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.