"God" in the Postmodern Era

Seems Leibnitz is another enigma. He was one of the first … perhaps the first European mathematician/scholar … to receive the Chinese book … the I Ching … claimed by some as the oldest book on earth. He received a copy of the book … probably translated into Latin from Joacquim Bouvet … a Jesuit missionary in China … successor to Matteo Ricci. Apparently Bouvet’s theory known as the figurists … en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figurism … tickled his curiosity as well.

How much of Leibnitz’s intellectual output stems from the I Ching … murky waters indeed!

Like the idea of Judgment Day, karma through multiple lives seems to be the result of the psychological need for justice where justice is not evident in the empirical world.

Whether or not God is actually evolving or changing, the concept of God is. In fact, there is archaeological evidence that suggests that before people believed in God, they believed in Goddess. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_goddess In other words before God was symbolized as male, as in the Bible, God was imagined to be female.

True, but psychological need does not necessarily detract from the idea of long term goal conscious goal setting. And since that goal may be forgotten or revise for accommodating imminent perceptions, does not change the fact that perceptions have motive, self realization and effect in simultenious, transcendent realms of experience.

Therefore the imminent psychology does not contradict it’s origin: . That IT has been cut away, does not mean that IT is not there.

The mistake the logicians of the Middle Ages made was denying variable interpretations, and seekingHIS identity in terms of either/or, male/female, is/isn’t.
They probably understood the changing aspects of the way adherents could understand, but they did not figure the extremely sudden development of the Enlightenement.

Errata: In the last paragraph, the sentence should read: ‘only in terms of’ in stead of ‘in terms of’.

The ontological uncertainty of the postmodern era we are living in is strikingly illustrated by this article: scientificamerican.com/arti … imulation/ If we can’t be sure about whether or not we are mere players in a computer simulation, what can we say about ultimate reality?

Yes, but that does not detract for the argument for returning to a pre simulation, unless all was simulated to begin with, in which case there is no argument.

Assuming that a simulation occurred, how would one return to a pre-simulation?

One that assumption is made, then the return would of course not be a literal one, unless the technology for time travel has already been developed. Without that a return, even an eternal one is strictly in terms of metaphor, or aphorism.

Felix … you must be a soul-mate … not in the romantic sense … in the sense … two people cut from the same cloth.

I find the article you suggested fascinating … it dovetails perfectly with my OP “Experiment is nearing completion. ???”

The validation of my thoughts become a bit intimidating though. :slight_smile:

For me … humanity is facing a choice … a blank page full of potential … the experiment will either move to a new level or terminate.

As I mentioned in other posts:

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Would you agree that, given ontological uncertainty, instead of basing our lives on ultimate knowledge maybe we should try basing it on ultimate ignorance?

How do you base your life on “ultimate knowledge”?
How do you base your life on “ultimate ignorance”?

What is it that you do? :confused:

If you base your life on ultimate ignorance its acting in the tradition of piety, submission and blind Faith.

If you base your life on ultimate knowledge, it is presuming that an ultimate being will not punish you by letting your soul be stolen, in the way the attempt was made to steal Faust’ soul. It literally validated the goodness of God’s Word. It need no representation by various authorities and can work magic in a personal interpretation. It protests a self declared authority to spell it out.

The goodness of the word has intrinsic and unassailable meaning.

Felix … the way I see it … we do base our life on ultimate ignorance … whether we are willing to admit it or not.

We are playing the game of life without a full deck of cards.

So it seems. The Scientific American article illustrated for me how little we know of ultimate reality. So, to suppose that we live in knowledge of where we come from, or where we are going or even how it is that we are here at this moment is a mistake. As long as that is the case, it seems to me it would be reasonable to live in the constant awareness of the ultimate mystery of existence.

K: I believe that what we see is the ultimate reality… we like to think that there
is some onion thing going on with reality and we haven’t peeled open the “real” reality but
the fact is, we have…there is no mystery, no “ultimate” reality to find… we are already
in the only reality that exists…look about you… this is it…and for some reason, we can’t accept
that this is the only reality we have…and the only one we are going to find…
deal with that reality kids…

Kropotkin

Amen … with a mellow heart!!

Peter … for me the mystery Felix refers to is the “stuff” on the other side of the ‘veil’ … yeah ultimate reality permeates our existence … and some may have imagined IT correctly … no one has proven it … with any degree of certainty.

If we truly could “see” all … there would be no further inspiration/motivation for the pursuit of philosophy, science or religion.

While reading this all I could think of was: nothing new under the sun. The condition you describe is not new. In the first century for example, "god fearers " would court various gods. No religion which I am aware of has had a god which was not contradictory or paradoxical.
The post modern condition is a return to a default condition which was only alleviated by arbitrary means, by force. Without this option you have the variety of opinions about god we see today. I’m not saying that god is meaningless or that it means different things to different people all of the time because we do have communities which use the word in a somewhat consistent way. That said there are different communities with their own meaning
Or use of the word god.
The interesting part of postmodernism, what might be new, is that the will of the individual is king in our day. The desire to belong is declining (whether that’s a fact or a linguistic fashion) and so god’s meaning is left to the personal tastes of individuals. Although this is the philosophical consequence of postmodernism, I believe that the communal instinct in all of us means that the majority shy away from the enormous responsibility of defining what god is for them.