Who Is God?

Discuss philosophical questions regarding theism (and atheism), and discuss religion as it relates to philosophy. This includes any philosophical discussions that happen to be about god, gods, or a 'higher power' or the belief of them. This also generally includes philosophical topics about organized or ritualistic mysticism or about organized, common or ritualistic beliefs in the existence of supernatural phenomenon.
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SimpleGuy
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Re: Who Is God?

Post by SimpleGuy »

I think we should identify god in a more sexual way than already mentioned, perhaps this is just the feeling having successfully aquired to manage to get a partner for your lifetime and not more or less.
Belindi
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Re: Who Is God?

Post by Belindi »

SimpleGuy, if that is the consolatory narrative that makes sense to you that's okay for you.

It is a problem that many religious explanatory stories don't make sense to a lot of people who now lack any explanation of suffering and how to avoid it. The official stories that explain life , death, loss, natural disasters, and how to avert or tolerate those are ' myths' . Those now need updating or replacement. Some people do indeed call their sexual or life partner God. Others call nature God. Some people call parenthood God and look no further than their grandchildren. Some people call money, or power, God. Others are driven by loss and helplessness to feel that crack cocaine is God.

So that people in a society can live and work together we need to call something God which is valued by all. In past times God has been explained by means of a mythical story which is told as real history. Is it impossible for people to live in a society unless all of them believe the same story that defines God? Does there have to be a leading explanatory myth?
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jerlands
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Re: Who Is God?

Post by jerlands »

Belindi wrote: April 9th, 2018, 4:56 am Does there have to be a leading explanatory myth?
I think the name of the game for some is to understand while others are happy finding security in the herd. The fact is not all men seek truth but many, like Stalin, seek power and dominance.
"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." - Mark Twain
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SBE
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Re: Who Is God?

Post by SBE »

There are many beliefs that claim to be the only way to salvation and their God is the only true God. There is so much confusion and righteous banging on the desk that makes me walk away from all mainstream explanations of the Divine. So, what I use as a test in discerning what could be true, is the belief must promote the betterment of all, while encouraging growth through freedom to make your own choices and learn by your mistakes.

Low and behold there is a philosophy of creation that does all of this and more. This philosophy has a major difference though, and can feel strange at first but after some contemplation makes a whole lot of sense. And that is the creator is not a masculine God our father but instead the Mother Goddess the Creatrix of the universe. The universe could be logically considered feminine in nature as we see the feminine creating life here in our lives. One might say life needs to be seeded by a male to complete the task but that is not the case in the beginning of most species. Androgyny is said to exist before the separation of sexes and all androgynous beings, even though possessing both female and male traits are considered female because they can create life on their own. There are many more reasons why this philosophy rings true to me, as it promotes our individual Sovereignty thus reminding us of our infinite worth.

While the patriarchal God system we see today promotes, through religion, royalty, the elite and government, the notion that authority is superior and we are inferior and must obey their dictates even if we think it’s immoral to do so. They teach that morality can only come from the obedience to authority. Hmm

http://wespenre.com/2/creation-of-universes.htm
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ThomasHobbes
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Re: Who Is God?

Post by ThomasHobbes »

When you know, you know..
God is spelled backwards.
It's obvious.
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SimpleGuy
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Re: Who Is God?

Post by SimpleGuy »

Belindi wrote: April 9th, 2018, 4:56 am SimpleGuy, if that is the consolatory narrative that makes sense to you that's okay for you.

It is a problem that many religious explanatory stories don't make sense to a lot of people who now lack any explanation of suffering and how to avoid it. The official stories that explain life , death, loss, natural disasters, and how to avert or tolerate those are ' myths' . Those now need updating or replacement. Some people do indeed call their sexual or life partner God. Others call nature God. Some people call parenthood God and look no further than their grandchildren. Some people call money, or power, God. Others are driven by loss and helplessness to feel that crack cocaine is God.

So that people in a society can live and work together we need to call something God which is valued by all. In past times God has been explained by means of a mythical story which is told as real history. Is it impossible for people to live in a society unless all of them believe the same story that defines God? Does there have to be a leading explanatory myth?
The problem is, even if an explanation does exist, it doesn't change the status quo at least from the point of explanation. But the experience of belonging together for two individuals is more. An explanation doesn't abolish your problems, it changes the viewpoint perhaps the ansatz to solve problems, but this is not always helpful. What is helpful is true experience of community.
Belindi
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Re: Who Is God?

Post by Belindi »

SimpleGuy wrote:
What is helpful is true experience of community.
Yes, and the true experience of community involves both world view and moral consensus. World view and moral consensus are personified as gods and God.

The traditional God matched an outdated world view which few people now credit. It's necessary to update the God story to match the predominating world view so that moral consensus won't be lost.
Darshan
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Re: Who Is God?

Post by Darshan »

Earthellism defines God and now understands his location. By defining hell as the surface of earth (earthell) and solving the problem of evil by clarifying that God is not here and that human devils among us steal our free will and rape, torture and murder us every second, earthellism locates God to heaven. God is not here on earthell but God lives and resides in heaven where he is omnipotent and omnibenevolent only there and not here. Heaven is above us located around earth and not near any other planet. The image of the pale blue dot by Voyager from 4 billion miles away clearly shows earth with a direct beam of sunlight engulfing this planet. God in heaven protects our planet from asteroids and redirects all astronauts back to earth and has not let one float off into space to die. 65 million years a 10 mile asteroid hit the earth and killed off the dinosaurs and brought the evolution of mammals and human beings. Clearly another asteroid that size should have hit us over the last 50 million years and stopped or massively delayed the arrival of human beings here but none did. Our God has protected us from such asteroids and provides us with heaven and earthell for our souls to exist in heaven and us as human beings and human devils here on earthell. Our God exists in our solar system and brought us here from another solar system that died when its star cremated its inhabitable planets. When our sun becomes a red giant and cremates Mars, Venus and Earth, our God will direct our souls to another solar system just like he did before. All this is derived from the book "The Life and Death of Planet Earth' which is the foundation of earthellism.
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Astrocyte
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Re: Who Is God?

Post by Astrocyte »

TigerNinja wrote: February 28th, 2018, 6:21 pm God. I have strayed into controversial grounds here. Many religions have varying interpretations of God. The Abrahamic religions all portray him as an omnipotent, transcendent being (I can't really say omnibenevolent noting in one it says "All ye who do not follow Allah, smite them above their necks", in another it says that God flooded a group of Egyptians chasing Moses and that "You shall not lie with man as you do with is woman for it is a most despicable sin" and I do not know enough about Judaism to make any educated claims on it). But who is He, as an individual entity. In quite a few religions, he is portrayed as male.

The question is less who is he, and more what is he. Islam has the understandable rule of not being allowed to portray Allah in imagery. Most of the time however (In Abrahamic religions) he is portrayed as a male figure with a beard in the sky. In Eastern polytheistic religions, Gods are composed of animals and are more abstract. Personally, I prefer this approach, and although I am atheist, I find that usually in Abrahamic religious imagery, they anthropomorphise God. In what religious text (I'm not being sarcastic; this is an honest question) is God specifically said to be a man with a beard, in the sky. In the sky is rational, due to Heaven supposedly being in the sky. I don't like anthropomorphism in a God, as that was one of my 'deal-breakers' with theistic religions. God/gods were always portrayed as a being composed of, or simply a transcendent form of a regular animal on Earth. They were always composed of Earthly creatures. Humans can't comprehend anything beyond it as that is all we have been exposed to in our whole lives, but despite that, at least do what Sikhs do and say that he has no form. So, all in all, who and what is God in your opinion.

It is incoherent to attempt to speak about God without taking seriously metaphysics i.e. the "explanation" for the way physical reality works.

So, why is God referred to as a "He"? Because humans - like all organisms - focus on patterns, such as the pattern 'male-female', and the pattern 'inside-outside', which is so clearly embodied in humans as the penis and the vagina; indeed, the 'power' symbol reflects this notion of an external force 'impregnating', or 'powering', things within a 'space' i.e. the circle.

Whether or not this is a useful or justified way of reasoning is besides the point: its the reasoning used by kabbalists, pythagoreans, and other occultic and mystical traditions. Reality is conceived as 'Yin-Yang'; a male and female principle; or in contemporary philosophical language, "self and other".

It probably isn't a bad assumption to take, as a biology informed by physics (i.e. biophysics), with a global analysis of the whole process, really does yield a sort of hegelian dialectic between a 'thesis' (organism) and an 'antithesis' (world) which is reconciled by the way they coherently relate to one another (the particular geometrodynamical forms which transform in ways that reconstitute the basic elements)

As for 'anthopormphism' as a God? I'm sorry, but that is an inevitable part of being human. A dog sees the world through the senses and functions of being a dog. It "dogmorphizes" whatever it relates with.

Humans do the same thing (all mammals do it). Its called 'projection', where the 'shape' of the organism's relationship to the world (its "umwelt", in von Uexkullian language) becomes embodied in minitature as its brain-body, with its mind expressing an "innewelt", or a world-structure that is made to reflect the actual interactions with the world.

So can we ever look at the universe and perhaps see in it a deliberate act of creation - that gives rise to a creature like us as an inevitable consequence of the constraints of the system we evolved within? Many people believe this; this is an idea supported in protean form by the work of biochemists like Nick Lane, and achieves a truly sacred sense within the anthropological theology of Pierre Teilhard Chardin.

To say God has no form is to say that the world we exist and evolved within has no form. See what the trouble is with traumatological religious systems that grew from the egotism of warfare, trade, and the poison of elitism? They are dualistic: they literally describe the world from the perspective of a brain-mind that has been structurally disconnected by developmental trauma. The only reason people do not see contemporary cultures and religious systems (Abrahamic, Vedic, etc) as being colored by trauma is for the simple reason that they do not have the mental skills - evolutionary biology, ethology, neurobiology, cybernetics, psychology, interpersonal psychodynamics - to know what does and doesn't matter in the emergence of mental states - and the building of a whole personality from mental states.

So, the issue is: is the physical world 'physical' in the way we think? A more accurate description, going back to the work of CS Peice, is that what we really mean is 'regularity', and 'habit'. The world is definitely regular, but that regularity may be, and probably is, a function of the relational dynamics of the interacting organisms.

God exists. My view is, this world is biosemiotic, and the universe itself may be 'physiosemiotic' i.e. alive. This theory is gaining more and more steam, and is being adopted, gingerly, or with a bit of traumatic response, by biologists, philosophers, semioticians, neurosciences, and of course, physicists like Brian Josephson.

The difference between how people in todays world and the people of 200 years from now, for instance, may be akin to night and day; a difference so large and significant that, unless you understand the difference, may be experienced as a bit unreal and unlikely.
Dark Matter
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Re: Who Is God?

Post by Dark Matter »

Astrocyte wrote: June 20th, 2018, 7:26 pm
It is incoherent to attempt to speak about God without taking seriously metaphysics i.e. the "explanation" for the way physical reality works.

So, why is God referred to as a "He"? Because humans - like all organisms - focus on patterns, such as the pattern 'male-female', and the pattern 'inside-outside', which is so clearly embodied in humans as the penis and the vagina; indeed, the 'power' symbol reflects this notion of an external force 'impregnating', or 'powering', things within a 'space' i.e. the circle.

Whether or not this is a useful or justified way of reasoning is besides the point: its the reasoning used by kabbalists, pythagoreans, and other occultic and mystical traditions. Reality is conceived as 'Yin-Yang'; a male and female principle; or in contemporary philosophical language, "self and other".

It probably isn't a bad assumption to take, as a biology informed by physics (i.e. biophysics), with a global analysis of the whole process, really does yield a sort of hegelian dialectic between a 'thesis' (organism) and an 'antithesis' (world) which is reconciled by the way they coherently relate to one another (the particular geometrodynamical forms which transform in ways that reconstitute the basic elements)

As for 'anthopormphism' as a God? I'm sorry, but that is an inevitable part of being human. A dog sees the world through the senses and functions of being a dog. It "dogmorphizes" whatever it relates with.

Humans do the same thing (all mammals do it). Its called 'projection', where the 'shape' of the organism's relationship to the world (its "umwelt", in von Uexkullian language) becomes embodied in minitature as its brain-body, with its mind expressing an "innewelt", or a world-structure that is made to reflect the actual interactions with the world.

So can we ever look at the universe and perhaps see in it a deliberate act of creation - that gives rise to a creature like us as an inevitable consequence of the constraints of the system we evolved within? Many people believe this; this is an idea supported in protean form by the work of biochemists like Nick Lane, and achieves a truly sacred sense within the anthropological theology of Pierre Teilhard Chardin.

To say God has no form is to say that the world we exist and evolved within has no form. See what the trouble is with traumatological religious systems that grew from the egotism of warfare, trade, and the poison of elitism? They are dualistic: they literally describe the world from the perspective of a brain-mind that has been structurally disconnected by developmental trauma. The only reason people do not see contemporary cultures and religious systems (Abrahamic, Vedic, etc) as being colored by trauma is for the simple reason that they do not have the mental skills - evolutionary biology, ethology, neurobiology, cybernetics, psychology, interpersonal psychodynamics - to know what does and doesn't matter in the emergence of mental states - and the building of a whole personality from mental states.

So, the issue is: is the physical world 'physical' in the way we think? A more accurate description, going back to the work of CS Peice, is that what we really mean is 'regularity', and 'habit'. The world is definitely regular, but that regularity may be, and probably is, a function of the relational dynamics of the interacting organisms.

God exists. My view is, this world is biosemiotic, and the universe itself may be 'physiosemiotic' i.e. alive. This theory is gaining more and more steam, and is being adopted, gingerly, or with a bit of traumatic response, by biologists, philosophers, semioticians, neurosciences, and of course, physicists like Brian Josephson.

The difference between how people in todays world and the people of 200 years from now, for instance, may be akin to night and day; a difference so large and significant that, unless you understand the difference, may be experienced as a bit unreal and unlikely.
Great post.

Who is God? God is both subject and object of my ultimate concern.

Who am I? I am the relating of a relation -- a synthesis of the Infinite and the finite, Eternal and temporal, Freedom and necessity -- relating to itself.

I am a localized region of dominant characteristics immersed a sea of information.

The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.
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Thinking critical
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Re: Who Is God?

Post by Thinking critical »

god is the extension of the human ego, it is whatever the believer needs it to be in order for it to be a god they can believe in.
This cocky little cognitive contortionist will straighten you right out
eyesofastranger
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Re: Who Is God?

Post by eyesofastranger »

I prefer to dismiss the God concept flat out. Great posts here, thank you.
Here's my problem, If our God is omnipotent and omnipresent across time and space my outcome becomes bleak. If Gods plan has already determined my every outcome then I am reduced to a program of predetermined outcome.
I suppose no one is prepared to accept that God.
If the states of matter in flux including qubit states then omni God becomes complex beyond the scope of human understanding but still not ruling out the possibility I am a simulation here for her amusement.
I like the natural formation of the universe with all the right constants forming from a singularity and I'm free to try and herd cats best I can. With entanglement hinting at a holographic property as well, even better.
Belindi
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Re: Who Is God?

Post by Belindi »

Eyesofastranger wrote:
Here's my problem, If our God is omnipotent and omnipresent across time and space my outcome becomes bleak. If Gods plan has already determined my every outcome then I am reduced to a program of predetermined outcome.
I don't think so because God changes according to other ideas. By other ideas I refer to scientific, life events, social movements, natural disasters, and technological changes. God is in a constant state of change, as, after all, constant change is how existence exists. Those theologies that insist that God has been defined once and for all have done much disservice, and the world is badly in need of an evolved theology that is credible and inspiring.

Determinism is our human attempt to predict so we can survive. God is far larger than human ideas of causes and effects. God does not have a plan as if God were an engineer. Omnipotent and omnipresent don't refer to being as if being were a static and unchanging thing. Omnipotence and omnipresence are analogies for being itself, and your own being is caught up in the great and ongoing creation.
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Re: Who Is God?

Post by kordofany »

God is an idea in the mind
Freedom is an Idea in the mind... And reckless behavior is irrational.. I can live free inside the prison.
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eyesofastranger
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Re: Who Is God?

Post by eyesofastranger »

kordofany's avatar says free within a prison. I do hope not but the facts are there is omnipotence or free will. Terribly sorry but you can't have both. If there is a future that can accessed by something then all free will is an illusion and the entire universe is a clockwork program. If future exists then all is written.
Physicists rightfully hate this dead end and have offered the multiverse. Can the god look at every universe? Now your a program again. Beautiful nature disallows the view of the future. After matter exceeds threshold speeds it becomes locked into a black hole and information seems to be truly lost to this universe.
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