Do you believe in God?

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I don't fully understand it either, as I said. However, I do understand what it proved. As to the longish proof, twice is enough....

As long as you understands it looks like you are dodging. Also... your post is probably stored if you just hit "back" enough. Then you can copy the message and paste it in a fresh post. For future reference.

And? A multiverse makes more sense than a super powerful wizard.

I do not recall directly saying that you have a religion... although I do argue that Atheism does fall under the definition of a religion in terms of comparative religions studies., where religion has been defined as human transformation in response to perceived ultimacy.

Given the nature of Mind, Information, and Language, I would prefer to believe in a Mind and Logos the engendered our being as radiant fractal resonances of "itself."

Below is something I wrote in 2012. It is just a brief musing... I never completed the essay.



Hinduism, Taoism, and Christianity

THIS DRAFT IS INCOMPLETE… so far I have only briefly sketched general definitions of the concepts of God or Nature for each of the three religions. Before the final draft I will have added extensive discussion on the concord or lack thereof between them and will attempt my “reconciliation” of the purpose of being human that I feel can be derived from those ontologies as a peice. And of course I will provide citation in the final draft. I felt like it would be better to turn in a partial draft than no draft at all. Hopefully you can extract some intimation of where I am going.


According to ancient Hindu thought, the realm of experience we participate in, although seemingly substantial, is actually a lower-order level of reality blossoming from the creative expression of the ultimate reality, Brahman- the one, necessarily existent substance- alive and burgeoning with radiant potentiality. This Maya, or creative illusion in which we humans find ourselves, emanates from the being of Brahman as a form of cosmic play in which his various essences/potencies become actual. Timeless and immaterial, Brahman engrosses himself by propagating his infinite nature as vibrating scintillations that harmonically interact. Level upon level of reality overlaps to engender a hierarchy of veiled experiences where Brahman is author, actor, and spectator. Through the mechanism of the karmic cycle, known as samsara, he eternally seeks newer and deeper states of novelty, dissolving himself into a matrix of pluriform in pursuit of the evolution/transmission of the soul. Therefore, to be human, through the lens of ancient Hindu wisdom, is to wear the guise of mortality and finitude as a means by which Brahman can forget himself and feel the crisp apprehension of aliveness that accompanies the contact between mind and matter- soul and body.

The Christian notion of God is a transcendent being, who, through his abundance of love and the over-flowing potency, created and perpetually upholds the cosmos. In the Gospel of John he describes the nature of God as follows: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. In other words, God is the infinite Logos in which all reality is potential and out of which becoming fruits- he is the intelligent fountain of being (light) outside which only non-entity and absurdity (darkness) permeates… and non-existence/chaos will never prevail over of him. Furthermore, God has relationships within himself. The esoteric doctrine of the Trinity informs us that three complementary aspects of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, dynamically interact to coax the ordered complexity of his essence into actuality as the demiurgic expression that is Creation. Human beings represent the hallmark achievement within God’s Creation as we are endowed by him with his own faculties of conscious intelligence, free will, and a moral/aesthetic sense in order that we may love and treasure him just as he loves and nurtures us.
The Taoist sage views the world as the manifestation of two complementary forces, yin and yang. Yin is the passive manifold that creates space for yang to manifest. Yang is the animate, corporeal nature that fervently seeks to consummate the design propositioned by yin; yin is the implicit while yang is the explicit. These two energies interact in a mode of ever flowing play where the harmonic opposition foments a substantive reality that seeks balance and equilibrium. The sum total of the forms which effervesce from the synergistic dialogue between yin and yang is called Tao.

Topics for continuing paragraphs:
The Christian notion of God is perfectly compatible with the Hindu concept of Brahman
Both concepts of God involve transcendent, immaterial, minded beings creating worlds for purposes.
The only logically coherent way to achieve the construction of a world is to implement the metaphysical principals of yin and yang which together provide reality to anything.
Thus to be human is to be a manifestation of God’s intent within the system of Tao. By interpolation this intent is to both separate from God and to rediscover God by coming back into him.

Outside of the young earth creationist community the Torah and in particular Genesis is handled today in a very figurative manner, and as someone whose spent some time familiarizing myself with Qabalistic philosophy I've seen how far that can be taken. There's plenty of history in mystifying and enlarging the meanings of the language therein going back a few thousand years in smaller traditions. Similarly you have the Greeks who often used the term 'world' in a much more fast and loose way than we would simply meaning the sum total of their environment. If one holds to the narrative that God parted the upper waters from the lower waters to create the world or even the earth, anyone whose not a YEC is already claiming that terminology to be used in the royal sense and to include trillions of suns, galaxies, planets, etc. and there's no reason with that sort of openness to say that only a single universe is an acceptable definition at this point. A young earth creationist would justifiably find a multiverse unacceptable but then again they'd also argue that the earth is 6,000 years old and that evolution didn't happen.

Even the debate over whether or not a God exists, as any intention extends past one's own beliefs for their own sake, seems to imply a need for one group to evangelize the other. That need seems to only apply to those who see their belief as salvific and that other people need to believe what they do to be saved - a trait that bible literalists and certain kinds of antitheists seem to be front and center on.

That above point perhaps reminds me of why I shouldn't get dragged into the haggling. My own evolving set of hypotheses and methods of dealing with my existence are always a work in progress but also I don't see, at least at this point, any reason to believe that someone who doesn't see the world the way I do is going to fall into any sort of perdition. I do see a certain kind of futility in various kinds of arguments, not because I'm in any way better but because eight or nine years ago I was front and center doing the same thing and I saw what it got me (tired, frustrated, and nowhere) and to date I haven't seen anyone's opinions changed by any of it.

Perhaps that's why I make the argument for direct experience; if there's anything behind it to be had you'll find out. If you're an objective sort of person who has enough mystical experiences and is able to go over them with a fine toothed comb to figure out what parts of it are simply subconscious communication and what parts might lend themselves to not only a greater vista of consciousness than the nervous system but might also lead to some sort of falsifiable claim - that's where you've really gotten somewhere and come up with something that people can use. Even if the whole thing turns out nothing like you may have thought; either it all turns out to be neurons talking to neurons or that you discover a rather inert and rigid panpsychism made of stuff that has no interest in our ability to prove its existence to one another, you've at least found a way forward and gained some remarkable self-discipline and aptitudes getting there.

Here's something that gave me food for thought.



My God may not be the same as yours - but I bet they are friends.

I don't necessarily believe it, but it made me smile. That was about 26 years ago.

My views have changed.
So has my hair line.

i struggle with the concept of 'belief' in anything. I tend to think in terms of definites or as-close-to-definite-as-possible-given-the-current-available-evidence vs I-have-no-idea-and-there's-no-point-thinking-about-it-until-I-have-more-information. The third category is that-would-be-cool-if-true and I think most people tend to mix this with the first type. As an IT bod I find the simulation theory interesting, but right now I'm happy to stay on the fence.

William Lane Craig stretches Mike Payton's assh**e beyond recognition.

Last edited by Deltaville on 03 Apr 2016, 4:57 am, edited 1 time in total.

So says the person who can only view things in a materialistic perspective.

The multiverse is on life support indeed, turns out that BICEP2 is close to nullifying cosmic inflation, making the so-called eternal inflation theory a laughable concept. Just the String Theory landscape concept remains, and once that is ruled out, IT IS OVER.

http://www.space.com/28423-cosmic-infla ... -dust.html

I believe there's not enough evidence for me to say for sure whether there's a God or not for sure, but personally I reckon that one does exist. If you look at humankind and life around us, and how complex and beautiful our planet is, it just doesn't look feasible for us to just be caused by a coincidental explosion of chemicals. There must have been a mind behind it all. But at the same time, I don't believe God is an 'all-loving' creature and doesn't meddle with our planet. He/she/it created all the forces like gravity and friction for there to be such forces in the first place.

At the same time, though, since I can't say for sure myself, I respect whatever anybody else believes about God.

I don't think that means what you think it means. One can propose a multiverse where the universes never meet, in which case nothing we can determine about our universe applies to the multiverse.