If you believe a god is ‘your’ god then is it not a false god? You are making a dinstintion between ‘your god’ and ‘their god’. If there is but one God then a people can be a ‘God’s people’ but you cannot have a ‘people’s god’.
By the same token any religion that distinguishes itself as seperate from other religeons who also worship ‘One God’ must be therefore be a false religion.
Maybe one day all believers will stop bickering over ‘whose religion is right’ and realise that there will never be world piece until you all stop putting so much emphasis on scripture and it’s interpretations and learn to debate you religeon with others. The sad fact is that for all the preaching of peace religion only brings division between one another. How many ‘scientific communities’ are there? One! Scientists use difference in opinion and sharing of theories as a uniting strength, while believers use difference in opinion and ‘sharing’ of theories to create a religious identity which seperates themselves from others.
Furthermore if your religion seperates you from the other believers then you are worshopping the church, which makes that church a false idol.
And we all know God’s opinion of False Idols. Are believers worshopping God or are they worshipping their religion?
First off, pardon my critique, it is simply for points of contention, you broadbrush generalize far too often in your commentary.
Religion and belief/faith are two entirely separate entities, not interchangeable, and should not be confused.
Cases in point: My paternal grandmother, who is almost solely responsible for my apprectiations of items of quality of life, was the most spiritual person I will ever meet. She was a Christian who never went to church, never had any “images” or “likenesses” of anything typically or customarily attributed to a person of Christianity. She taught me not only the biology of mechanical life, but the deeper images of how the mechanisms were indicative of the intelligent fingerprint of One. She had a Bible, but that was not her only book, and you would have never known they were in her home. Her life was the summation of virtuous life, and that proved her faith, beyond question. My grandparents were wealthy, which inclined my grandmother to be a candy striper at 3 different hospitals over a span of 50 years. She volunteered in many other roles, organizations, etc., (Red Cross, United Way, soup kitchens), as she felt she was responsible for helping anyone less fortunate. She wouldn’t have accepted pay for anything she ever did, even under penalty of death for refusal.
I had a friend in college, I assumed erroneously a close friend, who went to church 3 times a week, engaged in all manner of church activity, “witnessed” to others about the depth of his faith. He was a repugnant whore, a drunk, a drug user, a liar, and a fraud. He would vehemently oppose anyone who doubted “his church” or “his beliefs”. He was the consumate sculptured caste of a person of religion.
I said it previously in another post: You can have absolute religion, and be bereft of faith, the converse is also true. Religion is a poli-societal construct, (ie. the Roman Empire never fell, it became the Roman Catholic Church). Faith is something entirely unto itself.
So when you ask this question, you are inquiring about two entirely disparate groups of individuals. To which are you referring?
Your critique is most welcome Mastriani.
I was being very broad and general on purpose as Christians are not the only Believers who read these forums, and I was not targeting any religion specificly as I do not know of a religion that my initial post does not apply to, but am open to the possiblility that there may be a couple around that do not seperate themselves from other religions.
I don’t think I actally mentioned Faith anywhere, only Belief.
I know too many so called ‘Christians’ like your friend from college and that is the kind of ‘Religion’ I had in mind. The kind of ‘Religion’ that will hastily dismiss you if you ask questions, turning their religion into ‘us’ verses ‘them’.
Your grandmother on the other hand sounds like someone who does not get caught up with dogma and who would treat everyone equally reguardless of their religeon, and I think that is the type of person that all believers should aim to be.
As a Christian, i find C.S. Lewis to be most accurate when it comes to this. In The Last Battle (Chronicles of Narnia), there is a soldier working for “the bad guy” (a “false god”) who dies. Of course, he then sees Aslan (the “Christ-figure”) who lets this guy into “heaven.” Aslan’s reasoning was on these lines:
(1) The “false god” is against Aslan
(2) Aslan represents pure goodness/love
(3) Therefore, the “false god” represents pure evil
(4) Anything good/loving done must be in honor of Aslan, even if it is in the “false god”'s name because anything good/loving would be against this “false god”
(5) Therefore, this soldier who was doing good in the name of the “false god” was really serving Aslan, the “true god,” because it is impossible to do good things for evil.
i like this reasoning because it doesn’t limit “God’s people” to Christianity (as the fundamentalists believe it should), but rather to those people who are truly doing the good. i wouldn’t be surprised if there are some Hindus, Jains, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, and “Christians” in “heaven” just as i won’t be surprised if there are many “Christians” in “hell.”
Christianity isn’t really about a religion. To make it so is to do a disservice to the God/Christ they worship.
That’s quite a nice analogy from the Chronicles of Narnia (Although I’m sure fundamentalists would be unimpressed at the use of C.S. Lewis’s work when discussing religion)
Absolutely! If anyone from any religion is a good person and does what they think God wants from them, why would any of them be denied by God?
There are many religions (or at least subsets of those religions) who believe that only they will be allowed into heaven while all other good devout people would be sent to hell for praising God in the church (or other religious building) across the street, instead of in their church.
I talk to these people and get so annoyed when their love of their church turns them to judge others like that.
How so? i never suggested any definition as to what defines “good” or “evil” as that is a very messy subject. It isn’t wise to read extra information into another’s post.
i believe the Christian would say God is infinite, but not unknown. If God was an unknown, we wouldn’t be able to say “God” without having some kind of meaning associate with that word. God may not be absolutely knowable, but that is far from being totally unknown.
OK. Your point?
Sure it is. The problem is that the two are very difficult to define because Truth is not completely known.
Unless it is a censored version of Mere Christianity
i don’t think its a matter of doing good things, but rather being a good person. Personally, i believe that non-“Christians” do “accept Jesus”, it’s just that they have a different language game for it. It may be Vishnu for some. The point is that it is accepting of some saving power from outside one’s self, not saying “Jesus, …”
why not? You can say unicorn or manticore, without ever seeing one and knowing that both are mythological. so to say god is unknown is perfectly within reason. He’s just as unknown as the manticore, and just as well defined.
read the correlation:
Just because the nazi soldier goes home and is a good father doesn’t make him an overall good person… Just as the person serving the “false god” may occasionally do things for Aslan, but unless he stops completely serving that false god than he is not a good person…
But that is leading into the realm of grey that wasn’t willing to be touched here.
so you would consider the rapist who serves “aslan” good? Let’s expand on his character… in every other sense he helps his community, gives to the poor, helps little old ladies cross the street… he just has the one downfall. He likes to rape people.
still think it’s black and white?
or,
what if we changed rapist to curse, or pornographer?
The truth can only be known relative to the time frame and place we live.
truth is only objective to the eyes of the viewer.
That does not make them unknown, just impossible to experience. To be able to define something means to know it. i know what Bill Gates looks like, even though i have never experienced it. It is knowledge and experience that are differing from each other, not knowledge and definition.
Going home and be a “family man” was never defined as “good.” Again, have not yet defined “good” (or “evil”) because that is currently irrelevant to ths discussion at hand.
With regards to the occasional good, read what i wrote. i did not say if an “evil” thing does “good” occasionally (or better yet, by accident!), it makes it “good.”
It depends.
Sure. All you have proven is a diffculty with the semantics of “black” and “white”. And i haven’t disagreed.
Not true. It will always be true that “green” is “green.” Some truths may change, but others will never. You appear to be making things rather black-and-white here by stating that truth is always relative.
that does make them unknown… because you can define something does not make it known. You can define bill gates far more than you can god or manticores or unicorns, you can even say “Bill Gates Lives in Kirkland along Lake Washington”, and go to his house knock on his door and meet him.
I can define a manticore… it has a lions head and body, large bat wings, a scorpions tail. Does that mean I can know a manticore? Can I describe it’s ideal living environment. What it eats, what it breeds with?
Sure… it’d all be a product of my imagination, like god.
It’d be like describing a dream to you, like “Last night I dreamt I was in this martian city mining refined marzanium. Quaid came and saved us all by injecting the large martian hot plates into the ice core and making the air on the planet breathable.”
I’ve described something in quite vivid detail… is it knowable… to you? Could you go to Mars right now and see a colony mining Marzanium, and Quaid the savior of the planet brought oxygen to the world?
The difference between Bill Gates (and other actual people/places) is that we can effectively know them because they are planted in reality. Anything else (like for example god.) is unknowable, and any attributes about him come from our beliefs about him. (or her.)
well… let me try below,
When I speak of relative truths, I am not speaking of all truths… It should be obvious at this point what truths have relativity and which ones don’t. For example, if you say that the christian path is the correct one, and all you’ve got to back it up is the bible and a feeling, do you think that will convince other religion followers that your path is more truthful than their own?
You see and read what I type through the filters you’ve created to deal with reality. That in itself is relative, as you could read this and someone else could read this and come up with two completely different interpretations.
so in conclusion:
we can’t rely on ourselves because of our flawed filters.
we can’t rely on god, because he is a personification of ourselves.
So what can we rely on?
the good filters. What causes people peace and happiness? What causes love which consolates us all?
Believers would interperet ‘unkown’ here as ‘completely unknown’ as in ‘nothing is known about God’, though it is often used to mean ‘not completely known’ as in ‘if you don’t completely understand God then God in unknown’. In this way Logicians would view God as a variable.
I just thought scythekain was missunderstood there, but I don’t think he is helping himself by equating God to a manticore, you sound like you are trying to be insulting. Insulted people don’t listen to you much.
That would be included in dasnichtege’s Narnia example saying that just because you follow an evil leader and perform evil things does not neccessarily mean you will go to hell. Many soldiers in Germany regretted what they did after the war, and the reasons for what they did are subjective, not neccessarily being because they were evil. Some soldiers were afraid they would be shot if they did not follow orders, as some soldiers were.
Also dependant on your perspective. Some see shades of grey while others examine those shades of grey closely and see it is made up of closely mixed bits of black and white. Then again some things that look white to some look black to others. I suppose this too either is not black and white or needs closer scrutiny. (I’m not helping anyone am I? )
Not and argument, just a correction, something ‘objective to the eyes of the viewer’ is being ‘subjective’, which is kind of opposite to objective which is being the same to all viewers. It sounds picky but it is important to be precise in boards like this as there are people from many different religions and cultures on here and missunderstandings happen often if you are not concise.
We can rely on out flawed filters to be constant though. We may not be able to verify if we experience the entirity of reality or not but the subset of reality we do experiene is constant and therefore reliable.
There are many believers who do not see God as a personification, and I think having the human form of Jesus helps to keep God non human in Christian’s conceptions. People do like to identify with Jesus and it is probably a healthy thing to not identify with the creator of the universe Himself.
well if you can prove god is different than a manticore, than you can consider my statement withdrawn. But, since we imagine the qualities of god, and don’t know them… you can’t.
I’m sure someone, somewhere, views god as a manticore; and that he greated the world by stinging the sun with his scorpions tail.
That would be the filter effect I talk about in my post above yours.
well, let’s go back to colors. Das, stated that the color green is an absolute truth… that it’s green here and there, then and now. Not everyone sees colors the same ways. There are many people that have varying color blindness that don’t see green at all, see green as what you’d call red, or see green as what you’d call blue.
so while some people do agree that green is green, the very fact that there exists those that don’t and can prove that they don’t, prove that your truth is only objective to your eyes… (and to the eyes of your peers).
God is another good example. If you are in a group of people that all believe in the same attributes for god, than you are believing an objective truth, if you are suddenly thrust into a group where your view is the minority, for instance you believe that god physically lives on a mountain and controls the weather… or you believe god is a manticore… you’d see just how subjective your view point is.
You could even thrust a mystic into a room with a fundamentalist… and once again come out, surprised and amazed that your view of god is not all that objective after all.
Now let’s go back to colors… I stated in my filter statement above, that human interpretation is flawed and shouldn’t be solely relied upon. Using reason, we can come up with ways to test for color that is outside of our filters and thusly will make the color an absolute…
For instance you could take a chemical X and put it on a green, red, yellow garment and observe the reaction chemical X has to said dyes.
The less reason, common sense and science we can apply to something, the more subjective it becomes.
exactly my point. Everyone in here has a slightly different filter for the world.
emotion and belief can dramatically change your filters. What if you go through the day pissed off because someone cut you off? it’d dramatically change the way you react to the world.
What if you were told (and you believed it) that someone you love had 2 days to live? again it would dramatically change your filter.
we also know that people can completely change their belief system. Most people are not born atheists or agnostics.
?
So … Having god become a man, and god killing himself for our sins that he created so that we could join him up in heaven for all eternity… makes God less human?
If anything, The christian concept of god is more human than any other mainstream religion right now.
it depends on how you relate to christ. as I said above, many christians believe jesus is the creator of the universe. and even if you believe he is a virgin born son of god… how healthy is that?
Jesus, is the ideal scapegoat for all of our wrong doings. Do something wrong, don’t worry about it, you got jesus!
It’s a great psychosomatic belief to be forgiven of sins made up by the church.
Think I’m full of it? fine. At least I’m not okay with human sacrifice for sin.
That was a simplification of a fictional children’s story. It is hardly appropriate to use that as proof of my being “black-and-white”.
Not completely knowing something does not make it unknown. i know very little of you, yet i do have knowledge of you and experience you. Or, are you suggesting that you, along with this board, is a product of my imagination and i can’t prove otherwise?
Knowledge does not entail experience or reality. Let’s go talk to a schizophrenic. To him (or her), the visions being experienced are real and we can gain a knowledge about those visions without ever experiencing them. The only reason this person is considered hallucinating is because we are not also experiencing the same visions.
How do you know that i am real? Are you saying that you have sufficient evidence to prove that i exist? For all you know, you are simply a brian in a vat “experiencing” everything because of electrical impulses pushing through your brain. Nothing can be proven without first assuming something. Reality, just like language, is entirely self-referential. There is nothing outside of it, or as Derrida is known for saying, “there is nothing outside the text.”
All religions only have a “bible and a feeling.” Religion, by its very nature, is entirely subjective. i’m thinking of Kierkegaard where he writes about analyzing Christianity objectively (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 25):
This is the reason why i cringe at people like Lee Stroebel and Josh McDowell who try to make Christianity “objective.” It’s impossible to do that.
You’re right in some senses, but we have a loose de facto consensus on language in which an interpretation of “Colorless green ideas sleep furiosly” is impossible. Everyone reading this will have a different context in which to place the text, and this will result in different interpretations. But, when you wrote, you were not hoping for multiple interpretations, but one. So then, it is the writer’s duty to include enough context so that the meaning of the text the author wishes to convey is conveyed.
Then, why are we even attempting communication? It will all be futile.
Where did that come from?
God is by definition not a manticore, or else we would just say Manticore. Why use multiple words for one meaning? Or, to echo Saussere, Lacan, Derrida, and many others: Why use multiple Signifiers to signify one signified? Sure, there is a Sliding Scale of signification by which a single Signifier may signify multiple signifieds, but not vice versa.
That doesn’t matter. Everybody sees something that correlates to the commonly accepted “green.” Whatever that something is perceived as, it will always be called “green.” The Signifier will never change, even though the signified may. And i do not claim it to be an “absolute” truth (as if “truth” cannot be “true” at some time), but rather that it is an agreed-upon “truth”. It is intersubjectively defined as such because reality is self-referential.
Belief does not cause reality.
But you’re still relying on those pesky “filters” there. Unless there is a way to observe without using one’s senses, we’re still stuck with those pesky “filters” you talk about (and which i believe comes from a Kantian subjectivity).
Whoah! Slow down there. When was it proven that God causes sin? When was it decided God was a male? When dod God kill God? When was God only human?
i think you’ve been reading too much Freud. Perhaps we should discuss the ritual and ceremonial aspects of early Judaism and its influence on the Christ myth/story before continuing this thread.
i still like Nietzsche when he wrote (in Der Antichrist): “There was only one Christian and he died on a cross.”
as soon as god, manticores or unicorns post on ILP, you can attribute a higher sense of “knowing” to them.
absolutely… Schizophrenics are a good example, they have a loose grip on reality and get fumbled memories. They don’t even know what happened to them in the past… they think they do but it’s a complete re-work of their mis-wired brain.
God is the same. We think we know him… we don’t. it’s mere attributes of godliness, humanity etc, are attributes of it’s creator.
Right… The same reason you can’t say “I know god”… the god you know is not witnessed by anyone else but yourself, and even other people who believe in god, have different attributes for him/her.
Because you are responding to what I write.
Remember… as soon as you get god to post in here, or can produce a unilateral depiction of god as witnessed by many… god is unknown.
(basically, if god is “knowable”, why is it that he has such vastly different attributes depending on the country of origin of said religion?)
Since brains in jars is science fiction we can rule that out.
Reality is not self referential… we can compare our experience to the experience that other people have. How we react to reality is self-referential, and that is what we need to learn to control.
If I say, “the sky is on fire”, the first thing you’d do is look up and see that you are not seeing that, and think I’m lying, or crazy. If I tell you, “I go home and talk to Odin every night… I know odin is “knowable”.” You’d again challenge my claims… Odin is a mythological character and like any story we can only now what he is like from the creators mind…
God… is the same.
You could include pages and pages of detailed context and people would still interpret it differently.
so we can learn to turn the filters off…
from me. God is a complete inner creation, personified by the individuals belief system.
God by your definition is not a manticore. Can you prove he’s not a manticore?
They don’t see what you would call green.
well… you’re assuming that god is reality and a manticore is reality? so that it’s impossible to believe that god is a manticore?
Belief does not cause reality, it changes our perception of reality.
If you believe you have 1 day to live, do you think you would go through the day looking at things in the same way?
wrong… science is only valid when it’s repeatable. by someone else in a different lab.
So you don’t believe god has power over satan or creation?
Jesus Christ
Hellenism had a far greater influence on christianity. The jews at the time started believing in resurrection, and in “hell”. (which is a greek construct - hades)
well, now you’re just playing semantics… if you can’t call them christians, what would you call them?
Again, knowledge does not entail experience or reality. i can reply to you all i want, but being that i’m already delusional, why should it be put past me to talk to myself?
That doesn’t remove the possibility of existence. Have you looked at elementary physics? They talk frequently of “quarks”, “gluons”, and “muons”, yet cannot experience them. Yet, the physicists will adamantly assert the existence of such small things. Another case in point: gravity, strong force, weak force. These things “exists” and are “known”, but we cannot perceive them. Perception (or lack thereof) does not cause reality.
God needn’t be physically manifested. You are requiring a greater degree of proof for the existence of God than for the existence of me. Why is that?
How can you know? Because it’s on TV?
The thing is, these people are already experiencing reality as well. There is nothing outside reality with which we can communicate. At best, you can have some kind of intersubjective “truth”, but nothing objectively true. With this “system”, there can be no certainty of anya priori truth.
No, i would say that i’m not experiencing these things or have disbelief of your beliefs, but i cannot disprove your statements without appealing to something else already in “reality.”
But it would become easier to get across the intended interpretation.
But we can’t.
Because your belief excludes the existence of something named “God”, it does not follow to say that “God” must not exist.
If God were a manticore, we would not have two separate words. It’s a linguistic thing as there are no true synonyms. Any two Signifiers never refer to the exact same signified.
Sure they do. It might not be what i see, but they see the same thing.
i am assuming God is real in my arguments because proof is impossible. So, instead of squabbling over whether i can assert something, i assume it and work from there.
i don’t know. What’s the relevance here?
No matter what, though, “people” have “filters.” It will only be verified if the repeated experiments resolve the same way the original appeared to resolve.
Possession of something does not entail the continual use of it. i have a car that works, but i don’t drive it 24/7. i don’t even drive it the 16 hours per day i’m awake. In fact, i may drive it only 2 hours per week. Does that mean that during the rest of the week i lack a car? No.
Even then, God was not only human.
The whole thing is semantics. Language is much more important than what most people (e.g. philosophy and especially metaphysics since Plato) attribute to it. Language is what the post-structuralism (and subsequent “postmodern”) movement is all about.
Mentat Monkey- Why do you set your bar so low? The kind of religious people who ‘turn away all questioning’ and who 'wouldn’t be impressed by CS Lewis" and so on? You won’t find anybody here who would defend such attitudes, and there are so much more challenging aspects of religious belief to criticize, if criticism is your game.
It looks like we're breaking down into a classic discussion of what evidence is proper for the existence of God. The comparison of God to a manticore breaks down in one fundamental way: God is alleged to exist, and a manticore has always been intended as a fictional creature from the start. Instutiions and philosophies have all been attributed to the existence or examination of God, not so with manticores. As far as the experiential nature of evidence, many people who believe in God claim to have experienced Him, in ways similar enough that Christians can compare their experiences with that of other Christians, and so on. If there was some large body of people who had all claimed to have experienced manticores, I imagine they would be justified in believing in them. That would affect the outside observers justification not at all.
In other news, The scientific community is not monolithic, and human interpretation should be solely relied upon, because badgers aren’t known to be good at philosophy.
I don’t agree with much of what you said, and in fact I think you are focusing too much on your whole “one word for one definition thing” the english language by it’s very nature develops many words for the same thing…
Television: television receiver, television, television set, tv, tv set, idiot box, boob tube, telly, goggle box
computer: computer, computing machine, computing device, data processor, electronic computer, information processing system
No, because while there are many words that come close, each represents something slightly different. At the very least. these words are different simply because of semantical use. When one goes to the store to buy a television, chances are that one will not say “Where are the boob tubes?” or “Where are the idiot boxes?”
You’re right that at the surface these words are synonymous with the same object, but at the gaps of the surface (or, if you’re a structuralist: in the deep structure), these words do represent different objects with different connotations.
And, there’s still the problem that one word does not mean two different things. God may be manticore, but manticore isn’t always God.
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