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thinkinginpictures
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09 Aug 2017, 1:51 pm

Can we interpret God as being a superorganism (like bees, termites and corals) consisting of all the believing minds believing in the same deity to share its common values and working towards that common goal (whatever it be)?

Does this interpretation make God more or less real?

What are the pro and cons?



techstepgenr8tion
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09 Aug 2017, 2:53 pm

That definition makes an egregore, or group-mind/group-belief. I think the definition of egregore is still too different from God in the monotheistic sense to suffice. It could describe some gods or goddesses (lower-case) from antiquity but not even all of those, just some, whereas the rest vary from personifications of natural laws and relationships to who-knows-what actually talking to people.

In the Noam Chomsky and Neutral Monism thread I started talking about my outlook on the functionalist take on consciousness and why I think functionalism and emergence in a way edify occult connections and interactions in consciousness. That part gets into multiple realizability (ie. Ned Block's China brain criticism of functionalism - which wasn't IMHO a takedown, just a description of something we didn't think we were seeing until the Global Consciousness Project and a few other experiments became a known 'thing' - just a thing that's much less intense or overt than what Ned Block was picturing in his huge China egregore). When we realize that net public attention either can send out massive skews to probability in the world, or skews in probability in the universe enslave human behavior and intention (I'm not sure which is the cart or the horse 100% to tell the truth) you also get a much more sensible grip on self-organizing systems such as ant colonies and what not.


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naturalplastic
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09 Aug 2017, 3:18 pm

Maybe you could call a belief in a diety (or any ideology) a "super organism". But not a "god" a super organism.

During the Crusades Christianity and Islam could be viewed as two super organisms fighting each other (two bee hives fighting over the Holy Land).

Similarly the Cold War could be viewed as two secular ideological super organisms in combat: the Communist army ant swarm against the Capitalist Democracy army ant swarm.



AspieUtah
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09 Aug 2017, 3:37 pm

Jesus said that "God is a Spirit..." (John 4:24 King James Version).

While others have their opinions, I suspect that it means God is a concept, a goal, a precept, an ideal.


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09 Aug 2017, 9:18 pm

God is a backwards dog.


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Lintar
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10 Aug 2017, 10:31 pm

thinkinginpictures wrote:
Can we interpret God as being a superorganism (like bees, termites and corals) consisting of all the believing minds believing in the same deity to share its common values and working towards that common goal (whatever it be)?

Does this interpretation make God more or less real?

What are the pro and cons?


God no.

God is the ultimate, necessary foundation underlying the contingent reality that so many atheistic materialists believe is all there actually is. God is the answer to the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" God is not to be anthropomorphised, or thought of as being somehow an aspect of the physical reality that he/she/it was ultimately responsible for.

It's like the author of a fictional story. You wouldn't expect to find, for example, George Orwell as one of the characters inhabiting his dystopia "1984". He wrote (i.e. brought into being) the world Winston Smith inhabits, and therefore cannot be found within it. No amount of "scientific evidence" would reveal the author of OUR story, so we shouldn't even use a method that only ever was mean't to be applied to physical phenomena and events. There is no "scientific proof" one way or the other regarding God's existence, and there never will be.



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10 Aug 2017, 10:34 pm

DarthMetaKnight wrote:
God is a backwards dog.


Your point... ? That's what is known as a co-incidence. There is no implied meaning, nothing of substance to deduce from it.



techstepgenr8tion
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11 Aug 2017, 12:17 am

That's like evil is 'live' backwards, or really bassackwards. Ahh!! Evil is living arse-backward! Punny!!

Something similar I think might qualify for god and dog:

Liber Al Vel Legis 2:19 wrote:
Is a God to live in a dog? No! but the highest are of us. They shall rejoice, our chosen: who sorroweth is not of us.

The self-flagelating SJW comes to mind there!

We humans, our language, and our logic! :lol: :jester:


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11 Aug 2017, 1:05 am

Lintar wrote:
DarthMetaKnight wrote:
God is a backwards dog.


Your point... ? That's what is known as a co-incidence. There is no implied meaning, nothing of substance to deduce from it.


God must be a dog. That's where dinosaur bones come from. God is a dog and he buries his dog bones.


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11 Aug 2017, 3:58 pm

In traditional religion God is like a superhuman government, sort of Donald Trump XXX

For alternative version, for those who want something else: http://alternative-faith.blogspot.com
Using theories about the mother Mary, that she is the fourth person of the Trinity. Or perhaps this is the secret: Mary is God, not “just” the fourth person.
And some modern theories about "awareness"



techstepgenr8tion
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11 Aug 2017, 4:08 pm

Grischa wrote:
Using theories about the mother Mary, that she is the fourth person of the Trinity. Or perhaps this is the secret: Mary is God, not “just” the fourth person.

Isis/Sophia.


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naturalplastic
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11 Aug 2017, 4:47 pm

DarthMetaKnight wrote:
Lintar wrote:
DarthMetaKnight wrote:
God is a backwards dog.


Your point... ? That's what is known as a co-incidence. There is no implied meaning, nothing of substance to deduce from it.


God must be a dog. That's where dinosaur bones come from. God is a dog and he buries his dog bones.


You need to curb your dogma, and to spay your catechisms.



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11 Aug 2017, 7:08 pm

naturalplastic wrote:
DarthMetaKnight wrote:
Lintar wrote:
DarthMetaKnight wrote:
God is a backwards dog.


Your point... ? That's what is known as a co-incidence. There is no implied meaning, nothing of substance to deduce from it.


God must be a dog. That's where dinosaur bones come from. God is a dog and he buries his dog bones.


You need to curb your dogma, and to spay your catechisms.


"In Discordianism, we don't have dogmas. We have catmas."
- Robert Anton Wilson


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Grischa
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12 Aug 2017, 3:18 pm

I would like a female Mary/Isis/Sophia God best; fed up with narcissist types; even Christ, he seeks to gain farvor, but when you don't agree he'll send you to hell
in the past they called this religion, in psychology they call this narcissism



DarthMetaKnight
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12 Aug 2017, 9:18 pm

Grischa wrote:
I would like a female Mary/Isis/Sophia God best; fed up with narcissist types; even Christ, he seeks to gain farvor, but when you don't agree he'll send you to hell
in the past they called this religion, in psychology they call this narcissism


What makes you think that men are more narcissistic than women?


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techstepgenr8tion
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12 Aug 2017, 9:29 pm

Grischa wrote:
I would like a female Mary/Isis/Sophia God best; fed up with narcissist types; even Christ, he seeks to gain farvor, but when you don't agree he'll send you to hell
in the past they called this religion, in psychology they call this narcissism

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.


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