Peace

Lerrellus :God is a synthetic necessity.
He overcomes.all distinctions .( in him, with him , through him) this is what i remember from liturgy before stopped going to church.

The points I raise about God above: You will either address them to the best of your ability or you will continue to make me the issue.

What I believe is this: that what I believe about God is no less an existential contraption. Of course a God, the God, your God might exist. And, if He does, am I not permitted to ponder why He would allow for such destructive and devastating things as category 5 hurricanes? And [sooner or later] the next extinction event?

How do you rationalize it? By blaming nature? But what does that even mean given the existence of God?

Have you nothing to offer but affirmations based largely, in my view, on the comfort and consolation they provide you in a world bursting at the seams with so much terrible human suffering?

Who the hell wouldn’t want to believe there is in fact a loving, just and merciful God able to provide you with immortality and salvation up there…if you are willing to toe His line down here.

Sure, no doubt about it, a part of my reaction here is embedded in my own psychological turmoil and travail. The perturbations built right into the human condition in facing both the horrors of human existence on this side of the grave and the prospect of oblivion on the other side.

But that is a manifestation of dasein, in my view. And “I” only have so much understanding and control over that.

Agree.

I ask for koans. Have you no koans in your pocket?
If you wish to debate about what God is like or means, Bob has a good thread for that.
Have you a cure for suffering that can top Buddhism?

If we are to hope to exist
Then the line between the inside
and the outside
Has to be remarked
As if time offers a cure to turn ghostly shadow with the invisible ink that separates them,

And reverse course, of course,
Inside becomes out
And out reverts back
Into It’s Self

and our sense of childhood wonder
rise again
but strangely
So strangely
That god has.to suffer
Along
As well with what has been
Created, the price
For all the eons of effects and cameras, mantras

Just to Be, for a second’s
Pleasure, cries the boy
Unknowing the pathos
Of wasted time
In his soul.

That is his koan!

I was responding specifically to the OP: “When sky father and earth mother are wed, there will be peace on Earth.”

Now, that may or may not pertain to God and religion. And koans are either more or less about the manner in which a point is constructed or a reaction to the point itself.

After all, “a koan is a riddle or puzzle that Zen Buddhists use during meditation to help them unravel greater truths about the world and about themselves.”

What greater truths? With or without God?

And, by all means, if you feel Buddhism is the most effective cure for human misery – if that works for you – go with it.

Others, however, argue that like so many other religious/spiritual narratives, Buddhism detracts from the effort of those who insist that, on the contrary, if you want to reduce human misery you must go to the source: the political struggle of those who seek to counter the weight of those nihilists who own and operate the global economy.

That, in its own way, Buddhism is just one more rendition of an “opiate for the masses”.

Still, I’ll take your reaction to the points I raised here as more or less what I expected. Just as [no doubt] you’ll take mine.

The OP could have meant science and religion, neither of which can describe God alone. If you are really interested in the problem with religion, read Bishop Spong’s “Why Christianity Must Change Or Die”. It should be refreshing beside your atavistic nihilism.
I am not a Buddhist.
To talk about God, whom you do not claim to know, with me, whom you do not care to know, is doubly negative. Can you offer positive thoughts?

atavistic:
a: recurrence in an organism of a trait or character typical of an ancestral form and usually due to genetic recombination
b: recurrence of or reversion to a past style, manner, outlook, approach, or activity

That being the case then, on the contrary, my own nihilism is quite the opposite of that. It is derived from how I have come to think about the world around me given that no one has yet to convince me [of late] that a God, the God, their God does in fact exist.

Human interaction in a No God world is, in my view, reasonably consistent with the components I have chosen – given some measure of human autonomy – when confronting things like peace on earth: identity, value judgments, political power. Then my argument above kicks in. Which you basically ignore.

Then why this: “Have you a cure for suffering that can top Buddhism?”

To which I responded. To which you then chose not to respond.

To talk about God – you, me and others here – is, in my view, to invoke the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein. And that is deemed to be negative by the objectivists [God or No God] who do not wish to explore the extent to which what they do talk about is more an existential contraption than the embodiment of the real me – possessing a soul – in sync with the right way to talk about God.

In other words, when some speak of offering positive thoughts here, what they are really after are thoughts that reinforce and then sustain the comfort and consolation that their own view of God [in relationship to peace on earth] provide them. And, among friends or in church or around the dinner table, that is to be expected. But this is a philosophy venue.

Here, we’re expected to go a little deeper.

I do not have to be a Buddhist to note that Buddhism can be an effective antidote for suffering.
When you speak of God you use the outdated description–omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. This is a caricature of God which many progressive Christians no longer believe , hence atavistic. Believing that God is almighty, like some Marvel Comics hero, prompts questions such as why does God not intervene in natural disasters? It implies an outdated concept of God as localized in Western theism. Your argument allows that type of concept. Many rational and virtuous people no longer buy those descriptions of God. A good study of why people hang onto such beliefs. including reasons for existential angst , can be found in Freud"s “The Future of an Illusion”.

Ierrellus

You mean the folks who are experiencing them? Ierrellus, If you lost your home, your belongings, in a flash, if you felt deeply uprooted and scared while experiencing these things, just how peaceful do you think you would feel, how deterred from experiencing peace?

Unless I am misunderstanding your question…I think that very often feeling “peaceful” is a subtle sense that all is right with one’s world. I would not have that sense if the above happened to me but then again I am only human.

Which folks? Those who have lost everything or those who see that others have lost everything and can empathize with them?
Perhaps those INDIVIDUALS who were compassionate and empathetic in the first place before they lost everything (remarkable people to me) and those who did not lose anything who are also compassionate and empathetic.

I think that your last quote is based more on who the individuals are.

Yes, that is true. But if you are asking someone to name a better cure for suffering than Buddhism, this would seem to suggest that, as far as you are concerned, Buddhism is the best cure out there. And, so, if ending human suffering is important to you, why would you not choose to be a Buddhist?

My guess: the overwhelming preponderence of religious folks still believe that, when you speak of God, you speak of these things.

So, what are you then suggesting here – that they are all wrong because you are right regarding the one true understanding of God?

But then you are basically back to demonstrating that in fact this God – your God – does exist. And exist as you say He does. And not just because, in believing this “in your head”, it continues to comfort and console you.

Does your understanding of God include or not include the part where He is the Creator of all there is. Including the natural disasters built right into planet Earth. To my knowledge, no comic book character is described in that manner.

Okay, note a few of these “rational virtuous people” for us. And why hasn’t this point of view percolated up into a wide circulation across the globe?

Can you note some places [on or offline] where a significant number of people are in fact arguing for a God understood in this manner?

Iambiguous,
I refer you to Daniel C. Dennett’s “Breaking the Spell” and “Caught in the Pulpit”. Also Bishop Spong’s “Christianity Must Change Or Die”.
I will not spoon feed you on these works, but assume you can learn about them on your own. Surely you have heard of progressive Christianity. Polls mentioned in the above books show that the majority of Americans surveyed on belief in God no longer support traditional concepts about who or what God is.
Way back in the early 19th century William Blake writes of God as Nobodaddy (Nobody’s daddy). This was well before the "death of God " meme came about.

Which folks? Those who have lost everything or those who see that others have lost everything and can empathize with them?
Perhaps those INDIVIDUALS who were compassionate and empathetic in the first place before they lost everything (remarkable people to me) and those who did not lose anything who are also compassionate and empathetic.

I think that your last quote is based more on who the individuals are.[/quote
Off topic. So these statements bear other interpretations. Is that all you get out of this thread? Should I waste time trying to clarify what can be said in different ways? I’ll leave that up to the the mind worshipers known as philosophers. Are you all out of koans?

Worshipers of Urizen–a koan cannot give its depth when translated literally.

Ierrellus,

Wow!

Well, if what I said was off topic, then this thread has been off topic for quite some time. The subject is Peace.

Are you saying that they do not? As an English teacher, did you also teach Literature? The way I look at it, many statements can bear other interpretations. Perhaps you just want everything in a tidy bunch as you would have it.

That is what I gleaned from your quotes which I responded to. Perhaps you ought not to “hug” this thread too tightly.

I do not have an answer to that except to do what you want to do.
Is this the way you spoke to your students?

That is a pretty disdainful statement to make. I do not worship mind but I do recognize and respect it and since I do have one, I try to utilize it, feed it, learn from it, perhaps not as well as others do but still… I do worship nature though.

You asked the below question:

So I proceeded to answer it with a question of my own because I was not quite understanding it.
How would You have answered that quote, Ierrellus

Was I supposed to answer with a koan? You might have said from the very beginning of the thread “Respond with Koans Only”.

Are you saying that one need not use one’s mind when koans are around? No need to answer it.

Still, what does this really have to do with you responding to the points I raised above? How might you image William Blake responding to them? And, if you are in acquaintance with other progressive Christians, perhaps they might be more willing to explore the quandaries I posed above.

On, say, another thread. Sans koans. Although I do like the idea of discussing God [and peace on Earth] in the context of “paradoxes and riddles”. Or, for me, more in the way of ambiguities and the existential “I”.

Also, from my frame of mind [and that’s all it is], however one views God, it does not make my arguments above go away. God the Creator of planet Earth inundating us time and again with one or another natural disaster. Or, perhaps, Harold Kushner’s take on God comes closest here to encompassing an explanation. A loving, just and merciful God who set into motion a creation that He is no longer able to control. The God lacking in omnipotence.

And then the endless squabbles over what peace on Earth ought to look like from the perspective of any number of religious narratives confronting any number of conflicting goods.

Good post. Honest. IMHO the problem with conflicting goods is a belief in what is not. Any God worth his salt is a force not a person. The force is universal, unconditional love. That alone can save us from ourselves. Kushner is probably right. The three Os no longer apply to God which is why Bishop Spong compares the literalist Christian God to a comic book character like Superman.

Arc,
Mea Culpa. I was having a bad day and apparently took it out on you. No, you do not have to answer in koans. I was just saddened that the thread came to be about me.
Wm. Blake considered Wordsworth to be a pagan–not in a good sense.
Tennyson considered Nature “red in tooth and claw”.
Natural disasters, after all, are expressions of Nature.

Again, noting this among family or friends or folks you happen to bump into in which the subject of God comes up, will garner reactions that come with exchanges of this sort.

But, in a philosophy venue, what you think and feel about intertwining God and nature and peace on earth and love would seem to be open to a more rigorous examination. For me, this always revolves around configuring what you believe into demonstrations able to persuade others to believe it in turn. Otherwise we’re back in the bar or around the dinner table exchanging our “personal opinions”.

But, yeah, that’s just me.

If Harold Kushner – who is still around – were here, I would pose the same questions to him. Focusing not on what he believes about God but on how he is able to substantiate why others ought to believe the same thing.

Spong is deep. Consider this:
“Ethics must be freed from the tactic of controlling human behavior by imposing on it the will of some external deity. Christian ethics in the future must be directly linked to the right to explore selfhood, to the courage to live, to love, and to be simply for the sake of living, loving, and being.” (Spong 1998, p.165).
A new future for a religion that includes everyone in the here and now is not just bar talk or an evening’s chat. Spong is still a bishop although he is criticized by fellow church members as an atheist. His concept of God is that God be “understood not as a person, but as the depth and ground of life itself.” (166) His mentor is Tillich.

Neither Tillich nor Spong are shallow thinkers. Both could answer easily the questions and concerns you raise here. Both are read and studied by intelligent, rational, and virtuous searchers for truth.