on discussing god and religion

[phyllo]

How on earth would I know? Something or someone created existence. Or existence has always...existed? And we either have some measure of autonomy in existing or we don't. That's just one more profound mystery embedded in existence.

Right?

An "obligated God" is another dot. Why put in an extra dot without a reason? Now you have to back out of connecting that dot with other dots.

A lot of things believed on this thread have seemed silly to me.

But you're the one who is "trying to made sense of things". Why muddy it with the concept of obligations in a determined universe? A determined universe only has "mindless" motion.

Unless of course we are all just characters [or caricatures] created in some unimaginably mysterious entity's simulated reality.

Sure, maybe even God's. Maybe even your God's.

Things are as they appear to be. If this is a simulation, then there is no way to know that it is a simulation.

[iambiguous]

But given that God will claim all souls -- both the liberals and the conservatives, the believers and the non-believers, the saints and the sinners -- does it really make any difference then what behaviors we choose?

Does it really make any difference whether you spend your entire day in a drug induced state or not?

I would say that it does make a difference to you and to the people around you. Some paths are better than others.

Yes, but most religious narratives revolve around determining how God will judge this behavior.

Right?

And what can any of us really know about the lives of those who do choose this behavior? While it may seem irrational to us, that is only because, given the particular trajectory of our lives to date, we are predisposed existentially to think and to feel in a different manner.

But then any number of folks who do live their lives in a drug induced state here and now had no doubt once imagined that this sort of thing would never, ever be a choice that they made.

It depends on, among other things, just how much pain there is to be swept away; or on how many viable options are open to you.

But ultimately, the individual makes a choice for him/herself.

Okay, but "I" here is always nestled in one or another historical and cultural and experiential trajectory. And, in a world of contingency, chance and change, we never really know when new experiences, relationships and sources of information/knowledge etc., might yank us in a whole other direction; and with a whole other point of view.

Unless, of course, you are an objectivist.

[iambiguous]

How on earth would I know? Something or someone created existence. Or existence has always...existed? And we either have some measure of autonomy in existing or we don't. That's just one more profound mystery embedded in existence.

Right?

An "obligated God" is another dot. Why put in an extra dot without a reason? Now you have to back out of connecting that dot with other dots.

I don't know about dots, but "existence" either had a beginning or it did not. And a God, the God, your God is either embedded in there somewhere or He is not.

And mere mortals here on this teeny tiny planet in the staggering vastness of what may or may not be the multiverse, either have some level of autonomy or they do not.

All I can come back to then is the extent to which what you believe about all of this "in your head" is something that you can demonstrate that all reasonable men and women ought to believe in turn.

Whatever that even means given the gap between what any particular one of us might believe and that which would need to be known in order to grasp it all, say, objectively, essentially, wholly?

And that's before we get to the specific aim of this thread: exploring the dots that connect the behaviors we choose on this side of the grave and whatever is to be our fate on the other side of it.

A lot of things believed on this thread have seemed silly to me.

But you're the one who is "trying to made sense of things". Why muddy it with the concept of obligations in a determined universe? A determined universe only has "mindless" motion.

But isn't that what sites like this were created for: to explore these relationships? To ponder the extent to which the mindful matter [us] that has evolved in what [given God] may or may not [ultimately] be a mindless universe, is able to fathom [ontologically, teleologically] existence?

Unless of course we are all just characters [or caricatures] created in some unimaginably mysterious entity's simulated reality.

Sure, maybe even God's. Maybe even your God's.

Things are as they appear to be. If this is a simulation, then there is no way to know that it is a simulation.

Unless, of course, there is a God [your God] and He maps it all out for you in Paradise.

Just out of curiosity, how close or how far is this from what you believe "in your head" now?

[phyllo]

Every time the soup starts to clear, you throw in some more crap to muddy it again. That's your thing.

[iambiguous]

Every time the soup starts to clear, you throw in some more crap to muddy it again. That's your thing.

I'll go way out on the limb here and suggest to others that the soup starts to clear when you say so.

[phyllo]

It starts to clear when it's possible to make some reasonable statements. You know ... when some of the dots get connected. That's when YOU put in more dots so that it appears that there are always fewer and fewer connections and that no progress is possible.

[phyllo]

You basically sabotage every effort - to help you out of your dilemma, to bring things down to earth, to discuss constructively.

[iambiguous]

It starts to clear when it's possible to make some reasonable statements. You know ... when some of the dots get connected. That's when YOU put in more dots so that it appears that there are always fewer and fewer connections and that no progress is possible.

I'll go way out on the limb here and suggest to others that progress is whatever you say it is.

[phyllo]

No doubt, you will just keep saying those sorts of things.

[iambiguous]

It starts to clear when it's possible to make some reasonable statements. You know ... when some of the dots get connected. That's when YOU put in more dots so that it appears that there are always fewer and fewer connections and that no progress is possible.

Okay, bring this down to earth and note the extent to which, when human behaviors come into conflict over, among other things, religious and political values, reasonable statements are made.

And, again, I'll go way out on the limb and suggest to others that progress here is whatever you say it is.

With religion though the bottom line is always the same:

1] there are the dots that we connect between the values we embrace and the behaviors that we choose
2] there are the dots that we connect between the behaviors we choose and the religious narrative that we embrace
3] there are the dots that God connects between the behaviors that we choose, the religious narrative that we embrace and Judgment Day.

If there is a God.

In any event, existentially, down through the ages, there have been hundreds and hundreds of conflicting and contradictory renditions of this.

And that's a historical fact, my friend. I'm not just making it up.

[phyllo]

I will go out on a limb and say that "historical facts" are whatever you say they are ... as are conflicts, values, reasonable statements, "connecting the dots". Since you have no standards for evaluating this stuff, your judgement is whatever pops into you head at any moment. You are certainly not prepared to agree to any shared standards.

Therefore requests to "bring it down to earth" are laughable. You simply toss way any statement offered as not meeting your current demands. Just as you throw away anything that I say about "progress" or the clearing of "the soup".

Yet somehow you manage to convince yourself that you are doing philosophy and trumping all opponents.

[Magnus Anderson]

He just reduced you to . . . not being a God.

[Ierrellus]

Until the final reclamation, karma preserves ethics. It's an evolved adaptation tool. See the Auden quote below.
The Golden Rule for ecosystems=what you do to others will be done to yourself.
So, Iamb, are you an isolated entity?

[iambiguous]

I will go out on a limb and say that "historical facts" are whatever you say they are ... as are conflicts, values, reasonable statements, "connecting the dots". Since you have no standards for evaluating this stuff, your judgement is whatever pops into you head at any moment. You are certainly not prepared to agree to any shared standards.

Here we are all "stuck". Why? Because we are all embedded in that ubiquitous gap between what we think we know about reality/existence and all that would need to be known in order to actually settle questions like this.

Does this or does this not seem reasonable to you?

In the interim, are we or are we not left with that which we either can demonstrate to be true for all of us [historically or otherwise] or that which may or may not be true for all of us but is in fact "here and now" true for any particular one of us "in our head".

Again, though, whatever that might actually mean given an omniscient [ontological] understanding of Being itself. Which most religious folks attribute to God.

You and I on the other hand are left squabbling endlessly about things of this sort that neither one of us seem able to demonstrate much beyond believing something that either comforts and consoles us [and others] or, instead, disconcerts and discomfits us [and others].

I have absolutely no illusions regarding how folks will react to the things that [here and now] "I" happen to believe are true "in my head".

Therefore requests to "bring it down to earth" are laughable. You simply toss way any statement offered as not meeting your current demands. Just as you throw away anything that I say about "progress" or the clearing of "the soup".

Or perhaps you are making all of this much more convoluted than it need be.

I created this thread in order that those who do believe in one or another rendition of God can at least make the attempt to connect the dots [existentially] between 1] the behaviors that they choose on this side of the grave 2] their understanding of God and 3] how these things became intertwined here and now "in their head" when they try to imagine their fate on the other side of the grave.

What is it about "down to earth" here that you don't understand?

Better still, go ahead, give it a try.

Yet somehow you manage to convince yourself that you are doing philosophy and trumping all opponents.

Look, over and over again I note that I am entangled in my dilemma above. This precludes my being able embrace a moral/political narrative/agenda that allows me to believe that I am doing either the right or the wrong thing when my values -- deemed entirely existential contraptions -- clash with those of others.

And since I do not believe in God, the abyss -- oblivion -- looms ever more ominously on the horizon.

How on earth then does that enable me to "trump" or to "thump" all opponents?

What am I missing here?

And, with respect to the aim of this thread, how would you construe "doing philosophy" in a more appropriate manner?

[iambiguous]

Until the final reclamation, karma preserves ethics. It's an evolved adaptation tool. See the Auden quote below.
The Golden Rule for ecosystems=what you do to others will be done to yourself.

Maybe. But, again, what "on earth" do you mean by this? In what particular context?

And how do you relate it to the thrust of this tread: examining actual behaviors, actual beliefs in God and actual understandings of one's fate beyond the grave?

And how that becomes intertwined in any one particular "sense of reality".

So, Iamb, are you an isolated entity?

Oh, yeah.

Is that all the explanation you need?

[Ierrellus]

"God is a verb, not a noun."--Deepak Chopra. Recognizing that is the first step toward enlightenment, which makes anything we say about God a lie (Eckhart).
Enlightenment is here and now union with God, it has no need for reference to any hereafter. You are involved in eternity now. Your task on earth is to contribute positively to the ecosystems that sustain you and all life because you are an integral part of all that exists.
The concern of how to live this life in order to justify some reward in some afterlife is a consideration that few postmoderns find worthwhile. Most spiritual persons don't even think along those lines, and the fundies, although loud, are dwindling into a minority.
You are connected to all that exists. Because we share so much in common, our qualia cannot be seen as radically different.

[Chakra Superstar]

"God is a verb, not a noun."--Deepak Chopra.

Don't mean to nit-pick but that phrase is a corruption of a phrase that comes from the Advaita school - not Chopra. In its English form, it's at least a hundred years old and has even been attributed to Buchminster Fuller.

Normally, I'd ignore its attribution but my utter disdain for Deepak Chopra and his Oprah/new-age/everyone-gets-a-car/spiritual (cough) gurus, compels me to respond.


Sorry to interrupt. As you were.

[Ierrellus]

"God is a verb, not a noun."--Deepak Chopra.

Don't mean to nit-pick but that phrase is a corruption of a phrase that comes from the Advaita school - not Chopra. In its English form, it's at least a hundred years old and has even been attributed to Buchminster Fuller.

Normally, I'd ignore its attribution but my utter disdain for Deepak Chopra and his Oprah/new-age/everyone-gets-a-car/spiritual (cough) gurus, compels me to respond.


Sorry to interrupt. As you were.

Sorry to not supply the history of the quote, but more sorry to hear of your feelings for Chopra, Oprah, et.al. It smacks of the us vs them mentality that keeps the world in its current divided mess. It also hints at the fundy justice system of rewards and punishments. i.e, those fat and rich and popular must be doing something wrong spiritually in order to get ahead of us plodding masses in the material world.

[iambiguous]

"God is a verb, not a noun."--Deepak Chopra.

Either as noun or as a verb, one is willing to situate their own sense of God and religion out in the particular world that they live in or they are not.

How do you imagine that Chopra would react to the points that I raise here?

How does he connect the dots between behaviors that he chooses here and now, his understanding of God and his imagined fate on the other side of the grave?

Or would he too just bring the discussion back up into the stratosphere of, among other things, psychologisms?

In other words, this sort of thing:

Enlightenment is here and now union with God, it has no need for reference to any hereafter. You are involved in eternity now. Your task on earth is to contribute positively to the ecosystems that sustain you and all life because you are an integral part of all that exists.

Okay, you think this. Sincerely, genuinely. And in thinking this it evokes a subjunctive frame of mind [a mental dispostion] in which you can embed "I" so as to anchor your sense of reality in something that effectively obviates the manner in which folks like me construe an essentially absurd and meaningless world that culminates [for each particular "I"] in oblivion.

This works for you. It does not work for me. Though, sure, maybe that might change.

The concern of how to live this life in order to justify some reward in some afterlife is a consideration that few postmoderns find worthwhile. Most spiritual persons don't even think along those lines, and the fundies, although loud, are dwindling into a minority.

Again, this is wholly abstract. Just one more "general description" of human interaction that you are able to believe is true "in your head". Thus your own objectivist font of choice here is a God that brings salvation to all.

You are connected to all that exists. Because we share so much in common, our qualia cannot be seen as radically different.

I won't ask you what this means pertaining to the thrust of this thread because you obviously have no intention of going there.

It's all about what you are able to convince yourself is true about God because in believing this it gives you considerably more peace of mind than anything that I am able to [here and now] fathom.

Unless of course you're right.

[Ierrellus]

Iamb,
I cannot speak for Chopra on these matters. I don't always agree with what he says except when he brings the topic down to earth. My objective is to see matter not as curse or illusion, but as necessity and morality as ecological (also a necessity).
I appreciate your honesty.

[iambiguous]

Iamb,
I cannot speak for Chopra on these matters. I don't always agree with what he says except when he brings the topic down to earth. My objective is to see matter not as curse or illusion, but as necessity and morality as ecological (also a necessity).
I appreciate your honesty.

From my perspective here though, the point isn't what Chopra says, but the extent to which he is able to convince me that what he claims to know is true "in his head" is something that, in turn, he is able to convince me to believe is true as well.

After all, what else is there?!

What else is there to fall back on when folks discuss things like the existence of God? Or ponder distinctions between right and wrong behavior?

Only if I continue to suggest that, in order to feel some measure of psychological comfort and consolation, religious folks believe what they do about connecting the dots between "here and now" and "there and then", will they go deeper. Only then are they likely to probe their own religious trajectories and bring perspectives that revolve around things like "necessity and morality as ecological" down to earth.

They say that they have had "personal experiences" that led them to God. Okay, bring that into the discussion I tell them. Note how these experiences have come to aid and abet them in making the choices that they do among the living in order that they will still be around [whatever they imagine that means] to reflect God's will on the other side.

In other words, to what extent are they able to translate this into something other than just a "frame of mind"?

And the bottom line with your own frame of mind is that very, very few religious folks are inclined to believe that God saves all.

Yet that doesn't make the enormity of what is at stake here go away. The whole point of making religious distinctions between the saints and sinners is to create a transcendental font actually able to make this distinction.

It's not for nothing that this is at the heart and soul of the overwhelming preponderance of religious denominations.

But, from my frame of mind, you make this go away merely by believing it.

On the other hand, isn't this part all that matters?

I get that part. But I can no longer embody it myself.

[Ierrellus]

There is no sin; there is only one's forgetting who and what he is and who and what he is part of. If mind could alter matter. we'd all be in some favorite heaven by now. We do not transcend in a deterministic world which is comprised of overlapping ecosystems. Like it or not we are enmeshed in these systems, and we forget our place in them at our own peril. There is death on this planet, but it is usually a transition of the physical body to fuel for other life forms. What becomes of mind at death? No one knows for certain, which is why there are so many takes on the matter. Belief has only to be believed as true in order to comfort. So why not find comfort in belief that all will be saved, or will remember at last who they are?

[A Shieldmaiden]

There are people who enjoy rational thought and tend to despise the emotions, they prefer the experience of a kind of euphoria from the purity of intelligence and the satisfaction of rational thinking. The mind enjoys immensely the way it is logical and controlling but above all makes sense of disorder, one could say almost mathematical. So it would not be unreasonable to say by comparison that emotions are all over the place, they are not precise and they can quickly get out of control, so why would an educated person, a scientist, for example, believe in creation. It seems quite reasonable that they would gravitate and defend Darwinian evolution or even theistic evolution, a figurative (non-literal) interpretation of the Genesis account of creation. The biblical account of Genesis has been deduced to a religious myth and only those uneducated in scientific methods, would seriously entertain any validity in such a "myth", yet there are scientists who have doubts about evidence for evolution.

The Latin word religare, means “to tie, to bind”, which perhaps could explain the experience or power religion has on some.

[Ierrellus]

I would argue that religions and ethics began when the brain evolved enough to allow consciousness of Self, as this this in place of ordinarily this and that consciousness. Evolution of life forms depends on the deterministic creative agendas of DNA. Cosequently, philosophies that deny the self or eschew evolutionary theories are not my cup of tea. The real debate between some scientists and some philosophers has to do with whether the creative agenda of DNA is purposeful or random and fortuitous. I opt for purpose.

Some religious thinkers believe that the advent of the "I', the fall into mind, is the root of all evil because the "I' can easily forget its place in the we. Some, such as the writers Of ACIM, believe evil is the lie of dearth, the thought that there isn't really enough of necessities to go around thus perpetuating us vs them mentality. But the "I " is a lens of consciousness, an evidence of the personal. It is not the gateway to hell or to delusion.

[iambiguous]

There is no sin; there is only one's forgetting who and what he is and who and what he is part of. If mind could alter matter. we'd all be in some favorite heaven by now. We do not transcend in a deterministic world which is comprised of overlapping ecosystems. Like it or not we are enmeshed in these systems, and we forget our place in them at our own peril. There is death on this planet, but it is usually a transition of the physical body to fuel for other life forms. What becomes of mind at death? No one knows for certain, which is why there are so many takes on the matter. Belief has only to be believed as true in order to comfort. So why not find comfort in belief that all will be saved, or will remember at last who they are?

I can only react to this as but one more "general description" of human interactions that you happen to believe "here and now" to be true "in your head".

That, in believing it, it does comfort and console you.

But that, with respect to the aim of this thread, you won't take this belief there.

It works for you. It doesn't work for me. Or not anymore.

Let's move on?