God
Here’s a quote from the 1979 Noble Prize-winning physicist, Steven Weinberg, that you should read;
“Some people have views of God that are so broad and flexible that it is inevitable that they will find God wherever they look for him. One hears it said that ‘God is the ultimate’ or ‘God is our better nature’ or ‘God is the universe.’ Of course, like any other word, the word ‘God’ can be given any meaning we like. If you want to say that ‘God is energy,’ then you can find God in a lump of coal.”
Weinberg is saying that if the word God is not to become completely useless, it should be used in the way people have generally understood it for the past 3000 years: to denote a supernatural creator that has self awareness, appropriate for us to worship, control over the universe, etc. If you want to start calling anything and literally everything “God” then the word looses it’s meaning that it has held for all of history.
Yes, “like any other word, the word ‘God’ can be given any meaning we like.” That doesn’t negate the concept of existence and/or energy. Indeed you can find God in a lump of coal. Aren’t we made out of the same stuff that coal is??? In fact, Buddhist believe that rocks are something like consciousness in a coma. So there’s a hierarchy of awareness. Plants have awareness, albeit on a much lower scale.
To argue that one should use a word like it’s been used through history (which is not categorically true I would argue) is like saying that the meaning of words doesn’t change over time… most untrue.
To me you are arguing against the way has been used, the way people conceive of God. Like how people have conceived of Earth for most of history… as flat. One of the amazing things out of the way i see things is the awareness that we are all manifestations of the same oneness. What you do unto others you do unto yourself. It also means the fact that we have self-awarness is utterly amazing… something we all forget.
Life is beautiful.
I am in no way trying to negate the concept of existence and/or energy. I too acknowledge that all matter in the universe (including the 100 billion, billion planets… wow) comes from the same entity. Therefore I believe you and I share the same understanding of the physics of the universe. If you want to call that one entity (and therefore all of its subsequent byproducts) “God” then obviously you can, but to alter the meaning of a word so much cheapens the discussion we were having about atheism.
This drastic alteration of the word isn’t a slight change, but would be equivalent of me saying I’m married to the two old ladies in the apartment across the street. Whereas married is fundamentally a relationship you have with another person, and I have a relationship with those two old ladies because I see them sporadically; so according to me, we’re “married”. (I might even argue that your change in the word “God” is even greater than my change in the word “married”.) Therefore if someone asks me if I’m married, my answer would be yes, with this 5 minute caveat about what I believe the true definition of married should be, followed by me being dismissed as a loony.
Likewise the idea of “God” has changed over time, and I would argue could continue to change. From literally a man sitting in the clouds controlling all of earth, and reading everyone’s thoughts, looking for actions or thoughts that he has deemed bad, to now maybe a sexless spirit existing in another realm, still reading all of our thoughts, but maybe taking a hands off approach to the Universe. I could even see that one could argue that God in fact is so big it doesn’t even notice the earth and the people living on it. But to say that God is in fact what we would call existence and therefore you are not an atheist because you acknowledge what all atheists acknowledge (that everything started as the same entity), doesn’t advance the conversation anywhere except to your insistence that atheists not change any of our fundamental beliefs but simply start saying we believe in God.
The bottom line is that atheists all believe what you believe with one exception, they don’t refer to existence as “god”. Their existence and your existence are absolutely identical, with the same degree of self awareness, age, etc, just without the loaded name of God attached to it. If you want to call all existence God, you’re going to have a hard time convincing both atheists and deists of this theory.
I wish to call yogurt God, but only yogurt.
… except that when you start reading religious texts with my definition in mind, they all of a sudden start making a whole lot more sense. Because my conception of God is really such a impossible thing to wrap your mind around (even after really dwelling on it), people over time have come up with stories, anecdotes, and metaphors for the absolute truth to find a way to talk about it (because really, these concept dwell outside of language). These stories, anecdotes, and metaphors were collected over the ages and put together in what we call the Bible, Tora, Quran, whatever. Clearly all of these collections arose within the contexts of cultures, and therefore differ on the surface. But they all try to get at fundamental truths, buried as they may be.
You’re trying to tell me that I should accept and use the word God as has been used by people who’ve believed in these texts literally, instead of arguing for how the word should really be used. Read the first few paragraphs of the bible, couple that with your knowledge of science, the early history of the universe, and my definition of God, and I think you might be surprised at how advanced really the writer’s concepts were for the fact that these text were written over 5,000 years ago without the kind of scientific knowledge we have nowadays. In other words, the texts (specifically the first paragraphs of Genesis), was an attempt by man to get at the truth, with surprising insight and approximation of the truth.
Once you break your thinking about rejecting literal interpretations of stories and metaphors, and accept them as metaphors, I think you will find that there are some crucial truths buried in the Bible and worth examining and talking about. Heaven and Hell are no longer fluffy clouds and pits of fire, but rather how we as humans create the world we live in. If we all lived in harmony with one another, we in fact could be living in what would seem like heaven. That potential is there, and everyone has a choice to make.
Instead of rejecting religion out of hand, find new ways to talk about the truths that it essentially talks about. Atheists do no such thing, and in fact, in my estimation, do great harm by perpetuating dualistic thinking. Do atheists really believe that they are one with the God / existence? I’d like to hear your case that they do…
Something just occurred to me by the way. Science is pretty limited, considering that it cannot prove anything exists at all that lies outside of human perception. In other words, only that which we can perceive… can be proved. And what we perceive is limited. And furthermore, to say nothing exists outside of what we can perceive… I guess I’d say that’s just not very likely, but we’ll never know.
I plan on answering your other god email later today. but a lot of the answer is just, “i don’t get what the bible being interpreted as moral stories verse literally has anything to do with the existence of a god.” also, i don’t know if you’ve read the bible, the morals of those stories aren’t exactly ones I would think you would ever want to immolate. Have you read the bible? I have at Catholic class after school from 4th grade - 8th grade.
Let me just respond real quick before you write another long email (which, by the way, I really appreciate), by saying: I believe I was saying that the bible should be interpreted as metaphors, not moral stories (although it clearly has moral stories). In other words, it’s an attempt by man to capture some truth, ie, an interpretation of the truth.
My caveat here is certainly: I haven’t read the (whole) bible, so your knowledge of it will certainly be more expansive than mine. And while you are correct, it contains dubious morals (eye for eye comes to mind), it also has good ones: don’t kill, love thy neighbor, etc. I mean, Jesus was all about helping the less fortunate, no?
What does the Bible being interpreted metaphorically (not morally) have to do with the existence of god? Again, that question doesn’t make sense when you substitute what I consider god to be into that question: …existence of existence? Your question makes me think that you think the Bible is some sort of proof of the existense of god. While some people might certainly say so, that’s not what I had been saying at all: only that if you change your perspective on what god is away from a bearded old man in the sky to all of existence, the bible makes more sense… as a metaphor. Does the bible get it all right? No. Has it been influenced by people’s personal agendas? Certainly. Does it have value in attempting to put into words what cannot be put into words? I think yes.
Another thing to consider, once you start thinking of us as different manifestations of the same thing (God). Although we are under the delusion that we, as people, exist as separate entities from the rest of world, consider that you could actually never find a clear-cut line, or edge, or where your body stops and and the “outside” begins. In other words, while we as people certainly have most direct control over our own bodies, because we in fact still connected to everything else, the possibility that our thoughts affect things outside of body emerges. That is, prayer might have some real power. The funny thing is, that from what I’ve heard and read, science is actually coming around to this. For example, experiments conducted with people having to guess a number on a card they can’t see: they statistically signficantly more likely to guess the number of another person is actually focusing their mind on that number… how can that be if we are in fact a completely separate entity from the rest of our ennvironment. More examples can be cited.
What I think is happening is that science and religion are actually starting to find middle ground. What could only once be described through a belief system can now be described scientifically. That is why I am saying that the Bible has value, because it and other religious texts try to describe the truth (like science without the experiments), but that this truth is common to everything.
PS: Just thought of this: Once you see everything as being connected, and that separation is only an illusion, it implies that you actually never really die… only your body and the illusion of yourself as separate , ie, the illusion of me as Lee or you as Charlie (because really, we exist beyond names), dies. But the very core of you (what I would call the soul), lives on in different manifestations. So no heaven or hell after you die… those are concepts for what our life here on earth can be.
Grasshopper,
I am still having a hard time seeing what the bible has anything to do with the existence of god, regardless if taken literally (as a minority of Christians do, or metaphorically as a majority of Christians (and you) do). I believe, that under the slight and narrow chance that God exists in the most liberal interpretations of the traditional god (one with only unique self awareness), even then the bible is nothing more than a hyped up version of the Iliad, or other texts about the Greek Gods. (”The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson) Therefore, I really don’t want to even bring this discussion into the bible (or other holy books, which I know less about) because I am very unclear about what it has to do with the existence of God itself. But, just because you brought up the bible, I thought I would talk a little bit about it.
Let’s talk about your book Genesis, and some meanings about stories in them. One of the most well known is Noah and the Ark, which actually comes from the Babylonian myth of Uta-Napisthim, which probably comes from older nearby cultures, and is a good place to start. (On a side note, all the Polytheistic Babylonian rulers descended from gods, making their rule conveniently unquestionable. This I believe, showing the traditional and real reason for religion: controlling the masses) In the story of Uta-Napisthim, I mean Noah, god took such a dim view on humans that he decided to have the whole lot of them killed, including the innocent children. Just for good measure he killed every innocent animal, save 2, on the planet. What moral value are we to take from this metaphor of God? That innocent people and animals should be killed? What’s the metaphor for the moral to live by here?
Let’s do one more, Lot’s story in Sodom and Gomorah. Like the Noah fairy tail, God decides that he is going to destroy an entire city and kill all the people inside it. God sends down two Angles to tell Lot that he needs to pack up his shit and run. Lot is the only righteous one in the entire city. Of course the town’s people come by and demand that Lot let them in his house so they can fuck the two angels. Lot being the gracious host, instead offers his two young virgin daughters to “do ye to them what is good in your eyes.” I think the moral of this story could be women are not as valuable as men? I’m not sure. Anyway, the angles are strong enough to fight them off and the whole family escapes to the hills. Well, except Lot’s unfortunate wife, whom the Lord turned into a pillar of salt because she committed the offense - comparatively mild, one might have thought - of looking over her shoulders at the firework display. Moral of this story, don’t look when God is killing innocent children?
Even Jesus’ “love they neighbor” didn’t refer to people who were not in his group (Jews). Like all other groups of that time, Jesus and his Jewish neighbors had no regard for the members of other groups. Jesus didn’t mean love the Armenian, or the Asyrian, just love the Jew. Besides, do we really believe there was this dude who’s mother was a virgin, his father was literally God, he walked on water, made food from nothing, healed the sick, could kill people with the magic out of his fingers, helped his dad build houses as a child (all stories in various gospels). It’s hard to get meaning, even when taken metaphorically, about the stories of a teenage jesus getting in fights with peers and killing them.
I don’t want to keep going with stories about the bible, it is literally full of ludicrous things that, believe me, hold no value as a metaphor. The old testament’s eye for an eye is actually one of the more tame “lessons”.
Therefore, not only do I (and I would hope you) take the bible literally, I don’t think it should be used as a guide for good morals, or even metaphors describing what people should do, or why things are the way they are. The bible, and all the other “religious” texts are nothing more than fairy tales, like Sleeping Beauty or Jurassic Park. Actually, it’s worse. At least those two stories have some good morals to live by. The bible is full of destruction, human sacrifice, murder, hatred towards women, xenophobia, etc. The redeeming moral values that come from the bible are slim. The world would be a much better place if we followed the biblical teachings of Walt Disney (who had a STRONG distaste for religion).
So I mean that’s all I’m pretty much seeing in your email about the existence of God. That if we use your broad (like waaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy broad) interpretation of god in the stories, then one can see that there it all makes sense. In fact, I think the bibles shows just the opposite. That this vengeful God in the bible can’t be all of existence, but has to be somewhat controlling of existence. It’s not a we’re all connected God, it’s a right vs wrong God. What again does the bible show about the existence of God?
As far as your unrelated point about we’re all connected. I too believe that. I believe that the mind is more powerful than we know today which explains the certain degree of ESP we seem to possess. I see us and nature and rocks as all just physical players in the same ballet. I think that’s beautiful. What I don’t see is anything that resembles “god”.
Please correct me on your reasoning about god existing and why the bible was brought up by you. I think it actually helps my case more.
Charlie,
My turn for a question.
Why are you and Lee able to have this discussion?
If you are just the sum of your natural physical parts, just an evolution of energy guided by natural/physical laws, who is that entity inside that is imagining and reasoning your argument?
The ability to make decisions based on present knowledge could be thought of as an evolved animal instinct, I can see the athiestic-science view there. But then WHO is AWARE of the fact that YOU ARE THINKING?
IF you are just thinking, that’s fine, you’re thinking and thats all, you’re just an intelligent animal, like a cat thinking about when to pounce. But the moment youre able to become aware of self, aware of both worlds of internal and external, and are able imagine the endless possibilities in the interaction of those worlds, and then of your own free will, CHOOSE some sort of subsequent thought or action, I believe you are using a divine source for that energy.
Sorry to add another abstract definition for ‘GOD’, but my understanding (a great word by the way, “to stand under”, implies humblenes to something greater) is that ‘GOD’ is the tendency which has driven evolution of life towards self-awareness and self-realization. It’s like ‘GOD’ is both the beginning and the end, our origin and ultimate goal.
Without ‘GOD-tendency’, why did energy evolve the way it did? Why should infinitely small particles of energy (not even particles of matter) become organized after such a massive explosion of a singularity into the void of nothingness? If we think gravity and sub-atomic forces, then why are those around either? What is it about this reality that led the cards to fall the way they did? GOD. Not as an entity, not as some deciding being, but simply as the initial potential and ultimate destination of this reality. If energy cannot be created or destroyed, and theres a shitload of energy around here, where does it all come from and where does it all end? It’s infinite, truly infinite. The existence of an abstract like the infinite is GOD. The existence of conscious awareness is GOD.
I gotta agree with lee in the sense that people have given GOD a face and a name and all kinds of attributes because its true reality is a paradox, beyond our mental capacity. a more useful thought for GOD is without any categories at all.
Please, check out the book “GOD OF ALL WORLDS” edited by Lucinda Vardey
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0679745432/ref=sib_dp_pt/002-1292012-2000019#reader-link at AMAZON . It also talks about the word GOD in its first chapter and how it sort of ruins our perception about god, at least the way “he” is being envisioned in the Western World, because this concept hinders many people to actually understand what god stands for.
Another interesting reference to this discussion would be Neale Walsh book “WHAT DOES GOD WANT” and in the 13th capter, the reader is finally told: god wants nothing. God is life.
Very good way of thinking about god in a new way.
Keep up the discussion, gentlemen.
I am entertained.
THANK YOU!
Love tina in Berlin
Mariano,
I’m not sure why a huge amount of energy exploded a gibillion years ago, slowly forming into balls of gas. I would wager to bet no one on this earth knows why. It did happen, and maybe if we were smarter beings we could figure it out, like we have figured out why sparks of energy come out of flint and steel. But just because this energy comes out when a rock of flint strikes a bar of steel, doesn’t mean there is a higher power. What it means is that energy is released due to the friction of the two materials (or something like that).
Do you get my point? Just because we don’t have the faintest idea what caused such a massive (in our eyes) event doesn’t mean it has to be a god. In previous times, humans had no clue what caused lightning, so they assumed (just like you’re doing) that there was something more at work. It seems that the more and more we find out about the natural
worlduniverse, the bigger and more removed we make God. If we’re ever lucky enough to figure out what causes big bangs, maybe tears in the space time continuum, then people like you would be saying right right… but what’s ripping the space time continuum. There’s no stopping to how big you can make a God.Later, you refer to God as “the initial potential and final destination of this reality” as God. To me, that’s just the initial potential and final destination of this reality. What does it serve to turn that into a proper noun?
Basically, and I have to repeat what I said to Lee, that the word God you’re using for this physical phenomenon is loaded with thousands of years of history, where for thousands of years it’s meant a deity, and now you want it to mean all known energy in the universe. Why try and change the word God into something very very very different then what it’s meant forever. That’s gay.
Real quick:
Charles, first off, you didn’t answer Mariano’s crucial question: “WHO is AWARE of the fact that YOU ARE THINKING?”
Second, implicit in your argument that “just because we don’t know how the universe came to be doesn’t mean it was because of God” (which is correct) is the assumption that everything is ultimately knowable, rational, logical; we just haven’t figured it out yet. This completely neglects and denies the irrational, which is a very real thing. The number pie for example… it’s an irrational number; why does it have the sequence it does? There’s no answer.
Also, as I will show later - when I get the time - we are not trying to “change the word God into something very very very different;” I would argue that a more appropriate statement would be that we are evolving our understanding of the term, which, I think, is ultimately undefinable, irrational.
It seems that you are avoiding the deeper questions by playing semantics, clinging on to an orthodox definition of God as interpreted through the Bible. If it pleases you, we can start referring to God as Yawe, Buddha-head, the one, unity, tao… yogurt? Like I said earlier, it is not “gay” to expand the understanding and scope of a word; it’s how language evolves. Language is not static, though you make it out to be. To claim that theologians throughout the ages all the had the same understanding of God, is, well, incorrect.
Disagreeing with a narrow interpretation of religious texts does not an atheist make you. You seem to agree with the concept of an initial potential of reality, though don’t care to call it God… what to you is this initial potential?
I found myself unsure of whether my next post was going to further our discussion, or just continue in a circle, so I went back to the very first post to try and get a handle on the topic again, and I found myself shocked with the premise of this whole debate.
The idea that the “usefulness” of the word God is lost by expanding it’s meaning is a contradiction when you think about the goal of religion.
The core of any religion is to be a vehicle for personal transformation, to bring out the qualities of love, compassion, understanding and respect for all life in a ‘believer’. The personified Gods of the various religions are only meant to be visualizations to embody the universal energy that ties us together. For some, believing in an icon (a figure, a personified god) is easier to grasp mentally and spiritually and thus the ‘God character’ has continued to develop and eventually become synonymous with the ‘God notion’. To believe that the “God character” wholely encompasses the energy/force/presence that is worth worshipping and being humble to is an incomplete belief, and is harmful to the goals of religion. Belief in a personified God as the full meaning or definition of ‘GOD’ breeds judgement among believers across faiths because each personified God appears different. This simply can not be what God is, because this works against the idea of religion as a means for spiritual growth.
I think that Lee and I are arguing that the open ended ‘God-notion’ IS the more useful concept because it offers the most potential for continued spiritual growth across faiths. It allows for new interpretations of religious texts and spiritual practices in a way that unites ‘followers’ in a direction towards growth, and dissolves the boundaries between religions that can cause such counter-productive animosity. Weinberg’s point of view is so narrowly focused on wanting to keep the word God to mean the personified Gods of each various religion, that he is doing a great injustice to the evolution of human spirituality. He is even insulting the idea that one can “find God wherever they look for him”, even the lump of coal. I argue that those people who see God everywhere are the most in touch with what God and the nature of this reality truly is. His “3000 year old general understanding of God” is the concept that should be lost, or at least regarded as an inferior perspective, so that a deeper understanding can bring us all together.
No one is challenging the western semantic history that this personified God-character is what has been most commonly associated with the word “God” in most dialogues, but I am definitely challenging the usefulness of that association, and arguing that the word “God” gains meaning when defined through a broader spiritual perspective.
I was thinking last night….
You two might be right. I’ll keep thinking about it.
Charles, reading your possible conceit (!), it occured to me that all of this isn’t even a matter of right or wrong. We can’t be right, nor can we be wrong. God, like beauty, is ultimately a subjective term. I guess our point is merely trying to conceive of God in the most useful, non-destructive way. In the end, the God that you are opposed to - rightfully so - to borrow the phrase, the ‘God character’, will always be believe in an perpetuated by a substantial amount of people, but that doesn’t mean that one has ato follow in that conception.
Mariano, I think you need to be careful when speaking about the “goal of religion.” To me religion implies some kind of organization, and consequently an organizer. And while clearly like-minded individuals could self-organize, I feel that “spiritual organizing,” done with intent (as opposed to something that happens organically), usually includes some element of persuasion; and somehow I’ve never been down with proselytizing. That’s why I feel ambivalent at best about political activists and Jehovah’s Witness.
I guess I’m not sure where there should be a spiritual organization - arisen out of intention - at all. Perhaps it’s more religion itself, rather than differing spiritual beliefs, that has caused so much grief.