Gods at the Crossroads

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
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What follows is my perspective, and makes no claim to any one else perspective. It is my own freshly unearthed source of experience, but the experience itself is not tied to the limits of my individual being.

The Gods:

There are two Gods - the God of the past and the God of the future. They are united in the moments that will, in retrospect, be interpreted as pivotal in a mans quest to become who he is.

The God of the future was already presented a few years ago (around the release of the iPhone4S): now I describe the God of the past.

The God of the Past:

This God comes to me when I am so grateful for my existence that my mind can not deal with this other than to conjure and image of a sublimely beautiful being of either mother- or father-like behavior, which makes it evident to whom I really am grateful.

It’s just problematic to see my parents as Gods, they are certainly noble and powerful but they are not the entire collection of beings accumulated in my genes, nor are they the whole circumstance in which life is possible.

So my God here is in the same vein as the ancestral Gods of old, but I propose it as an abstract principle. Each God of the past (that which has already been created) shall be ancestral.

Simplified Example:

My God is electrical - my family tree is one of thinkers, orators, teachers, men of the cloth, healers, lawmakers. Your God may be earth like - builders, traders, farmers - honor this God.

In honoring the Earthly element, I do not honor God, as I do not know this God, but I honor you, and your God only as a consequence. God inhabits the context in which a persons qualities are exalted. This is his Great Work, that in which he can become God-like - live up to his God.

Relativity Principle:

All men are created unequal, God, like the speed of light, is a constant within a reference frame. From outside that frame (from the building site looking into the judges study) God appears skewed.

We can not understand each others God, precisely because he is maximally exalted above the head to which he is God.

If I am to respect you to the utmost, I can not hail your God directly. I can only hail you and your commitment (relation) to that God.

In Practice:

Un-skewed practice of religion (very rare at this point) is thus always wholly personal and tribal, and recognized as such. There is no God who is exalted above all men.

Existing Religions:

Christianity is claimed by/makes claim to (the same thing) a certain subspecies of modern man. Within this species, it is divided in two main sects (Protestant/northern and Catholic/southern) and within these sects a multitude of divisions. Ultimately, every little parish claims his own Jesus Christ, and reads from the Bible accordingly to this claim.

The same goes for Islam and Buddhism. However all these sects claim to have the Historical God who is exalted above all men. All these religions I therefore denounce.

Apotheosis:

The Gods of Future and Past are united in the Man of the Crossroads. Where the God of Past meets the God of Future, man (or woman) is exalted over both.

This is also why there is no reason for one man to know another mans God - God is ultimately overcome.

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In the case that religion is meant to include all truth, whenever there is scientific advance, God is forced to include more common, less exalted notions. Not only is it nonsensical to require a God to justify scientific method, but all that makes God divine is invalidated by the commodity of scientific values.

Whenever a Meta-God arises, two or more tribes have found a common Ground. But whenever there has been such a synthetic prophecy, there has immediately been a new real-life antithesis. Sense of sacrality wanes and fearful need to crush the other to maintain belief in ones Gods divine rights increases.

It is not in preferable that Christianity would come to be at peace with the values Islam or vice versa, because an even greater war between this God-greater-than-god and an awakened giant further East and down in the Western gut would arise. It is rather preferable that freedom of religion is absolute, state religion is abandoned and prayer-houses are not represented in media or via sights and sounds in the streets.

God becomes private again, a sacred flame. Vesta always was Rome’s only truly crucial god, the one representing the central hearth of the city, the sacral exaltation of its foundation. Whoever represents Jupiter (optimism, expansion) and Venus (attraction, favor) is a matter of circumstance, not of Ground.

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All of nature is united under the laws of nature, but mankind shall never be united under one God, or on one Ground.
There is no Man-kind that is not antithetical in its highest value to another Man-kind.

Science unites all men under the lowest, most common value.
Religion divides all men under the highest, most context-specific value. Religion and science are thus natural opposites, and should be treated this way.

Religion gives opportunity to all sorts of exalted irrationalism – The celebration of ones fortune including all suffering. The Greeks got it exactly right, which is only because they were extremely fortunate.

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Interesting thesis overall. Not sure what you are referring to here.

That’s like thanking God, one aspect of prayer that makes sense to me too.

That’s one way of looking at it. Another is that like a finger pointing at the moon, each religion points to ultimate reality.

I’m not sure what you mean. Where does this leave the theist?

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fc----I missed this one…you are presenting some ideas for discussion…felix had some good response…
interesting that this thread didn’t take off…it could be good…I don’t think I agree with you about no reason to know another persons god…it can be fun and very revealing…

also science and religion could be happy bedfellows…but we are too polarized right now…

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Hi Felix
I was referring to this thread

ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopi … 5&t=177120

I think that aspect should be emphasized.

It’s their claim to “ultimacy” that I object to, at least when taken as universally.
“Universal ultimacy”, to me, is a contradiction.

He has found a way of wosrship that is synonymous with action.

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fc----is your god supernatural…

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Thus far I’ve only read the OP and revisited your “I’ve created a New God” thread’s OP.

You say:

This seems a cryptic statement, as “personal” and “tribal” may very well be at odds with each other. A tribe need not exist, and perhaps cannot exist, of only Earth or Air people (I associate your mention of electricity with the sign of Aquarius, which is an Air sign). And why could there not be a tribe consisting of all mankind?

Also, your New God seems to me very “electrical”. Are not the God of Past and the God of Future two sides of the same coin?

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This must immediately remind me of Neumann (see my signature quote):

“While nothing was so necessary as Moloch’s pitiless wrath, nothing was more precious than the always endangered joys of peace protected by that wrath and sanctified by the goddess. […] In endangered cities such as Carthage, this protection was a perpetual need. The Carthaginian woman was responsible for the domestic hearth while her men fought to preserve its sacred flame. […]
Carthaginian hearts belonged to Tanith even when necessity compelled them to revile her. Yet the terrifying realization of Carthage’s precarious position usually forced them to give Moloch pride of place. As in Sparta, military necessity demanded that Ares (Moloch) be given higher official honors, but Aphrodite (Tanith) was dearest to them. The Carthaginian woman did not enjoy equality of rights although—or because—she was at the heart of Carthaginian life. She was the center of the home for which her men fought their perpetual wars. […]
In [Flaubert’s] Salammbo, the male principle (Moloch) rules officially, although the unofficial, but actual, deity is the female principle (Tanith). Unless given this official priority, Moloch’s wrath would oppress Carthage and not her enemies.”

Liberalism’s Moloch was originally the Hebrew counterpart to Ares and Moloch, Yahweh. Yahweh was severed from the Hebrew counterpart to Aphrodite and Tanith, the Shekinah, who was very much like Vesta. Indeed, the very fact that there can be tribal, not just personal, gods implies that there can be universally human gods: the male principle and the female principle. To be sure, Neumann denies that this is possible:

“[T]he very language used in liberal regimes condemns [Emma Bovary’s] yearning for sacred familial bonds. At best, she could have asserted that such ties are good for men. Yet even—and especially—this statement arises from a global concern, a concern with all men, and not with mere familial or civic unions. Only on the horizons of illiberal cities such as Salammbo’s Carthage are such unions infinitely more precious than humanitarian cares. For they alone, and not humanitarian concerns, are sanctified by Carthage’s familial and civic gods.”

Neumann does not believe, to speak with my signature quote, in “a Bodenständigkeit beyond the most extreme Bodenlosigkeit”—the Bodenlosigkeit that doomed Madame Bovary. My humanitarian cares, however, are in a sense superhumanitarian cares: a concern with all beings insofar as they are truly human: see the end of http://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?p=2422319#p2422319, and compare this excerpt from a private email I sent last week:

“The rationale I think I’ve found is a com-passion, a fellow feeling, a concern for one’s present and future fellow philosophers—and indeed for all beings insofar as they are veritably human, for example even for the merely moral man inasmuch as ‘a lofty spirituality itself exists only as the final product of moral qualities’ (BGE 219).”

The last bit may serve to explain why I consider Van Alden the most interesting guy in Boardwalk Empire.

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Such was, that the god’s anger was turned against their fear, that they had immollated brunhilda, for her naivete.Or in spite of it.