You should prolly let them speak for themselves.
Itâs difficult to imagine an omnipresent deity who is a also a person as is the Abrahamic God. This is the problem you so vividly describe. Do you think deities that are Persons are not suited to the year 2025?
If so, you can save the idea of God by thinking of Jesus and other sages as intermediaries between the unknowable God and the human.
The reality is that there is vibration in the now (in the physical).The individual needs to understand how they interface/interact with this vibration at the consciousness level and introduce control over it rather than being dictated to by it and not introducing any control over it.
Ultimately, the SELF is separated from the vibratory nature of consciousness because the SELF is not consciousness.
The psychological hierarchy is,
I amâŚ..SelfâŚ..AwarenessâŚâŚControlâŚ.ConsciousnessâŚ.ThoughtsâŚ.Emotions.
Jesus doesnât want to be thought of that way.
âYou will make your requests to him in my own name, for I need make no promise to plead to the Father for you, for the Father himself loves youâŚâ
God is not unknowable. You donât have to know anyone completely to be in relationship with them.
That is true, Ichthus. In what way or ways might you claim to know God ?
Of course you can have a personal relationship with God IchthusâŚYou only have to look at Jesus to know what God is like âŚâŚâŚ.donât be sillyâŚâŚGo through the gate and leave those good works of yours behindâŚ..I keep telling youâŚ.Donât fill peopleâs heads with your theist false teachingsâŚThatâs what the Pharisees and Sadducees didâŚ.so not only didnât they have a personal relationship with God their false teachings also prevented other individuals from having a personal relationship with God as well.
Jesus has warned THEISTS!!! about getting into the sheepfold by devious means in Matthew 7:21-23.
Go through the gate and DONâT!!! take your good works with you âŚ.or youâll get kicked out of the sheepfold!!!
Matthew 7:21-23 couldnât be any clearerâŚ..
Annoying, Schmupiter.
That would be gossip unless he told me to share it with you, now, wouldnât it, Belinda? Bless your heart.
The devil is devious BelindaâŚ.donât listen to false teachings.There is absolutely nothing you can do to contribute to your salvationâŚ..no good works âŚ..nothing at allâŚâŚ..God does it allâŚâŚEverythingâŚ.Be careful.
Thanks ,but Iâm too much a Humanist to saddle God with all the problems of the world.
âFor the Lord has no hands or feet now but ours.
It is through our means that He must help people.
We are the ones who must work for Him.â (Teresa :transl from the Spanish)
Itâs weird. You sound like you are saying that if God does everything, he also does evil ⌠but instead say he leaves us problems to solve. Then you give a Teresa quote that makes her sound sorta deist.
Just an observation.
This updates something I said perviously in 2012:
âOnly an intelligence can form a word, but when we find words too small for humans to writeâit isnât an intelligence forming the words? And they arenât just random, nonsense words. They are words that make all living thingsâmany parts of which are irreducibly complex.
âIf DNA is required in order to build an organism, but an organismâs existence is required in order for DNA to be âaboutâ somethingâwhich came first? If building plans are required to build a skyscraper, but the skyscraper itself has to at least be a real idea in order for plans about it to be drawn up so that the actual skyscraper can be constructedâwhich came first, the drawn up plans (DNA)âŚor the idea behind them? DNA cannot be reverse-enginered plans an organism stores about itself after the fact, because the organism wouldnât exist without DNA. So it seems like all this information must have started out as an idea.â
Kant calls God Idea. But it needs to be clear that the âstartedâ bit⌠itâs cosmogonical⌠subsuming co-eternally what it conceives and initiates and co-develops.
No personal God? None of this^^^. Personal God? Love.
God is not only transcendent but also immanent. i
Immanent God is a process not an entity. We humans are able by means of reason to be creators of good truth and beauty.
God is immanent in every moment, so what/who is it that is immanent? The cornerstone.
Ichthus77 wrote:
Time can be infinite and whole, while one configuration of the physical can have a beginning.
Ah, yes. This describes our universe as depicted by modern science. We donât typically have a sense that when something comes into existence, it must also disappear from existence. When something comes into existence, it may stay forever. So a thingâs lifespan may be eternal yet also have a beginning.
Ichthus77 wrote:
I compare that mind â That mind? So you think of the timeline as a mind?
gib wrote: â So the law of conservation of matter and energy.
Do you think the body of the universe (mass/energy) is the timeline?
Seems you do:
It just started whole â Sure, in the sense that all matter and all energy that ever existed was there at the beginning.
I donât know if my statement means that I believe the universeâs mass/energy is the timelines, but I donât think time can be separated from the physical goings on in the universe. Time is just the manner by which change unfolds. It is the order of events that the universe goes through in its evolution. In terms of my theory, time is the order of experiences had by the universe as it evolves. And since these experiences are connected by entailment, one could even say time is entailment.
But does this mean that time has a mind?
Ichthus77 wrote:
gib wrote: they donât quite mean the same as what they mean in the human context
Why?
Take omniscience, for example. In the context of my theory, one can say that God is omniscience, but only in a particular sense. Meaning that God experiences everything, but not necessarily that all experience is known. Experience has to lead to knowledge in order for the experience to be known, and I donât believe all experience necessarily does. We know all of our experiences because the brain parts associated with each of our experiences sends signals to the cognitive centers so that we can know it as well as feel it.
Another way to define Godâs omniscience is not that He knows everything but that all knowledge there is to be had is had by Him. This makes sense if God is all experience and knowledge is one form of experience. Wherever there is knowledge, therefore, God has it.
Ichthus77 wrote:
How were you led to your concept of a not-love god? I hope know youâre wrong. Does your philosophy rule out a God of love (if so, how/why?)? (And) If so⌠doubt your philosophy.
Fortunately, my philosophy does not rule out a God of love. It just doesnât arrive at that conclusion explicitly. But nothing in my philosophy negates a God of love, so there is room for it in my theory.
Hereâs something I posted in my other thread (My Theory of Consciousness) that summarizes my take:
gib wrote:
âŚthis isnât the Christian God, or any personal God, it is the universe itselfâthe physics of the universe counting as its body, the subjective qualities of experience accompanying every action counting as itâs spirit. Itâs difficult, however, to attribute to this God the usual characteristics, like counting as a person, or hearing prayers, or intervening in the physics of the universe to suspend the laws of nature. It is questionable whether it even knows about us, and to the extent it knows, itâs questionable whether it cares. This God follows the laws of natureâeven if that means allowing for great and catastrophic natural disasters, disease, war, and other horrors of our reality. Expecting it to answer your prayers, or to show mercy to the suffering, or to demonstrate its supernatural powers by performing miracles, is naive at bestâabout naive as expecting the same out of the material universe that atheists believe in. Our God is nothing more than the atheistâs universe except with a soul. The only catch with my theory is that the events that happen in the universe represent different qualities of experience and the way they flow. â These experiences are what God is experiencing, but they are in all likelihood incomprehensible. This God does not experience love or hate, or concern or disdain for His human children, or thoughts and emotions, or memory, or dreams, or sensations like touch, taste, or smell. These are human experiences that must correspond to some kind of neuro-chemical events in the brain. Thatâs not to say, however, that other physical phenomena canât come along with similar experiences. Maybe certain chemical processes elsewhere in the universe feel like thought. Maybe weather patterns on Jupitar feel like emotions. But even if thatâs the case, I would suspect that these would be very different kinds of thoughts and emotions than human beings are familiar with or could even imagine. Itâs possible, in principle, to be sure, that an exact replica of some experience humans are capable of having is possible with some other physical apparatusâcomputers, for example, may in fact experience the processing of signals through their circuitry as thought almost indistinguishable from human thought. But for the most part, this God experiences a colossal diversity of experiences the vast majority of which are unknown and incomprehensible to us.
Belinda wrote:
God is not only transcendent but also immanent.
Yes, good observation. He transcends all matter and the physical, making Him metaphysical. And yet, Heâs not in another world, He is in this worldâall around us, so to speak.
I think the property of being metaphysical means having no place in space or time, to be âbeyondâ them. Such a thing cannot be said to be in any specific place, or exist at any particular timeâit doesnât âfitâ space or time. So it canât very well be everywhere, but neither can it be nowhere. The only word left to use is âimmanentâ.
Lucky for us, we actually have some examples right here in our own heads. We have direct access to certain metaphysical experiences that reside in our minds. Take emotions, for example. Theyâre pretty abstract, wouldnât you say? Certainly not physical objects. And we are intimately acquainted with them, we know how they feel. So we have an example, right here in our heads, of a metaphysical thing. And itâs true: they arenât anywhere, but neither are they nowhere. They donât have a specific place to which we can point and say âThereâs my fear.â So where are they? All I can say is that theyâre âin our midstâ. â Could that be equivalent to âimmanentâ? Is God âin our midstâ?
Isnât it interesting how immanence (call it supra?) and transcendence (call it super) are basically the same thing ⌠as in ⌠youâre not mere matter? Shall we call it incarnate (omniincarnate when it comes to omnipresence⌠or at least omnispatiality)?
First of all, what about the fact that the information of each moment doesnât stay in its own moment necessarily? Second of all, why donât you believe in a personal God if you believe the universe experiences as a whole?
I havenât read the entirety of your last two replies. And honestly, if you donât believe God is love, I question the fruitfulness of engaging any further on this issue at this time.
Atheists and Theists agree 100% that humankind is responsible for all atrocities that have or will happen throughout history and also agree 100% that if a devil god exists then he is 100% responsible.
You are getting God confused with the Devil god.
2 Corinthians 4:4
You are the occasional Occasionalist; donât try to Bugs Bunny me with something that sounds like the moral argument implications that atheists are right (agree with theists) that⌠without Godâs always good thoughts, actions, and values to ground the Good (not to mention all the other great-making qualities that go even more above and beyond, while completely in alignment with the Good that God is, does, and valuesâŚ), there is no objective moral truth⌠the nihilist atheists, anyway. The atheists who try to ground morality⌠not to mention all greatness/beauty⌠in human well-being, while also granting humans had a beginning and will pass away⌠are much to be pitied and puzzled at. Why would you ground something in a conduit that can pass away, rather than in the eternal source?