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Hello multitude.tv!
I was unaware I had 'ducked' these questions, and, as tiresome as I am going to find it, I'll try to find some time over the next week or so to labour through it for you. No worries.
Quantum is being a bit disingenuous, I suspect, above, as this:
Nobody is going to say that our perception of colour doesn't exist
and this:
Colour, my friend, is not 'real' in any 'objective' sense.
Fit together like cheese'n'onion. Perception is subjective. That's exatly what I was saying. And I have been pointing out that the subjective Universe is no less 'real', necessarily, than the objective Universe since the two, in fact, are one. However, who cares and others seem to have been arguing, earlier in thread, that there is an Objective Universe which all things must demonstrably be provable within for them to lay claim to Reality, independent of an subjectove experience. Hence my alluding to love, grief, remorse and similar aspects of Reality which cannot meet these criteria.
We all know that colour is not a property in and of objects themselves. That colour does not exist 'out there' in and of 'stuff'. That rainbows are tricks of light, position of perceiver, and water droplets, and the 'colours' arching through the azure blue sky are not in any sense a part of the Objective Universe, the one outside of our heads, other than as products of the perception of those in the right position to perceive them in as much as they themselves are a part of that Universe. Don't we?
The example of 'weight' seems a bit misguided to me, especially as relating to 'iron atoms', since weight is a measure of the effect of gravitational force acting on mass, and as such, may well not 'exist' depending on where the given mass happens to be located in the Universe. The same mass of iron will have completely different weight, or practically no weight at all, depending on where it happens to be. So not such a clever analogy there Quants, perhaps?
Similarly 'wetness' : I am clearly saying that many aspects of what we commonly accept to be 'real' are completely contingent on the grain of quantization of subjective perceptual apparatus used to examine the Objective - hence wetness exists for us in spite of not being a property of H20 molecules - Objective reality, that is. The observed 'Reality' of the Universe is mutable according the scale of measurement used to analyze it. Beyond certain scales, certain things cease to be meaningful or useful as descriptions or metaphors.
Before I 'splain myself properly, though, if I must, I'd like to just set something a little less crooked:
Not necessarily a Christian Theologian, as such, but spinning off from the Dawkins thread in Head Shop (can't be bothered to link, sorry), I noticed this little paragraph in Terry Eagleton's review of The God Delusion, linked to in that very thread:
"Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms. For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects."
So, if it's OK by you, who cares, I'll accept that concession gracefully and without too much further ado.
If you'd like more examples, I just picked up a rather spiffy book called 'The Future of God' for £3 in a charity shop, in which many leading theologians, including Desmond Tutu, John Seed, Ina May Gaskin, Harold Kushner, Barbara Thiering and Bernadette Cozart reveal their 'extraordinary range of ideas' as to the nature of Divinity, from which I'll galdly cull some further examples of such a belief.
Quick example from Matthew Fox, flicked open and noticed on Page 258: "I experience divinty as a presence. Everything. Everything is in God, and God is in Everything...All Being is a revelation of Divinity".
Wowzers! Ker-Ching! Sound familiar? It's another of those tired old ideas you came across and dismissed when you first became interested in the Occult! This geezer must be another kind of old Sheeple, rehashing silly sentiments he's read somewhere and not had the brain to pass up for a more sexy understanding.
You can see why this might be important, underpinning as it does whole swathes of your argument about what 'most' or 'many' modern religious people think God might be, and how you claim that 'none', which you might concede to 'few' modern thinkers on the subject would agree with my assertion as to what Divinity, God etc. is and why, in this sense, the entire question of 'belief' makes little or no sense? |
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