If you anthropomorphize a gecko then you don’t really interact with the gecko. You interact with a humanized gecko.
Your understanding of the gecko is distorted.
The same applies to God.
That argument assumes that you already have some previous understanding of the gecko. The understanding that a gecko is in some ways like a human, may be an improvement over whatever your previous understanding was.
The same might apply to God.
Indeed according to Genesis 1:27, God was the real person of whom humans were images. So understanding God might help us understand ourselves and to interact with each other better.
If what the human perspective yields is unreality, we can have no knowledge of the real God or the real universe.
We have evolved enough to have some faith in our senses that they reveal what is outside the body–the reality of the Other.
The gecko can be known, with some degree of certainty for what it is other than something similar in ways to a human.
This topic reminds me of Nagel’s “What it’s like to be a bat”. Nagel claims we will never know. Yet we understand echolocation among other aspects of batness
We know their habits. E. O. Wilson, contra-Nagel, explains in “Consilience” what it’s like to be a bee.
Reading plus experience helps us fathom what is other than ourselves. The senses seldom lie, otherwise we would not know what to eat or with whom to have sex. Reading and experience have revealed a loving God to many. And is God really totally Other?
Experience shows lots of people suffering … from disease, starvation, exploitation, abuse, …
How do you reconcile that with a loving god?
Man’s inhumanity to Man, not God’s inhumanity. God is in the rescue and reclamation business, in the healings offered by good doctors, in the charity organizations that feed and clothe the homeless… God does not cause human suffering but works to alleviate it.
There is sufficient supply of food, for example to feed the starving of the world. The problem is distribution.
There is all sorts of suffering that can’t be attributed to human failings.
Humans didn’t create disease and parasites. God did.
Humans didn’t create drought.
“God, if he be good, is not the author of all things, as the many assert, but he is the cause of a few things only, and not of most things that occur to men. For few are the goods of human life, and many are the evils, and the good alone is to be attributed to God; of the evils the causes are to be sought elsewhere, and not in him.” Plato’s Republic, II, 379
Sure.
“God, if he be good” is only responsible for good things.
Can’t argue with that logic.
But is God good? Is God only good?
Plato’s Socrates thought so. And the history of theodicy from Plato on is the effort of men to justify the ways of God to men. The split of the proto-orthodox Christians from the gnostics was mainly on that point. Since Darwin natural selection has taken the place of the demiurge in that controversy.
Hang in there, phyllo. You’re at the part where the Christian tries to convince u that God is not responsible for evil.
Right! I was about to summarize 2300 years of theodicy.
Dasein’s
Yeah, that’s my point. With zillions of Gods and/or One True Paths out there to choose from, how to explain why any particular individual chooses one over the others?
Is it because they sat down and thoroughly researched each denomination in order to arrive at the most rational manner in which to connect the dots between morality here and now and immortality there and then?
Or is it more likely that given the historical, cultural and and experiential contexts in which they were “thrown” at birth, and given years and years of indoctrination as children and given all of the unique experiences they had over the course of their lives, they were predisposed existentially to pick this one and not all the others?
You tell me which seems more reasonable.
For example, in regard to your own spiritual path.
I aim to do the best I can with what I’ve got. Call it the existential imperative.
Whatever best comforts and consoles you, sure.
The one that Ierrellus is talking about.
If I was having a conversation with another person, then we might be talking about a different God.
Okay, but when in religious circles the discussion gets around to eternal punishment, very, very, very few of the faithful are convinced that their own God actually eschews that. Quite the contrary, in fact.
So my belief is that with eternal damnation likely to be at stake, whatever God you do subscribe to ought to be one that you are able to convince others is in fact the “the God”.
And then to include as well here the part that revolves around theodicy. My own particular fascination with religion.
Now, to the extent that Ierrellus’s own beliefs revolve more around the manner in which those beliefs comfort and console him rather than in his capacity to convince others to reject all those other Gods, well, you’d have to take that up with him yourself.
I made a promise to him to avoid responding to his posts here at ILP. So long as he does not attack me in them.
Phyllo.,
I speak of everybody’s God, not just my God.
And, contrary to public opinion, the God does not create tsunamis or other natural disasters and is not responsible for starvation or any form of human suffering.
You apparently believe in the fundamentalists God, not in the God of universal, unconditional love. My belief is that if God is love of that caliber, there would be no hell.
FYI, I am a panentheist–a progressive Christian. I do not ascribe to fundamentalism wherein God can be accused of all sorts of immorality. Universal love creates; it does not destroy. It comforts, it does not induce suffering. It repairs broken lives. Its only obstruction is the ego.
Imagine what it would be like for a group of logical positivists to watch a thread like this.
Yo I just thought of some funny Monty Python type shit. Okay u know how positivists and verificationists believe the word ‘god’ is nonsense? So as they read the thread, every time they get to the word ‘god’, the readers voice is bleeped out and a loud horn sounds (a bicycle handlebar horn).
Okay that’s a start. Let’s develop the skit further. Irrellus, what do u suggest?