C2V wrote:
The knee jerk I struggle to get my head around (hell if there weren't body metaphors crossing confusingly all over that) is that god is not necessarily religion. Wiser people than me have been trying to get this thorough to me as this subject has been everywhere recently. Religion and god could very plausibly be completely disconnected.
It's also entirely plausible that god, if one exists, has never been described or known by any religion in all of human history, and may never be known, nor described.
If you disbelieve the representation of god as described in any one religion, then that is in effect all you are disagreeing with - their theory. In the original post the author seems to be describing god as he is described in Christian and Islamic religions - a loving, intelligent, just, perfect external entity. Nowhere is it guaranteed that god, if one exists, represents nor comprehends these qualities at all.
The more I get into the issue, the more I favour the abstract of what a god may be, rather than believing any religious descriptions. And trying to stop interpreting any talk of "god" through a religiously-influenced bias.
This actually gets kind of close to something I've been wondering about recently. I've noted that NT's tend to be something of authority junkies - they view the world in terms of social pecking order. To them, having someone "in charge" is a foregone conclusion, something that has to be that way, as opposed to a curious artificiality brought on by their manner of thinking. In many religions, particularly western ones, God is described as some kind of ruler... I have to wonder if, assuming there is an entity one might describe as God, he would be anything like this description, or if the whole ruling over everything notion is purely the invention of an NT-dominated society.
Curiously enough, Buddhism seems to subvert this completely.