geo wrote: ↑Mon Dec 12, 2022 2:52 pm If "God" is Robert Tulip's metaphor then, yes, I believe in him/her/it. Otherwise, a definition would be helpful.

As you and I have said, the God concept is protean. It's as though there are a hundred types of hammer, so if I ask you to get me one I need to describe it in particular, or else you won't know what to hand me. "Believe in" is an interesting phrase here. For non-remarkable truths such as the sun rising in the east, I don't need to use those two words. It's only with disputed truth, claims that can be challenged for lack of evidence, that I'd ever say "I believe in....." The words mean a particular commitment, Which by the way, I'm not sure I can say I have. Yet there is social pressure to "believe in" something.

B. Camp wrote: ↑Sun Jul 02, 2023 8:16 pm Yes. God is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. If you are a believer and believe that then the easiest way to conceptualize God is that God is everything and everything that exists makes up God as a whole.

God being everything does not make God omniscient. In fact, omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent come from philosophical considerations. While it's possible that such an entity is real, the greatest likelihood is that some speculation got out of hand.

What about omnibenevolent? Isn't the Christian God also said to be omnibenevolent? Or is he a bit of a shithead at times? The OT seems to display a side of the Christian God that few could argue is good.

Chris OConnor wrote: ↑Sun Jul 09, 2023 5:45 pm What about omnibenevolent? Isn't the Christian God also said to be omnibenevolent? Or is he a bit of a shithead at times? The OT seems to display a side of the Christian God that few could argue is good.

The notion that "God is everything" seems the very opposite of the angry anthropomorphic deity of the OT. And maybe that's actually the point since God-is-everything is such a nebulous concept there's nothing really to latch on to—whether it is to question its existence or to check its compatibility with science. Indeed, isn't that Deepak Chopra's point when he talks about the "Quantum Physics of God" since quantum physics isn't well understood. Those gaps in our knowledge are useful in that respect.

I used to be a hard-core internet atheist (I used to debate people in the youtube comments section, i was 14 at the time) but the thing that pulled me out of it was learning about Euler's Identity. Always associated math with being rigid and no-nonsense, so seeing that it could be so seemingly, coincidentally, and surprisingly profound (it's not as profound now that I've finished my math degree) made me reconsider.

The logical side of me doesn't believe god exists but the fun side of me wants to be wrong in believing god exists. As in, I don't give a fuck about all the reasons why he doesn't exist because Euler's Identity is too fucking cool to not be a deliberately planned fact that was invented for us to discover.

Thanks notnilc, welcome to Booktalk. Euler's identity is explained at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%27s_identity
e to the i pi + 1 = 0

Does this just show an intrinsic relationship between natural logarithms and the circle?

Interesting take on why to believe in God!

geo wrote: ↑Sun Jul 09, 2023 9:13 pm

Chris OConnor wrote: ↑Sun Jul 09, 2023 5:45 pm What about omnibenevolent? Isn't the Christian God also said to be omnibenevolent? Or is he a bit of a shithead at times? The OT seems to display a side of the Christian God that few could argue is good.

Omnibenevolent is a concept that emerges before we get to the NT, but putting it that way is Greek. Thanks to Philo of Alexandria, and then Augustine and a few others in the late Roman Empire, Greek philosophy inspired an effort to be rigorously logical about God. This was, in my opinion, an unfortunate development.

The Gods started out as Jungian archetype characters, featured in stories that tap into our sense of awe and our fear of overwhelming events, such as volcanoes erupting or the death of our parents while we are still young. Yahweh seems to have been a sky-god who fertilized the earth with rain, and/or a battle god who inspired his people to amazing deeds. Moses and the Exodus brought monotheistic jealousy into the Hebrew and Canaanite belief structure, but without cutting away the stories of dysfunctionality in the Abraham/Isaac/Jacob(Israel) traditions.

Then, what's really interesting, in the Prophetic centuries of being caught between imperial ambitions of Egypt and of Mesopotamia/Persia, the Hebrew religion morphed into Judaism. Probably under the influence of Zoroastrianism, it identified God with goodness. [Not that God had not been good in the old stories, but in them there was much more of an element of favoritism (the "chosen people" after all) and arbitrary exercise of raw power. For example, God "hardened the heart" of Pharoah.]

Several interesting developments came out of this experience. First, the Jews struggled to explain their defeat. Although they had been fighting with neighboring peoples and kingdoms as far back as their stories recorded, the narrative had always been that God would save them and give them victory. Just as the Greeks had done, they explained defeats as the result of the anger of their God. And what was God angry about? The main answer was dalliance with other cults, with sacred prostitutes and idol worship and even the horrible Moloch who demanded child sacrifice. But there was an interesting second answer, that God was angry over injustice.

God's anger over injustice does not have clear roots. Mosaic law has a strong element of imposing justice. "Love your neighbor." "Free your slaves every 50 years." "Punish wrongdoing." Stories of kings abusing power were fed into this tradition, especially David arranging the death of Bath-sheba's husband Uriah, and Naboth's vineyard being seized by King Ahab. But however it happened, the prophets, especially Amos, declared that injustice was the basis for the punishment of Israel (the northern kingdom) and Judah (the southern).

With the return of some of the captives, the second interesting development occurred. There was a literary tug-of-war between those who would exclude non-Jews from the culture, led by Ezra and Nehemiah, and those who emphasized the Jewish mission to bring a religion of mercy to the nations. The OT books of Job, Jonah and Ruth are in that tradition. Job questions what they were punished for by asserting essential righteousness, with the only answer being that God was powerful enough to create all this and could do as he saw fit. In Jonah, God sends a prophet to call the scandalously immoral city of Babylon to repent. Jonah resists, being famously cured by his three days in the belly of the great fish. In Ruth, a foreigner shows great loyalty and devotion to her Jewish mother-in-law, and becomes the grandmother of King David.

But not until the time of Philo, Gamaliel and other great Rabbis of Roman times do we get a God who is all about love. The mission to the nations gets taken quite literally by Paul, who believes that the end times will come as soon as the whole world has been evangelized. The order of weapons and empire will be overturned, and peace will reign.

There are still some harsh passages in the NT, especially in the Epistle to the Hebrews, but in the main, the reversal has been complete. God seeks out all the other nations for a realm of peace, (making Alexander's mission to bring Aristotelian logic to the whole world look lazy.) No more favoritism, no more arbitrary harshness. But since it did not exactly work out as expected, the realm of peace got moved to the afterlife.

The claim of modernist theologians, that the God of the Bible represents to us the promise of a rule of peace inside us, and of relations between people that are fundamentally reciprocal and caring, holds up pretty well, I think. But we have to accept that a character beginning in terms of arbitrary power (sometimes exercised harshly) then became a character who inspires rather than compelling. And you might say the change recapitulates the evolution of the relationship of parent and child, beginning in command and power (but exercised with love) and transitioning to benevolent inspiration and truth imparted through reason.

geo wrote:The notion that "God is everything" seems the very opposite of the angry anthropomorphic deity of the OT. And maybe that's actually the point since God-is-everything is such a nebulous concept there's nothing really to latch on to—whether it is to question its existence or to check its compatibility with science. Indeed, isn't that Deepak Chopra's point when he talks about the "Quantum Physics of God" since quantum physics isn't well understood. Those gaps in our knowledge are useful in that respect.

So, that which is not well understood works well for propagating scams, and there certainly has been a hefty share of that stuff in religion's past. But I am coming around to a deep skepticism about the notion of "understanding" God or religion. When we believe we understand something we also believe we can submit it to the uses to which we wish for our world. Understanding a thing makes it tractable.

But in fact such an instrumental relationship to life is deeply unfulfilling. We need to relate to life as we (should) relate to another person: not as a mark to be fleeced, but as a soul like ourselves with infinite possibilities of surprise and delight (and danger, too).

As a result, it may be that no symbol that we can understand and verify can ever deliver the relationship to life (and to each other) that a mystery can. Not that we should ever choose to "believe in" anything based on what it can deliver, but that we should be aware of the impossibilities that come along with only "believing in" what we can verify.

I don't believe in any gods. A definition of the god being discussed is necessary before the topic can be discussed. Of all of the arguments I've heard in favor of God's existence, I don't agree with any of them.

Hello,
There was a time I did believe wholeheartedly that God existed. Unfortunately life and the state of the world and amount of evil in the world makes me seriously question if he exists.

Rachel.S. wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 12:15 pm Hello,
There was a time I did believe wholeheartedly that God existed. Unfortunately life and the state of the world and amount of evil in the world makes me seriously question if he exists.

I completely agree. When you look around and see so much pain and suffering, and then you are told that there is a loving all powerful God that knows about the pain and suffering, before it even happens, and has the power to stop the pain and suffering, yet chooses not to, that makes me think that we are wrong about the existence of such a deity. It makes much more sense that no God actually exists.

We don't even have to look at our own pain and suffering. Just look at the animal Kingdom in general. Most people avoid watching videos of how animals hunt down and eat prey alive, but that is the norm. Hyenas literally will sit there and slowly eat the guts out of a living animal, while the animals writhe in pain screeching and slowly dying. What sort of a lunatic sadistic God would create such a world? It is far more probable that we are either defining God incorrectly, which would destroy the entire religion of Christianity, or that God doesn't exist at all.