God is an Impossibility

On the contrary, as with others, I am always willing to discuss God and religion “straight up”: an open and honest exchange of opinions between folks who respect each other’s intelligence.

And I certainly respect yours.

But I am also willing and able [sometimes eagerly] to exchange polemics. Yet even here I never lose sight of your obvious intellect.

My entire point however is that, with respect to value judgments, this is the only manner in which we can interpret such conflicting assessments. As embodied in dasein.

Why not true? You are jumping to conclusion based on ignorance of the central driver of the major religions.

There are secondary reasons [political, social, cultural, etc.] for theism and religions, but if you are familiar with the doctrines of the major religions, the central theme of concern to the individual is the fear of what will happen after death, thus the hope of the afterlife as a reward from God or other means. These are driven by psychological existential elements within the psyche of believers.

Even Buddhism which is not theistic, its central theme concern the mother of all sufferings, i.e. the fears arising from the fact of mortality [the ‘corpse’ in the Buddha Story]. Some Buddhists believe in rebirth.
In Hinduism there is transmigration and reincarnation into other bodies after death.

Show me if there are more critical themes than the matter of death and the afterlife in theism and other religions.

As for theistic religions [especially Islam and other Abrahamic religions] I am bothered by SOME of its believer who are evil prone and are inspired by their God to commit terrible evils and violence [evidence of this glaring].

Don’t blame others if your arguments are not sound nor convincing in relation to the OP.

I am still waiting for any one to prove my premises and whole argument wrong. I will welcome it as it will enable me to improve on it.

I realize that you cannot see how excessively naive you are concerning religions. Obviously you have no idea of the “central driver of the major religions”. And as long as you maintain your hatred, you will never see anything but the presumptuous evil that you paint of them for yourself and others. Out of your fear and hate, you have constructed a tunnel for your vision, thus will remain blind regardless of what anyone says. You have proven that on this thread as well as many others.

You are merely a religious preacher of your hatred (commonly referred to as a “troll”).

The “central driver of the major religions” is to maintain a social order even before there were, when there are no, and beyond the use of armies to maintain social laws. They are to prevent social chaos at the most fundamental level. They have proven themselves in that regard. And with that at heart, any and all concerns of people are blended into the soup that you so hatefully spit out. You give the impression of being no more than a young, naive recalcitrant child who has been inspired to hate his parents, completely unaware of the underlying reality that has kept you alive.

Religions serve a purpose, fulfill a function … call it what you want.

But is the religion based on a fabricated God or a discovered God?

Is it possible to fabricate God and “fool most of the people most of the time”? If so, then that means most people want to accept a falsehood. Yet evolutionary survival requires an embrace of objective reality … those who based their lives on illusion must have died in greater proportion than those who had few illusions. Pursuit of truth must be an evolved trait.

Maybe moving away from the personal “I” is the way go.

If I am not who I am, how might I see things?

Someone has to tell me what he/she sees. I have to listen to that unique person. Then I can find the common “I” - the transcending “I”.

And how would one go about that? You either are or are not born into a particular historical/cultural/experiential context. You either are or are not indoctrinated as a child to construe God and religion in a particular way. You either had or did not have a particular set of experiences, relationships, sources of information/knowledge etc., embedded/embodied in “I”.

And that has always been my point. Once you recognize the existential parameters of “I” here, you can set about to the best of your ability to establish what all reasonable men and women are in fact obligated to believe about God and religion instead.

And I’m always the first to acknowledge that this may will be something that can be accomplished. But, in a world bursting at the seams with contingency, chance and change, you would seem unable to entirely preclude sets of circumstances that might nudge “I” in different [conflicting] directions. If only from the cradle to the grave.

Instead, what would need to be established empirically/materially/phenomenally is the existence of God such that the variables I speak of are rendered moot. In other words, a God able to render “I” moot. A god able to subsume any common “I” there might be.

That extant God able at last to connect the dots between the behaviors that we choose on this side of grave and our fate on the other side of it.

Again, the rest is faith. An existential leap to God. Or a “bet” on God.

Still, in a philosophy forum, the quest is always to go beyond that. To grope and to grapple with ways in which to reach God using the tools at the philosopher’s disposal.

Or to acknowledge that may not even be possible. We just don’t know what is true here. We only know that oblivion is out there somewhere…waiting for us around one or another corner.

Then what?

Then maybe God and religion are things that we invent in order to comfort and console ourselves when confronted with “I” leaning over into the abyss that is nothingness for all of eternity.

I would like to believe in God myself.

And, here and now, I suspect the “scorn” that may occasionally filter into my reaction to those who already do revolves psychologically around a resentment that they are comforted and consoled and I am not.

And, with respect to this frame of mind, whether God does in fact exist or not is [ironically enough] immaterial.

There. Right there.

My Gods aren’t so pretentious as to claim having created the Universe.
Perfection is simple: gold.

As usual, your views are very ignorant and resorting to childish attacks.

You are basing on your familiarity with the Catholic Church, Church of England and other sects where their focus is apparently on the social order. However, note the trend in Christianity [& Buddhism, Hinduism, even Islam] where believers are moving away from organized religions to personal interaction with their God.

Prove to me the “central driver of the major religions” is to maintain a social order.
How is the ‘Buddha Story’ and the central theme of ‘dukkha’ [commonly translated as ‘suffering’] related to ‘maintain a social order’?

The central theme of the original primitive religions which emerged out an existential crisis is retained in the major religions.

The ‘social order’ element came about later and subsequently was exploited by politician theologians.

Btw, ‘social order’ as a concept is independent of religions. It is an evolved instinctual* impulse that inherent in the evolution of humanity and this social order can be maintain by culture, politics, terrorism, fear, various elements of strength/power, etc. Religion is merely exploited by some to impose social order via politics or cultural elements.

• note how social order is maintain the some animals and the primates.

Then your God is inferior to another God who is all powerful with an ability to create the Universe.
If your God is an inferior and ‘cheapskate’ god [like Zeus, Thor, Neptune or the monkey God -Hanuman] I am not too concern about it.

You, an asthmatic cough of dust, speak of Odin?

That you are as poor of spirit as to worship the void in your heart, doesn’t mean the universe is as empty as it makes you feel.

There…where?

What makes faith in God a very definite possibility for many – “in their heads” – is that His existence – there – enables them to believe as well that not only is there life after death, but that they will be judged by God as deserving of salvation, as being privy [at last] to God’s divine wisdom…to His divine justice.

After all, what is the wait for God’s “second coming” [in Christianity] but an affirmation that He will have established Himself empirically, materially, phenomenally.

In the interim, however, comfort and consolation can only be derived from defining [arguing, analyzing] God into existence; or from personal experiences that convince some but are unable to be conveyed to others [like me]; or from one or another rendition of deism.

But, still, that can only be my own “existential contraption”. I clearly have to acknowledge the gap between what I think I know about God “here and now”, and all that would need to be known in order to understand Him fully, wholly: logically, epistemologically, ontologically, teleologically, deontologically etc.

Just like you.

Maybe that which renders “I” moot is an aspect of God.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Then it’s always back to distinguishing between what we think may be true “in our head”, and that which we are able to demonstrate to others is in fact true.

Or, sure, just keep it all up in the scholastic clouds of “metaphysics”: grappling with God “philosophically”. Or keep it all confined to a world of words, a jostling over definitions and “arguments”. Or let it be all about “personal experiences”.

Meanwhile the clock keeps ticking in the general direction of oblivion. What’s it to be then? Heaven? Hell? Salvation? Purgatory? Nothing at all?

And my argument is this: that when push comes to shove this is really [for all practical purposes] what God and religion are all about.

Not really. More importantly, what you think in your head is separated into what’s reasonably likely and what’s unlikely.

I don’t worship the void [whatever that means] in my heart.
Where did I say the Universe is empty? I believe the Universe is empirically real.

What I believe is, reality is empty of an illusory God which is claimed to have created the Universe.

What I do is to live life in such a way towards optimizing my well-being and that include contributing to the resolution of all evils of the present and potentially in the future.
One part of the solution is to recognize and acknowledge the idea of God is an impossibility.

The impossible God is only an idea and ideal to cling on to resolve a terrible existential crisis but theism has its inevitable loads of evils [glaringly evident]. To deal with such theistic-related evils we must understand God is an impossibility [as argued] and revert back to its psychological beginning and resolve the problem from that root cause.

I would add, what is thought in one’s head can be separated into,

1. Emprically existing
2. Empirically possible
3. Empirically impossible
4. Non-empirical and impossible - e.g. synthetic a priori judgment

An absolutely perfect God [imperative default as argued] is a transcendental illusion and non-empirical imposibility.

Can be translated as :

“1. Emprically existing” = exists in reality

“2. Empirically possible” = does not exist but is logically possible

“3. Empirically impossible” = does not exist and is logically impossible

“4. Non-empirical and impossible - e.g. synthetic a priori judgment” = who knows what it means but seems to be essentially the same as #3 - does not exist and is logically impossible

Hi, I think he meant the void to mean Sunyata, the Buddhic concept.