Do you believe in God?

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Are you serious? Go back and read the thread again to find out the answer to your first question-- making sure to fully investigate all of my external links if you truly want the answer to your first and second question.

I cannot believe I am actually having to explain to you the difference between God and a leprechaun but here it goes. God is a word that is used to describe the transcendent, unimaginably powerful, intelligent, and personal (Minded/intentional) being who created the universe. This word God can be interchanged with other words if one prefers to refer to this entity that the vast majority of the peoples of the world have intuited/deduced from the nature of reality as something other than God. In the West we use the word God. In India they refer to Brahman. In China they refer to the play of the Tao. In North America they refer to Great Spirit. All of these refer to what one could call God. In contrast, a leprechaun is a humanoid fairy who, in Irish lore would interact with people in this plane of reality. A leprechaun is not a transcendent being who created the universe. At best you could speak of leprechauns being analogous to "angels or demons." However, it is fairly silly to attempt to compare the modern concept of God with any sort of "mythology." If one does this move, then it demonstrates their superficial understanding of philosophy and theology.

Also... you keep throwing this word evidence around... "just give me the evidence." Once again... I will refer you to the bulk of this conversation for "evidence." And if you mean physical evidence of God... I would like for you to explain to me what that would look like.

Lastly, your assertion that believers "know" is ridiculous. Leaving aside people who don't think critically about anything... atheist and theist alike, no one would claim to know things with certainty. This really frustrates me. This is what I was alluding to earlier. Why is it that knowledge in science gets to be provisional, but not in theology? Scientism driven atheists love to celebrate that their knowledge is constantly evolving because they ask questions and they accuse theists of being closed minded because they have it all figured out. This is total BS. I am sorry but this is just elementary school banter. And I laugh when the atheist directly contradicts himself later when he says "science has shown that God does not exist... or very probably does not exist." What this means is that the atheist who espouses scientism think s of the God of the gaps when they think of God. So in their minds God is the God of the gaps. Then having formed this idea in their minds, they announce that God is a silly idea and say watch God disappear as science moves forward. When in actually, intelligent people who think critically on these issues find more evidence for God with every scientific discovery. Seriously... this entire conversation breaks down on how you define God.... and in every single case the Atheist has a, frankly, childish notion of God. I hope people are aware when they watch Tyson new Cosmos for example... or Stephen Hawkings universe... that these are not just scientific documentaries... these are philosophical and theological propaganda pieces... it frustrates me to no end to see educatiuonal documentaries corrupted with BS side commentaries on how "once upon a time people didn't know anything and so they thought God had to do everything "and now we know otherwise" Thats just trash. Period. And to think kids are watching this. For me s**t like that is just* Just* as bad as young earth creationism teaching non-evolution in schools and people walking with dinosaurs.... it is just as patently absurd and dangerous misinformation.

On Watts and Spinoza, as i have said, you need to brush up on your Watts, because he is one of my favorite Minds in history, and he most certainly had a meaning behind those metaphors... as was revealed earlier in the thread... you have misinterpreted Watts to a very very large degree. Alan Watts was not an atheist or a pantheist... Alan was a Theist or Panentheist. The entire message of Alan's project is that we are God pretending that we are not. If you think that is a metaphor for "us being coextensive with God", then you are mistaken. You just need to listen to more of his lectures to understand him. Alan's project was to get Western cultrues to see that the purpose of God's creation is to dance... and therfore it is not serious. And the kingdom of heaven is here. After this life is the Godhead... and the Godhead made this life in order not to experience the GodHead.... therefore "it" is here and now.


"A Enlightenment involves the dissolution of the ego (sense of self), so it's natural to experience this as a merging with something greater (all of existence), and a Jew would call it God, for lack of a better term. If God is defined as everything, even I would believe it, since I believe in everything. But if something is everything, then it's also nothing, and becomes meaningless."

You might like to read Spinoza's 'Ethics' and see if you don't feel a tingle.


Spinoza talks about this everything you refer to in a very thought provoking way.

You are correct... God is everything.... or at lest you could say that everything derives its nature from God. Every-thing
THING every-THING. God is in fact no-THING. You are quite correct. But does this make him absurd? I do not think so. God is undifferentiated. We are differentiated. This is precisely what separates us from God. God created a system of conduits wherein he could dissolve himself into a matrix of pluriform. In other words... things.

Brahman (no-thing)-------Maya------Atman (every-thing)
Yin (no-thing) + Yang (thing-ness)---------------------------------> Tao ( Every Thing )
God (no-thing)---- Holy Ghost-----Son (thing)

Last edited by NoahYates on 15 Apr 2016, 10:11 am, edited 2 times in total.

Again... this one lecture of Alan's on G.K. Chesterton pretty much says it all. This is the 3rd time Ive linked it in these 44 pages, but I definitely feel like it is important.... just in case someone has not heard it. Seriously... what Alan says in this lecture is golden. He condenses all of his lectures into this one. It is my single favorite lecture by Alan.

For those who have absolute faith in a god, the answer should be very simple, straightforward. I don't have any faith.

I believe in the possibility of existence of one or many supreme beings that could be called "gods" for the fact that they would be more powerful than us humans. Even if they exist, I can't see a reason why we should be paying them any respects and worship, yet more if they forged this sort of reality in which we are.

There's also the possibility that we are these supreme beings ourselves, should we eventually find a final proof that we're the dominant species in the whole universe. I tend to think we'll be self-destructing before that happens - that would be an ironic form of extinction to supreme beings.

Taoism is not theism, so lets get that out of the way. Taoism is the opposite of theism. Taoism means there is no central controller, or assembler of the universe as if from parts. That is a distinctly western idea. Things arise from their own intrinsic nature, passively. Living things are not made, they grow. Alan could tell you about it if you weren't saddled with a new age attitude that seeks to blur all spiritual ideas into one incoherent mess.

Anyway, I don't espouse scientism. I will consider any evidence you may have, in whatever form, and so far you have shown none, except for some proselytizing videos, too thick with ignorance to watch for more than a minute.

Knowledge in theology could be considered provisional, except that it's not based on observation or evidence, it's based on what believers want to be true. The only critical thought applied to it (by it's proponents) is most often phony. It's an act where they go through the motions of being critical with no intention of actually giving up their belief if they find inconsistency or contradiction. Then come the ad hoc rationalizations.

I understand Watts better than you. He's playing a trick on theists. Indeed, all of spiritual teaching is a trick. He takes what you think you know and twists it in order to force you to experience reality differently, without preconception. He uses whatever terminology is necessary to do this. God in his hands is merely a tool so you can transcend God, and transcend all spiritual concepts, none of which are capable of describing reality. You can be given everything, but you have to give everything up first.

Without getting into the limitations of the above, it is actually in violation of the position you take on magical beings by way of the following definition via Merriam-Webster:

2: a religion developed from Taoist philosophy and folk and Buddhist religion and concerned with obtaining long life and good fortune often by magical means

It's that magical means that I speak of. And, the general term applied to that subset of religious beliefs is that the 'universe' is the controller and self regulating body. It is 'god' itself.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Taoism

Yes, I believe God exists. Though it was only for a day, I saw my father who had died and been dead for half an hour be brought back to life through prayer. I know also from evidence by design that God exists and from the historicity of the Bible and fulfilled prophecies in the Bible, like Isaiah 53 in Christ, that the Bible is true and Jesus(in Hebrew, Yeshua) is the Christ(Messiah). For those that love pet sins or have been indoctrinated into multiculturalism, even though they consciously hate the stupid philosophy, it's difficult to accept because Christ goes against what they want, but nevertheless God is real and Jesus Christ is Lord.

zkydz,

There were different schools of Taoism. I'm not so concerned about the alchemy/ magical aspects of it. The Tao Te Ching describes some interesting ideas and highlights the differences between eastern and western thought. Tao was often mistranslated as God by Christian missionaries, the first to bring these texts to the west. Tao as the universe from which things arise of their own nature is not incompatible with science.

It is quite interesting that you would say that, because in the philosophy of science, it has been speculated that the historical reasons science arose in the west is precisely because in the east, the concept of Tao as unknowable led to intellectual malaise of sorts when it came to seeking explanations and order in the universe. Science arose in the west, because of the enlightenment, which was born out of the renaissance, where christian, hermetic, jewish, and islamic theologians at the academy working to understand the universe and the mind of God rediscovered and revitalized Greek literature/culture where they used science and reason to arrive at rational conclusions about the metaphysics of reality. In other words, man became scientific because he expected law in nature, because he believed in a law giver. It is a modern myth that science and God are in any way opposed.

Last edited by NoahYates on 15 Apr 2016, 12:25 pm, edited 2 times in total.

That's why I've bowed out. I have noticed the tendency to use the same arguments for both sides of the fence while ignoring the contradictions.

Magical beings are ok here, but not there, that sort of thing.
Sooo, turning off notifications. I actually have real issues to deal with other than bantering the same thing over and over and over ad nauseum.

The difference in what I have been trying to say as compared to many of these posts is this: I am not telling anybody what is right or wrong. I am trying to encourage a more open, logical thought process that allows for possibility. That gadfly in everybody's ointment. An equal opportunity protagonist if you will. That shutting off 'possibility' is the slippery slope to being closed minded on things that are beyond our grasp at this time.

I don't see that much 'possibility' discussion here. A few pearls of wisdom from both sides. But, mostly rancor. I have NYC for that. LOL

The Ionian Greeks plowed the Science Road for the West. The Ionian philosophers got rid of the Gods, Demons and Ghosts from Nature and started relying on principle, primordial substances (the 4 classic elements for example) and rules based on regularities. It was a long way to go to get to modern sciences but a journey of a thousand miles begins with a small step.

That is a rather large brush stroke... I would say that Plato and Aristotle were more influential in the paradigm shift of Western culture that is the Renaissance, which catalyzed the reaction in the collective minds of Western thinkers that would precipitate the blossoming of the Enlightenment, which gave us the scientific methodology we use today as tool to tease out the secrets of how nature operates so that we might describe phenomenon and make predictions.

The Ionian thinkers (Ionia being the eastern Aegean Islands and coast) predated, and started the Greek tradition the lead to the later Athenian philosophers you're talking about ( who in turn would later be revived and who would lead to the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment).

Correct. When I spoke of a revival of "Greek philosophy" I was referring to Plato and Aristotle, as they had the most influence on Western thinkers in the Scholastic tradition.