A Wise & Mature God

[Hopeful Monsters]

Study The Bible. Observe how socially liberal and progressive I am (I’m NEVER racist or prone to build any issues on the basis of race; and I'm never full of tribal pride, never pro-enslavement, never homophobic, never anti-women’s rights, never all about encroachment and interference): I’m so Wise

I am punitive, raging and damning – I punish people for Eternity in the agonies of Hell: I’m so mature

I’m not at all punitive or vengeful – I am full of Love, Forgiveness and Boundless Magnanimity – that’s why you do not have to Believe in Me or Accept Christ during your lifetime: No contrariness or capriciousness about me … is there?

Worship, adore and praise me all your life – from childhood to deathbed: I’m narcissistic and insecure

I boast of myself and my works: I am vain and prideful

Accept ‘Christ’ – otherwise I shall not grant you Eternal Life with me in Heaven: I’m small minded, petty, spiteful and vindictive

Do not show interest in other gods or indulge in idolatry: I’m prone to jealously, envy and insecurity

Believe the following – I Saved those that I Myself Created & Sustained and Who Live & Move & Have their Being Within Myself, by Sacrificing Myself to Myself to Appease My Own Wrath: I’m so coherent, am I not?

I am powerful enough to Create and Sustain the entire universe – all its content, its extent, its phenomena, its stupendous physical manifestations; yet I only communicated my existence to one small community of humankind in the Middle East, leaving whole nations, communities and cultures on Earth to extinguish while knowing nothing of my moral codes, guidance and redemptive message: I’m weak and my work is sloppy

:

Maybe if I was solely the creation of unwise, immature, contrary, capricious, narcissistic, vain, prideful, insecure, petty, vindictive, spiteful, incoherent, weak and sloppy – ie. only too human humankind – I would possess such attributes.

But I don’t have these attributes at all, so that can’t possibly be the case.

Can it?

So do tell me please – Am I not a Wise and Mature God?

[Kassiana]

Of course the Bible doesn't portray a wise and mature God. That's why I'm no longer a Christian. I realized the Bible didn't show the God I believed in.

[volta]

I am also misrepresented by the moron humans who try to comprehend me, but in doing so anthropomorphise me into some sort of evil super-man... the fact that a small tribal culture several millenia ago did not have the capacity to comprehend me, or the language to express their experience of me, does not mean you should take all that they say about me literally. I never said the Bible was infallable, I never asked you idiots to rationalise me, I never asked you to name me, label me, define me. I am nameless, I am indefinable. You suck.

If you read the Bible properly you would see the progression of man's relationship with me, you would see man striving to get closer to my will, you would see the move from polytheism to monotheism, from ritual sacrifice to the perfection of mythology, ritual and metaphor in my 'son' Jesus. You idiots I am a living God, vital and existent in everything you see, hear or touch. Stop praying to your pie-in-the-sky deity, stop quivering about non-existent heavens and hells, and realise your own place within my divinity.

Duh. :Cheeky:

[Hopeful Monsters]

Of course the Bible doesn't portray a wise and mature God. That's why I'm no longer a Christian. I realized the Bible didn't show the God I believed in.I agree with you and know your position from your Post in my other recent GRD Thread - although I don't agree with your god-belief system :huh:

PS - I have since added another manifest attribute above: spiteful.

[Hopeful Monsters]

Duh. :Cheeky:And you'd never get man emotionally and obsessively compelled to fantasise me – basically an elaborate parent figure – into existence, then establish me by tortuous, ornate-but-spurious intellectual argument or by bogus, impoverished philosophical foundation – would you?

Duh. :Cheeky:

[volta]

1. How do you 'fantasise' a deity into existence? Is it an act of the imagination alone? Does this imagining occur out of a void, or is it based on experience first?

2. Why has every human culture since the begginning of time done this..?

[I ask out of curiosity as to your view, not as an argument against you.]

[Puck]

I am also misrepresented by the moron humans who... I never asked you idiots to rationalise me,... You suck.... You idiots I am a living God,

Nice god, that.

[Hopeful Monsters]

1. How do you 'fantasise' a deity into existence? Is it an act of the imagination alone? Does this imagining occur out of a void, or is it based on experience first?

2. Why has every human culture since the begginning of time done this..?A fair enough question and a good one. I'll try.

You can fantasise a god into existence in the sense that the SOLE LOCUS OF ITS EXISTENCE lies within culture.

If mankind is extinguished, so, essentially, does that cultural artefact cease to exist also.

Cultures certainly do keep on inventing gods (http://www.godchecker.com/), that’s for sure (http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/bl/bl_myth_gods_index.htm), they just never never stop (http://www.lowchensaustralia.com/names/gods.htm).

But gods are not created out of a void at all, are they?

The raw material is there from the very earliest emergence of the hominid mind―

- childhood feelings about parent-nurturing figures and more generally about the need to have upwardly directed relationships – these pass into culture

- the habit of assuming causal links and habitual, routine assuming that all things that seemed fashioned must have a fabricator

- desires to control nature, appease and appeal to it, these fuse into culture

- the drive to make sense of nature, catastrophe and establish coping mechanisms for bereavement pass down culture, gathering strength

- it follows that anything that provides self-comfort and emotional analgesia survives in culture

- the ego’s desire to be immortal drives the human imagination

- we have pattern seeking brains; enjoy social control, rigid rules, codes, ritual and repeated physical and mental behaviours; we love building institutional edifices and ways to communicate strictures to others; and we attempt to impose behaviours upon each other

- then there’s the need both to create social cohesion and to survive hardship through hope (these being favoured by evolution)

- we project longings, yearnings and good feelings outward onto imagined perfected entities and disown bad and nasty feelings outward onto evil ones (demons, devils, Beelzebub, Satan anyone?)

- and culture fantasises a figure that encapsulates deep feelings and obsessions about: suffering; altruistic sacrifice by a parent or brother figure; the desire to be rescued; guilt, shame, persecution and punishment fetishes; deep and emotive empathising with vulnerability: eh voila! ‘The Christ’ is born into human culture

That's just a few initial thoughts :devil1:[I ask out of curiosity as to your view, not as an argument against you.]Understood :cool:

[Hopeful Monsters]

... and then there's our fears, doubts, uncertainties, vulnerabilities, narcissisms, obsession-compulsions, neurological quirks, our search for 'answers', our belief that's there something 'deep' about life and existence ― says who? why should there be? perhaps THERE's NOTHING DEEP ABOUT LIFE AT ALL!

... which mean we don't just create gods - we actually believe they exist outside the human mind! :devil1:

[volta]

You can fantasise a god into existence in the sense that the SOLE LOCUS OF ITS EXISTENCE lies within culture.

If mankind is extinguished, so, essentially, does that cultural artefact cease to exist also.


I would agree with you that the gods or God exists only within the minds of living cultures, but... that he is but a metaphor for the final stepping-stone the human mind must take to return to the true 'God' (life/the universe/nothingness... there is no proper way to label such a thing). All mythology and religion (at its root anyway) serves to turn deep human psychology into conscious metaphor. Parallel mythologies and religions have sprung up in every single culture, however different they have been, since the beggining of time. Every single mythology shares a common core, a common structure, common teachings. They are the spontaneous outpouring of the human sunconscious, moulded into beneficial metaphores. They are a means by which humans may live in accord with the powers of the universe they find themselves surrounded by (and this includes the social benefits you outlined before - structure, security etc).

Primitive societies saw a common 'energy' running throughout the universe, that also animates them. (Even if you take a naturalistic view of life as nothing more than chemical reactions, this 'energy' (I know its a horrible horrible word to use, try and ignore idiot new-ager connotations) can be seen as basic flux.. the universe is not static, it is in a constant state of flux, energy of some sort or other is present)

It is the apprehension of the source of this undifferentiated, yet everywhere particularized substratum of being that is sought after, and frustrated; the forms of sensibility and the categories of human thought so confine the mind that it is normally impossible to perceive anything beyond the immediately phenomenal. (Whether your into your Kant, or going even further into any sort of Kuhn-inspired social constructivism; or whether you go the opposite direction entirely, it cannot be denied that moving beyond the immediate experience of sense-data to an objective outside world is problematic, to say the least.) The purpose of myth and religion is to make this jump beyond the immediate senses possible - by analogy. Forms and conceptions of the mind can be so arranged as to suggest a truth beyond the immediate.

The problem with modern religion is that it does not recognise that it is but a mere means to an end, it mistakes itself as the end; the metaphorsd have become literalised. 'God' and the gods are but convenient means to shake the human mind beyond its normal workings into a deeper understanding of existence, they are not pan-dimensional uber-humans. Heaven, Hell, all mythological images are but archetypes of the unconscious. Religious redemption consists of a return from unconsciousness to a state of 'superconsciousness' (again, excuse the language, its somewhat unavoidable). By superconsciousness I mean an escape from the duality of this existence, a ceasing of the differentiation of self and other and a return (almost buddha-esqe) to seeing ourselves as a part of the universe, as inspeperable with the universe, and thus God... ie. heaven/eden/nirvana.

So I would suggest that although religion is frequently(/invariably) used as a social tool for all the reasons you posted above, at core that is not its purpose.. its purpose is the removal of the individual from the phenomenal world, and the return of him to the purely numenous.

I dont know if my little rant answer any of your objections, or even made much sense, but I was on the disco-biscuits last night and the world is still spinning... :devil1: any questions/criticisms are much welcome.

[Hopeful Monsters]

I can’t do justice to your Post really. It’s a good contribution.

Those must be some good disco biscuits.

We can only guess at what happens to us beyond the material and immediately phenomenal but our guesses might be vaguely informed ones.

For some the answer has come as various ‘Revealed’ Gods. I say baloney, desperate cultural invention and fantasy-wishful thinking to these.

One crucial question that most religions ask is: what happens when we suffer bio-physical, bio-electrical and bio-chemical brain and body death?

I believe we cease to exist in every sense, but that the matter-energy we are made of is distributed back into nature. (Eventually even that might be reduced upon the heat death of the universe.)

Does our conscious personality, self, core person, essential essence, continue? I don't believe so, and I'm not actually certain what is your position.

Yes – religions try to grapple with our subconscious and fate through metaphors, but the key questions are: Are we created? Does our creator lie outside or throughout us as an independent or encompassing sentient entity? Do we continue on for Eternity by the gesture of that entity?

I say that this is wishful thinking – we come up with answers to such questions ie 'yeses' to the questions in the para. above (rather than 'noes') because the notion of ceasing to exist is unacceptable to our conscious selves and even more so to our id/ego/deeper self.

But just because these ideas are appealing, attractive, seemingly solve our dilemmas, doesn’t mean they are ‘True’ (cue the ‘philosophers’ to wade in with bogus stuff about what is ‘Truth’).

[I studied philosophy as my Degree minor, but I distrust it as having any utility, and I think it is not up to the job of establishing the Truth about the EoG, and it’s redundant anyway using it with the 'Revealed' religions (the religions based on the supposition that 'God' has Revealed himself to mankind).]The problem with modern religion is that it does not recognise that it is but a mere means to an end, it mistakes itself as the end; the metaphorsd have become literalised.Yes. 'God' and the gods are but convenient means to shake the human mind beyond its normal workings into a deeper understanding of existenceBut there may be nothing deep at all to anything about our lives or existence whether alive or thereafter!!