It would seem that throughout any scripture the only thing it would be necessary for God to convey – to convey clearly – is the manner in which one might be assessed in a favorable light by God on Judgment Day.
Isn’t that what it is really about in the end? And yet it is obvious that God has done a rather poor job of this. Otherwise why would there be so many conflicting renditions of God out in the world. And, even when folks can agree on which particular God one should/must worship and adore in order to gain access to immortality and salvation on Judgment Day, the Scriptures are vague enough to allow any number of conflicting interpretations of what it means to worship and adore this one true God in a righteous manner.
And yet, in my view, this is something that many true believers simply will not fully address. If, when push comes to shove, religion is not all about Judgment Day and salvation, what then is the point of it?
So it would seem to be imperative that the believers find a way to nail down which God is in fact the one true God; and what it is that He expects of us “down here” in order to be deemed worthy to join Him in the Promised Land.
Is that really the point though? Instead, is it not this: Which option is better in the eyes of God?
After all, “down here” women have to contend with men [sexually or not] for the breadth of a single human lifespan. Whereas what they choose to do down here in the eyes of God have consequences that shall span all of eternity.
So: how do we decide what women ought to do in the context of Judgment Day?
Well, different Gods, different answers. Or, sometimes, as with the God of Abraham and Moses, it’s the same God with different answers.
With religionists though what becomes of vital importance is that there is but one truly righteous manner in which to behave “in the eyes of God”.
How then is one to reconcile this verse with the manner in which most Christians embrace Jesus Christ as the “Prince of Peace”?
Well, the sword is said not to be an actual sword at all. Rather, it is a “spiritual sword” instead.
But this is just one of many examples of how the Bible [any Bible] can be twisted into a narrative that can be embraced by folks anywhere along the political spectrum. The same is done by those who seek to attach Christ to, say, socialism or capitalism.
That’s simply the way of the world. You want to believe that something is true. And so you hammer whatever it is that you find into a frame of mind that rationalizes your own behaviors, your own values, your own sense of self.
All the while insisting this is not what you are doing at all. You are simply “telling it like it is”.
Read a controversial passage from one or another Scripture and there will be religionists who insist it is meant to be taken literally and those who insist it is not.
Lucky for them, God simply did not make that part clear enough.
Actually, when most of us think about escaping, it pertains more to the trials and the tribulations we endure from day to day “down here”.
With religion it would seem the “escape” is aimed more in the direction of that part where we have shuffled off this mortal coil.
In other words, many embrace religion in order to escape death.
But there is an escape function religion does serve for mere mortals in the here and now: an escape from the moral uncertainty rooted in “how ought I to live?” With God that’s easy: The will be done.
All of this at times heated debate [from some of us] only because folks don’t have either the intellectual integrity or the intellectual honesty to admit that, as of now, we simply do not know how to grapple with the existence of existence itself.
Instead, all we have are arguments. Scholastic contraptions [or theological contraptions] in which sooner or later the words start piling up on top of each other. And then the inevitable avalanche of tautological assumptions.
So, the closest we ever get to a God, the God, their God here is by way of the [perfect] circular argument.
A few claiming to have concocted the most perfect circle of all. In their head for example.
Is this true? Do all “actual Christians” not claim certainty? Perhaps it is true. But where is the demonstration that this is in fact true? Where is the hard evidence, the empirical data, the research that backs it up?
And how exactly would we define “actual” here?
In fact, from my own personal experiences over the years, I have known any number of Christians that made very little distinction between having faith in God and knowing that he does exist. If only “in their heart and soul”.
But then certain religious objectivists will often insist that they are not the real Christians, Moslems, Jews, Hindus etc… As though they are in turn able to demonstrate that this is in fact true.
But all of this changes when the religious objectivist confines the existence of God to his own particular definitions and deductions.
God then becomes a logical contraption, an intellectual contraption, a philosophical contraption that he [and only he] can bring you into contact with.
As always this kind of position, which you present in different forms, does NOT fit with other statements and arguments you make and imply about the world, religious people or objectivists in general, knowledge, perception and so on. You come off just as certain, but when pressed at a meta-position level, about all sorts of things. Perhaps you are not an ‘actual’ nihilist, since you come across and I would say are certain about all sorts of things, and since nihilists are not, you are not one of them, just as Christians might say those who are certain are not actual Christians since they are not faith based. Imagine if someone came across a group of people with your positions, they would see a bunch of people confidently enraged at people with different epistemologies, saying that people are not intellectually honest when THEY are certain - and the group knows this because it is certain about its own epistemology, models of perception and so on. You are just another objectivism, but one that makes disclaimers - which are also based on certainties by the way. But hopefully you like what you are doing even if it contradicts itself.
How could anyone who is not sure not only about what is real, but what is REALLY going on inside other people - even objectivists are often careful about such claims - make the statement you made above. Think about all the claims about what is real you made in that blanket insult and psychological analysis. The problem of other minds is not a problem you subjectivists like you.
Yes, you have pointed this out a number times. And, sure, “in my head”, right now, I do feel that my argument regarding dasein, conflicting goods, and political economy [re God and many other things] is the most rational manner in which to understand human interaction. But I can only remind myself of how many times in the past I thought the very same thing about very different ways of understanding myself and the world that I live in.
And I can only presume that if I changed my mind before I can change my mind again. That’s the whole point about speculating in a world bursting at the seams with contingency, chance and change. Even here, you never know for certain what the next post might bring.
Ironically, it was in an exchange with you some months ago, that I began to piece together what eventually became this:
If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.
I don’t recall the thread or the context, but it allowed me to reconfigure the manner in which I construe the relationship between identity and conflicting goods.
An “actual” nihilist?! What in the world is that? All I can do is to plug the manner in which I understand the word subjectively here and now – out in the world – by citing example after example of how I have come to understand its meaning pertaining to identity and value judgments intertwined in human behaviors that do come into conflict. As I have noted, my interest in philosophy has now more or less come down to this: [b]How ought I to live?[/b]
But my point revolves around the speculation that intellectual honesty/integrity itself involves certain assumptions about human interaction. My own, of course. But I am also able to grasp the manner in which the assumptions themselves are problematic.
Now, if you wish to insist all of this makes me just one more objectivist, fine. But I do not construe my own frame of mind as being in the same ballpark with the objectivists that I roast here.
But I always strive to make that crucial distinction between what we can in fact demonstrate objectively is real [mathematics, the laws of nature, empirical facts, the logical rules of language etc.] and that which seems more likely to be just a subjective point of view.
My own subjectivism then pertains to the relationship between identity, value judgments, political economy and human interactions that come into conflict precisely because this relationship cannot to be pinned down objectively.
Or so it seems to me. And I often point that out, don’t I?
As for the “blanket insult”, I’m not sure what your point is. Yes, I often employ provocative language in my posts. And I do this by and large because I truly do enjoy engaging in polemics.
This:
[b]What I am is a polemist. At least from time to time.
What does this mean? It means that occasionally I enjoy provocative exchanges. A provocative exchange is one in which folks take opposite sides on an issue and aggressively pursue their own point of view. A polemicist might employ such devices as red herrings, irony, dissembling, sarcasm, needling, pokes and prods, intellectual cul de sacs, satire.
But it’s never meant to be personal. It’s just a way to ratchet up a discussion and make it more invigorating, intriguing, stimulating.
When the best minds are goaded they are often driven in turn to make their point all the more forcefully. It’s like both of you are down in the arena using words for swords.
From my experience these are almost always the most interesting exchanges. As long as they are understood to be just exchanges of polemics.
The paradox is this: the more you seem to be disrespectful of someone’s intelligence the more you actually respect it instead. Otherwise why pursue the exchange at all?
But few folks really appreciate this sort of intellectual jousting. It’s a lost art to say the least. Gone are the early days of the internet when I could engage in epic battles with Objectivists, Marxists, Kantians, Platonists and the like. [/b]
The assumption of course being that God does in fact exist. Now we are faced only with trying to grasp what it might mean for God to reveal Himself to us.
Yet that would not seem to be a very difficult task at all for an omniscient/omnipotent being.
What is our “spacio-temperal ‘prison’ and our skepticism that anything other than our consciousness exists” next to that?
And what if this presumed God does choose to reveal Himself some day [soon] and it is not the Christian God at all?
Notice how nihilists were not on his list. Unless, of course, the Devil himself is a nihilist. But than how in the world would we go about proving that?
Yes, in venues such as this one, nailing down the definition of God can become the all-consuming task. This allows the epistemologists among us to go up into the stratosphere of abstraction – deducing the meaning of God. And God is then “captured” in the circular logic of a particular set of assumptions swirling around in a particular analysis. God, in other words, becomes an “intellectual contraption”.
But most of those who live with God in their actual day to day lives “down here” are less concerned with that and more preoccupied with how they ought to live their lives [in interacting with others] in order to be judged by God in a favorable light. After all, isn’t that the part connected to a deontological morality, immortality and salvation?
And isn’t this [for all practical purposes] what religion is really all about?
How then, in this context, is “the tao of God” relevant?
The same with many here who link their intuitive “feelings” about God to some amorphous, indeterminant, indefinite “entity”. Or those who link their “spirituality” to an ecumenical God…or to some “natural” deity that is somehow at one [like they are] with the cosmos itself.
The last thing these folks seem to focus on is precisely what the Christians, Jews, Moslems, Hindus, Shintos etc. insist is the only really important thing to focus on: How am I to live in preparation for Judgment Day?
If this isn’t the bottom line for God and religion, what is?
But to go there necessarily involves situating their spiritual consolations “out in the world” where actual flesh and blood conflagrations occur every single day over conflicting renditions of “good” and “evil”.
Does this or does this not reflect God and religion as a purely mental construct?
Is it true? Maybe. But how would we even begin to determine it?
And how would we go further and establish that this assertion about a God does in fact pertain to the existence of the God? His God.
And how many religionists would agree that God [their God] would be fine with an atheist “honestly” being unable to believe in God. The atheist will be shown by God that He does in fact exist by, say, still being around after he dies…or being given a tour of Heaven.
I always come back to how someone can possibly know something like this when he is never actually able to accomplish the task of demonstrating to us why we should know this too.
