Define God

The part in the funeral, where the Pastor says, “From dust you came and to dust you shall return”, is enough to show that the river metaphor applies, even when out of water. We came out of this planet, and our bodies will return, but the question is posed, what about the “breath of God” that made mankind a “living spirit?” What happens to that?

However you call it, it is hope that helps us get up in the morning, do our jobs well and keep a positive approach to life. Given just the knowledge about life that we have today, and accepting it as fact, we don’t achieve anything but the loss of hope.

I think you choose the exception to the rule as though it were the rule. I agree, there are numerous things that can happen, which endanger the observing “I”, but the various examples you have given tell me nothing about how people in those circumstances experience their observing “I”.

Your insistence that one should demonstrate the existence of some thing called God fails to accept that God isn’t a “thing”. The Bible is clear on that, except when speaking metaphorically.

Demonstrably, over thousands of years, there has been faith. It is only since we try to apply rationality to religion that we find it doesn’t compute. But that is because it never should. The truth of the Bible, for example, is the “true to life” truth. It is listening to a poem that takes us back to the past. It is singing a song that reminds us of the last time we were singing with loved ones who have departed. It is observing a painting and being caught up in its colours. It is listening to a symphony and flying in the clouds. It is being in everyday situations and feeling an inspiration overcome us. It is being in a loving community and feeling it with all our senses. It is being in flow modus.

What other people do I can’t influence, and even if I do, then it was out of my control. The fruits of the spirit are not there to soothe, but they give a direction of flow in which everything wholesome can align and may then soothe or inspire, but most of all it spreads. The fruits of the spirit are the splitting of the light of love into a rainbow.

That is also my opinion, that if someone has a personal faith, the fruits will show it to be what it is.

The terrible things are the boundaries that we come up against, and we realise that we are not in Eden, but have been metaphorically driven out by our consciousness. Our knowledge of Good and Evil makes us no longer innocent and this presents us with borders that we can’t cross. It is what the sages that wrote Genesis came up against and tried (quite well in my opinion) to come up with some way of understanding it.

I’m still not really sure what you mean by this.

You can see it that way, but there are other ways to consider existence in this contradictory world.

If you are attempting to overcome the contradictions you encounter in the world, there is no book with an objective explanation. There only the books with metaphor, allegory, fables, and myths.

Yes. And those who believe in a God, the God, my God are able to concoct a “frame of mind”, “a psychological bearing” enabling them to intertwine that in the life they live. Still, what doesn’t go away for me is that distinction between what one is able to demonstrate is true about their own religious narrative and what can only be embodied in a leap of faith.

Thus:

And, indeed, I truly do miss that in my own life. But: I am no longer able to believe in God. I believe instead that “I” am embedded in the profoundly problematic mystery that is existence itself. And, here and now, there is nothing that enables me to go beyond it as that “brute facticity”, essentially meaningless and ending in oblivion.

That seems reasonable to me given the accumulation of actual experiences that I have had, coupled with the many, many hours I have spent groping and grappling with my own existence philosophically.

In fact, I am the first to acknowledge that even regarding my own observing “I”, there are simply too many variables in my actual lived life that were/are either beyond my control or understanding.

I just suggest that, in turn, this is applicable to you and to all others.

In fact, that is the whole point in my speculating about “I” here as an “existential contraption”. And certainly in regard to value judgments that revolve around God. What’s left then but that which we are in fact able to demonstrate is true in regard to this…and to all other aspects of our lives.

As with Ierrellus and others here, you have you own definition, your own understanding, your own take on God. I see this largely as an existential contraption rooted in the lives you’ve led…more so then in anything you are able to show us is true because there is evidence to substantiate it.

You can believe, say or claim to know anything about God. But then what? With immortality, salvation and divine justice itself on the line, that’s just not enough for some folks.

This part:

Look, if you are able to think yourself into believing this is a rational take on God and religion, fine, that works for you. It enables you to ground your own “I” in frame of mind that comforts and consoles you. And, sure, why not sustain this as the “bottom line” for you all the way to the grave.

I certainly once thought the same myself. But, over the course of our lived lives, each of us can come to think themselves into believing something they are not able to think themselves out of. Like me. But that’s the part I root existentially in dasein.

This is a psychologism to me. It is a frame of mind that wraps itself around the way the words make you feel. And that need be as far as it goes. But it is not connected to the world as I know it to be. Not in the context of a God said to be “loving, just, and merciful”.

Here [for me] there is only Harold Kushner’s take on Him.

And my own “bottom line” here basically revolves around this:

Okay, but, from my frame of mind [in a philosophy venue], someone will either bring his or her own personal faith out into the world of [at times wrenching] subjective/subjunctive human interactions, or it remains largely bundled up “in their head” as what I construe to be just one more psychological defense mechanism.

Stuff like this…

…just doesn’t connect with me anymore. It tells me little or nothing about God out in the world that I live in. Instead, it becomes what I have come to construe as the “mind’s eye” God. And even then assuming some measure of human autonomy.

Basically, it revolves around the assumption that you don’t think about these relationships as I do. For you the battle is intertwined in a considerably more substantial “self” grounded in a belief in God. Therefore it has a meaning far beyond anything I have access to now. For me, viewing human interactions in an essentially meaningless word that ends in oblivion deconstructs any battle as just another existential contraption rooted in dasein, conflicting goods and in the raw naked reality of political power.

Perhaps. But the points I raise above remain that which I have managed to think myself into believing is a reasonable assessment of the human condition in what I presume to be a No God world.

Nobody wants to hear negative aspects of their being, spouted from books that know nothing of they and their struggles with life… it’s condescending, negative, and unhelpful, in living a fulfilling 21st Century life. Bishop Spong’s got my vote.

MagsJ,
Thank you.

Is it a modification of definition that’s catching on and being implemented? even in small pockets of the Continent, or more widespread?

Has it been implemented in your place of worship Ierr? Most of the churches here have adopted something similar, including becoming multi-faith places of worship, in order to fill the empty pews… and don’t even get me started on the fairs, concerts and other such neighbourhood socialising events they hold.

I find “Confessions” very helpful in the situation I presently find myself in. For a long time I have been going through the same questions that Tolstoy describes in his “Confessions”, albeit without the thoughts of suicide that cornered him. Fortunately, that didn’t occur to me, even though life sometimes seemed so pointless, but especially when I saw my family I recognized my responsibility. However, I do feel tormented and fear the isolation whilst at the same time doing many things to cause my isolation.

I also came to the realization that our existence has a cause, as Tolstoy writes. This “coding of life” into the chaos of the universe briefly excited me, only to subside in the same way as Tolstoy describes his experience. One aspect he discovered, however, and which often goes unnoticed, is the fact that the “spirit” brings people together and is active among them. In intellectual discussion, however, it rarely occurs if it is present at all. In other words, the more we discuss (Latin discussus: to break apart, shaken, scattered), the less likely it is that the mind can be effective.

This understanding led Tolstoy to renounce his social status and to study the farmers in his area who had recently been taken out of slave status. Their conditions were not good, but their faith impressed Tolstoy. It also impressed me and fits well with my acquired understanding that when communities focus on good and healthy, more good happens. The opposite is also the case: whoever focuses on evil and that which is unhealthy, also experiences evil. The fact that Christianity uses (sometimes drastic) archetypal symbols and metaphors to enliven the representation of this reality only shows us how people were taught in the past. It takes nothing away from the truth of the stories.

The problem begins for me, as for Tolstoy, when one tries to judge the doctrine by reason. Teaching is very often what separates the different churches, and it does not help that they agree on central themes of the Gospel. This, in my opinion, should be the goal, instead the different churches have gone to war because of the differences in doctrine. Tolstoy experienced the conflict in Russia. There was also, among other conflicts, the Thirty Years’ War in Central Europe, which also made it clear that these conflicts were about power constellations and not about central teachings from the Gospels. How can one upkeep the command to love your neighbour, even one’s own enemy, and still go to war because of doctrinal differences?

I think we must accept that the stories of the Gospel, which carry so much truth in them, do not stand the test of academic decomposition, but speak directly to the part within us that recognizes what corresponds to life. The inspiration that leads to a focus on what is true, healthy and good, hits every true listener in the heart and is immediately understood. What is often lacking is the willingness or ability to act accordingly. God is what happens between people when love is shared.

All I can answer here is that hope and faith is what keeps us alive. That was what I realised when I read “Confessions” by Tolstoy. He struggled with faith and ended up embracing the simple faith based on the Gospels and ruled out the doctrines that he found himself unable to believe. It is a slender book, perhaps something for you to read.

I found that I wasn’t able to believe in the God that most theologians spoke of, moralising as they do. At the same time, I grasped the Sermon on the Mount as a central expression of my Christianity. I also found the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism helpful, where there is no mention of God. These two statements give me the standing and the perspective I need to progress through life. In addition to this, the Mystics approach that God is “no thing” has also helped my put things into perspective. I think our problem is self-induced to some degree, due to our adamant demand that any idea of God be reasonable, but our understanding of reason is limited if we can’t understand that our very presence in this strange universe isn’t reasonable.

I would say that the living force - I use the term metaphorically - in us keeps us alive and out of depression. I think it would be confused to think of depression and hopelessness as the default and anything else as delusory. Animals have few beliefs and certainly not like our equivalent verbal ones, yet they are rarely depressed. Depression and severe anxiety (over the problems in life, over death) are associated with a welter of beliefs. One can then add to these, for example, beliefs in a deity or something to soothe the problems caused by other beliefs.

Of course some lives are shattered, and without the option of getting out of certian kinds of holes (because it certainly helps if one has time and help to process, for example, trauma, and severe poverty can also devastating, some people are depressed anxiety due to their ongoing life situation. But it would be a mistake to think that the default state is depression and hopelessness.

I am not sure that faith (as if faith in God is necessary), but one needs some kind of focus. Something one loves to do, would love to do (better) and social connections as a base. For the person who is depressed they happy person may seem ‘in denial’. But this is confused. Hope is also a complicated concept. I think one needs some sense that one can achieve one’s goals, some of the things one loves to do or accomplish. I think ‘hope’ often elicits and image of a person yearning, sort of on the side of life, or locked in a cell, or looking out a windom. IOW as a kind of passive, hoping to win the next lottery, kind of thing. I see that thing that keeps us going as more inextricably tied in with activities and goals and people.

And then also viewing approach to a deity (or whatever) and one mediated by reason, rather than say, experience.

I cannot answer your legitimate concerns. I’ve not been to church in sometime. I learned of Spong by reading Dennett’s “Caught in the Pulpit”, a work about ministers who have had to change their ways of thinking about religion. As a former fundamentalist, I found Spong’s ideas liberating and hopeful.
The loudest voices of religion in the USA are still the fundamentalists. There is no progessive movement in the way the hippies did in the 60s USA, to my knowledge. Apparently, these ideas have not gotten down to street level, but are found in books the fundamentalists would probably not read, because they have not had an existential crisis that demands change of attitude. Yet I’ve been told, but cannot verify it, that in many polls the people do not claim to believe the old ways of thinking about religious dogma.

I don’t think that I meant that depression and hopelessness are the default, but they are the other end of the scale to hope and faith. This means that when hope and faith are destroyed or even weakened, the gradual recession comes and leads us downhill. Listening to a lecture by Jordan Peterson, he indicated that the flow of serotonin not only influence our posture and stance, but posture and stance can influence the flow of serotonin as well. This means that if you speak or act as if everything is depressive, serotonin levels become low and you gradually become depressed. The same principle is also true if you speak or act with hope or faith. Of course, this is only one part of a complex procedure in the body, but it illustrates my point.

I think the difference between us and animals is that they have been blessed with no conscious awareness that could make them depressive. Sure, a dog may look down in the dumps if it has to go out in the rain, but that is a long way off from depression. But the difference with us is that we can be a walking paradox, whilst animals (except cats maybe) are straightforward. Our projection of a possibility, that we regard as malevolent, into the future, may affect our outlook on life, whereas animals appear to live in the present.

I was using faith in this context in a wider sense. You need faith that what you’re doing is purposeful (at least I do) or right. You need hope in an outcome in order to proceed. That is probably what you call focus. But hope doesn’t necessarily have to do with yearning, except maybe in the middle of winter yearning for summer. To think of it, there are many things that one can yearn for, but I get the picture you’re painting.

But it isn’t a woeful yearning that I’m referring to, but hope and faith that you mostly take for granted. When that falters, it can have you lying in, missing appointments, ignoring the phone etc. Being active in life requires a positive mindset and that I call “hope and faith”.

I guess I prefer to terms (at least partly) positive expectation - generally based on past experiences coupled with temperment and intuition. Faith to me is too specific. I know you are using it in a broader sense, and I have also. But I think it is too hinged to an ontological assumption that there is a God. I don’t think one needs this to not be depressed. But this is me making suggestions of word use, not really disagreeing. I just see this as not based on having certain beliefs. We, like other animals, have momentum to engage in life. Beliefs can stop this momentum or potentially enhance it. We may fear death, suffer lost or missing connections to others, nature, meaninful work, but unless we have been severely damaged we will like wolves or deer continue to be social and work towards goals. Life carries its own momentum, regardless of the specifics of beliefs. You have to have extremely damaging events or circumstances, generally the latter and/or literally unhealthy thoughts and beliefs that take over to have this momentum stop. Humans are particularly vulnerable, due to their awareness to letting verbal cognitve thoughts take over and be destroyed or severely damaged by them. The default is not depression, as you agreed, but engagement.

I suppose I would say, metaphorically, that the animal in us will get knocked down and reengage with life, again and again. The only thing that stop that animals is not a lack of faith, but the present of thought schemas that tell the animal there is no point. I can feel sympathy for that and know how that can happen from personal experience. But the default is to engage.

I certainly believe that human beings can get waylaid by ideas that are totally contradictory to reality, which can cause all kinds of behaviour. But we can be of a malevolent, selfish nature or of a beneficial, caring nature. Both are engaging with life, coming from different backgrounds, and depending on what we have learnt as children to be the default. The “shadow” personality is often overlooked, because we are not really in touch with it and attempt to pretend that it isn’t there. It seems to be more powerful when we do that. We seem to be channels for various influences, good and bad.

One aspect is that the malevolent nature needs a “medium” with which it can express itself. The Bible is as good a medium as any other, but it can equally be used to find expression of the beneficial, caring nature. This is because the biblical mythology describes human nature with all of its features, looking from a meta perspective, but especially the nature of life when the beneficial spirit is driven out. The Bible describes above all the classical competition between Chaos and Order, which, when overdone, can also lead to a different kind of Chaos, but Chaos nonetheless. The Bible describes the physical default as entropy, degeneration and decay, which is not only in Autumn visible. The amount of extinct species shows it very clearly as well. The only thing that has enabled thriving civilizations has been the heroes of the past that have brought order and fought against decay. They aligned themselves with the epitome of all that is good – God. From the beginning, the Bible makes it clear that humans have a proclivity to degeneration, albeit we often lack an awareness of that fact.

Of course, there are people who assume that the Bible is describing a material reality, but it is really a metaphorical reality, nonetheless true if you go along with the story. Everywhere in the Bible, God is a mystery. How else? But I believe that people need a very clear vision of what is good in order to be able to struggle against the degeneration that is a part of life that we need to be aware of.

Oh, sure. I wasn’t thinking in terms of morals, just on what gets us out of bed in the morning to participate in life. The participation may nor may not be of a kind others appreciate.

Likewise, all I can really answer here myself is that in regard to hope and faith, one needs a context in which to explore them more substantively.

Hope for what and faith in what? Given what set of circumstances? Viewed from what vantage point?

And then of course given the extent to which God is able to substantiated Himself.

That’s the only thing that makes sense to me in a philosophy venue. That and in acknowledging there may well be limits here beyond which the tools of philosophy are even able to go.

Then it all becomes a subjective/subjunctive leap of faith. Rooted individually, as I see it, in dasein. And, here, all the philosophers and scientists in the world are clearly stymied.

We’ll just have to leave it at that for now. Until you are able to provide me with something that goes beyond what you have merely come to believe in your head. Or until I come upon an experience that allows me to fall back on more than that which I have come to believe in my head.

After all, all these centuries later what else still is there?

I have always regarded the search for something to hope for or believe in a search in my realm of experience, rather than from ideas that don’t hold water. My wife is especially wired that way and always someone I can bounce ideas off of. We struggled a while with evangelical ideas, found they didn’t hold water because of their insistence, against all proof, that the Bible is to be taken literally as a history and not as metaphorical, allegorical or mythical. It was so clear to me that this wasn’t going to sustain any faith or hope in me.

I made a leap of faith when I discovered the Mystics, who really suffered for insisting that God was “no thing” but a spirit that moves in love. It is when love is shared that God becomes a reality that can cause things to happen, that we regard as miraculous – because they don’t happen under normal circumstances. Of course, this spiritual phenomena can only be experienced when you align yourself with it, and it flows through you. This is apparently much more difficult that it looks on the surface. Aligning one’s self with love needs a lot of assistance. It requires tradition that is regularly being remembered in a narrative, and thereby enlivened. It requires enactment, as a habitual way of living; it requires ritual and celebration as encouragement; it requires commitment that shows sincerity and reliability.

The problem in the past is that taking things literally has been the attempt to do this, but, as the Apostle Paul has written, “the letter binds whereas the spirit enlivens”. If we have to be always consulting the book before we can act, it doesn’t work out. There is no spiritual flow, but at best an excitement in reaction to the words. The aspect of forgiveness is intended to make us free to act, even to make mistakes, but to do our best in letting the spirit of love flow through. If we’re blocked and can’t do that, then we do not experience God.

I wish you well, and that you find an experience that makes it more than “in your head”.

Iambiguous continues to remind me that this is a philosophy forum, limited to those matters which are amenable to rational discussion. Is that the case? Are revelations of at-one=ment experiences or feelings of holiness (Wholeness) all “in the head” and are thus too private and personal to be considered worthy topics of discussion by “rational and virtuous” persons who are worried about how to justify an afterlife with this one. Other than my take on progressive Christianity, I would not have barged in on Bob’s thread, but my name was mentioned by Iambiguous as another proponent of irrational beliefs.

It is still difficult to define and explain that which is an infinity confined to what seems like the present moment, it is an infinite, existing all at once as multiple things and aspects, simultaneously. Like “The many faced god” the god of death.

Iambiguous has set himself up as the arbiter of what is ‘in the head’ and what is not. He confuses ‘not in his head’ with ‘only in your head’, though he thinks he has science on his side. He also confuses learning with ‘words on a screen that would compel him.’ Ironically his depression and anxiety are not, however, just ‘in his head’, they are the phlogistan we are all in denial of. Remember how polite the members of the court were at Versailles. Politeness and ‘humility’ should never be confused with what is going on in a social interaction.

Yes, many people search for the same thing. Some find it in God, others in philosophy, others in political ideology. Though there have been hundreds and hundreds of hopelessly conflicting narratives down through the ages.

And, sure, many will focus almost entirely on self-gratification.

All I can do then is to focus the beam on how each individual comes to a particular set of conclusions about life predicated largely on the manner in which I have come to understand “I” embedded in existential layers embedded in the lives that they live.

The arguments I make in my signature threads.

That, in other words, there does not appear to be a way in which philosophers or scientists or theologians [among others] can take this into account and come up with the most reasonable or virtuous way to live.

Here [and now] is the existential leap of faith that you have come to embody:

And, given my own existential leap of faith to an essentially meaningless No God world ending in oblivion, I can only ponder the extent to which you are able to demonstrate that what you believe here is in fact something that can be demonstrated at all. Is it something that I might be able to embody myself?

My “thing” here in regard to God is the part about the actual behaviors that your narrative above prompts you to choose such that you connect the dots between them and what you imagine your fate to be after you die.

The rest [to me] is just a psychologism. A frame of mind that you have managed to think yourself into believing that comforts and consoles you. Sustaining this then becomes the primary aim rather than the part about convincing others that they too can share in this psychological balm.

There must be millions and millions of men and women able to embrace a “general description” of God and religion and love and forgiveness in this manner. But then comes the part where all of this becomes entangled existentially in conflicting goods — conflicts we are bombarded with in countless contexts that the news media pummel us with everyday.

And then the part where one encounters all of these vast and varied religious narratives that sooner or later have to come to grips with fitting God into their daily lives such that behaviors must be chosen and the consequences lived with given that there either is or is not a place for “I” on the other side of the grave.

Same here. I certainly wish you well in turn. And I can assure you that if I happen upon this experience, I will bring it here and allow others to react to it.

Again and again: You believe what you do about God. And what you believe about God clearly sustains some measure of comfort and consolation. And, sure, that can mark the end of the discussion.

But, in my view, your belief is either able to be communicated to others in a way that goes beyond personal experience and self- serving arguments or it cannot.

In a philosophy venue.

Though, by all means, don’t go there if you prefer not to.

I make no bones about my own entirely existential approach to God here. “I” as dasein comes to believe what he or she does. And, based on that belief, he or she chooses certain behaviors here and now. And, at least in part, that would seem to be related to how one connects the dots in turn between God and what happens after you die.

What is religion if not profoundly embedded in that?!

You have your “progressive Christianity” narrative. And that competes [whether you call it that or not] with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of additional narratives all claiming – as you do – that their own rendition of God is more, what, reasonable?

But one thing seems certain. However many different people embrace how many different narratives, they all share in common the belief that God allows them to ground “I” in something that transcends the brute facticity of an essentially meaningless existence that ends in oblivion.

Something I no longer have access to “in my head”. I can only hope that someday I might reconnect to that frame of mind again myself.