If you believe that morality is all important, to the point where you hold God to it and condemn God Himself if he strays from your moral sensibilities, then why do you need God at all to validate your beliefs and your approach? Actual theism and worship seems unimportant to you compared to things like caring for your fellow man. You already know this, and you explicitly state that it is more important to you than any religious truth. Why bother with the religion at all?
I am 79. My days are numbered. From what I hear I have six possible afterlives:
1.heaven with God
2.hell as torment or being without God
3.reincarnation as karmic improvement
4. oblivion or nothingness
5. reclamation into God
6. purgatory as remedial
Being human I weigh these possibilities on a moral scale and have decided that given my temporality all are acceptable to me except hell. That was the cause of my break with fundamentalism. In college I met people who were doing things I was told I would go to hell for doing–dancing, going to movies etc. I could not condemn those who did these things. Fundamentalism usurped my youth. No wonder that at 50 I underwent the “middle age crazies”.
I cannot give up religion. I have had God experiences, which validated the presence of God for me. As to what God is like the only thing I can think of is that God is universal, unconditional love. That means, for me, God would not stand by idly as any human sends himself to hell because of human beliefs.
Hm. I guess since I don’t take any of these as my dogmas I was insensitive. I consider Christianity to be a usurpation of the original Roman religion. But also a convenient vehicle for it. And I remember those myths from my youth fondly. For me, Catholicism always meant time with my dad. We would go to church and comment on the sound quality of the sermon after. He would teach me to pray to my guardian angel before bed. There is something manly about Catholicism, these larger than life spirits and stakes. And what I do carry on into my current faith is the idea that a God will never answer to you. But also that life is holy, without any need for consideration of an afterlife.
Thanks.
The “afterlives” are from my readings in Buddhist, Hindu, Christian mystic, Judaic and atheistic sources. Maybe there are other possibilities.
“Every thing that lives is holy.”–Wm. Blake. Maybe that recognition is all that matters.
I wonder if it includes mosquitos and flies. I killed a fly yesterday. Does that make me a murderer?
Maybe Blake meant sentient beings, but it could be said of life itself.
I think the quote has more depth than is found in our propensity to scoff.
I was curious about this question as well and the book below by Bernado Kastrup attracted my attention because he says that our main worries about death seem to stem from a materialist worldview (even if we’re not aware of it) and he has been a proponent of metaphysical idealism and has managed to surprise even the skeptic Michael Shermer with his analysis. The prevailing ideas, that a part of us goes somewhere, or that nothing goes anywhere, is based on the idea that our minds are somehow located in our bodies. Either there is an escape mechanism, or everything ends with death. He quotes from several sources but also explains his hypothesis very well, that we have our perspective upside down. Mind (or consciousness) isn’t something that our brain somehow produces, but rather the “Mind at large” is what produces our brain (as well as the rest of us). This has the consequence that death of the body means a re-joining of our individual mind with the cosmic mind. He points to near-death experiences as examples of where those returning from their brush with death have experiences that, given that brain functions had reduced, are not explicable – especially not in such detail, and that there are similarities to the effects of psycho-active drugs, which also shut down particular brain-functions (rather than enhancing them) and therefore enabling a connection to “Mind at large”. The religious person is likely to identify this mind at large with God.
There is no doubt that this hypothesis needs much more beef, and Kastrup provides this in his several books on the subject. Of course, he is not just concerned with near death experiences, but rather tries to give us a perspective to overcome the materialistic mindset. I am impressed with what he has to say, and when talking to my son about the subject, he found it more soothing than anything else he has heard. If you take the cosmic consciousness as the basis for what we perceive, it first of all jogs our mind somewhat, but there is so much in ancient traditions and especially amongst the Mystics, that resonates.
God experiences are understandable if you realise that our brains function to interpret our sensual input and provide us with a usable interface, much like our computers, without the confusion of what goes on below. At times, our brains, for whatever reason, drops this function and allows some of us to experience things that we can’t explain or even understand, but have an emotional effect that we can’t ignore. This explains the great variety of descriptions of such experiences, being, as they are, often interpretations of an input that is more than sensual.
People who have written forewords or recensions to the books Kastrup has written, include
Menas Kafatos, Ph.D. Fletcher Jones Professor of Computational Physics, Chapman University. Author of The Conscious Universe: Parts and Wholes in Physical Reality.
Shogaku Zenshin Stephen Echard Musgrave Roshi. Director of the Zen Institute of San Diego, California. Author of Zen Buddhism, Its Practice and the Transcendental Mind.
Rick Stuart, Ph.D. Practicing psychotherapist.
And he has had multiple conversations with top names on YouTube. Worth looking up?
Bob,
While I thank you for your insightful post, I’m not into metaphysical idealism and would find Kastrup tedious. I’ believe that OBEs and NDEs are natural places a brain can conceive of, not indications of contact with some universal mind. I believe God is in matter. One does not transcend to know of God or find evidence of God in visions made by a brain that is partially shut down. The union of psychology and physics is in its infancy; we still know little about the the possibilities of our own minds, much less of the mind of God.
Don’t write Kastrup off before you give him a shot. He gives a more thorough-going presentation of idealism than most of it’s advocates. He avoids the anti-science biased many of them fall into. While I wouldn’t call myself a true believer, his thought makes more sense to me than Dowd’s. I haven’t read any of his books yet, I just watched a parcel of his video dialogues.
So, what you seem to be saying here, at least to me, is that one may be immoral and at the same time, be a saint?
Perhaps this may be one of the reasons why abusive priests were able to pull the wool over our eyes for so long a time. People would see them kneeling at the altar looking up at the cross and praying so diligently - showing just how close to God and sanctified they were.
Just where does one start on one’s journey to being close to God anyway?
Is the idea of eternal punishment in the new testament? In that case, that is its origin, as it doesn’t exist in the Old Testament nor in other religions. I know it mostly from Dante as I havent ever managed to get through the New Testament.
It is obviously baloney. It is very sad that it has gotten people in its grasp. I cant even fathom how it could be taken seriously.
Karma is probably real, so is reincarnation. That makes for very deep complexities I should not try to go into. But it is an idea that is in line with the basic ideas of causality and valuation that seem to govern this cosmos, where eternal bliss/torment aren’t.
Once you find out which god you want to be close to.
No god created the universe, it brought itself into being from necessities.
But it brought into being gods before it brought into being matter. Matter is the most ambiguous form of being, the furthest from pure necessity. Hence, the possibility of miracles, transmutation of substances, etc.
We can ascend up that chain, to the origin of necessities, which in Kabbalah is called Kether, the Crown, where non-being negates itself and becomes being.
That is a perilous journey with several increasingly dark nights.
St John of the Cross gives some particular accounts of them, not universal to mankind but as I understand, reading them, very relevant to Christians on that path. Other, more ‘messy’ and to me relevant accounts are given by Crowley. Ancient kabbalistic lore gives very fiery descriptions too, especially of the dangers involved. Merkabah.
P, can you justify your statement about Catholicism? Im always confused about this religion. It has life affirming members who seek closeness to God, it has a history of persecuting on an unspeakable scale in the name of morality - it is not, apparently, singular of nature. Which indeed the name itself gives away.
Essentially what the eternal punishment comes down to, is not being able to live up to ones soul standards ever again, because of some critical mistake, or rather, critical weak-effort, at one point.
And I mean spiritual weak-effort.
Id say.
The soul is forever incarnating, and it has certain standards. Failures are part of that standard, practical failures, but not so much spiritual failures. What is a spiritual failure?
Ill ask that again. What is a spiritual failure?
Spirit, and will are related.
Will and standards have to do with each other.
Yes, will is drive, but it is also integrity; no drive can persist without integrity, like a battering ram has to be of strong substance, like light has to have its integrity to penetrate substances and to hold together at its phenomenal speed. Integrity and will belong together, and spirit is integrity.
Did I make that clear?
What happens if one simply knuckles down under pressures one might suspect aren’t just?
I am too bad to go to heaven; I am too good to go to hell. At least that’s my opinion given the standard criteria for going to these places.
As a temporal being I cannot fathom atemporal existence. I think the most honest answer to where I’m going when I die is I don’t know.
Agnosticism appears to me to provide the most honest answer to ultimate questions about eternity.
And yes, I’ve had God experiences, God spells, so to speak; but these are not guaranteed tickets to a rewarding afterlife. These blessings may just show that there is more to life here and now than I can understand. So my hat’s off to agnostics everywhere. I appreciate your doubt.
Both of those comments give me the impression that both sides of this type of argument are entirely clueless concerning the nature of God -
God = everything I (me - my all wise self) think is good (even though I have no idea why it would be good).
Satan = everything I (me - my all wise self) think is bad (even though I have no idea why I think it is bad).
Why is it SO SO SO difficult to realize that -
“God” = “whatever facts that cannot be changed”
“Satan” = “the persistent lust to have what cannot be had”.
Are humans really, seriously THAT dumb as to not be able to see something as simple as that?
I love it when cancer patients pray to the god that invented cancer.
When they recover from cancer they thank god, but forget the hard work of generations of scientists and medics who have given their lives to the treatment of this disease.
LIke after a tsunami they pray for their safety after loosing half their family. Pray for food.
Yet god made the tsunami and people donate food, not god.
That God “invented” cancer and caused tsunamis is a matter of opinion. What an immoral God that would be!
Reminder–this thread is about eternity and time.
I killed a fly yesterday. Does that make me a murderer?