"I am a jealous God"

U

ULTRA

Realistically Surreal
Registered Senior Member
Hi folks.

I've been wondering why God subscribes to human emotions? Or could it be that we are gifted with Godly emotions...

He is said to "suffer" from jealousy, anger, wrath and love amongst other things. Are these needed to be perfect? In a diety are they perfectly in balance? Certainly he doesn't seem to mind "smiting" people now and again.

I find the whole thing rather curious.

Regards

Ultra.
 
I find the whole thing rather ridiculous.


I also find it very indicative of the source of gods.
 
i don't know what god is. i tend to the think what we call the father is law, and law is not emotional at all. i have had ongoing interactions with the spirit which i've perceived as beneficial, but have never gotten the impression that the spirit was emotional at all. in regards to love, i have recognized that from the spirit, but not the emotionally or sexually driven love that humans so often engage in. it's more of a value, and a willingness to act in one's best interest regardless of emotions. but jesus was a human. he had emotions. perhaps they talk of god this way so we can relate?
 
ULTRA said:
I've been wondering why God subscribes to human emotions? . . . . He is said to "suffer" from jealousy, anger, wrath and love amongst other things.. . . . Certainly he doesn't seem to mind "smiting" people now and again.
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Because man created God in his own image, and then wrote stories about God in which he returned the favor.
 
Hahaa. Good 'un Fraggle. I'm a biologist so you wouldn't expect me to believe in God, but I do believe we have a spirit or soul or whatever you want to call it. I say this because long before we were born we had an undeniable potential to be. Assuming that the universe is infinate then this potential is also infinate. So given the right conditions to exist and an eternity of potential it seems likely we will continue to be eventually.

If there is a diety, it would probably need less conditions to be than we do, not needing sustinance, air or even a planet to stand on.

Whether such a diety would need or require emotions is an interesting question though because if it did not, then what does it do for motivation?
 
Well without motivation or emotion, why would he care about anything? Why would he do anything. It would be a bland mechanical existence.
 
ULTRA said:
Well without motivation or emotion, why would he care about anything? Why would he do anything. It would be a bland mechanical existence.
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This is your own delusion how can you possibly know if God needs to care to do something His actions cannot be like our actions as we need to put effort into something or work for something or become commited to something that's all weakness or limitation. It's impossible that God is mechanical unless you are talking about delusions and not God.
 
Hey now, I'm not being confrontational, simply exploring possibilities like any good scientist should..Now surely you cannot claim to know the mind of god? If we are made in his image it follows his thinking processes are at least somewhat like ours (though likely more powerful). What is a got without motivation? why would he bother constructing us troublesome humans if he had at least a sense of humour. Why smite us when we do him wrong if he doesn't know how to care? It doesn't make sense.
 
And look at his "Chosen People". They end up Killing his son, being murdered by the Nazis, persecuted all over the place and being plonked on stolen land with no oil of all things. What's he trying to say?
 
ULTRA said:
And look at his "Chosen People". They end up Killing his son, being murdered by the Nazis, persecuted all over the place and being plonked on stolen land with no oil of all things. What's he trying to say?
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That's a common misunderstanding of the term. In Abrahamist mythology, God chose the Hebrew people to reveal himself in his true monotheistic nature. He wanted this truth to be spread throughout the land, so that all the traditional polytheistic religions (with their more useful multi-dimensional model of the human spirit) would be abandoned. So he made a deal with the Jews: "You promise that you will evangelize the one true faith, and in return I will free you from bondage in Egypt." This is referred to as "The Covenant" between God and his Chosen People.

We all know how that worked out. Judaism, the original Abrahamic religion, went on to be the only non-evangelical Abrahamic religion. The Jewish community grows only by reproduction, with the occasional conversion more than balanced out by the more common abandonment of the faith. Today only one human being in five hundred is Jewish, not at all what God had in mind.

So God punished his Chosen People for failing to honor their Covenant. Millennia of conquest, occupation, destruction of the Temple, Diaspora, the antisemitism that virtually defined European Christendom, the Holocaust, the refusal of the Europeans to take Jewish refugees back after WWII, the kindly British giving them one of their old WWI trophies as a homeland without bothering to notice that it was already somebody else's homeland... all of this has been God's eternal punishment for failing to uphold their end of the bargain called The Covenant.

This lesson was not lost when the next two Abrahamic religions began metastasizing out of the Middle East like cancer epidemics. Evangelism is one of the core principles of both Christianity and Islam. So today half of all human beings are either Christians or Muslims: they believe in the One True God, even though they routinely kill each other over the precise meaning of that faith, a state of affairs that evidently pleases God because with all of his unlimited power he never intervenes to fix it. He's too busy emblazoning tortillas with the faces of Biblical characters of whom no portraits exist for comparison.

We should be grateful for the Jews' sacrifice, by their refusal to turn over a new leaf and begin evangelizing their religion. As bad shape as the world is in with a billion and a half Muslims and two billion Christians, can you imagine how much worse it would be with a billion or two Jews, also armed with nuclear weapons???

So be sympathetic to the travails of the Chosen People. They're doing us all a great favor.
 
ULTRA said:
I've been wondering why God subscribes to human emotions?
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-- Short answer:

Because mankind created God in their own image.

-- Longer answer more appropriate to the 'comparative religion' section of the 'science' domain:

I think that human beings have an innate social instinct. Infants selectively attend to human faces. Small children, even those with neurological defects like Down's syndrome, learn to speak without any formal instruction. Babies are capable of reading people's inner states from the subtlest features of tone, expression and gesture.

There's obvious selective advantage in all of that and human beings appear to be optimized by their evolutionary history for life in highly interactive social groups.

I think that one of the implications of these social instincts is that most people find personalities to be more comfortable emotionally and easier to understand than abstractions. We can talk to them and interact with them. We can relate to them emotionally.

(Just think of the differences, both in terms of difficulty and emotional engagement, between solving calculus problems and hanging out with your friends. Keep in mind that formally speaking, calculus is a far simpler system than natural language. Linguists and philosophers can't even fully describe or explain natural language, yet nevertheless, children can speak it and most people find conversation very enjoyable.)

This situation leads in turn towards personalization and anthropomorphism in mythologization. The unknown and hidden principles behind things like the weather, fertility and so on (for early polytheists) and behind the entire universe and being itself (for monotheists), are typically imagined as if they were the work of supernatural personalities who think and behave in ways that we can relate to, similar to our own. That way natural events and even history itself can acquire purposes, can be interpreted in terms of divine plans and intentions. The hidden personal powers can be beseeched, pleaded with and offered sacrifices. People can address, speak to, and form emotional relationships with their divinities.

I think that this is a pattern that we see repeated in the religious mythology of just about every culture on earth. The names and details of the particular gods differ from place to place, but their personalization is pretty much a cultural universal.
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
Because man created God in his own image, and then wrote stories about God in which he returned the favor.
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Some jealous, wrathful men created one image of their god. But not all fall in this category.

BG Ch 2
60 Turbulent by nature, the sense even of a wise man, who is practicing self-control, forcibly carry away his mind, Arjuna.
61 Therefore, having controlled them all and collecting his mind, one should sit for meditation, devoting oneself heart and soul to Me. For he whose senses are mastered, his mind has become stable.


This god sure is stable minded.


Still further.

62 The man dwelling on sense-objects develops attachment for them; from attachment springs up desire, and from desire (unfulfilled) ensues anger.
63 From anger arises infatuation; from infatuation, confusion of memory; from confusion of memory, loss of reason; and from loss of reason one goes to complete ruin.


This god can be a slave of anger, jealousy etc, can he? Witness. Ch 14

22 He, who is contented with whatever is got unsought, is free from jealousy and has transcended all pairs of opposites (like joy and grief), and is balanced in success and failure, -- such a Karmayogi, though acting, is not bound.

Kennyc said:
Why would a god need motivation?
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Why, indeed.

Moreover, Krishna is not driven by some selfish motive. Witness. Ch 11

22 Arjuna, there is nothing in the three worlds for Me to do, nor is there anything worth unattained by e; yet I continue to work.
23 Should I not engage in action, unwearied, at any time, great harm will come to the world; for, Arjuna, men follow My path in all matters.
24 If I do not perform action, these worlds will perish; nay, I should be the author of confusion of castes and the destruction of these people.
 
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ULTRA said:
Hi folks.

I've been wondering why God subscribes to human emotions? Or could it be that we are gifted with Godly emotions...
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Or rather, it could be that we are separated parts and parcels of god, hence we both draw from the same quality but have vastly different quantity.

He is said to "suffer" from jealousy, anger, wrath and love amongst other things. Are these needed to be perfect? In a diety are they perfectly in balance?
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I think its more accurate to designate us as "suffering" from these things, and even then, only because we often call upon them to reinforce an artificial sense of self (which in turn causes all the problems).

Certainly he doesn't seem to mind "smiting" people now and again.
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this world celebrates a 100% mortality rate with or without thunderbolts. Given that the living entity is eternal and that god controls one's arrival before birth and further destination after death, killing doesn't attract a criminal element for him.


I find the whole thing rather curious.

Regards

Ultra.
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Generally we would prefer to be a person than a non-person, simply because it affords a greater quality of being. I say "generally" because sometimes a person might consider in grander to cease to exist, but that's merely due to an artificial sense of self (which then paves the way for misuse of self hood etc)
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
Because man created God in his own image, and then wrote stories about God in which he returned the favor.
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Yes but religion does not end with that. Religion is man's attempt to define God a thousand different ways and most of them are beautiful.
 
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