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God Is Imaginary

 
  

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Unconditional Love
13:55 / 23.08.06
Since both christianity and science are both temporal phenomena they are both always changing as those that relate to those ideaologies and institutions are changing, because as you suggest they are not static but a form of relationship based information carried by human beings as perceptions and interactions to physical phenomena.

I think christianity and atheism/science make the perfect partners, i also think this is why western children in my experience of education are educated in this manner, as you suggest one can be viewed as a progressive force an evolving phenomena and the other as a more preserving conservative phenomena, I wont say which is which because both can be viewed in those terms. They together create the nessecary friction that creates movement and change in society through the basis of oppositional forces, they are not isolated from a far wider social interaction either, that of the whole catalogue of human cultural developement and current experience.

Its the force of the interaction between them thats of great import, it cultures a stimulation of imagination, readaptation of ideaologie, reexamination of dogma/facts and behavioural attitude. without the conflict of intrests, the friction, cultural and information war to borrow terms being chucked about in the media, i belive society would create other friction, conflicts in other ways to create change and does.

It is not just religion that is founded on friction , but all percieved oppositional forces, i also would put forward that systematic friction is a form of cooperation that many adherents to either side can remain ignorant of because they may not concentrate on the relationship or interaction and only the idea of there team some how winning. Not that every interaction has to nessecarily be based upon a conception of forces being oppositional or conflicting.

Look at how we can kick the crap out of each other arent we fucking cool.
 
 
Ticker
14:20 / 23.08.06
Intolerance for other people's religion and belief structure is oppressive and hateful.

I think you might be overgeneralizing here.


Sure enough, I was slinging the big phrases around so thank ye for the chance to dig into it.

I would say you may have all the tolerance you can for people's beliefs, it is their actions that may require intolerance.

This is where in the modern melty-pot of multiple beliefs the separation of church and state becomes extra handy.

I may believe a shit load of rubbish, but that should not concern you so long as my actions adhere to the social contract of our mutually shared culture. I may tolerate via freedom of speech all kinds of nasty beliefs that I would never tolerate in action.

On Saturday a friend quickly retracted calling me a fence-sitter, in that my conceptions of divinity these days are that there sometimes seem to be phenomena that act like a single monotheistic god and sometimes seem to act like many and varied gods, and that I can conceive of the expression of the many as aspects of the one while at the same time using the word *seem* to take an atheist stance when it suits me. The net result is that I often find myself playing both ends against the middle in debate... well, maybe having enough self-doubt to entertain the notion that I might be playing both ends against the middle. Does anyone think this is a good way of being? I'm interested because I'd really like to know at this point in my life.

From a Fortean view it is also the healthiest in that keeping your perspective fluid and flexible you are able to look at new information with less of a bias to try and jam it into an existing system.
 
 
Scrambled Password Bogus Email
15:22 / 23.08.06
Tally ho for this thread actually yielding positive discussion. Well done all.
 
 
LykeX
20:22 / 23.08.06
That's what makes Barbelith such a great place: a genuine desire for high-quality discussion rather than simply shouting matches. That and self-congratulatory backslapping.
 
 
LVX23
06:24 / 24.08.06
just skimmed a lot to catch up...

Mysticism should not seek to be "proven" by science. As someone noted upstream, it's a matter of gnosis - of the personal relation and communion with creation. These are subjective experiences around which we wrap meaning and myth. Trying to prove the virgin birth or Moses' reception of the 10 Commandments completely misses the symbolic content of these myths.

Magick also suffers from this modern affliction of having to prove everything with science in order for it to be real & valid. Science & Religion are complementary, not oppositional. Crowley was looking for reproducible methods to attain gnostic states, as well as trying to map the astral territory of shared myths. He wasn't looking to reduce those experiences to materialistic and mechanistic phenomena.

Religion is a handy scapegoat to explain primitive behavior patterns common to ape tribes. So are drugs, video games, immigrants, and twinkies. Religion lets us vent our frustrations from being forced to go to church as kids. Religion - like God, Faith, Magic, Pagan - has many different meanings to many different people. It seems foolish to condemn an entire class of hundreds of millions of people as ignorant, irrational, intolerant, and murderous.
 
 
Lurid Archive
10:08 / 24.08.06
It seems foolish to condemn an entire class of hundreds of millions of people as ignorant, irrational, intolerant, and murderous.

The frustrating thing about arguing religion on Barbelith is that people here have alternative faiths, on the whole, and so object to *any* assumptions made about the nature of "God". On the one hand, this seems fair enough, but on the other it strikes me that there is something fishy going on. That is, it is fairly clear to me that in common discourse I am exposed to there is an automatic respect afforded to those who worship the Abrahamic God (not without exceptions, but still...), and that talk of religion almost always refers to that God.

My frustration is a result of the fact that I think people referring to religion and the implicit call for respect for religion are largely using the status of Abrahamic faiths without wanting any of the baggage of those faiths. And I sometimes get the impression that criticising the kinds of beliefs I have overwhelmingly see in people of faith (the belief in the existence of an actual God, heaven and miracles, say) is sometimes viewed here as tantamount to attacking a straw man. Which is decidedly odd.

So my atheism largely refers to Christian, Jewish and Islamic constructions of God. I'm sure that there are other modes of belief where my atheism wouldn't bite - the purely metaphorical models, for instance, don't leave much to disbelieve in though I doubt I'd find the models themselves that appealing either - and my disbelief doesn't mean I think that all religious people are stupid, ignorant or evil. But...I do think that religious belief is largely irrational. This isn't that big a criticism, in a sense, because I do agree with xk that actions matter a lot more than words, and rationality isn't, by any stretch, the most important attribute for a decent human being. But I think rationality can be useful, even when we talk of ethics or morality (I could go into this at length, but suffice to say that current affairs and world politics could do with a lot more rationality), and that religion is often irrational.

For me, it suffices to read up the thread and see the attempts to cast both science and religion as exercises in faith - from my framework that is a clearly a way to devalue the rational. Having said that, there are no easy answers, and I know that there are more intelligent, more rational, more knowledgable and certainly more moral people than me who get their strength from religion.
 
 
Evil Scientist
12:06 / 24.08.06
I'd like to reply to something you said LVX23 but I don't think this is the appropriate thread to do it in. I've posted my reply over in Science method applied to Temple. if you fancy having a look.

Cheers.
 
 
Ticker
14:40 / 24.08.06
For me, it suffices to read up the thread and see the attempts to cast both science and religion as exercises in faith - from my framework that is a clearly a way to devalue the rational.

I can see where you are getting this from up stream (I think at any rate) yet I don't believe faith automatically devalues the rational.

rational:logical; reasonable; intelligent; prudent;

Out of these I'm going to pick 'intelligent' but feel free to pull another.
I believe an intelligent observant person may study their reality with the aid of tools from the scientific method and still process other information with faith.
I don't believe science and religion are antithetical nor faith and the rational.

There is a reason the term 'blind faith' exists because faith in and of itself is not formed without input and often the informational process is quite rational.

I'm not sure if I should stroll down this particular path or not so I'm going to await your feedback.
 
 
Saturn's nod
16:09 / 24.08.06
I think a crucial point to this whole thread is the one Rigettle raised early on, and pertains to the Straw God.

Depends upon what you mean by God...

Depends what you mean by imaginary...

Though you generally won't find fundies, theistic or atheistic, addressing these questions very deeply. Generally they just assume that their (usually somewhat narrow)definitions are universal.


It frustrates me that so many are eager to criticize christians by attacking the the Straw God - the old disapproving white man on a cloud - when I've never met one out of the hundreds in my church with whom I've heard or read how they understand what God is, who thinks of God that way. It's seen as the erroneous media-cultural idea we need to get past before we can engage in any useful religious activity, a bit like the bra-burning thing & feminism. Those people are my concrete experience of being a practicing Christian in a church community. It's laughable to me for generalisations to be made that put us in the same box with people who kill people who run abortion clinics or other people for being gay but if you're going to make general statements about Christians then I don't think it is justifiable to exclude us.

There have been nontheist and nonpatriarchal Christians since way back - Meister Eckhart's the one who springs to mind, but Julian of Norwich also talked about Christ as our mother, which is a good hack at the patriarchy anyway you look at it. But then my church is keen on science (see picture) and we have processes for revising our written texts, and no clergy or creeds, so maybe you know you're not talking about us. Maybe all the christians you've met so far had different ideas when you established relationships with them in which is was possible to talk about such deep and tender matters of the soul. And hey, maybe all of my kind of christisn will get bored of trying and wander off and our church will go extinct, too. But I don't think it can be convincing to define us as not Christian if we say we are trying to follow Christ. khorosho started this thread by talking about an omnipotent 'Angry Father' archetype, which pretty much sums up the Straw God, but I don't know any Christians who believe in that kind of God, and I hang around with other Christians frequently.



As for what motivates people to attack others on the basis of beliefs which appear delusional to me, I don't know, but I'd model it as unexamined internalised images of the angry parent, 'toxic shame' etc. My approach to that is to demonstrate what I consider a healthy relationship with the divine, and be willing to talk about what I mean by God. I think maybe some people have a hard time even thinking about God for the same reasons - the "you shall not be aware" rule kicks in as in dysfunctional families, & their minds avoid the waking-up pain?
 
 
EvskiG
16:32 / 24.08.06
Saturn's Nod, from the above post you seem to identify yourself as a Christian.

What is it, exactly, about your practices or beliefs that leads you to identify as a "Christian" rather than, say, a generically religious or spiritual person?
 
 
Saturn's nod
19:17 / 24.08.06
Off the top of my head: belong to a christian church, use christian scripture as essential religious text, love Jesus and attempt to follow his example, experience Christ as resurrected teacher and access point for God's transforming creative power, speak with God in language reliant on christian scripture, use realised eschatology - and other metaphors for spiritual experience and religious aims - based on christian mythological worldview, understand suffering as potentially creative/redemptive when it exposes injustice.
 
 
EvskiG
19:54 / 24.08.06
If you don't mind my asking, is there any part of the Nicene Creed with which you agree?

It's my understanding that many (although certainly not all) Christians -- and many mainstream Christian churches -- consider it to define what Christians believe.
 
 
EvskiG
20:09 / 24.08.06
Ah -- I found the source of the picture you posted.

I presume you're a Quaker, then.

Never mind.
 
 
Lurid Archive
14:36 / 26.08.06
I found your post above rather frustrating, Saturn's Nod, as I said above. As far as I can tell, you want to say that disagreeing with a conception of God as held by a great many, if not a majority of christians (eg, as described in the Nicene Creed - thanks for reminding me of that EvkG) amounts to attacking a straw man. *shrug*

Certainly, if you treat all your beliefs as metaphor rather than statements of existence (as very few christians I have ever met do) then there is much less to disagree with, though I'm pretty hardcore as an atheist and would doubtless be reluctant to accept the value of the metaphors.

I believe an intelligent observant person may study their reality with the aid of tools from the scientific method and still process other information with faith.
I don't believe science and religion are antithetical nor faith and the rational. - xk


Certainly it would be silly to claim that science, rationality on the one hand were totally at odds with faith and religion. Clearly, people do reconcile these very successfully. I *do* think there is something of a tension, however, that arises from the success of science which at heart relies on a naturalistic model. The tension arises because the material success of this naturalistic model can easily lend weight the opinion that (and this gets a bit dodgy, I realise) this model is correct.

Now, for anyone with a sophisticated view of religion, this isn't really a big problem (though it probably does have an impact on the shape that a convincing faith can take), but in my experience a lot of people justify some kind of belief on the basis of what amounts to an argument from design. And I hear that argument so frequently, that I wonder if it actually is quite central to some kind of religious faith. If it is, and I think it certainly is for some, then this is where the tension between science and religion can be found.
 
 
Unconditional Love
16:44 / 26.08.06
By design lurid do you mean creationism as say in comparison to evolution, that kind of conceptual areana?
 
 
Lurid Archive
16:57 / 26.08.06
By design I was referring to the Teleological argument, the argument for the existence of god on the grounds of design. And yes, I do think that this is the context in which one should understand the debate between evolution and creationism - ironically, I tend to give creationists more credit than others, since I think they have a point, however misguided.
 
 
Unconditional Love
21:19 / 26.08.06
Thanks for that link reading through that raised alot of differing questions, some ideas i had encountered before the anthropic principle for example, i kept jumping from word to word to check other ideas and came across this which i found intresting Cosmogony being i think a more accurate term than cosmology for example. I was also thinking that many of the philosophys that are embodied in western esotericism can best be captured by this term Emanationism When you said up post many people seem to borrow the status of god based traditions, i think some people understand the process of 'god' as emanation(s).

Its also worth looking at what differentiates Esoteric cosmology from other variants of cosmology, especially with reference to religous cosmology that maybe creator based.
 
 
grant
01:04 / 27.08.06
I'm not sure where the angry Father pops up in the Nicene Creed. I've just read two versions at the link twice (and I've got a slightly different one memorized from my misspent youth), and I can't even find anything about obedience in it.

Judging the living and dead? Is that it?
 
 
Lurid Archive
08:47 / 27.08.06
I guess you are right, grant - I wasn't taking the "angry" part as the key element - and I do recall that I was taught of a loving, rather than angry christian god.
 
 
Unconditional Love
11:54 / 29.08.06
I was taught about a god who was loving and wrathful or perhaps better put merciful and severe, its that contrast of qualities which i also find in myself that intrigues me about an omnipotent diety, a diety that at least seems to me from what i know of the abrahamic traditions to be very human, approachable in a sense because, traditional christians may part with me here, the god that is presented seems capable of making mistakes, he doesnt present as a perfect abstract but as an imperfect organic.

Or perhaps its that i desire for my deities to be more human in quality than aspirational ideals, personifications some how make the idea of a deity more approachable. I have been thinking about that in regard to the emanationist view point, and how somehow that view of a creative process seems more akin to a form of spiritual mathematics, it doesnt sit to well because i dont feel as if i can go over and say hello to it, hows things?

Heres something i found problematic with atheism and wonder if anybody could comment upon, i found as i embraced a particularly materialistic view in part of my life it led me towards a sort of negative pit of nihilism, as if the meaning had been stripped from my exsistence. These days i respect atheism and its attitudes for what utility it provides me and the mental tools it offers to approach a variety of situations, but i still wonder if i were to adopt it as my primary perceptual focus how would i avoid the nihilism which has crept into my experience prior.

Its not just the intellectual nihilism but emotional oblivion and attendent depression that i tend to encounter when i dont operate from a spiritual viewpoint.
 
 
+am
12:32 / 29.08.06
Heres something i found problematic with atheism and wonder if anybody could comment upon, i found as i embraced a particularly materialistic view in part of my life it led me towards a sort of negative pit of nihilism, as if the meaning had been stripped from my exsistence. These days i respect atheism and its attitudes for what utility it provides me and the mental tools it offers to approach a variety of situations, but i still wonder if i were to adopt it as my primary perceptual focus how would i avoid the nihilism which has crept into my experience prior.

Its not just the intellectual nihilism but emotional oblivion and attendent depression that i tend to encounter when i dont operate from a spiritual viewpoint.


I can totally relate to this. I certainly reached a point in my life where I was thinking- life is meaningless and worthless, what is the point of living if every day is torment etc. At this stage I had rejected the C of E Christianity I had been brought up with, was interested in ideas magical, but didn't really believe them. In thrall to existentialism, I attempted to compensate for the lack of meaning or purpose I felt, with the whole "nothing means anything so you might as well do whatever the hell you want" idea. Which just meant I acted like a bit of a twat for a while, and felt bad about it. I can't be sure how related the depression I suffered was to my existential crisis, and which preceded which, but in my low state I found nothing worth living for in the world. To me the world seemed such a terrible place that the only reasonable response to the scientific materialist view of reality that I had grudgingly accepted as the "truth" was abject nihilism.

I would not consider myself religious, but I have a very strong spiritual bent, so much so that I feel it is the reason I keep going. A life without spirituality, without acknowlegement of and interaction with the subtle forces contemporary science denies exists, is for me an unbearable life, like constantly living under overcast sky when the sun is shining above the clouds.

I know I am setting myself for the "religion as a crutch" argument, and that the importance of spirituality to me could be explained away any number of ways by different psychological models, but it seems to me everyone needs something to keep going, a reason to keep on existing. And for me it is the joy and peace I get from my own developing spirituality and the practises that involves. I can get on with the affairs of the world with a smile on my face, as I know there is more to it than meets the eye. All this physical stuff in the end just doesn't do it for me, y'know? Sorry, bit of a tangent I know, but M.A.R's post really struck a chord.
 
 
illmatic
13:03 / 29.08.06
Why do you need spirituality to give life meaning? "The meaning of life is life". Looking at and observing the fecundity of life and activity around me, it's energy in motion, and I can see "meaning" emerge from it spoontaneously. For me, spiritual practices are things that remind me to pay attention to life, and connect with it, not things I have to use to prop myself up.

Not having a go, Adamski, I liked your post, perhaps more reacting to MAR. But I don't think disbelief in the spiritual necessairily leads to nihlism and "emotional oblivion". But I do think these things often act as a crutch to the unhappy, and you'd be better off dealing with the unhappiness directly.
 
 
Scrambled Password Bogus Email
13:40 / 29.08.06
For me, spiritual practices are things that remind me to pay attention to life, and connect with it, not things I have to use to prop myself up.

YES! Zackly. To remember the very simple things, the next breath, and to be grateful. To centre in gratitude for the Carnival of Life, with all of it's dualities, and to remember that it is not dual in essence. To clear a little space of busy forgetfulness, and to give thanks for what is, and to try to work with the flow and transformation of energies in order to be At the Centre. Doing not doing in all things, mindful, present and aware.

It's incredibly, incredibly subtle, and not at all what I thought spirituality was like or about when I previously held atheistic views much like those presented here in this thread. As with most things, there is far more beneath the surface than a cursory glance over the subject as presented by popular consensus and mediated information might suggest. It was a long, long time before I was able to counter my deeply, deeply ingrained resistance to the symbolism and myth present within my particular Work and actually try, just try, embracing it for what it was, at face value, without maintaining a 'professional distance' and, essentially, being a curious observer. I decided, after a year or so, to begin embracing the ritual in its entirety, to see how it may affect the Work. And, after a few months of this, I had to change my atheistic outlook based on new evidence and data. No faith involved, here, to be honest, just adaptation to new information available to me. Faith is something else altogether. A lifelong meditation, really.

This is not to say that everybody would have the same reaction as I did of course, nor that this reaction is Truth. But, as I pointed out to the thread starter, it is my Truth, and I inhabit it, it's my relationship to the Universe, and will inevitably have deep ramifications for the life I manifest around me.
 
 
+am
14:20 / 29.08.06
Why do you need spirituality to give life meaning? "The meaning of life is life". Looking at and observing the fecundity of life and activity around me, it's energy in motion, and I can see "meaning" emerge from it spoontaneously. For me, spiritual practices are things that remind me to pay attention to life, and connect with it, not things I have to use to prop myself up.

I agree with what your saying Pegs, though I particularly find the regular practise of Reiki and other techniques very good at allowing me to engage with life fully, as it gives me energy and zest, and brings up and makes me deal with things that would otherwise negatively effect my interactions with the real world. It allows me to appreciate the greatness and makes the negativity (my negativity?) roll off me. My spirituality doesn't give my life meaning per se, but it makes it... fun. I guess this was more what I was trying to express. Its not a prop, more of a lifestyle choice... Also its fun to use reiki on rampant materialists if they let you. Its hard to deny super hot hands and bodily vibrations!

Not having a go, Adamski, I liked your post, perhaps more reacting to MAR. But I don't think disbelief in the spiritual necessairily leads to nihlism and "emotional oblivion". But I do think these things often act as a crutch to the unhappy, and you'd be better off dealing with the unhappiness directly.

I don't think so either. For me, it lead to these things. But then I had other problems.
 
 
Unconditional Love
21:34 / 01.09.06
If something in this life makes you happy you go with it, personally i dont care if thats god for somebody, atheism for another, mp3s, the internet or what ever it is, what ever keeps you going. Anybody that wants to interfer with that happiness and try to remove it does not have your best intrests at heart.

If my crutches keep me standing rather than falling over and not getting up again i dont have a problem, or should i use a more attractive shiny crutch of somebody elses choosing? We all have crutches no matter what you want to disguise it as its still keeps you going and propped up.

Survival startegies are many, mine work for me, yours work for you. My happiness is my own to measure.
 
 
EmberLeo
21:46 / 01.09.06
I've been told so many times that Religion is a crutch. The image in my head at this point is of somebody who has no legs at all telling me that my legs are crutches, and because he is fine without legs I shouldn't need my appendages either.

--Ember--
 
 
Tryphena Absent
23:03 / 01.09.06
I think religion is a crutch, which is not to say that all people actually lean on that crutch but that I stopped religious and magical practice on the grounds of morality. I couldn't condone my own actions in believing in something that was superior to me and deities by their nature must be superior because they have the capability to hear so much, so many people and perform actions that people cannot but would often like to. If this is so then I necessarily defer to them in some sense, worship and put faith in them and I wasn't happy with the implications of any belief I harboured. I felt that not only was I supporting an inherent inequality but also deferring my own moral and occasionally practical responsibility onto another creature, one that I couldn't see in front of me but sought help from. So I don't believe because I don't think it's ethical for me to believe. The very nature of God(s) means that something else has ultimate responsibility for our environment and that doesn't work as an idea or an ideology for me.
 
 
illmatic
23:16 / 01.09.06
What about Gods as something other than that, Nadzdha?

MAR: Survival startegies are many, mine work for me, yours work for you. My happiness is my own to measure.

But you specifcally connected atheism with intellectual nihilism .... emotional oblivion and attendent depression and I don't think that's a connection that plays out. Neither do I think it's a strong argument for spirituality, phrased the way it is. Surely spirituality has to be about something *true* about our lives and existence, rather than simply a paneca for life's problems? It's not just about cheering ourselves up, is it?
 
 
Tryphena Absent
00:08 / 02.09.06
What about Gods as something other than that, Nadzdha?

Well that is my view of Gods really, I don't see how they can be creatures that are not perceived as more powerful and in control than humans, no matter how good our intentions are when we approach them. Do you have a different view? I'd be interested to hear it...
 
 
illmatic
08:30 / 02.09.06
I'm writing something offline at the moment where I'm trying to articulate this - I'll post it if I think it makes any sense. Most of the writing/thinking I find myself drawn to and inspired by is that which suggests God or Gods are aspects of our experience - ways and means of exploring what it means to be alive. Being alive is a pretty peculiar thing after all, as is the Universe. The strangness of Gods , their cosmic scale seem to me attempts to address this profundity.

Religion, at it's core seems to me to be largely about inner experience - gnosis. Inner experiences which make sense of your personal signifiance and your relationship to *everything else* and let you experience this in new ways. I don't mean all this stuff is just an inner experience either, because if you pursue this stuff with any sort of commitment you'll have experiences which cause you to question this division.

(I should add that I'm aware religion, as it's practised, is not soley about personal gnosis. The way in which in deals with this gnosis, tries to communicate to communicate, the political and communal significance of religion are things that follow after the initial inspirations IMO - I didn't really want to get into discussing them here).
 
 
Unconditional Love
12:00 / 02.09.06
Its a connection that paid out for me and led to an nde, which subsequently changed my life and gave me more of a focus on spiritual matters, i am not arguing rather relating experiences i have had, which is why i chose emotive words to make the expression.

Something true? In my experience the most truth spirituality offers is direct experience of the self and the world without ideas like the truth getting in the way of experience, now i also see that as a way of cheering yourself up and instilling a little joy into life, but that process may well involve facing a few home truthes about the self. I do think that spirituality that doesnt offer an aspirant joy and happiness in experience is mostly lacking a good foundation. Also anything that forces you into facing home truthes is just plain abusive, imo. Just because something is not true doesnt make it false, it just makes it, it. acceptence without judgement, hard to apply to things but so liberating when applied to the self.

About 6 years ago my own spiritual experience began to inform me that there was no truth (making judgements already!) to christianity or athiesm, i started to see them both as forms of cultural conditioning to be undone, at the same time i took my investigation of other cultures conditioning more seriously to try to gather as many differing view points as possible, to gain as many perspectives, i can see with limited knowledge how these cultural view points also act as a form of conditioning.

I am very intrested in freedom as an experience, systems of thought generally create constraints on freedom for a variety of reasons, atheism constrains with its materialistic focus, christianity with its biblical and god based philosophy, so do african based, indian based and chinese based systems, from the point of view where freedom is your highest value any fixed cultural system is limitation. I am fascinated by and respect them all and many more but dont feel i belong to any of them, belonging and attaching to ideas creates identity with those ideas personified to the forefront of persona, some of my reasoning and expression is borrowed from all of the cultures and bodies of knowledge i have mused upon internally.

Nadezhda Krupskaya has a very good point about external gods, they do in a sense act as control systems, internalised gods that are recognised as self creativity bring more will back to the individual and the experience.
From what i understand just as much result can be gained magickally from assuming either view point, one firmly pushes faith outside of the self into the other, and the other firmly roots faith in the person and there own ability to create and self generate. Yet focus on the forms themselves and the mythic structures those forms are embodied within is a limitation upon creative freedom.

If god(s)become the other outside, they can be used as that great unknown fear, to punish, always watching, spiritual cctv, its not nessecarily the only perception thou, love can also come from nowhere as can joy or insight. whats more important to me is not where the sense of identity of god(s) is placed in realtion to myself, but in the interaction, the intangible relationship, the energetic produced by the perception of self and other, it doesnt matter what the self and other are judged as but how they relate, the quality of relationship, mutual freedom in interaction. i have yet to discover any system of thought that embodies relative freedom, because i realised alongtime ago real freedom cant be contained, not even in words.(let alone gods and magickal/religous systems)
 
 
Tryphena Absent
13:30 / 02.09.06
Religion, at it's core seems to me to be largely about inner experience - gnosis. Inner experiences which make sense of your personal signifiance and your relationship to *everything else* and let you experience this in new ways.

That's a way of externalising to understand your inner experience though and while it makes for an interesting system to navigate yourself it can also be employed as a way to swim over rather than through your own psychological make up. Here's an experiment okay, it may be ill conceived but this is vaguely why I stopped this:

Money, at its core seems to me to be largely about outer experience. Outer experiences which make sense of your personal signifiance and your relationship to *everything else* and let you experience this in new ways.

Money is a human construction although many people seem to regard it as something other. When I think about the wide implications of money as an outer experience specifically the implications that don't generally affect me, I know that I have to reject money as a system of experience because it disadvantages people. I feel the same way about Gods, (morally) I have to reject them because they are disadvantaging groups of people. This is admittedly simplistic but related to my initial post in this thread.
 
 
Jared Louderback
04:36 / 03.09.06
True or not, the idea that there is SOME greater power out there who is on your side (be it your personal nameless god, allah, aliens, the subconcious collective, or my main man, Ganaesh) is pretty comforting, warm and fuzzy. I just sort of assume that all that a god is a super-dimensional being who can operate the fourth dimension of time and the fifth dimension of probability like we can operate the three dimensions of space...

But, I am probably just a nut. Shame on me, believeing in imaginary things. :P
 
 
Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero
04:44 / 03.09.06
I felt that not only was I supporting an inherent inequality but also deferring my own moral and occasionally practical responsibility onto another creature, one that I couldn't see in front of me but sought help from.

I wanted to comment on this, because I held a similar view for a long time. I can agree with the sentiment that religion is a crutch, and as such it is useful for some one who is spiritually "lame" and can help them grow towards health. Those that are already healthy are not generally benefitted by a crutch, only hampered.

A little simplistic, but I think you see what I'm getting at.

But what confuses me is this--the idea of moral guidence from a diety is not one I've run into often while practicing outside of a ethical monotheistic system. I certainly don't go to Hermes (or anyone in the Greek pantheon, for that matter) for moral guidance, mainly because as a child I read tons and tons of stories of those guys doing stupid, mean, or just fucked up things. So I'm wondering, how often did you feel you were defering your moral obligation to dieties? It's not something I, personally, have ever found necessary (or recommended, for that matter).

If you are working in a ethical monotheistic system, though, like Christianity or Judaism, then it's a different story.

How I deal with it: I'm fortunate, actually, because a few years after I gave up on it all (monotheism, I mean), I had a Bible and World Religions professor that totally gave me a different perspective on a lot of things I had thought I knew everything about. There are several ways to view the relationship between God(s) and humans, whichever system you're into.
 
 
illmatic
08:30 / 03.09.06
I was presenting the above pretty much in response to your that God(s). must equal something superior to you.("I don't see how they can be creatures that are not perceived as more powerful and in control than humans" I don't think that's the case, and it misses the essence of religion IMO.

That's a way of externalising to understand your inner experience though and while it makes for an interesting system to navigate yourself it can also be employed as a way to swim over rather than through your own psychological make up.

Well yeah, but isn't that true of any system of beliefs? It doesn't invalidate religious thinking and experience per se.
 
  

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