E
exile
Guest
If God isn't a benevolent God doesn't that make God both God and the Devil?
You keep making G!d an entity.
Expecting a 'Him' to 'do' things.
Ya gotta move beyond the anthropomorphising principle.
Expecting a 'Him' to 'do' things.
Ya gotta move beyond the anthropomorphising principle.
responsible, benevolent, you are giving human qualities to spirit.....
it doesn't exist.
in my opinion and understanding.
It is like saying G!d is loving, or caring, or causes plagues, bumper crops, thunderstorms, floods....
this is 2,000 year old thinking....blaming and pointing.... as a society we need to move beyond that.
it doesn't exist.
in my opinion and understanding.
It is like saying G!d is loving, or caring, or causes plagues, bumper crops, thunderstorms, floods....
this is 2,000 year old thinking....blaming and pointing.... as a society we need to move beyond that.
seattlegal
Mercuræn Buddhist
radarmark
Quaker-in-the-Making
Anthropomorphism includes attributing any human quality to the D!vine, or to the universe (see the anthropic principle)... and even if all people agreed to the claim of G!D's benevolance, if it doeas not exist, those beliefs do not make it true (everyone thought that the world was flat ot that man could never fly or that the world was deterministic).
Like Budwieser being the highest selling beer indicating it is the best beer......right.
exile, what you are questioning/stating is exactly why so many folks are moving away from a literal theology, a literal theism.
We anthropomorphize because it is easier....the He/Him thing for not a genderless being...but for spirit/principle.
If you can't move beyond that definition, you will have issues with it. Once folks start questioning, they need to see what is there....it is the old problem of pointing at the moon, but observing the finger.
Tis why in many religions they teach you not to question, not to explore, just listen to what you are told and have faith it is true...
Like the guy caught in bed with another woman.... He asks his wife, "Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?"
The fact that you are exploring and questioning is good, keep it up, but also question your instant conclusions.
exile, what you are questioning/stating is exactly why so many folks are moving away from a literal theology, a literal theism.
We anthropomorphize because it is easier....the He/Him thing for not a genderless being...but for spirit/principle.
If you can't move beyond that definition, you will have issues with it. Once folks start questioning, they need to see what is there....it is the old problem of pointing at the moon, but observing the finger.
Tis why in many religions they teach you not to question, not to explore, just listen to what you are told and have faith it is true...
Like the guy caught in bed with another woman.... He asks his wife, "Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?"
The fact that you are exploring and questioning is good, keep it up, but also question your instant conclusions.
Gatekeeper
Shades of Reason
I'd say God is somewhat indifferent meaning God doesn't intervene in our lives apart from natural laws. It is up to us to recognize and then live in harmony with the laws that govern our existence. When we fall short we have a negative consequence. When we meet the mark we have a positive consequence. This all plays out on a global scale. We are not just individuals; we are a collective whole and responsible for one another's well being.
God surely is not an adversary (satan/devil). To me God is "life". Life is structured in a manner that leads us to live in harmony with all existence. We are still a relatively young species, however. I think we as humans are just beginning our first steps as children of "life". God is the ALL, meaning all things. We are simply pilgrims living in God -- slowly learning, growing, and developing as a species as we inch our way forward.
bananabrain
awkward squadnik
in isaiah, G!D Makes it perfectly clear that the Divine "Makes peace and Creates evil". i don't see why that is such a problem. are you expecting G!D to Suspend the laws of nature on your behalf? the point is that humans have responsibility, that includes responsibility for our actions given that we possess knowledge of good and evil. it's hardly an out of date insight.
b'shalom
bananabrain
b'shalom
bananabrain
Amergin
Well-Known Member
I agree. It is almost all idolatry devoid of reason and scepticism or analytical thinking.
I think the concept of a personal god or a god with a humanoid personality is too silly to debate. Nobody knows if God the creator is a conscious being, or a natural cosmic force that is not conscious and lacks a personality. There is a new hypothesis seen on the TV show "Through the Wormhole," in which the entire cosmos is regarded as a single being much like a computer can be conscious and cognitive while being composed entirely of wires, silicon, or diamond, or nano-Carbon chips which individually only say yes or no. In the complexity of the circuits can behave like a conscious cognitive being.
It is hard to conceive in many ways those galaxies, nebular clouds, and the Hadron field of space, matter, dark matter, dark energy, and the nano-universe where the rules of physics are different. It rather confuses me to some extent. However, that Cosmic Being as my mere human brain understands it makes a hell of a lot more sense than the Humanoid Gods invented by man with no evidence.
JHWY, Allah, Elohim, Brahmin, Ahura Mazda, Zeus, Jupiter, Dagda, Amun-Ra, Odin, Jesus in the deified fraud, or Quetzalcoatl are products of our imagination. All of those gods make no sense whatsoever. They are called god but do horribly evil things. The Old Testament God does all of the killing, and Satan does none. It looks like Satan is the Good God while JHWY is the terrifying and sadistic Cosmic Monster.
I believe that the Creator is not a being but a force or collection of forces acting over 11 dimensions to create an eternal series of universes that expand, contract, and burst again into a new universe. I cannot comment if that ultradimensional force has a personality. However, it does not need a personality of conscious to do what it does.
Amergin
Amergin
Well-Known Member
God makes nothing perfectly clear. God is composed in the brain circuits of human beings. That is why there are so many. Like the human warlords on which God's are based, they are horribly imperfect. Some mentally insane, and many amoral or psychopathic. That is why they don't make sense.
Humans do have knowledge of good and evil as it applies to our species. It was not confered by a god invented 6000 years ago. That God was much more evil and sadistic than the worst warlord on which they were designed.
Evolution of humans over 3 million years of human evolution, selected for greater success, humans who defended the tribe, made wise decisions, used justice. Those randomly mutated genes for psychopathology and other mental illness, dementia, vengeance, rage attacks. Further evolution from Homo habilis through Homo erectus, to Homo heildebergensis, Homo rrodesiansis, Homo sapiens idaltu, Homo neanderthalis, and Homo sapiens sapiens. Each stage partially perfect brain with intuitive knowledge of good and evil. But like many genetic diseases, there are mutations and recessive bad traits that keep psychopaths, amoral leaders, insane psychotic leaders, and brains with very small amygdalae.
Our moral evolution is not just in the 3,000,000 years of genus Homo. Proto-humans like Australopithecus, Ardipithecus, and Sahalanthrampus were working on natural selection and social selection (banashment or killing them) to eliminate the psychopathic, amoral, and insane of humanity. It works for most humans today. However, some, perhaps with inbreeding, preserved the humans lacking intuitive morality.
This led to additional pressure to eliminate those defective humans by civil law (Clan Law), and punishing religions who considered defective humans to be evil spirits. The last 7 million years of hominid-human evolution has done a good job at eliminating most encephalopathic psychopaths, amoral humans, insane-delusional humans with irrational thinking.
My real fear is that we may divide into two groups of humans. One a chaotic society of criminals, psychopaths, and schizophrenics...with a high reproductive rate and overpopulation. The Second is the more intelligent, with strong intuitive morality, social morality, Advanced in technology, science but devoid of Stone Age religions. They would likely live in thick walled cities with highly trained armies, helicopter gunships, missiles, and artillery to protect the City State from the incresingly stupid undereducation population will not be a happy world.
Amergin
E
exile
Guest
There has to be a division between the two groups, but how is it supposed to happen when the people on one side of the group behave like the people on the other side of the group? How is that supposed to happen when the psychiatrists hold delusional beliefs like "God exists" in the NT sense and the schizophrenics are the ones who are saying that "God does not exist."
seattlegal
Mercuræn Buddhist
"We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe."
~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
One of the most advanced in technology and science, J. Robert Oppenheimer, exploded his firecracker in the Mojave Desert and, in the process, became, in his words and quoting the Bhagavad-Gita, Shiva the destroyer of worlds. Therefore, I conclude, science, in its purest form, is religion.
Serv
Amergin
Well-Known Member
Ooooh the pain! Guinness is the best beer and widest selling in the world. It is the reason Celts are smarter, Celtic women more beautiful, and Celtic men being more handsome. It is why we Celts are all poets, great singers, the best fiddlers, best pipers, and best playing the Bodhran.
Amergin
Amergin
Well-Known Member
It is a matter of the increasing gap between rich and poor. The gap is also between intelligent and non-intelligent, the educated and the uneducated, the freethinkers and the religious fundamentalists.
What could separate them could be a form of social selection. Educated people tend to marry educated people. Their genes for intelligence are passed to their children who will associate with and marry other children of intelligent people. Uneducated (high school dropouts) tend to be economically deprived. They seem to inevitably marry other people who are equally uneducated and in poverty.
What happens is that the generations of Intelligent Grandparents, parents, children and subsequent generations likely will live in large gated communities, guarded, and inaccessible to the lower class.
The Lower Class of uneducated, poor, and superstitiously religious will live in neglected communities of deteriorating housing, high crime, gangs, poor sanitation, disease (with no access to medical care), mental disorders, and cognitively impaired.
This process in each group will be expanded by inbreeding within the high or low group. This is much like breeding various characteristics in dogs or cats. Further inbreeding enhances the desired animal characteristics. It will work to some extent in humans if the two groups are strongly segregated. The gifted will have grandchildren more gifted than they are. The less intelligent and those with personality disorders leading to poor status, over three generations will produce grandchildren less endowed than they were.
I am not saying I like this outcome. I do not. I am just observing trends that could lead to such an outcome.
Evolution occurs mainly when a geographical barrier, an ecological barrier, or whatever divide one species, and eventually the single species become two new species. Over enough time they become two different genera and on to Families over millions of years.
H. G. Wells hinted at such an outcome in humans in his novel, "The Time Machine." The millions of years in the story allow the evolution of two separate species (Eloi and Morlocks) that cannot interbreed. One lives underground the other live only on the surface.
I am no advocating eugenics. Quite the opposite, I would hope there is a way to prevent the above scenario from happening.
Amergin
Amergin said:
Amorality, as I see it, and far from being eliminated from the species, has been elevated to a political virtue without which no man or woman shall likely obtain office. Machiavelli wrote the dogma, as it has been summarized: "do good when you can; do evil when you must; do both unhesitatingly;, and don't lie to yourself about which is which." Examples of Machiavellian amorality in high places are everywhere and plentiful. Although this might, paradoxically enough, be as much an example of morality as amorality, Winston Churchill could not understand why the public was squeamish about using poisoned gases against (his words) uncivilized tribes because, after all, he thought it better to debilitate the savages with poison gas than to shoot them with machine guns. More recently, Bernard-Henry Levy reminded George W. Bush that war is not metaphysics, good against evil, but is politics waged, he quoted Clausewitz as saying, by other means. And then there's Nietzsche whose Zarathustra spaketh: "You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I tell you it is the good war that hallows every cause. War and courage have done more great things than charity."
Amergin said:
If only. If only one of those punishing religions, Russian Orthodoxy, had managed to stymie or otherwise thwart, even if by means of exorcism, its errant son and seminary drop-out, Josef Stalin, before he managed, in the "scientific" manner that Marx and others claimed Marxism was, to liquidate the Kulaks altogether as a class.
Amergin said:
On the contrary, they've all got jobs at the Pentagon, Goldman Sachs, the World Bank and what Ezra Pound called the "Banque de France and the Stank of England." But seriously, we evidently need seven million years more. The whole of the 20th Century was a blood bath and sacrifice to Moloch and Mars. When Hiroshima and Nagasaki evaporated in mushroom clouds, the Goddess of Reason, which the French Revolutionaries had, a century or two earlier, carried in procession to Notre Dame Cathedral, was demoted. If, as it has been said, many Western intellectuals had been proclaiming, until the Manhattan Project, that God was dead, they soon thereafter began to wonder aloud if the Devil in any case was not.
Amergin said:
A problem with this bifurcated world, as I see it, is that it seems, I emphasize seems, to presuppose that the second group, because it is more advanced in technology and science, is necessarily also more advanced in morality and ethics. I see very little correlation between technological and moral/ethical advancement. The reverse could prove true: that the least ethical could be most technologically advanced. What scares me more than this bifurcated world of yours is what Aldous Huxley called the rise of the "scientific dictatorship," shades of which we have already seen -a modern, secular state, with absolute powers of coercian, with, as Yeats saw it, "a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun."
Serv
Amergin
Well-Known Member
Excellent countrepoints Mate. You have a unique way of looking at issues outside of the conventional box. Thanks even for your skilled sherracking of my weaker points.
Amergin
