God Is...

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The knee-jerk atheist is someone who doesn't argue against how theists define God. He merely states his lack of belief.

Let's say I use Anselm's definition: God is a being greater than any which can be imagined. That is quite clearly Being itself.

If you don't want that definition, make your own. Just make sure it corresponds to how theists really talk about God, or else you'll be stuck wallowing in ignosticism. In that case, the conversation is meaningless.

I had the same trouble arguing for immaterialism. People were having trouble even figuring out how an immaterialist thinks. I was surrounded by people making faith-based arguments. They were materialist and the other options were completely wrong, right at the start of the debate. I see a lot of intelligent people getting sucked into atheism because they don't understand what theism even is, for lack of experience... just as apparently only materialists can think rationally and pragmatically about the world.

Well, different theists talk about God differently. So it quite depends what theist you're talking to. I would suppose most knee-jerk atheists are mostly arguing against a particular interpretation of the Christian God, likely as not the one they were brought up with.

In these circumstances, I'd gladly agree your God exists for you. I don't think it exists for me. That Being is is pretty much a given. That God is is a matter of dispute. If God does not mean anything more than Being, does not add anything to it, I will call it Being for sake of avoiding contention, as I will be understood by atheists and theists alike. If God does add something, then God is not Being, but Being + X. This latter would be my definition.

(You could, of course, define Being into God, in which case the disagreement is now over Being rather than God)

If you define God as something that is, and I define God as something that isn't, on what grounds do we come down on a particular side?

I am an apathetic agnostic. I don't know if God exists, and I'm not particularly concerned. I am interested in why people fall either side, and their reasoning for doing so. I've been called an atheist by theists, and a theist by atheists. By my behaviour and day-to-day thought, I am an atheist, though my imagination runs such that I find pleasure and resonance at a metaphorical level of the polytheism of paganism.

I wanted to ask you some questions about your immaterialism - I'll do that over in the appropriate thread.

Please don't say a thing like that again. It makes my ears hurt.

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.

Tapping into and exploring what you're talking about - ie. finding the god of the real (if there is one) or at least exploring the principles that would perhaps lead to their source, is really what active mysticism is all about. The esoteric systems around the world attempt to take the contemplative and philosophic direction toward finding these truths albeit they use different symbol sets based on their culture (ie. Hindu and Buddhist language in the east, Greek, Egyptian, and Judao-Christian in the west) and also have particular areas of disagreement such as the role of the mind as well as differences of opinion on what an individual's optimal orientation toward mind and matter should be.

Overall though they seem to come to very similar conclusions - ie. to say something as if there's both a supreme deity and no deity at the same time, that the best description of such a being is No Thing, ie. something very similar to the inscrutable Father that Jesus spoke about happens albeit it's panentheistic figure with a deistic relationship to us rather than being a Jupiter/Zeus figure like so many of the western religions seem to have corrupted it into.



I'd agree that part of the problem is people like the OP can't decouple the two - ie. religious politics vs. the question of actuality. I suppose if one comes to the question already quite certain that all of it, 100%, is man-made authoritative then one will assume that there are no other questions to be asked - that the concept in its entirety is whole-cloth fabrication.

The problem I find with this approach is that it's also needy enough to deny people's internal experiences, deny that visions and revelations do happen (regardless of whether one prefers to see them as belching neurology or legitimate contacts with higher planes). There are enough legitimate miracles, ie. just within our 'I' experiences as they are, just within our ability to decouple ourselves from our environments and have internal realms to balance out external hardships (ie. the world of imagination) or even to go a step farther and discuss the issue of invention and human innovation.

When people talk about us being massive colonies of cells and say "Aha! Consciousness is an illusion!" - maybe the concept of it being a unitary thing is an illusion, a bit like the concept of a solitary camp fire is an illusion when you could cut the logs and embers into quite a few piles and have separate fires going, but that still doesn't make fire itself an illusion nor does the divisibility of consciousness make it an illusion either. To take that line of reasoning would suggest that our entire world is an illusion if there's nothing in my house, on my desk, etc. that can't be split apart into it's basic chemical building blocks, then to it's atoms, those atoms themselves aren't real because you can split them into quarks and leptons, and you can follow that all the way down until about all you have left is energy.

The above is exactly why I think it's dogmatic and really quite religious for people to say that philosophy doesn't matter. It's about the only quality-check on thought that we have if we can apply it with integrity and as far as I can tell atheism can become just as superstitious as any other religion without philosophy as a guiding light.

God is a metaphor.
I would also like him to be an onomatopoeia but you can't have everything.

A waste of time used to oppress minorities and other religions in fact http://godisimaginary.com/ a good video discription of it all is

WONDERFUL!
I LOVE YOU GOD! YOU TOO, JESUS! AND I CAN'T FORGET YOU, HOLY SPIRIT!

Fat and needs to shave his beard.

He probably just gained a little weight over the holidays from partying too much. After all, it was Jesus' birthday.

He needs to lay of the McDonalds then.

God is on my side.

Dead.

Pascal's wager is the dumbest thing ever. Get off on emotional blackmail?

What happens when Meistersinger meets his maker and Krishna says, sorry you have been a bad Hindu you have not been following me at all, you will be sent to Naraka.

Pascal was mostly a fraud, he he famous for something the Indians invented centuries before.

He one of the most overrated philosophers and mathematicians.

Fake.

A murderous misogynistic homophobic sociopath.