The absolute knowledge of the absolute God is impossible

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The absolute knowledge of the absolute God is impossible

The absolute knowledge of the absolute God is impossible because the absolute God is unimaginable. The absolute God comes in human form to give you the experience of His existence, in absence of which, you may deny the very existence of the absolute God and may become atheist (Astityeva….Veda). The identification of the human form in which the absolute God exists is the knowledge of God (Brahma Jnanam or Brahma Vidya).

The experience of the existence of the absolute God does not reveal any trace of the nature of the absolute God and hence God is always unimaginable. The only information about the absolute God is that God exists. “Aum Tat Sat” means that God exists and no more information about God is available. The word Tat means that God is beyond your imagination. The word Aum denotes that God is the creator, ruler and destroyer of this world. These three adjectives indicate the works (Creation, rule and destruction) of God only and not the nature of the God. This is called as the information about the existence only (Sanmatra vada). God comes in human form, which is characterized by the awareness or chit.

The awareness is fully developed up to intelligence and therefore the human form is indicated and not birds and animals. Such human form (Chit) is not the information about God but it is the information about the medium selected by God to enter the world. Thus, the medium is only awareness (Chinmatra vada) and not the inert materials. The aim of Shankara is about the selection of the medium by the God to enter the world. The Advaita followers, who concluded that awareness itself is the absolute God, misunderstand this. God enters the world through human form for entertainment, since the very basic aim of the creation is only that according to Veda. Such entertainment gives Him continuous happiness (Ananda). Thus, the word Sat-Chit-Ananda denotes the absolute God entering the world for continuous entertainment through the human form.

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knowledge is only of existence- existence is because of God

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That’s a circular argument.

My advice read up on the history of theology if you think that simply stating trite messages is even in the same stadium as philosophy or reason or that just claiming something passes for valid criticism.

The knowledge of God at all is impossible, I’m agnostic though so that explains why I think that. Really religion is a guess at best and not even an educated one, and that goes for all of them, the only really difference is how aggressive the nations of a particular faith were as to how far it spread and that’s not reason to boast.

Deist faiths make far more sense than claiming your God is better than another because he transforms into Megatron the destruktor! Occam’s razor should really strip faith down to Gods bare essentials, the more people try and big there personal god or Gods up the more puerile religion seems, I mean who cares if your dad can beat up my dad? Gods are meant to be above petty bickering, well the monotheist/peaceful ones are anyway.

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Even though God is unimaginable He comes down in human form to give His presence to us. He is known as Human incarnation. The proof of such human incarnation is the divine knowledge preached by Him.

The divine knowledge alone can be the proof of the God as per Veda. The exceptional quality of the divine knowledge (Prajnanam) is the spontaneous proof. You can experience the available highest quality of the knowledge and there is no need of any testing procedure for that. How are you selecting the Miss. World? You are experiencing the spontaneous beauty directly and there is no need of instruments to test the beauty. You are selecting the top most beauty in the available competition. If you say that some higher beauty may exist somewhere and some time in this world, the result of the competition can never be declared.

Only ugly sadists may tell like that. Gita says that the possessor of such top most knowledge that can give the most perfect guidance to the souls is God Himself (Jnanitvatmaiva…). The importance of Divine knowledge is only due to the importance of correct guidance in the spiritual path. For this the exhibition of miracle is not required. The exhibition of super power through the miracle is needed only for the low level atheists and to punish the low level devils. When a Police Officer is invited to address the college, he goes in normal civil dress. When he has to deal with criminals, he will be in the Police uniform. Even there, he will send his subordinates in the uniform to deal with the criminals. But he will not send his subordinates in uniform to address the college.

Similarly God comes to preach the Divine knowledge and sends His subordinates to exhibit miracles. Since majority is in the lower strata, the miracles have to be exhibited widely. Hence God gives the Super powers even to devils. The miracles include even the miraculous experiences in the life of any one, which prove the existence of unimaginable God.

Miracles and knowledge are the two requirements of people here in lower and higher levels respectively. Generally God meets directly the requirement of higher level. The liberated souls who are the servants of God generally meet the requirement of lower level.

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@dattaswami1.

That sounds almost like a pure form of gnosticism. I often wonder where the Gnostics got there ideas from and if it wasn’t almost certainly inspired by the Eastern religions. The ideas are fine but are they convincing? I’m not so sure. Although it’s better to let faith come to you than to force it onto others, that is a long and bloody history we seem never to understand. Still that we never learn from history is a tragic idiom, our lives are too fleeting, and it seems if there is an after life it doesn’t reveal itself in a way were we can teach the next generation, circular or an ultimate end and an afterlife like the Christians believe.

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You can experience such Human form of God now in this world, itself. You can see Him, converse with Him and ask doubts and get clarification in spiritual matters. Thus He Himself is the proof.

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in losing oneself in time, one stands before the mirror of eternity

in that mirror one sees God face to face

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You mean if I see someone and here people or voices that no one else can see, I can take that as proof God exists? Hmmm me I’d take it as proof that finally and not with any real surprise I had gone mad.

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Are you implying that there is a God in all of us? Well Nietzsche would be pleased. :smiley:

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As Freeman Dyson has said God is mind on a scale beyond our comprehension. This definition of God is compatible with a scientific world view.

As for God being present in all of us, this belief is a cornerstone in the perrenial philosophy embedded in all major religions.

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It isn’t actually. The major Abrahamic faiths all believe God is indivisible uncuttable, one (but can be felt in all of us, rather than we are all a piece of God literally, transubstantiation aside, to say otherwise would get you hung, burned or torn apart by horses, in the 1st to 18th century).They say that he lives in another realm, and that the only way to get to him is through them, or Jesus accordingly. The belief that God is in all of us if we look (in any more than a figurative sense, is an anathema to the unity principle of Judeo-Christianity and is a very Eastern or gnostic or even atheist belief, in the case of Nietzsche who said basically Man has killed God because he does not need him any more, thus man is now God. Thus Sprach Zarathustra.

“Look under a stick, split a rock, there you will find me.”

Gospel of St Thomas.

You could be burnt even for saying this heresy from the 5th C onwards and indeed the document only resurfaced in a gnostic vault in the 19th century. After all copies were either neglected, or failed to be copied.

The Lord thy God is a jealous God. He resides in all of us, but we are not Gods, that is the ultimate blasphemy, especially to Jews and Muslims, and most Christians even.

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Well I’m not claiming that we are all Gods so lets put that to rest now. God is uncuttable but it’s only human minds that are doing the cutting in any case. It is the cutting of small minds that results in the division of the major religions. God is both transcendent and immanent. If God was not there as the power of being sustaining every element of creation, the universe would cease to exist in less than a nanosecond. In Acts Paul says it is within God that we live and move and have our being. In Galatians he says that Christ in him is the hope of glory. The notion that God only dwells in some far off realm is a superficial reading of the sacred texts by people who’s hearts are are from him. Fanatic religionists have always killed spiritual people. They stoned the prophets. The gospels writers implicate their complicity in the execution of Jesus. The perennial philosophy wasn’t locked in a vault. It’s been there all along. The Gnostic gospels merely confirm that such is the case.

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Ironically since John the Baptist was supposed to have come from an Essene community he was of a more gnostic type faith, as would have been Jesus who he baptised. Which is amusing, left to its own devices perhaps religion would of always been more inclusive, politics huh. :unamused:

The Gospel of Thomas is thought by some to pre date all the cannonical gospels, which I find likely because some of its stories are repeated particularly in Matthew, sometimes almost word for word. The trouble is that Gospel is not talking about Jesus transcending bodily into heaven or any miracles so it doesn’t have the shazam factor of the Gospels of MMLJ just simple messages of Jesus. It also strikes me then that it is also more likely to be accurate. Being as it wasn’t a propaganda piece and was written perhaps as early as 30 years after Jesus’s death. None of the Gospels were penned that close the nearest are about 70AD and the furthest up to about mid 2nd century. What is true though is all the Gospels canonical or not are not penned by the person in question.

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“30 years after Jesus’ death” and “about 70AD” are less than 10 years apart. Your wording makes it sound like one is much later than the other. Considering the 70AD figure is widely accepted, and as far as I know the “30 years after…” figure is you siding in favor of a very controversial conclusion, I’d say give credit where credit is due and say the Synoptics are at least as close as the GoT to the source, if not closer.

Also, your distinction of ‘propaganda piece’ vs. not seems pretty arbitrary. The GoT was most certainly a propaganda piece for Gnosticism, inasmuch as the synoptic Gospels were propaganda for a new religion based on a risen Christ.

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There’s nothing inherently wrong with the word propaganda, it could be true as not, or false as not, it’s merely a political tool to manipulate opinion in this case.

Actually since it’s cited as the part of the Q or source text by some, it’s not that controversial, other mainly theistic scholars, refuse to see the breadth of quotes and comparisons with the other texts as significant, but at the latest it is still an earlier work than John.

I admit though there is no consensus, I just think that Thomas is older based on what I’ve read. It makes more sense. Of course the contention is not in its age its in the fact James the Just is held above Peter and that Mary Magdellene was a disciple. Simple as that if it didn’t contain those passages and if it was properly dated at the time then it would most likely have been canon. Same thing happened to Mary Magdellene’s Gospel, it had passages about women being equal to men (or at least being the most beloved of Jesus disciples) and thus so they got rid of it. Who knows if it was true or not, someone ought to make a film about it? :wink:

If it weren’t for the Gnostics/Essenes being anal about keeping texts and copying them (Dead Sea Scrolls, Nag Hammadi vaults) from hundreds of sources, we wouldn’t even know about them. They would of been excised - by simply not being copied and thus falling to ruin - from history. Although in some cases I suspect the most controversial texts were destroyed.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Thomas

The entire church and my faith doesn’t rest on my decision though either way, it also leads me to be more critical and have less of an agenda, unlike most theist scholars, now and in history.

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Sidhe

Yeah, IF it was widespread enough to even be considered, IF the Church fathers had any idea who wrote it or where it came from, then may be. But those are some pretty strong if’s we don’t have any evidence to settle.
I think you’re projecting a modern attitude of what Christianity is like back onto the Church Fathers, picking out what you imagine to be the controversial parts of the text, and then declaring by fiat that the book was stymied for those reasons, based on the assumption that the book was old enough and well-known enough to even be taken seriously enough to be rejected for it’s content.
As far as I can tell, neither of the issues you cited above would have mattered at all to the Early Church. Tracing a lineage back through to Peter didn’t become an issue until about a thousand years later with the Schism; Before that, a Church Father who could trace his roots of education back through to James or John was as respected as one taught by Peter. Mary Magdelene being a disciple would only be a big deal if the people making the decision knew this was factually incorrect - and I’m sure they did, since the Synoptic Gospels (which were never seriously disputed) would disagree with that claim.
The Church would be much more likely to reject the GoT because they saw it as ‘just another apocryphal gospel’, of which there were scads. If they did bother to examine it for it’s content and not it’s pedigree, the biggest problem they would be likely to have would be with it’s persistent portrayl of Jesus’ message as “Receive life through these secret teachings I have discovered and passed on to you” and not “Receive life through me”. The first is just Gnosticism, the second is the message of the Christian Church- from the very beginning, as evidenced by Paul’s letters which almost certainly predate any Gospel.

I’ve learned to be very skeptical of people who back extremely controversial claims, in the name of ‘not having an agenda, unlike almost everybody else’. Especially when the very last thing they wrote here was a diatribe about how evil and stupid ‘fundamentalist’ religion is, and how glad they are that it’s dying out. I’m glad you’re magnanimous when talking to me, but I AM allowed to read the things you say to other people, you know.

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Oh, they knew about it.
The Gnostic’s were completely exiled from mainstream Christianity before the canon was even considered.
There were countless texts that didn’t make it; some just because of trimming, and others because of doctrinal consistency.
However, when it came to the Gnostic’s…well…they weren’t even invited.

To be a Gnostic was to be a member of a fringe religious variation of Christianity that wasn’t accepted by either of the other three variations; Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

The Gnostic’s can’t be accepted by Christianity for one simple reason; to the Gnostic’s, God, the creator of earth, was evil; the soul and spirit were inferior to the mind, and the God of good was found in the mind.
A dream was considered a glance into the realm of the God of good.

So even if you take out all of the gender junk out of the debate, even on a fundamental level, these are not Christian’s when compared against all of the other fractions and variations of Christianity around simply based on their views of God and Earth.

To them, Earth itself, and all life on it, and the creator of it, are evil.
The only chance a soul has is to escape into the mind…hence, Gnostic.

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Of course they knew about Gnosticism, it plagued the Jews before it plagued the Christians. I’m not talking about Gnosticism in general, I’m talking about the Gospel of Thomas in particular. As you say, there were tons of Gnostic texts floating around, I see no evidence that this one was well known enough to even be specifically rejected, or that it was close enough to orthodox Christianity to be seriously considered, even if it was noticed.

And don’t forget that Gnostics consider the material world to be evil- just like they consider the creator of it to be evil. This is important because it would make the Incarnation of Christ even harder to understand, and theologically senseless.

Yup. That’s why I find this talk of suppression and Church Conspiracy stuff to be so silly- Gnostic teachings are so trivially, obviously non-Christian that not including them in canon is the most natural thing in the world.

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Hi Uccisore. Welcome back to the forum. I enjoyed reading your essays.

It wasn’t obvious that what has become known as gnosticism were “non-Chrisitan” until the fourth century when the canon became more or less fixed and the creeds were codified. Before that many ideas competed for dominance in the churches. I agree that the process by which this occurred was not a conspiracy. But there is evidence of suppression. Wouldn’t you agree that branding someone a heretic and excommunicating him/her is suppression? Banning and burning books is suppression and those kinds of actions occured frequently according to the historical record.

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Oh! Glad somebody read them, thanks.

I'm not sure why you're putting the Gnostic resolution thing on the 4th century.  While it's true that the canon wasn't settled yet, that's completely different than saying doctrine wasn't settled. The formal organization of a body of texts seems like an arbitrary date to assign.  You could maybe make the claim you are about Arianism, but Gnosticism? I see no evidence that it was [i]ever[/i] taken seriously as part of mainstream Christian belief. Ironically, if you're arguing that all the various heresies and interpretations were equally competing views until an Ecumenical Council declared that they weren't, you're putting more emphasis on Church authority than I am. I think it's more realistic to suppose that the thread of Church Fathers going from Jesus through Peter, Paul, John, and Timothy and on through all knew what was what- and would reject Gnosticism as such.  The only thing that a Ecumenical council did is respond to a need to formalize creeds in a growing Church...but that's not to say that the individual fathers, or say, the Church or Corinth, didn't have it's mind made up about Gnosticism until a council told them what to think is pretty obviously false.  
A can imagine a similar situation, in which all the Protestant Churches get together this week in the US to decide that the Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons don't count as legitimate Christian churches. It would be in bad faith to say that prior to that meeting, there were 'many competing views', and that the JW's weren't 'non-Christian' until that meeting declared that they weren't. Living here, you and I know that mainstream Christianity has considered them as such from day 1. 
And yes, labeling someone a heretic and excommunicating them is certainly suppression - and it's also completely justified. Back in those days, we weren't talking about some guy on the internet, we were talking about a person who was writing books, teaching in a Church, and most likely under the title of priest, Bishop, and etc. The early Church was NOT Protestant -if you have somebody teaching the wrong things (such as Gnosticism) and claiming that they're acting under the authority of your Church as they do so, what do you expect to happen?