From the very beginning of humanity we have been accompanied by spiritual and godish myths. It is a milestone in human existence that we are in the act of jettisoning these myths, jettisoning God. There exists a popular army of atheists who are actively engaged in the heave-hoe - and a corresponding army of theists resisting it. This conflict inevitably boils down to unending ad nauseam arguments concerning the existence of God.
This thread assumes the premise that we have heard the splash, God is gone. No more arguments about His existence. Now what? Do we now embrace obliviousness concerning the 50 some millennia we have had Shamans and spiritual myth lending a hand at the helm of the ship-of-humanity? Or do we, as philosophers, seek an objective analysis of God and his influence on charting our course? Is it possible to honestly eulogize God? *
in another forum it proved to be impossible and after 64 pages, mostly of arguments of God’s existence, the thread was locked down.
God can’t be dead, dead implies being alive at some point and then dying. God was never alive, he is nonexistent
What do we do once the entirety of humanity acknowledges it? Hmm, I don’t know, say “oh well”, move on, and start dealing with more important issues in the world than the right way to fall on your knees and waste time worshiping nonexistent beings?
There’s war, natural disasters, famine, diseases, injustices in the world of all kind, pretty sure humanity has better things to do. No reason for us to care about a God that never cared about us.
That would entirely depend upon which of the "God"s you are talking about (real, psychological, sociological, conceptual, … which in itself would probably be required to be in any proposed eulogy).
I like Nietzsche’s response. When confronting the emptiness we can either believe nothing matters (so might as well play Nintendo and eat cheesy puffs all day) or else we can gird our loins like men looking upon open seas and new horizons.
Obviously we should do the latter! And I think there would be space for a lot of things in this case, including eulogizing God and re-examining our inheritance from all these ‘spiritual’ traditions…
Some people have the theory that contemplating a godless society and the project to re-valuing all values is what actually drove Nietzsche insane.
I was inspired to start this thread by reading your post(s) in the other atheist/theist thread. you wrote among other things “God is a meaningful concept” with “real-world correspondence.” I was hoping that this thread could be the place where we might examine “the inheritance” and define “the meaning” in specific and more concrete terms. Of course it is difficult, especially because one must slough off the barrage of atheists and theists who can not move past the existence argument; and the indifference of the atheist who is too invested in their moral judgment against God that all of their cognitive energy is spent in the efforts to give Him the heave-hoe.
Let me give an example of a single specific/concrete eulogistic point about God (“God” is a metaphor which encompasses religion, sacred texts, etc. and how they are used to inform human relations):
Trans-saeculum stability of referential myth - Western culture, that is to say Christian culture, has used the biblical stories as references to other abstract ideas or in corresondance to the real world. For millenia we have been “People of the Book,” and because God and His word have been “unchanging” (actually slow to change) this has been very stable. At one time the TV show Seinfeld was wildly popular. Everybody had seen the re-runs and we began actually using the different episodes referentially, to explain facts of life by, e.g. “that episode when George ‘did the opposite’…” In fact someone wrote a book on the philisophical concepts embodied into the episodes and the general format. But now younger generations haven’t seen the episodes with the same consistency that children were once told the Biblical stories. Now Southpark might be more relevant to the younger people. I’m sure there are newer myths in popular culture of which I have no knowledge and so it causes a generational isolation. The trans-saeculum stability of referential myth, and the associated generational connectedness, was superior in the religious milieu.
As a premise let us accept that both are abstract constructs of the human mind.
I can’t see such a clear distinction here. Is there such a thing as a God without a sacred text, or in ancient times -without sacred oral myths? And what text could be sacred without it being connected to a God?
The sacred text; the Godhead; the priests/shamans; the institutionalization of it - are all part of a package.
I admire your stance and perspective on the subject, but until you define “God” more precisely, you can’t say anything “philosophically” in answering your questions.
Sounds like a worthwhile enterprise, and couldn’t agree more, or be more eager to participate. My dream for years has been to restore scripture and the wisdom revealed there through God and others to the place I think it truly deserves… Rising above the impediments that you cite and reconnecting to something extremely important there that’s long been lost…
Yes, and if I add to this thought, I would say another loss is not only stable trans-generational reference points, but also trans-generational iteration on texts (the “slow change” you mention…)
Biblical texts, or others of a similar variety (Homer for instance) are not the product of a single author but the product of a trans-generational process taking place over millennia of shaping, sharing, inheriting, reshaping,… the result being texts so richly compact, so pithy, that more is said in 2 pages (e.g, Genesis 2-3) than texts 1000s of pages long by modern history’s best philosophers. That we no longer do this, I think, would be part of my eulogy of God…
I do think there is a distinction though. God is a character in such texts and such texts are designed to reveal God, but they also reveal other things. So while there is a connectedness (a sacred text claims, or has people who claim, that it reveals God, and we need the text to discern whether or not this is so, or to appreciate the view presented), I would want to say they are separate, especially if we want to take the next step and start speaking of real-world correspondence and leave the text behind completely (as we must eventually do if we commit to this course).
So the question is, and I think it’s a fair one, who or what is God? For me, this is above all the meaning of the God-character as revealed in biblical scripture, because I feel something important there. Curious what your ideas might be, whether biblically derived or not, especially in the absence of the omnipotent, all-knowing and controlling creator God that Nietzsche declared dead (and that I agree with the atheists never was).
To a point, let me ask you though, Are your parents the rules and ways they treated and taught you? Or are they individuals first and last? Do people pray or talk to religious texts or to their deity?
But I just did. You are replying to a post where I said “The trans-saeculum stability of referential myth, and the associated generational connectedness, was superior in the religious milieu.” And I have not defined “God” at all, let alone precisely. The referential myths of the Biblical stories are, to a large part, not even about “God,” but about very flawed human beings. They display all the follies, faults and foibles of being human. God’s only part of this is just being sacred - to create a special-ness that makes parents consistently want to teach these myths to their children. In the post-God milieu we have no such special-ness, whether in referential myth or in marriage (which once was vowed with God as witness to create the special-ness) … or in any other part of life, but that is a concept that is too much, much too much - “philosophically” speaking.
In Kropotkin as Educator Eric_ and Magnus Anderson are passionate champions of [size=150]Special-ness[/size]. [size=85](I made the word big and bold because it’s special)[/size]
To stay true to the analogy: My parents are dead. Just like in the firm premise of this thread, the analogous God is Dead.
We eulogize and memorialize and the dearly deceased take on the existence of myth as they exist only in the images and stories remembered - for God and for loved ones. And yes, some “people pray or talk to” to their dearly departed loved ones. Would you desire to take that away from them?
I’ll make another analogy. God is the great mentoring teacher and we are the matured students moving on past their teacher. I’m LuLu and God is Sir.
If the Abrahamic cults, Christians, Catholics, Jews and others re-united, then the promise of Revelation would come to pass and God would return to his elect.
God divided man and prevented us from all striving together as one people in the days of Babel.
Does man have what it takes to create a new major transition and unify us in peace and harmony once again?
Or should we maintain Babel’s curse and stay divided by war and division and unable to communicate with each other?
People want to be good and do good. Unifying the world would be very good.
This is not to say that all governments should meld. It is saying that all the Gods should. These are divine matters, not political ones.
As a Gnostic Christian who has climbed that metaphorical stairway and reaped it’s rewards, the end of the religions that helped me to climb that staircase, — I would find disappointing, — but better than them surviving without changing their immoral and divisive creeds.
To me, religions now produce more harm than the good spoken of by Mr. Dennett.
I have a love hate relationship with Christianity and Islam in particular. They both have the potential for the good that all people want but they do not have the proper moral position that puts righteousness and equality together the way Gnostic Christianity does and that is a fundamental insult to justice.
To all Abrahamists I ask, will you let your religion die or will you push your church or mosque to seek rapprochement to your fellow Abrahamists thus insure that the promise to Abraham and Jacob be fulfilled? It is in your hands and not Gods.
Theophile you have a basic disagreement with the premise of the OP. You want to “restore scripture” and a god-centric view of the wisdom contained there-in. That is not letting go of the dead, it is trying to resurrect them. This is a funeral and we need to let-go of the deceased. We should not “restore scripture” but extract the principles, the wisdom contained in them. We need to disentangle the principles from the deceased God so that we don’t bury them with God.
To be blunt I’m disappointed that you didn’t go to the podium and eulogize God and the great things He has done for humanity.
From the beginning of human existence man has had abstract concepts of transcendence which is unavoidable in a creature that has the skill to think abstractly. These ideas of transcendence created an abstract authority higher even than the strongest Alpha man. The ideas of transcendence empowered the Shaman and created a competitor to the Alpha. A God figure attenuates the tyranny of the Alpha Strongman. Western Civilization has benefited greatly by this balance of power between the civil authority of the Strongman king/government and the moral authority of the Church (see for example the story of Thomas Beckett).
With the death of God we have lost this balance of power. Now all authority, civil and moral, is embodied in the Alpha Strongman - the State. The State is the sole wielder of legitimate violent power and the ultimate arbiter of what is right and wrong. Surely that is a recipe for misfeasance.
This thread is an analogy of a funeral, attended by loved ones who are trying to eulogize the deceased (If you have any experience in life you know eulogies are difficult, yet a great catharsis and very neccessary). Your contribution in this thread is that of a detractor of the deceased who stands up before the audience and says: “The deceased was a fucking asshole.” What does that make you?
I think we do have basic disagreements. Maybe you should see that as a good thing versus a “disappointment”, and an opportunity to learn and/or teach… (How boring and “Last Man” it would be if we all spoke the same language as in the days of Babel! How happy Nietzsche would be to see a great disruptor such as God enter the scene and shake up that empire of the same…)
Put short, I see no need whatsoever to declare the God of scripture dead and in fact see the God revealed there as being in perfect accord with Nietzsche’s will to empower humankind (the God of scripture wants the same, as made clear from the very beginning). I would say though, consistent with this, that God is unnecessary, once humankind truly steps up to the plate, and is in the likeness of God. But this is not to say that God is dead.
So sure, yes, let’s extract the “principles” as you say, and learn to be wise, but not so that we can dump God on the side of the road like dead weight. I see no need to go that far…
The only ‘god’ that died is the ‘god’ whose word is final, authoritative source of truth. I see little or no need to eulogize this god because this isn’t the God that I ever believed in. As the atheists like to say, this god never really died because it never really was…
But anyways, this “basic disagreement” aside, I’m sure we can still talk “principles”. With that in mind, why not start with principle number 1, the most basic principle and the only one we need, namely, there are no principles.
Moses came down with ten (commandments), sure. Israel expanded them into the hundreds and thousands. Jesus came and boiled them all down to one… But even this one was still just to give his people what they wanted in a time of immaturity, when they weren’t ready to face the harsh truth that there’s nothing we can rely on forever, no ‘principle’ that can guide us through life and to the good life… Jesus gave them a principle because that’s what they wanted: something easy they could live by, and still be recipients of the promise…
What we need though, is wisdom, which is learning how to discern the true from the false, the good from the bad, without any principles, because no principle holds forever, or in all cases. What we need is to embrace the hard way of wisdom, and put down the things, i.e., principles, of childhood that were merely designed to keep us safe, and give us decent guidance in a time when we didn’t know better…
(First of all and above all we need to realize the biblical mandate: GET WISDOM. With this, we can start to think, less of principles or rules, and more of the way of wisdom, which the bible says begins with fearing God… Hence the next question should really be, not what rule can we follow to prosper, but what does it mean to fear God?, and how is this the beginning of wisdom? …)
