Greatest I am
Valued Senior Member
Just a preference for it.
My favorite for those who tick me off. That is not you buddy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcQ6p5GO3Qs&feature=kp
Regards
DL
Is God a just judge?
- Thread starter Greatest I am
- Start date
Just a preference for it.
My favorite for those who tick me off. That is not you buddy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcQ6p5GO3Qs&feature=kp
Regards
DL
Greatest I am
Valued Senior Member
http://payingattentiontothesky.com/tag/the-temptation-and-expulsion/
Christians are used to the Vatican thinking Satan was a female reptilian hybrid.
Mind you, they can be shown to be wrong about almost everything.
Regards
DL
Yazata
Valued Senior Member
Yazata said:
I'm not convinced that in order to not be 'spiritually blind' (I'm not sure what that phrase means) one has to base one's thinking in one of the ancient religious traditions.
But the thing is, you seemingly spend a lot of time criticising the contents of the Bible, yet you continue reading the book with the ferocity of a fundy. You continue to call yourself a 'Christian', albeit a 'gnostic' one.
My question is, if you have really decided that the Bible and Christianity aren't the path for you, then why continue to focus so much of your attention on them? Why not broaden your horizons and see if another path might be more congenial?
You might find that path in one of the non-Christian religions. Or perhaps you might craft a new path for yourself in modernist terms. (Einstein's unique spirituality would be an example of somebody doing that.)
Yazata
Valued Senior Member
I think that a great many atheists do have these kind of experiences. It's just that an atheist isn't likely to put a personalistic theistic spin on them. They are less likely to interpret their experience as a sense of God's presence and more likely to interpret it in non-theistic terms, as a sense of the ultimate cosmic mystery or something like that.
Yazata
Valued Senior Member
I switched the order of Write4U's questions.
Historically, people prayed to gods for good fortune, successful childbirth, plentiful harvests and stuff like that. And when the focus turned more towards salvation, to escaping the pain and suffering of this life, to triumphing over death itself, the benefits that gods were imagined as offering grew all the more desirable.
The question of whether a god experiences needs would seem to depend on how we are imagining the god.
Many/most of the gods of religious history are depicted as displaying desires and perhaps needs as well. One could argue that if we are going to imagine deities as somehow being persons in the psychological sense, then they would pretty much have to have desires and needs. Is it really possible to be a person without them?
There's another more philosophical way of imagining the divine that probably derives from the Greeks here in the West. (India thought of it independently.) It imagines the divine as perfection, unity, ultimate being, the eternal source out of which flows all the flux and change that we see in the natural world. The Platonic tradition, and especially the Neoplatonists, thought of divinity this way. And this way of thinking generally suggests a single impersonal ultimate principle.
The late antique Christians kind of combined the Neoplatonic One with the much more personalistic Biblical Yahweh and ended up with a highly personalized deity that's simultaneously imagined as being eternal unchanging philosophical unity and perfection.
One possible way of addressing the seeming inconsistency between these concepts of the divine might be found in the way that Mahayana Buddhism imagines the Bodhisattva. As they advance on their path, Bodhisattvas are motivated less and less by their own needs and desires, they are less and less attached to them, dependent on them and driven by them. But Bodhisattvas continue to recognize that less advanced beings continue to suffer.
The Bodhisattva doesn't need other beings to do anything or be anything in order to be happy him/herself. Bodhisattvas will be perfectly fine no matter what happens. That isn't because they are totally self-absorbed, but rather because they are totally selfless. But recognizing that others are still all wrapped up in their own selves and consequently do suffer and need to be happy, the Bodhisattva continues to help others through pure selfless compassion. In Buddhism, compassion is very closely associated with selflessness.
Historically, people prayed to gods for good fortune, successful childbirth, plentiful harvests and stuff like that. And when the focus turned more towards salvation, to escaping the pain and suffering of this life, to triumphing over death itself, the benefits that gods were imagined as offering grew all the more desirable.
The question of whether a god experiences needs would seem to depend on how we are imagining the god.
Many/most of the gods of religious history are depicted as displaying desires and perhaps needs as well. One could argue that if we are going to imagine deities as somehow being persons in the psychological sense, then they would pretty much have to have desires and needs. Is it really possible to be a person without them?
There's another more philosophical way of imagining the divine that probably derives from the Greeks here in the West. (India thought of it independently.) It imagines the divine as perfection, unity, ultimate being, the eternal source out of which flows all the flux and change that we see in the natural world. The Platonic tradition, and especially the Neoplatonists, thought of divinity this way. And this way of thinking generally suggests a single impersonal ultimate principle.
The late antique Christians kind of combined the Neoplatonic One with the much more personalistic Biblical Yahweh and ended up with a highly personalized deity that's simultaneously imagined as being eternal unchanging philosophical unity and perfection.
One possible way of addressing the seeming inconsistency between these concepts of the divine might be found in the way that Mahayana Buddhism imagines the Bodhisattva. As they advance on their path, Bodhisattvas are motivated less and less by their own needs and desires, they are less and less attached to them, dependent on them and driven by them. But Bodhisattvas continue to recognize that less advanced beings continue to suffer.
The Bodhisattva doesn't need other beings to do anything or be anything in order to be happy him/herself. Bodhisattvas will be perfectly fine no matter what happens. That isn't because they are totally self-absorbed, but rather because they are totally selfless. But recognizing that others are still all wrapped up in their own selves and consequently do suffer and need to be happy, the Bodhisattva continues to help others through pure selfless compassion. In Buddhism, compassion is very closely associated with selflessness.
Yet the antelope would not kill the tiger and you find it perfectly fine that the tiger killed an innocent antelope. You found justification for the tiger to kill and animals don’t only kill for food. If a group of tigers kill a bunch of antelope you just say “oh well, they were hungry” or “well the antelope went were he shouldn’t" hey, no problem to you because it is a tiger? and yet the poor antelope is now dead.
Humans can plan ahead better than the tiger can, so that to you is where the problem comes in. Personally, I don’t see the logic behind your way of thinking. If the tiger killed someone close to you then the tiger would no longer be justified and the tiger would be bad. Then again if you were going to be true to your own logic you would say “well the tiger killed for a reason, thats nature for ya. We must have decided to walk on dirt too close to them”
I really think that line of thinking has been detrimental to humanity for thousands of years.
Did you NOT find the tiger to be an opportunist?
We don’t play by the rules of nature? Hold on a second, the tiger killing whenever he wants a snack IS a “rule of nature” according to you. I think that has always been a problem for humans.
If a human baby were left to his\her own devices and observed a small ecosystem that included the violence of wild beasts killing smaller living things he\she would (imop wrongly) find this acceptable.
Otoh, if you omit the tigers and only have animals that get along and DO NOT kill, now that is what the child sees and if one day out of the norm a tiger wandered in and started killing the child would say “WTF was that?” To that child it would be outside the norm, yet you (we) grew up to find this acceptable. And unfortunately we learned this in what….nature.
I don’t agree with it. I think nature can be changed and changed for the better OR we can just accept whatever it throws at us. Personally, I never understood that line of reasoning.
Yazata
Valued Senior Member
Yazata said:
That raises an interesting issue.
I wasn't raised in a theist home and have never been a theist, even as a small child. I don't feel threatened by or bitter towards religion in general or theism in particular.
But many atheists, at least the sort of atheists that one encounters on the internet, seem to me to be fixated on Christianity, drawn to it like a moth to a flame. They become emotional just thinking about it. There's obviously some kind of connection there.
So while I think that the '1 foot in theism' remark is apt, I don't think that I'm the one that it applies to.
Yazata
Valued Senior Member
That happened to me a few days ago too. I'd written a fairly innocuous post and when I tried to submit it, something choked and nothing happened. (I don't know if it was Sciforums or my creaky old version of IE). So I tried to submit the post again and got a Sciforums error message that said I'd already submitted an identical post.
When I backed out of that message the post was there, but it had the skull-and-crossbones thing.
I don't think that the moderators have anything to do with putting it there and don't believe that it's an editorial comment on the post itself. I'm guessing that it's the Sciforums software doing it, if it detects something weird about how a post was submitted, flagging the post for a moderator to look at.
Write4U
Valued Senior Member
Yes, I agree. That little rant of mine was to demonstrate that we are NO more civilized today than we were 100,000 years ago. We are more "efficient" at killing, but I don't believe that counts as becoming civilized.
Then we cannot even execute a guy who really deserves it, in a civil manner.
It was a question not a remark.
You seem to be too much supporting it, bitter about it, taking offense to the truth yet projecting such on others. I've seen no sign anyone other than theists here are fixated. If you are bending over backward to be fair to theists, you are not being fair.
Write4U
Valued Senior Member
Strangely, most all people agree that the universe is (inter) connected in some manner. Perhaps an abstract geometric formula.
The difference only comes in when trying to identify this "unifying condition". I still like David Bohm. What he calls the Implicate, theists call god's "motives".
That is the entire difference. all other considerations are "justification" and "apologetics", IMO.
We may be much more civilized. We can really only surmise. We were also closer to the animal kingdom then and in all sectors of the animal kingdom there are members that would be viewed as dangerous…well they kill. They killed for their own advantage though. The lion would, if the means and capability ware present, have been kept out. Which would only be normal.
Write4U
Valued Senior Member
The problem is that they are necessary in the scheme of things. Everything finds a natural balance, if you adapt to it, your chances are fair. If you do not adapt to nature but seek to control it, things get "out of balance" and BAD things begin to happen, ever so slowly and unobtrusively, but inevitably.
You see, it'll be the god's who are at war and it is humans who started all of it. Such irony.
Greatest I am,
So say humans.
It might not be the case for reptoids.
jan.
So say humans.
It might not be the case for reptoids.
jan.
Write4U
Valued Senior Member
True, but then, a reptoid attidude is not what i personally aspire to, I prefer a more symbiotic relationship......Greatest I am,
So say humans.
It might not be the case for reptoids.
jan.
According to religious traditions, humans are free moral agents. Animals are different in that they are under natural instinct, and therefore do not make moral judgements based a range of choice. Rather animals act in a way that connects them to global integration like within eco-systems. A smart and faithful dog will make choices in the field, but all these choice connect and integrate him to his master and his environment.
Being a free moral agents does not imply morals are relative. Rather it implies humans have a choice of defining morals as relative since being a free moral agent allows for subjectivity. A free moral agent can choose the natural way based on the natural logic of nature, or the unnatural way based on the sale pitch of self serving con artists. Free will does not make the job of finding the natural way easier, but makes it harder. This expands the mind.
The lion is not making a moral judgment when it hunts and kills. It does not matter what line of bull I sales pitch the lion. His choice is not relative to the effectiveness my sales pitch to his desires and vanity, but is defined by nature. Humans are the ones that subjectively read into their natural behavior and attempt to make it relative. The lion works within nature and his actions contribute to the integration and balance of an ecosystem. God's creation has all the answers built into it, but the subjectivity of the human mind, combined with being a free moral agent, which allows subjective departure, directs humans and cultures in ways that lead to its own dissociation. The irrationality then misuses cause and effect and blames God for this.
As an analogy, picture a maze that you need to work through with many paths and many detours. There is a way from the beginning to the end, but since we are free moral agents with subjectivity and not purely instinctive, we don't have the way for us conscious like an animal acting within nature. If we assume the god of chaos and casino math rules this universe (random universe), we might assume e any path will work, since all is relative based on black box odds. This may be helpful to navigate a black box maze, but it also makes us go down the wrong path so we lose time and trigger predictable consequences which may cause pain. But since we are willful and subjective and expect a free choice or lottery win.
The path is already there to follow, but it is the ego and the subjectivity of the will that creates confusion so it can't see it. Instead the ego tries to define the maze, like it wants it to be, to make it easier for itself. The problem this creates is that one subjective way, may not work for all, thereby preventing integration of humans with each other and nature. The spiritual person attempts to remove the fears and manipulation of the ego and the collective or cultural mind, to make reading the maze of life easier. Once you soften the noise from the ego and from the outside, the quiet voice from inside gradually reconnects one to the natural you; inner child, who instinctively knows how to navigate maze. Once one sees the path one marvels instead of whines.
Being a free moral agents does not imply morals are relative. Rather it implies humans have a choice of defining morals as relative since being a free moral agent allows for subjectivity. A free moral agent can choose the natural way based on the natural logic of nature, or the unnatural way based on the sale pitch of self serving con artists. Free will does not make the job of finding the natural way easier, but makes it harder. This expands the mind.
The lion is not making a moral judgment when it hunts and kills. It does not matter what line of bull I sales pitch the lion. His choice is not relative to the effectiveness my sales pitch to his desires and vanity, but is defined by nature. Humans are the ones that subjectively read into their natural behavior and attempt to make it relative. The lion works within nature and his actions contribute to the integration and balance of an ecosystem. God's creation has all the answers built into it, but the subjectivity of the human mind, combined with being a free moral agent, which allows subjective departure, directs humans and cultures in ways that lead to its own dissociation. The irrationality then misuses cause and effect and blames God for this.
As an analogy, picture a maze that you need to work through with many paths and many detours. There is a way from the beginning to the end, but since we are free moral agents with subjectivity and not purely instinctive, we don't have the way for us conscious like an animal acting within nature. If we assume the god of chaos and casino math rules this universe (random universe), we might assume e any path will work, since all is relative based on black box odds. This may be helpful to navigate a black box maze, but it also makes us go down the wrong path so we lose time and trigger predictable consequences which may cause pain. But since we are willful and subjective and expect a free choice or lottery win.
The path is already there to follow, but it is the ego and the subjectivity of the will that creates confusion so it can't see it. Instead the ego tries to define the maze, like it wants it to be, to make it easier for itself. The problem this creates is that one subjective way, may not work for all, thereby preventing integration of humans with each other and nature. The spiritual person attempts to remove the fears and manipulation of the ego and the collective or cultural mind, to make reading the maze of life easier. Once you soften the noise from the ego and from the outside, the quiet voice from inside gradually reconnects one to the natural you; inner child, who instinctively knows how to navigate maze. Once one sees the path one marvels instead of whines.
Greatest I am
Valued Senior Member
Greatest I am,
So say humans.
It might not be the case for reptoids.
jan.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_ZBqpEUbik
You show your fixation woman. Take me in.
Regards
DL
Greatest I am
Valued Senior Member
I stopped here and did not read the rest too carefully. You seem to be indicating that man, a natural animal, somehow has no instincts.
Am I reading you right?
If so, what is this baby using if not instinct?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBW5vdhr_PA
Regards
DL
Write4U
Valued Senior Member
And you propose we are exempt from that connection?
And who (except for man) is interested in expanding our minds?
IMO, a gross misunderstanding of how things work. The only reason we think we have choices is that we take too much! and leave too much waste! If we only took when we were really hungry, and leave the rest alone, we could live nicely within the natural cycle. BUT WE WANT IT ALL! and we can't have it, so we stomp our foot and blow it up.
You don't even need a brain to navigate a maze to food. A slime-mold can do it very efficiently. Moreover, they practice farming. Man does notthat is not already practiced in nature. Other (older) species have learned to take only what is needed, or you die.... I's really simple.
Yes the path is there and the earth existed millions of years happily following "natural selection". Then we came along and are spoiling it for everybody, except perhaps a few insects, .......oh and slime-mold.
http://www.nature.com/news/how-brainless-slime-molds-redefine-intelligence-1.11811
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110119/full/news.2011.27.html