Mr stumpy, i’m not completely sure, but i’m pretty sure that you just misused the semicolon. At least not according to the wikipedia page on the semicolon and its uses.
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Fixed. 
TheStumps-
Reconcile the following statements:
First: Divine entities must be personalized.
Second: Except some forms of Deism.
Third: Divine entities do not have to be personalized.
Whether a divine entity must be personalized or not, however, is of little significance to my overall point and the topic of the thread. It must be considered what we can know about God, and whether it is even possible to know that God exists, if we can rely on neither logic nor human perception. The problem is how it can be possible at all to apprehend God under the conditions posited by brevel_monkey?
If the human wants to experience the divinity as humans can emotionally.
Which claim the divine is beyond personal experience; removed.
Human’s don’t have to exist the way we do; we do, however, exist as we do.
The Moon didn’t have to exist the way it does; it does, however, exist as it does.
This has nothing to do with experiencing divinity as a human, spiritually.
It has to do with conceptualizing divinity for consideration.
The two are cardinally different.
We can conceptualize divinity to concepts far beyond the tangibility of human experience and comprehension.
We do it all the time; “God is everything”.
We can’t actually grasp this truly; it is actually beyond our capacity to experience that and beyond our capacity to fully comprehend.
The same people that say, “God is everything”, don’t actually experience that same God as everything conceptually.
When they experience their God, they switch conceptual models to a singularity rather than an omni-existent plurality.
There is a difference between the two endeavors.
The fall of humanity is a fall of consciousness. Our ability to perceive spiritual reality is impaired. We lost the ability to see things in their spiritual dimension. The knowledge of good and evil replaced knowledge of divine life. This is our exile from paradise. We have fallen to the point of believing that the world we perceive with our ego consciousness is the natural world and that our fallen sub-human state is the natural human state.
And yet if the case is made, as it is here by brevel, that all human power to experience God is impotent, then how will conceptualizing God make theism more legitimate? What is the use of conceptualizing God so that God is excluded from human experience? It seems to defeat the purpose.
Note: There are plenty of ways to conceptualize “God is everything” which are perfectly available to human perception and logic.
Well, see, you are asking about logic and conception.
That’s not what I was addressing.
I was addressing why personalizing takes place; which isn’t for logical purposes.
We can conceptualize impossibles, I agree and asserted that.
We cannot experience impossibles emotionally…they fail to compute as something tangible.
You cannot emotionally connect personally to “everything” without some personalized singularity.
And doing so does nothing to the validity of the claim at all; that, I was never asserting at all.
felix dakat,
I’ve known paradise. It can exist in this world.
TheStumps,
I don’t understand what you are calling “impossibles”. The fact is, personalization does not have to take place, a God that is, for instance, everything can exist, and no one has said why logically one must think of God as beyond human perception and logic or what use it is to do so.
You don’t HAVE to.
It’s what DID happen.
My working theory as to why that is the case in humanity is based on the concept of singularity of reality.
Reality is not singular on it’s own.
It is large, dissociated, vague, non-personal.
You cannot connect to that in the way that you connect to a person; it is too foreign and non-unified.
If we met an entity that was a malleable mixture of constantly shifting particles and it’s identity of it’s self was also ever shifting dependent on the shifting of the particles of their matter that never materialized to pure solid state at any time, and shifted in density over mass distances of space and time at random with parts of itself; we would not be able to emotionally grasp how to connect with this entity as it is.
If you wanted to emotionally connect to it, then you would need to construct some form of singular idea of this non-singular identity.
This is an example of an “impossible”.
Like infinity.
You cannot emotionally attach to “infinity”.
That capacity, infinity, is beyond your emotional comprehension as an human because you and I have never personally experienced “infinity”.
We can imagine it all day; but we can’t feel it.
Another impossible is “everything” in the literal sense.
We don’t even know what “everything” is in all of existence, or even what that truly means.
We have no emotional comprehension of what 99.99^googol of “everything” is.
We only know what’s here, what we have first hand grasped with out emotions in interaction and observation; that’s it.
It’s impossible to grasp “everything” in an emotional comprehension as an human being.
If you want to, however, emotionally grasp “everything that is beyond you” as one singularity, or sets of singularities so that they can be interacted with…meaning; a sense of interaction with reality in the way that a person and animals are interacted with (which we attach to inanimate objects all the time without thinking about it either) then a divinity or divinities accomplish this in one of the most impressive .zip file compressions ever accomplished.
It’s not necessary, no.
I don’t have such in my spirituality.
Many don’t.
But it’s a propensity of our biological design.
TheStumps,
For my own edification: You point out that deists conceive of a God that is, in your words, “beyond personal experience; removed.” Brevel states that “The only way to experience God in thought is to personalise him in some way.” Commenting on brevel’s statment, you wrote, without any qualifiers, that “Technically speaking…it’s accurate.” Thus, you must conclude that deists qua deists can’t experience God?
To address the topic of the thread: Faith becomes possible when [we] realise the flaws and limitations of deductive reasoning and accept that the inner nature of the world may not be constrained by the same frames with which we are forced to percieve it.
We need to talk about what this statement means.
No, I didn’t give any direct qualifiers, but I did state clearly that I was referring to emotional conception of experience; not mental.
I do disagree with Brevel on the assertion regarding thought.
I do agree, however, if by “thought” it would be meant, comprehend - existentially speaking.
And no, a Deist; by definition; does not hold their God to be tangible and experienced.
The definition of Deism is the distancing of divinity.
About personalization/Deism, I get you. Thank you for your clarification. I think we can set that aside for now.
What is it exactly about brevel’s “thought” that you disagree with?
Why “existentially speaking”?
How about god being defined as the ultimate reality of everything. Up with agnosticism.
How about god being defined as Lisa Lampanelli. Up with her breasts.
HUMPTY-------------I like that photo. What do you think about the definition of god?
I think it’s as ridiculous as that photo, but not quite as arousing. That’s why I keep posting that every time you post your definition. I don’t know if you noticed…
HUMPTY----why is mine ridiculous? Yours is pretty good and that is why I keep posting that definition.