Face of god...

[_Z_]

you don’t understand how treating something incredibly powerful without the relevant respect and careful handling techniques could be destructive?

i can yes, and i also see a natural learning curve ~ with or without any teachings. more to the point its 'power' i view differently [power is not a term i would use].

i have yet to see any evidence of god acting in the physical world, moreover i think the world is him acting in the physical world i.e. there is no other way but via the singularity. if he wanted to change things that he has already created [in your belief system], he has but to say hi.

i believe the pagans learned via the medium of their gods, which is as valid as monotheists from theirs. it is prejudice to say that there is only one true god and that he taught all the others a lesson in egypt. many aspects of abrahamic religions have parallels in egyptian paganism, the confession, the beams of light, the eye.

the only thing that makes abrahamic religions appear as better than others is that the romans ‘gave’ it to us. if they had chosen another then the people of that religion would be casting all others down and thinking themselves all superior. having said that i think it had to happen and was beneficial ~ except the inquisition of course, and the burning of pagan books, and the loss of the great greek philosophical works until islam brought it back to us.

good and bad points in all don’t your think?

you seem anxious to drag the Divine down to the level of zeus and his daytime soap-opera antics. in short, yes, you do have it wrong, i’m sorry to be blunt about it but i don’t mean to be rude.

god, like jupiter the father? is it so different to how you imagine him? most abrahamics i find would say yes it is entirely different, then go on to describe an ‘occult’ deity, which bears no relation to the god most people imagine. similarly the pagans had an idea of such a thing but it was not a god as such, druidry has the awen, the egyptians had the hidden place and the nameless one. monotheist just wrap the whole thing up into a single deity.

the same reality is there for monotheists as it was before them, we all learn from that same reality. maybe your interpretation of it is more right or maybe mine is, but i cannot accept that yours is entirely right and all others entirely wrong! is buddhism wrong? can you say why? is hinduism wrong [is pagan], can you say why its gods are false too? strangely; these religions are largely accepted and the western religions are vilified, why?

not a face per se, but nonetheless a point of interaction, which is how i would define a face, as an "interface". think of it as a "power socket" and you’ll understand the symbolic aspects of plugging in the wrong stuff.

good point. infinity has a value of zero [as does energy overall], so i would think any kind of plugging in would be neutral. my main reasoning is that i have yet to see anything spiritual that isn’t natural, and beneficial, ambivalent even [in the main].

having said all that i can entirely see your point about respect! this is something humanity must learn or fail in a big way. i can respect without being awed by some malevolent power thats all.

but what you are doing is generalising from your own experience. spiritual energies feel equally natural to me, but just because static electricity is harmless it does not follow that i should drop a toaster in the bath. there are many different types of spiritual energy and you are assuming that the stuff you know about is the only type. this is far from being the case.

again very good points! electricity causes harm due to its polarities etc, spiritual energies are of one source, this is why i take them as being variants of the one. if anything they arent even ‘energies’ as such, more thought like. these are not just my perceptions btw, maybe i am wrong, i am willing to listen if anyone can tell me how and why infinity would be any different. firstly it is not material, nor ‘energy’ nor differentiated [all are finite variants]. its essence is unity ~ how can it be anything but?
see it is not just experience but philosophy too.

this is just semantics. effectively, you cannot see something if you cannot see it and live. that is all the Torah is saying. it uses extremely terse and precise language and you have to understand its way of expressing itself.

ok i accept that, what are its precise statements? " you cannot see something if you cannot see it and live" so we cannot make images of it? does your god desire to kill you? is it even possible to see him [he has shape and hence is not infinite?] ~ if not then you wont die by seeing him.

this is one of the reasons that in our tradition, mystics have to be married, otherwise they might not have a reason to come back from the "pardes", the mystical garden.

oh yes i agree there my friend, coming back here is like putting a tramps clothes on after having a bath .

"don’t get too close to the image, because you will end up thinking that because you can have a physically close relationship with the image, you can have the same physical closeness with the Reality - and you’ll also end up confusing the two."

thats the point of paganism, one may have intimate contact with divinity knowing that the gods are only intermediaries and ‘connectives’. remember that the ultimate nature of reality must be universal, hence we and all things are part of it! if not then god is set aside from the rest and is hence not ultimately infinite, and we will be playing the proportions game. any proportion one cares to give god if not infinite, then the infinite is infinitely greater. it doesn’t matter if said god is very very big, so big we cannot see more than such a part within our field of view, that it is impossible to percieve anything of him at all. mathematically and philosophically the proportions are thus.

no, that’s exactly the point - we don’t WORSHIP the intermediaries, the books and the prophets, for PRECISELY this reason - they are just the CONNECTORS, not the SOURCE! you’ve just substantiated my argument for me! in fact, this is also maimonides’ classic argument against paganism

i see, i wonder what christians have to say about that! i presume this is one source of your difference with them also. i am open to criticism, so no worries there mate. i am actually against worship, but may i say that the wiser pagan may worship to divinity via an intermediary. the worship would not be to the god. though i suspect that in ancient times it was to the god.

example 1. thats a difficult one and worthy of its own thread. could we worship everything equally? would that be a form of universal respect so lacking in modern society.

example 2. may a christian worship jesus fully as divinity itself?

example 3. have all the god either risen to the level of divinity or are the living forms of divine archetypes? presuming that divinity has many forms.

see it may be possible that ancient pagan worship is as acceptable as non iconic monotheism [judaism and islam] [iconic would be + jesus].

not what i’m saying. i’m saying that the actual beginning point of creatio ex nihilo cannot be argued about as it cannot be examined from outside the system.

i see. sorry if i am hard work but these things are not easy, and i don’t know much about judaism [but now that it deserves much respect, maybe more than i had previously thought ].
can it not be argued [are we outside of its system?] though, certainly; ‘if it exist’ and ‘has had effect’, then such aspects are axiomic. we may also devise understandings that leave it out completely, whence it becomes irrelevant.

what you are failing to understand is that from G!D’s perspective, there is *also* no Creation due to Infinity; it is only our perspective that sees it as such. our mystical tradition is set up precisely to examine such questions, but we do not see it as "making things up", rather as a spiritual quest to the heart of the Ultimate Reality - not as a goal but as a journey.

please accept my apologies for my lack of respect. from where i stand it seams abrahamics think they know it all or have the keys to wisdom and knowledge that no others have. they appear terribly arrogant, then again when i look back at my posts so do i! in my defence in think some actually are and others allude to it, they seam to infur that they are ultimately right no matter what we say. not all but some.

mathematics is one of the only tools that can. if you don’t understand that, i think you really need to read that book i recommended earlier, the "mystery of the aleph", which deals with the maths of infinity.

it is a guide but it is metaphoric to the finite world so why don’t mathematicians see it as metaphoric to infinity? sounds like a good book, maybe i should read books occasionally.

you’re evidently not aware that the properties of infinity can in fact be examined mathematically. read the book.

i am [infinite sets, injectives n all that stuff yes] but no they cannot, only the properties of infinity as expressed can be determined mathematically.
i.e. where it interacts with the finite/quantum. of this i am absolutely sure.

but that’s what WE’RE saying! have you not understood that? we refer to this Ultimate, Fundamental Reality as ‘EYN SOF - the Divine Perspective of G!D.

ok sorry, i did not see this. i was more saying that due to the ultimate nature there is no creation, as it is timeless and limitless, without beginning or end hence it does not start/create. for this reason creation appears contradictory in my mind. you obviously have a way of reconciling that in your minds, but i don’t.

b’shalom