young age too.. around 13 onwards it began to develop. I would sit there and think about the interactions between everything - atoms, plants, animals... and I would question. I would think about why it all exists, and for one split second I would have this moment of pure clarity and understanding.... when it faded I could not even begin to tell you what I had thought of...
I don't get it as much, but I still can get it say when I'm watching the Planet Earth series of docos.
Ahhh the universe is amazing. It's a shame people have to trivialize and dumb it down by saying that a sentient God being created it all.
If I were to hazard a guess I would say it is far more complex and wonderous than that.
 
"We spend our whole life trying to figure out our own stupidity in other to know what is right and wrong, religions are meant to do this for you by putting their unquestionable philosophy of life in a creative tale"

something i wrote a few months ago...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top