What is God?

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You're also talking about a world that existed quite a long time before Chipotle, Starbucks, or science as we know it and it ran - almost by necessity - as a constant war machine and quite often on slave power. It was an imbalanced message for imbalanced times.

In my own opinion though - I don't think people get it right if they want to either just focus on the masculine or focus on the feminine in their religion or cosmology of spiritual practice. In Hermetic Kabbalah they're pretty clear that in IHVH the two H's are both the feminine/goddess aspect, that it's an androgen deity, and that the highest androgen sephira of the Tree of Life - Kether - bifurcates into Chokmah (the Yod) and Binah (the first Heh); the pillars of Mercy and Severity extend directly down from the two of them where the desired path, ie. Mildness, is the middle path between the two.

Also worth noting, just like how much of the Christ mythos was ripped from Dionysus, Osiris, and Tamuz, also how much of Mary's symbology was ripped from the Greco-Romanized Isis cults. There also seem to be hints of Hecate with the three Mary's - maiden, mother, and crone - at the foot of the cross.

sorry I am not so sophisticated, my elders says: there is a God, it is obvious who he is, unfortunately there 's not a female aspect to it

Nice to read about what you wrote. I was reading recently something else, "Tender is the night" by Scott Fitzgerald, in English, a language that I do not master fully, but it was apparrant that there are some narcissists in this book and then I started reading on the internet reading articles about Jesus as narcissist. That made me come to this idea, that I want to get rid of this masculine idea of God.
This is the site: https://archive.org/stream/JesusChristN ... s_djvu.txt

If I could simplify my POV as to not look over-philosophized and out of touch: both Abrahamic theism and naive materialism are both almost as deficient.

I also don't like terms like 'God' or 'supernatural' much because they're loaded up with a bunch of ancient rubbish and connotations that make them impossible concepts. For example, if we ever properly discovered that such a thing that we would have previously called God exists we'd be forced to call it natural rather than supernatural because it would be a previously unaccounted parcel of nature, physical (ie. a field) rather than non-physical because that's our definition for anything that has any sort of tangible effect, and whatever hypotheses we might come to about it's nature or degree of conscious volition would probably boggle our definitions of sentience because it would likely be as cold and mechanical as aware.

The other reason I can't stand the natural/supernature, physical/nonphysical language is that the net effect of those thoughts cause us to completely ignore anything that isn't either completely Jesus or completely Dawkins/Dennett (ie. the number of people who don't know anything about the Global Consciousness Project, Ganzfeld Studies, PEAR, etc. is astounding). It's a degree of cognitive dissonance that's only rivaled if not surpassed by our national political dialog and, IMHO, it's really properly a subset of that rather than a legitimate handling of the state of human knowledge.

Looking at words "What is God?" I wonder what the story would be if they were in the order and emphasis of "God is What?"

Or try this one:

What is the Easter Bunny?

vs.

The Easter Bunny is what?


I the term God is probably that far beyond repair.

Taking only those phrases about those elements of the thoughts, they are good points as I see it.

Expanding a bit, I expect the "completely Jesus or completely Dawkins/Dennett" reduces the thing to a smaller package which is easier to take in and pigeonhole. The in-between may have a complexity which is just too overwhelming, too big, too variable, too indefinite, too undefinable, and therefore has to be blocked out.

Then we're probably screwed because both of those are blatantly wrong. One tries to turn a collection of regional philosophy and mystical text over 1,000 years into some kind of unified edifice that it's not (and tries to disabuse the dying sun god myth of all his historical precursors), the other makes a bizarre case that if we had 3.7 billion years of evolution that any science that would suggest consciousness beyond neurons is pseudoscience, not on its methodology but on its results, all because we know the planet is 4.6 billion years old - not 6,000 years old.

I mean, that alone would be something pretty close to proving that we're monkeys with no free will. While I'd often agree with both parts of that - that we are flea-bitten chimps with no free will - I'm not able to throw either the science, my experiences, or a lot of the experiences a lot of people have had throughout history, out the window on the grounds that what I'm left with would be too complicated for a 1st or 2nd grader, or an adult millennial, to understand.

The challenge, as I see it, seems to be that everyone's politics-obsessed and they'll generally throw out any facts that they can't adapt to their political box. It's a real shame because there legitimately is a lot to be sorted out still about the universe, about orientation of consciousness to the universe, questions of what emergence is, how interactions of conscious units - like cells vs. whole mammals - can stack congruently, and I see our understanding of biology being artificially hamstrung for a long time if we have emotional fixations one way or another on this stuff. We're currently still laboring under a lot of self-imposed restraints that don't fit the facts. We might grow out of the 19th century habits if we're lucky before the century's over but still - it's a significant handicap and I think it's harming our progress in understanding biological systems. The idea that consciousness is an illusion or hallucination is about as useful as the elan vital that it replaced.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 14 Aug 2017, 5:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Red herring probably is not quite the perfect characterization: I, believing in Jesus and the Bible, think the science versus the Bible argument is at least a bit of a red herring. The Bible is not about science, and I don't see it as even pretending to be, it is about being, and doing the experiencing of being human.
Science rightly tells us much about the structure and processes of being a human, and of the universe we inhabit, that is what science does and does well - it observes what happens and works to determine the causes of effects. It also takes what it understands to be present causes and tries to determine what their future effects would be.

Being isn't scientific. Sure, the origin and operation of your physical material body is science. Science is even working on the origin of consciousness, which obviously is an element of being, but consciousness is not the whole of being. A statement which could potentially sound like metaphysical fru-fru, but the way I take the concept of being it is in part immaterial and who knows, perhaps forever beyond fully reachable by science, perhaps not.

I think science runs into problems when it reaches things that it can describe the behavior of but can't say anything about the intrinsic qualities of. That's an inherent challenge with anything that starts looking at the smallest discernible components - ie. they just 'are' as a blunt force in and of themselves and are stuck being inscrutable.

I had the chance to read the bible through several times a while back and around the same time I was researching pastors, trying to find the best one to go to. Ultimately there were a few particularly fiery non-denominationals I met and I started realizing, when their homilies were particularly high-soaring, they were going in the John and Paul direction and somewhat indirectly hitting on the Platonist/Neoplatonist metaphysics inherent in those authors. One of the challenges I always had was the simultaneous narratives of emanationism and substance dualism, ie. a universe made of matter that was non-God material drafted by an infinite God, although 'spoken' into existence by the mechanics of said deity's speech, and at the same time loads or references to a 'true vine' or 'if you've seen me you've seen the father'. One doesn't have to reach out too far to come up with ideas like the Ballard's 'I AM' Activity or theosophic/new age at-one-ment. That also puts the cross in a very challenging position - ie. it's the lingam-yoni, the crossing zone of the sun and horizon, it's the Tau of the Hebrew/Canaanite alphabet, it's also the diagram of the four elements, the center point of which is the aether or quintessence which they come from or the place where the soul, or rose, unfolds at the center of the rose cross. For what's there even Flavius Josephus in Antiquity of the Jews (40 AD?) really does a lot of damage to the credibility of most modern pastors in his account of the 2nd Temple.

I don't think that renders Christianity or Judaism utterly wrong, they're formed from a ground of generally good ideas so long as if people can separate out the Zoroastrian/Manichean aspects, just that I think the bible-literalism of the last couple centuries as a reaction to the enlightenment has been awful and completely deranges these texts.

There is a lot in there and some of it is too involved today for what neurological and endocrine diseases have done to me the last decade and a half - their effects periodically vary from being able to still read a hundred pages at a sitting to a page of print might as well be paint spatters for all that my mind can take in of it that day. And sometimes as part of that, sometimes its own independent thing, if I haven't already known it for three decades I won't know it that day.

Emanationism - had to look that one up.

I dunno, was it literally that or was that the authoring culture's way of expression, "... although 'spoken' into existence by the mechanics of said deity's speech, ..."?

I have read some things about how we have to be careful about how modern westerners take ancient eastern cultures' ways and styles of expression.

Where I think past and current lines of thought connect is with synchretism. Synchretism was huge in Egypt, huge in Greece, huge in Rome. After the period of history where deities were strictly tribal or national (where any conquered tribe took on the deity of the victors) it became a game of whose deities reminded you of which in your own pantheon and it seemed like their personality and effects in nature were culturally contageous. Similarly you could have seemingly opposite ideas become tightly wound, adjusted, acclimated, excused/apologized by bridge narratives, etc..

It seemed like that kind of polytheistic melting pot had a significant hand in people using deities as a way of describing clusters of natural forces. There's some indication that this might have been an Egyptian habit before it was a Greek or Roman habit but even then I don't think it fully evolved into the sort of mutation pool that you saw in places like Alexandria, Egypt under the Ptolemies. The then 'seven planets' were referred to often as well as the chief seven deities of any given pantheon, the seven days of the week are named after them in various ways, and in the Judao-Christian tradition they're sometimes covered as the 'seven Elohim', particularly notable in the apocalypses of Daniel, Zechariah, and John.

I made the mistake of assuming this discussion would actually be serious, that the person asking the question was sincerely interested in it. Judging by the quality of the comments, I now see how wrong I was. Many of the responses are truly appalling, utterly disrespectful and blasphemous. Shame on you, you disgusting people!

The politics are probably even worse.

On aside note, and I'm not saying this with respect to anyone in particular in the thread, I gave up on any notion a long time ago that most people care about truth or even have it in their top 3 or 5 priorities. While I'm not foolish enough to measure that by whether or not people agree with me I see it in how people conduct debate and discourse or, really more accurately, lampoon the process.

What reactions, which ones, which ones?

I was going to say, yes, do tell us, so that we can elevate our righteousness to the same level as yours - but that's probably why it was not said which ones - that way we can not become equals to the poster, who will forever be above us.