God is a Dictator.
Regarding God being a dictator, why not? Well, where does a dictator get his power? A dictator is ultimately at the mercy of his people, but usually dictators come to power through force supported by a powerful minority, such as military or other special interest.
Kings, on the other hand, are kings by inheritance, meaning they are thought to possess a genetic suitability to lead. Logically it makes sense to support a ruling family in which children are taught leadership from birth, though actual results vary.
Dictators must assume power, propped up by force rather than right or universal agreement. Often it is fear that keeps them in power. The problem with a dictator is if he can assume power, so can the next guy. Fear in the long term breeds resentment rather than respect, thus it is incumbent on the dictator to mitigate rule-by-fear to stay in power. And there are many examples of modern dictators plagued by paranoia—their own fear of people, the military, a power base, a political rival, a popular rising star in the Party, opposition, etc.
God doesn’t fear people, nor does He require permission or the will of the people to act. Kings are sovereign because it is assumed they are fit for rule by their nature and character, literally BORN to lead. Humans are fallible, of course, and not eternal, hence why regencies are necessary sometimes. But this model is closer to a working analogy for God’s sovereignty than a dictatorship. God’s suitability for rule depends on suitability inherent in divine nature. With God being eternal and perfect, there’s no need to assume the same kinds of problems inherent in mortal sovereigns or dictators.
An elected president in a republic is a sort of acknowledgment that earthly kings aren’t as effective as rule by God alone. Early Israelite government was free and open, ruled by popular warrior-judges with demonstrated effectiveness. It’s essentially an informal representative democracy, whereas we have a formal system. We really just have a number of “point men” that operate at executive levels in tandem with popular legislators. In ancient Israel, each clan would be represented by a chosen leader. The western model could work in the same way the ancient Israelite theocracy worked. The main difference is that the west represents a conscious rejection of God as head of state (in practice), whereas the Biblical system had a cyclical acceptance/rejection of God. The kingdom era did not change this. But I think what’s obvious is that God is certainly not an elected official. God allows apparent self-rule only because it’s the most conducive way to let people obey God out of their own free will. Wholesale rejection of God results in destruction, e.g. the flood, Sodom, Conquest of Canaan, the Jewish exile, of course, but it’s easier to ward off consequences when individuals are free to choose. The Old Testament never requires faith in God for one’s right to exist. It only requires that we obey His commandments. Self-rule makes that a lot easier, hence why I think America even as a secular society is in a strong global position (although the national debt is a great cause for concern).
I look at God’s sovereignty differently, though, as neither a king nor a dictator, but rather a supreme Ego, a creative individual. The opening chapters of Genesis clearly demonstrate that God created the universe. It and everything in it belongs to God. God is under no obligation to share His things. He can destroy His toys if it gives Him pleasure to do so. That may seem like a childish, selfish description of God. Selfish, yes. But whether you agree that’s a good thing, or you hate God for appearing childish, it ultimately doesn’t matter. God can do what God wants with His things. It’s understandable that someone might attribute despotism to a Creator who won’t share or bend to the whim of an inferior being.
But it’s also the petulant cry of an inferior being who envies that sovereignty without consideration for the responsibility that goes with it. If you had God’s power, had the ability to set man free, how would you respond to your creation rejecting you? Could you withstand the temptation to revoke man’s agency? And if you revoked human agency, could you exist for all eternity knowing you created an army of robots who HAD to obey you?
I like things the way they are. Let God be God. The fact that God allows me continued existence shows me that I remain a valuable part of His creation. That makes me feel pretty good about myself!
If God existed he would certainly have the right to "think of himself as God". Lol!
I agree that there are all kinds of problems with comparing a JudeoChristian type God to a human political leader, and trying to measure both the same moral yardstick. Peaches to pears.
God is like a dictator in that he doesn't have to answer to voters, but on the other hand he doesn't have to fear being overthrown by his subjects. A paranoid sociopath like a Stalin or a Hitler has to worry about being overthrown. So that is why they induldge in cruelty and so forth to instill fear. God, if he exists, wouldn have to worry about that (unless you literally believe that chapter in the old testament in which there was a moment when God DID get afraid that we humans were going to overthrow him so he "confounded the languages"- that whole Tower of Babel thing). An omnipotent creator diety would have no reason to either punish political prisoners NOR to cater to voters. So God cant be compared to either a dictator or to a POTUS/PM.
Nor really to a monarch either except that monarchs have a certain legitimacy -they legally inherit the role as a birthright- rather than steal the throne by force or chicanery like a typical dictator (though we are now on three generations of dictators in north korea). So like the ancients we still speak of god as being a "king" whose rule is legit. But even that's just an analogy. And like all analogies its imperfect.
Something HAD to have created us. Life on this planet must have come from somewhere. It's no accident that life exists here.
Guess evolution isn-t on the game plan..
The first existenses could but bring themselves into existense .
Quote by Lao Tzu .. 3000 yrs before concept of judeo christian , was a thought.
A long sigh..........
_________________
Diagnosed hfa
Loves velcro,
Something HAD to have created us. Life on this planet must have come from somewhere. It's no accident that life exists here.
Guess evolution isn-t on the game plan..
The first existenses could but bring themselves into existense .
Quote by Lao Tzu .. 3000 yrs before concept of judeo christian , was a thought.
A long sigh..........
Maybe the bible is really a load of s**t and evolution was always God's game plan?
But life on earth had to have come from SOMEWHERE!
Something HAD to have created us. Life on this planet must have come from somewhere. It's no accident that life exists here.
Guess evolution isn-t on the game plan..
The first existenses could but bring themselves into existense .
Quote by Lao Tzu .. 3000 yrs before concept of judeo christian , was a thought.
A long sigh..........
Maybe the bible is really a load of s**t and evolution was always God's game plan?
But life on earth had to have come from SOMEWHERE!
Agreed , but given the data on life discovered on other worlds , and the gazillions of planets , And apparently how often , freak accidents are reported about any given instance ....? And the eons worlds have been forming .
.. am not qualified to even offer an opinion about the nature of the universe.
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techstepgenr8tion
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No one knows, that's the thing.
We can probably rule out a theistic deity whose watching over each and every one of us personally, some of the other possibilities are a bit more agile and savvy (like process philosophy, pantheism, panentheism, etc.).
This is why I get more excited about ceremonial magicians sharing their results of contact with archangels, Olympic spirits, kings of the four quarters, etc., various people who tend to have profound entity experiences on psychedelics, or the various people who come back with interesting near death experiences. That has at least something we can examine and something we can triangulate for consistency and value.
As far as trying to figure out if there's one grand deity or whether you can even talk to it is a totally different matter. What's probably more pressing to us right now is figuring out how the fundamental rules work and what we might be able to do in order to catch our own slippage as a culture - like our inability to create flexible enough institutions or economies that work without massive waste, ie. getting our understanding of human consciousness tightened down a bit better so we can be sure that we have hundreds, even thousands, of years left to figure out whether we can chat up the Ancient of Days and whether it's even a mind we could remotely understand if it is out there.
_________________
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin
We can probably rule out a theistic deity whose watching over each and every one of us personally, some of the other possibilities are a bit more agile and savvy (like process philosophy, pantheism, panentheism, etc.).
This is why I get more excited about ceremonial magicians sharing their results of contact with archangels, Olympic spirits, kings of the four quarters, etc., various people who tend to have profound entity experiences on psychedelics, or the various people who come back with interesting near death experiences. That has at least something we can examine and something we can triangulate for consistency and value.
As far as trying to figure out if there's one grand deity or whether you can even talk to it is a totally different matter. What's probably more pressing to us right now is figuring out how the fundamental rules work and what we might be able to do in order to catch our own slippage as a culture - like our inability to create flexible enough institutions or economies that work without massive waste, ie. getting our understanding of human consciousness tightened down a bit better so we can be sure that we have hundreds, even thousands, of years left to figure out whether we can chat up the Ancient of Days and whether it's even a mind we could remotely understand if it is out there.
Hey somerandonguy , reluctant to admit this but , you have some profound
Thought processes going on there . Am in agreeance with you , but am pretty sure if your aware of those psychoactive drugs, ayahuasca ,pardon spelling
And the like . Your prolly aware that certain regions of the brain have been treated with ? I believe, electrical stimulation ,? And simulated near death experiences .. but all those kinds of things have always fascinated me.
And many other things that might relate to things in that direction.
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Thought processes going on there . Am in agreeance with you , but am pretty sure if your aware of those psychoactive drugs, ayahuasca ,pardon spelling
And the like . Your prolly aware that certain regions of the brain have been treated with ? I believe, electrical stimulation ,? And simulated near death experiences .. but all those kinds of things have always fascinated me.
And many other things that might relate to things in that direction.
A couple things that don't get explained by fiddling with electrodes to the brain, at least that I can say that I'm aware of from experience:
1) Precognitive dreams - it can happen that you have a dream with some really heavily distorted 'slap you in the face' elements, like something's trying to force your attention on one element, you might even tell some people about that dream over the next few days, and it happens so many months later. The standard attempts to explain that away would usually either come down to appophrenia, ie. so many 'like' situations passed that you didn't notice and you just picked up on the one, or possibly falsified memory (though that gets harder if you ask the people you told about the dream). Still - you can rule out appophrenia if the element that was focused on was too oblique and that it was a one-off in a dream followed by actually experiencing it in waking outward life.
2) There are times when you can get hit with such heavy banks of synchronicity that it feels like the universe is flirting with you in some bizarre way. It hasn't happened to me often but there have been a few weeks in my life where it seemed like the standard rules went out the window and I either saw very strange tetherings of unrelated events come together (like I end up out of town, unpredicted one night stand, come back to town and all my friends are having serious fights - at the same time, who don't even know each other or hang in the same group) with their SO's. I've also noticed that if you do start diving into the occult and play around with various symbolic content it's apt to have knock-on effects in the outside world, not anything you can really control well but if you do it and if you experience it it's tough not to consider that there's some kind of information permeability between inner and outer and that said information is bouncing around out there.
Entity contacts of course, no matter how intense, are highly personal (unless you know someone whose either had the same experience or even shared the same experience with you at the same time), and the subjectivity/objectivity or what indeed was 'shared' gets quite difficult to untangle. I would say though that I had an experience, a run-in with something that loved me very deeply and maternally (showed up as Isis/Mary but there's no certainty that it was an actual identity match), and if I were to try to compare a vividness scale to a pain scale - like 0.5 I cut my finger, 8.2 I need to go to the hospital because my appendix is about to blow up, imagining an entity contact in a sober state would best be a 2.5 level intensity, with a good hallucinogen you could get up to maybe 5 or 6, I had something in the 8 range - quite sober - just meditating but on the edge of a hypnogogic state where.... this is where this gets odd... is it normal to have a vision where you try to look at something and you can't focus on it because it's too bright.... a bit like you're trying to stare at the top of a fresh-snow-covered mountain at noon time in the winter or stare directly into the sun?
This is where I've just been forced, by experience, to accept that what we're dealing with at least has animistic properties - even if there were no God in the ultimate divine mind sense there's clearly a lot of 'something' whether it's actually connected to anything larger or not, in the way that Kabbalistic and neoplatonist emanationist thinkers like to assume, I have no clue - it might be the case, it might be, I have to admit that if there is evidence for that sort of webbing and tethering I haven't seen it yet but admittedly I have a lot of bright fragments, interesting tidbits, but little to go on in calling it a comprehensive worldview, rather I tend to just pick at whatever philosophies seem to capture it best (I tend to like things like neutral monism, functionalism, etc. because they tend to explain consciousness in ways that are more exchange-based rather than identity locked as you'd have with dual-aspect monism or panpsychism).
My sense - if there is a God or a divine mind, it's scary in about the most playful and seductive way you could imagine. What I'm trying to say is think about how rough history has been, how much horror people have gone through, and with NDE's you have people saying that in their moment when things slowed down they saw absolute beauty and mathematical perfection in everything. In a way that sort of validates some of my hypothesis about my precognitive dreams, ie. Minkowski spacetime or what you'd call an eternal block universe (eg. your entire life already exists and it's a bit like its burned on a blu ray or DVD - now is just the play point), but at the same time you try to look at the whole spate of everything under that umbrella - it really f's your head up when you think about it, about as badly as the Golden Dawn exempt adept pledge to 'Look at every event in your life as a conversation between you and God', which TBH I've been through enough things and spent enough time contemplating the horrors of the 20th century and now that this is really rough. It's also another reason I got chills watching The Joker yesterday, whoever wrote that seemed to load up on these sort of darkly flirtatious coincidences that were leading Joaquin Phoenix's character Arthur along.
I know all of that was a lot but, that's part of what's on my plate and what I'm trying to chew on lately. I think it will be interesting when we can do more to suss out more relationships between brain and subjectivity, and who knows - maybe ideas like IIT will have their place.
I like this guys in particular though lately, still need to read Beyond the Dynamical Universe but he and his co-authors seem to be talking about interpretations of consciousness that deal with neutral monism and what he's calling consciousness being governed by adynamic global constraints:
_________________
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin
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Something HAD to have created us. Life on this planet must have come from somewhere. It's no accident that life exists here.
Guess evolution isn-t on the game plan..
The first existenses could but bring themselves into existense .
Quote by Lao Tzu .. 3000 yrs before concept of judeo christian , was a thought.
A long sigh..........
Maybe the bible is really a load of s**t and evolution was always God's game plan?
But life on earth had to have come from SOMEWHERE!
I completely agree life had to have some kind of deterministic origin. Everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause. From there we can conclude that the universe is not infinite, yet it is logically possible for a first cause to exist outside the created universe and itself be infinite. That first Cause is a conscious entity and possesses an ego (identity, "I"). And since the Creator is a single, intelligent, and personal agent, God as described in the Old Testament is the best and, really, only candidate for who that Creator could be.
Somewhat tangential, but in my interaction with others on this topic, I've noticed that accepting that assumes the human mind is sufficiently reasonable to draw the correct conclusion. Logical arguments such as the above will often fail, and the reasons for that are simple. First, n00b apologists tend to accept the premise of the atheist and work backwards, whereas atheists refuse to accept the opposite premise. If you know God exists, why argue as though He doesn't? You can spot those arguments from miles away: "If there is a God..." What do you mean "IF"??? Second, this also assumes that the atheist has the capacity for reasonable thought. Christians, from reading the first chapter of Romans, ought to know that this is extremely unlikely. No better conclusion can possibly exist. Therefore, if one claims to logically conclude that God doesn't exist, his logic is flawed. Reasoned arguments with people like that can't happen because they are incapable of rational thought. Or like my wife likes to say: "Never argue with idiots. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience."
Thought processes going on there . Am in agreeance with you , but am pretty sure if your aware of those psychoactive drugs, ayahuasca ,pardon spelling
And the like . Your prolly aware that certain regions of the brain have been treated with ? I believe, electrical stimulation ,? And simulated near death experiences .. but all those kinds of things have always fascinated me.
And many other things that might relate to things in that direction.
A couple things that don't get explained by fiddling with electrodes to the brain, at least that I can say that I'm aware of from experience:
1) Precognitive dreams - it can happen that you have a dream with some really heavily distorted 'slap you in the face' elements, like something's trying to force your attention on one element, you might even tell some people about that dream over the next few days, and it happens so many months later. The standard attempts to explain that away would usually either come down to appophrenia, ie. so many 'like' situations passed that you didn't notice and you just picked up on the one, or possibly falsified memory (though that gets harder if you ask the people you told about the dream). Still - you can rule out appophrenia if the element that was focused on was too oblique and that it was a one-off in a dream followed by actually experiencing it in waking outward life.
2) There are times when you can get hit with such heavy banks of synchronicity that it feels like the universe is flirting with you in some bizarre way. It hasn't happened to me often but there have been a few weeks in my life where it seemed like the standard rules went out the window and I either saw very strange tetherings of unrelated events come together (like I end up out of town, unpredicted one night stand, come back to town and all my friends are having serious fights - at the same time, who don't even know each other or hang in the same group) with their SO's. I've also noticed that if you do start diving into the occult and play around with various symbolic content it's apt to have knock-on effects in the outside world, not anything you can really control well but if you do it and if you experience it it's tough not to consider that there's some kind of information permeability between inner and outer and that said information is bouncing around out there.
Entity contacts of course, no matter how intense, are highly personal (unless you know someone whose either had the same experience or even shared the same experience with you at the same time), and the subjectivity/objectivity or what indeed was 'shared' gets quite difficult to untangle. I would say though that I had an experience, a run-in with something that loved me very deeply and maternally (showed up as Isis/Mary but there's no certainty that it was an actual identity match), and if I were to try to compare a vividness scale to a pain scale - like 0.5 I cut my finger, 8.2 I need to go to the hospital because my appendix is about to blow up, imagining an entity contact in a sober state would best be a 2.5 level intensity, with a good hallucinogen you could get up to maybe 5 or 6, I had something in the 8 range - quite sober - just meditating but on the edge of a hypnogogic state where.... this is where this gets odd... is it normal to have a vision where you try to look at something and you can't focus on it because it's too bright.... a bit like you're trying to stare at the top of a fresh-snow-covered mountain at noon time in the winter or stare directly into the sun?
This is where I've just been forced, by experience, to accept that what we're dealing with at least has animistic properties - even if there were no God in the ultimate divine mind sense there's clearly a lot of 'something' whether it's actually connected to anything larger or not, in the way that Kabbalistic and neoplatonist emanationist thinkers like to assume, I have no clue - it might be the case, it might be, I have to admit that if there is evidence for that sort of webbing and tethering I haven't seen it yet but admittedly I have a lot of bright fragments, interesting tidbits, but little to go on in calling it a comprehensive worldview, rather I tend to just pick at whatever philosophies seem to capture it best (I tend to like things like neutral monism, functionalism, etc. because they tend to explain consciousness in ways that are more exchange-based rather than identity locked as you'd have with dual-aspect monism or panpsychism).
My sense - if there is a God or a divine mind, it's scary in about the most playful and seductive way you could imagine. What I'm trying to say is think about how rough history has been, how much horror people have gone through, and with NDE's you have people saying that in their moment when things slowed down they saw absolute beauty and mathematical perfection in everything. In a way that sort of validates some of my hypothesis about my precognitive dreams, ie. Minkowski spacetime or what you'd call an eternal block universe (eg. your entire life already exists and it's a bit like its burned on a blu ray or DVD - now is just the play point), but at the same time you try to look at the whole spate of everything under that umbrella - it really f's your head up when you think about it, about as badly as the Golden Dawn exempt adept pledge to 'Look at every event in your life as a conversation between you and God', which TBH I've been through enough things and spent enough time contemplating the horrors of the 20th century and now that this is really rough. It's also another reason I got chills watching The Joker yesterday, whoever wrote that seemed to load up on these sort of darkly flirtatious coincidences that were leading Joaquin Phoenix's character Arthur along.
I know all of that was a lot but, that's part of what's on my plate and what I'm trying to chew on lately. I think it will be interesting when we can do more to suss out more relationships between brain and subjectivity, and who knows - maybe ideas like IIT will have their place.
I like this guys in particular though lately, still need to read Beyond the Dynamical Universe but he and his co-authors seem to be talking about interpretations of consciousness that deal with neutral monism and what he's calling consciousness being governed by adynamic global constraints:
My last post back to you is missing ??????? Not showing on this tread ?
WHAA...?
_________________
Diagnosed hfa
Loves velcro,
Something HAD to have created us. Life on this planet must have come from somewhere. It's no accident that life exists here.
Guess evolution isn-t on the game plan..
The first existenses could but bring themselves into existense .
Quote by Lao Tzu .. 3000 yrs before concept of judeo christian , was a thought.
A long sigh..........
Maybe the bible is really a load of s**t and evolution was always God's game plan?
But life on earth had to have come from SOMEWHERE!
I completely agree life had to have some kind of deterministic origin. Everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause. From there we can conclude that the universe is not infinite, yet it is logically possible for a first cause to exist outside the created universe and itself be infinite. That first Cause is a conscious entity and possesses an ego (identity, "I"). And since the Creator is a single, intelligent, and personal agent, God as described in the Old Testament is the best and, really, only candidate for who that Creator could be.
Somewhat tangential, but in my interaction with others on this topic, I've noticed that accepting that assumes the human mind is sufficiently reasonable to draw the correct conclusion. Logical arguments such as the above will often fail, and the reasons for that are simple. First, n00b apologists tend to accept the premise of the atheist and work backwards, whereas atheists refuse to accept the opposite premise. If you know God exists, why argue as though He doesn't? You can spot those arguments from miles away: "If there is a God..." What do you mean "IF"??? Second, this also assumes that the atheist has the capacity for reasonable thought. Christians, from reading the first chapter of Romans, ought to know that this is extremely unlikely. No better conclusion can possibly exist. Therefore, if one claims to logically conclude that God doesn't exist, his logic is flawed. Reasoned arguments with people like that can't happen because they are incapable of rational thought. Or like my wife likes to say: "Never argue with idiots. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience."
Sigh
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techstepgenr8tion
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WHAA...?
Ugh, hate that.
I've picked up a habit over the some 15 years I've been here - if I'm writing a long-player I'm constantly copying it to notepad, because I have plenty of faith that this site can mangle something I wrote and that was especially true when the site would come down with 500 errors after hitting the send button and not be reachable for another half hour or so. Thankfully I haven't experienced that last one lately but old habits die hard.
_________________
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin
WHAA...?
Ugh, hate that.
I've picked up a habit over the some 15 years I've been here - if I'm writing a long-player I'm constantly copying it to notepad, because I have plenty of faith that this site can mangle something I wrote and that was especially true when the site would come down with 500 errors after hitting the send button and not be reachable for another half hour or so. Thankfully I haven't experienced that last one lately but old habits die hard.
Ratz... okay admit to not being raised techy. But had much experience with oldr
Tech. Ty for advise .. consider myself doing well .to editting these posts .
And thought exercises , sometimes become interrupted . So when am on a roll of thought . Based on response to informative info. Not thinking i should have
To copy and paste stuff .. this site is as much a luxury to me as a opportunity for extra thought and some sort of social interaction . Am not in a problem solving mindset , taking it for granted that what i post gets posted . Then later chk for responses. Ok, its late will try to reread your previous post , and hope can get brain in gear again . Its late ..going to bed. Niters Techstep
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To be fair though - a good amount of what was in there was at least six or seven years in the figuring and after at least a solid three or four year philosophy and occult reading and practice binge, you're getting the benefit of.... like... a day. No worries if it's a bit tricky to process.
(And I should probably say the same to blazingstar on this, I think what I was saying to her a few months ago - certain global concepts seem like they should be readily apprehendable, they just aren't familiar to a lot of people, but things far more complex - like nosebleed physics and mathematical theories - tend to be somewhat common around here)
_________________
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin