on discussing god and religion

Consider…

There was the man that he was, there and then, in regard to behaviors that he chose. Either alone or among others. He did not believe in God and so those behaviors were derived from that assumption. And we must never forget it’s the behaviors that we choose that precipitate consequences for others. As long as they remain only “in our head” others are reasonably removed from any consequences.

But: just because you do believe in a No God world does not make the existence of God any more or less certain. It all comes down to the extent to which, as with believers, you have faith in what you do believe about No God.

In other words, does the definition of “atheist” include the capacity to demonstrate that in fact there is no God? Nope, not in my dictionary.

Me, I always go back to the gap between what we think about God and all that can be, must be known about Him going back to the explanation for why there is any existence at all. And why this existence and not another?

In this sense, for all practical purposes, we are all agnostics.

The Gods of Spinoza & Teilhard de Chardin
Derek Harrison compares radically alternative visions of the absolute.

Imagine being called all of these things and then, to the extent that they are applicable, being asked by someone like me to explain how each description can be, as well, attributed to the things that you choose to do out in the world with others. In particular [for me] the part that revolves around pantheism.

This is a frame of mind that, with respect to God, religion and life that you live, I have never been able to come even close to wrapping my head around. With a God/the God, I am at least able to imagine an actual entity, a particular being up there/out there able to explain everything else. A “thing” that one can turn to for the “final answer”.

With pantheism how does one even begin to describe how it actually all unfolds? Being “at one” with the “universe as a whole”? The divine universe? The cosmos itself as the ontological and teleological font you entrust “I” to both before and after you die? It simply does not make any practical sense at all. Not to me. You explain nothing beyond “that’s just how it is”.

Okay, but back again to this: In what context? If, with respect to God and religion, you are an advocate for his line of reasoning, how does it all come together when you are immersed in a set of circumstances in which because you think like you do, you choose this behavior rather than another?

The Gods of Spinoza

^ The God of Spinoza realizes every possibility extending from infinite to infinite. There is always a bigger fish. By letting go of physical/emotional bondage, we begin to understand why we act as we do and, even though we become our own cause through reason, being our own cause is more free than being controlled by the effects of lower nature. Mind is eternal. Nobody can hate God. God comes to know himself through us. Evolution manifests all attributes of God over time until we reach the ultimate divine station.

And you actually go about demonstrating this to others…how?

All of the possibilities for every world model have somehow been pre-contained in the quantum source, what cosmologist Micho Kaku calls countless genesis coming from an ocean of Nirvana. Nirvana is timeless, and is mind, God’s mind, looking at every outpouring, and shaping it. We do this ourselves for God too, as through us, God comes to know himself.

The very fact and miracle that we are here shows that there is purpose, there is meaning, and there is destiny, even destiny to make it more perfect than it ever was before. Time will make space perfect.

And you actually go about demonstrating this to others…how?

Man would always be in a very limited position if he never made a leap of faith.

On discussing God and religion in the age of the coronavirus:

nytimes.com/2020/03/22/opin … e=Homepage

The arguments are made. Then the reactions to the arguments. Then the part where the reactions revolve in large part around your actual set of circumstances intertwined in your faith or your philosophy of life.

Here and now.

I don’t know about you, but on Easter I plan to join thousands of others in a packed mega-church.

I have no idea what I’ll be doing on Easter… so much for that illuminated path, all lit up with arrows n everything.

A pretty path, none-the-less…

Oh, I do know what I’ll be doing for Easter… I’ll be mostly staying in, so mostly not going out.

I was, of course, making and ironic reference to Donald Trump, who was talking about ending social distancing here by Easter so that the U.S. economy could recover and people crowd into churches. He has, since then reversed himself, as he often does, and extended the social distancing advisory until at least April 30th.

I missed that jest, but even the Vatican is on quarantine, let alone all other public places and venues… humans and their routines, huh?

The UK is looking to extend ours up to June… those two months best be spent well, on Op stings and the like.

The Gods of Spinoza & Teilhard de Chardin
Derek Harrison compares radically alternative visions of the absolute.

Here I wish that anyone might be willing to take up the task of explaining how, however or whatever one holds this relationship to be, it is able to be described in terms of the lives that we live from day to day to day.

Is that even possible at all?

You get up in the morning, turn on the TV and there it is: wall to wall coverage of the coronavirus. Now, given whatever one construes the relationship between God and/or Nature and/or the Universe to be, where does their reaction to this terrible pandemic fit into it?

Instead, in magazine articles like this – here it’s Philosophy Now – we get this sort of assessment:

Got that? So, given this, why do things like the covid-19 virus exist at all? With the God of Abraham we can at least imagine some entity up there/out there bringing it about for reasons that are beyond the grasp of mere mortals. Then it is possible for these mere mortals to concoct rationalizations like “God works in mysterious ways”. And that however much this affliction may make your own individual existence a living hell here and now, know that God loves you and that in time it will all become better. And clearer

Spinioza’s God then “transcends” all of this. But in a way that also transcends the very lives that we live. After all, how does one connect the dots between one and the other. To me it’s like trying to connect the dots between enlightenment and Nirvana in Buddhism. It all becomes whatever you manage to think yourself into believing that it is in your head.

The Gods of Spinoza & Teilhard de Chardin
Derek Harrison compares radically alternative visions of the absolute.

For me [of course], it is then even more important to take these distinctions out into the world around us and to note how they are relevant to our own interactions with others as that reflects on morality here and now and immortality there and then.

So, can anyone cite instances where Spinoza himself explores this aspect of God.

Imagination then leading to faith. More or less blind. But at least this devotion is able to zero in on one or another rendition of a God, the God, my God. From the old man with the long white beard in the sky to any other imagined entity.

But Spinoza’s God?

Think about that. Only in trying to it all eventually becomes ineffable. If Spinoza’s universe is objective what does that tell you about self-conscious entities such as ourselves? If we are of and in this universe how are we no less determined by its laws? And how would Spinoza address the quandary – the antinomy? – embedded in mindless matter evolving into mindful matter able to concoct conflicting arguments such as this?

And what of the is/ought world?

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Re Ethics

Okay, let’s bring this down to earth by focusing in on a particular context in which conflicting goods precipitate conflicting behaviors precipitating consequences deemed moral by some and immoral by others.

Someone here can explain the manner in which Spinoza might react to it. In particular given his assumptions about God. And his assumptions about what the universe really is.

Then we can focus in on how he actually went about demonstrating – experimentally, experientially – why and how this is the case.

The inevitably futile attempt to somehow square the coronavirus with God:

nytimes.com/2020/04/11/opin … e=Homepage

[b]'Still, the turn to Easter is an appropriate time to ponder questions of meaning amid the welter of death and suffering worldwide. A pandemic sharpens the permanent questions of theodicy, the debates over whether it’s reasonable to believe in a good and loving God in a world so rife with misery. But because any justification of God’s ways can seem smug and abstract when set against the awful particularities of sorrow, believers often eschew frontal debate in these moments, emphasizing solidarity and mystery rather than burdening the suffering with our moral speculations.

‘In these pages, for instance, the famous Jesuit, Father James Martin, recently argued that “the mystery of suffering is unanswerable,” that no explanation suffices for all the diversities of human pain, and therefore what Christians must offer instead of argument is the person of Jesus — whose ministry of healing both reveals a loving God and shows us where to find his presence today, among people caring for the grieving, the dying and the sick.’

'Writing in Time magazine, the famous Anglican theologian N.T. Wright offered a similar conclusion: Instead of seeking explanations for our present disaster, we should “recover the biblical tradition of lament,” an expression of solidarity both with our fellow humans and with God himself, who in the Old Testament grieves for his people’s infidelity and in the person of Jesus weeps for Lazarus. The Christian tradition, Wright argues, doesn’t require us to “explain what’s happening and why. In fact, it is part of the Christian vocation not to be able to explain — and to lament instead.”[/b]

And on and on with many additional such rationalizations.

In other words, unless, of course, as far as you are concerned, it is not futile at all.

And, sure, to the extent your own understanding of it all manages to work for you, that need be as far as you go.

From my own frame of mind, whether someone pulls away from God here or is drawn in closer, it all revolves around recognizing that there is really no other alternative.

You either accept that it is all somehow part of an ultimately loving, just and merciful God’s plan, or…or what?

No God and you have to endure the pain of it all with no ultimate meaning; and then accept that, if the virus fells you or someone you love, there is only oblivion in the end.

On the other hand, what of the pantheists? Or Buddhists? Or even Scientologists? How on earth do they react to something like the covid-19 pandemic?

Wholeness is a matter of balance between order and chaos. Human society including globalization brings us order. But, it also brings us chaos–this time in the form of a pandemic. To the individual whose awareness is centered in the Tao, there nothing shocking or surprising about this.

Again, you think up “general description intellectual contraptions” like this one and they work for you. They allow to put the coronavirus into a comforting and consoling compartment in your brain that “explains” it. End of story. Yours.

Meanwhile on this thread what I am far more interested in discussing is how this explanation pertains to the behaviors that you – the real me – choose in interacting with others such that you arrive at a conclusion regarding the right thing to do here and now as that pertains to the fate of your own particular “I” – soul? – there and then on the other side of the grave.

Prompting you to concoct yet another general description intellectual contraption for why you choose not to go there.

Then around and around we go.

I have only to look at the fruit that your way of thinking brings to your life as shown by your interaction with others on this forum, to conclude that it’s a miserable way to look at life that ought to be avoided. Of course, another way to look at it is that its not a way that you’ve actually chosen but rather a way that has chosen you.

Your perseverative way of thinking and interacting has a character of obsessive-compulsion. There is psychotropic medication that can attenuate those symptoms in many cases and which is often more effective in conjunction with cognitive behavioral psychotherapy.

But that would entail the admission that you have a problem and seeking treatment or at least a consultation. And that would require personal insight in the first place. Whereas what I’ve seen from you on this forum is resistance to and inability to learn from the critical insights of others about what you’re doing. So in my estimation the prognosis is not favorable.

Anyway my Taoist philosophy doesn’t fit into your narrow religious framework. Too bad for your religious framework.

Exactly. If you are going to have a philosophy of life at least make it one that prompts you to feel good? That way you can react to a world bursting at the seams with conflicting goods precipitating all manner of human pain and suffering with the least amount of misery yourself. Then choose behaviors that don’t rock the boat and concoct one or another narrative “in your head” that includes an afterlife of some sort.

One can imagine all those religious folks reacting to Nietzsche in much the same way. Why on earth would someone not believe in God with so much at stake!! So Nietzsche himself had to devise a philosophy of life in a No God world that included the Ubermen. At least on this side of the grave one could become the master rather than the slave.

Like I said, if your own intellectual contraption here works for you, you win. The coronavirus [like everything else] is snugly contained in what you believe is true in your head.

Again, my argument is that one’s religious views are rooted in both. You don’t choose to be born at a particular time historically and in a particular place culturally. You don’t choose to be indoctrinated for years as a child to view God/No God in the way that others insist that you do. And then as an adult you only have so much understanding and control over all of the myriad existential variables that ceaselessly construct, deconstruct and reconstruct “I” from the cradle to the grave given a particular sequence of experiences, relationships and access to information, knowledge and ideas.

How is this not applicable to you?

From my frame of mind [and that’s all it is] this is analogous to the sort of ponderous intellectual gibberish I get from folks like Meno.

And, on any other thread, sure, bust your brain coming up with I construe to be autodidactic pedantry. But over and over and over again I remind folks that I created this thread in order to bring thinking like that out into the world of human interactions such that you choose particular behaviors deemed to be righteous so as to achieve the fate you desire for “I” in the afterlife.

And Taoists either have a rendition of this or they don’t.

And if that is the case [and in fact it is] what are you even doing here at all? Is your whole point merely to remind us that your own religious views are a comfort and a consolation to you?

Or do you have an actual argument aimed at demonstrating why my assessment here is, philosophically or otherwise, less reasonable than your own?