Why does nobody talk about God-proper?

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
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It seems the form of the concept has become outdated. Those who believe in “Him” are not making any sense, those who don’t lack moral depth. I think that we are simply not yet able to establish a new form of the concept. We do not anymore know what we are, we have changed a great deal since God-proper existed. Accordingly, we know even less about where we are going.

God has never been anything but a moral goal. With the humanist revolution, the former goal has been realized. Other cultures still believe in God as an avenging power, because for them, the humanist axiom has not yet been established. People who still believe that God can be represented by a person, instead of as legislation, as we understand it.

Kant made God secular. Perhaps Kant is the one we need to employ in our struggle to survive as a culture agains the eroding tides. We have overcome Kant in philosophy, but was this good? I think we should return to him and question whether, if Kant has only been overcome by showing that reason is energy and serves no moral aim, this overcoming has been of any use to us.

Should we not employ the knowledge that all truth is a-moral to establish willingly a Lie? Why not? It is the only choice!

“Kant”, a metonym representing the idea of reason an sich. Like minded thinkers: Pythagoras, Newton - mystics who discover rational laws from observing the ways of passion, as if the way, and not the passion, is the thing.

Quantumphysics and the Categorical Imperative -
we choose not to look. The essence of the possibility of God is that we do not question this possibility. We trust that there is goodness, and rely on it by a certain name. We make it our friend. But what is goodness, in this age? Is it not still the same as ever? The overcoming of shackles, and for that we need shackles. But world is falling again in shackles, and it is time for a new God.

Wow, that sounded prophetic. The other side of me says that the Zen master was right - you can never be sure what is good within time. Fuck Kant, improvise. But this is a nonsensical objection. There has to be an object of action, and God is such an object.

What is God? God is the World as He intended it.
What does this world look like? Imagine.

Modern Homeric art is rare is but exists: “If you build it, he will come.” This attitude is in general not more than a fortunate whim. If there is a way to cultivate this then by Zeus, this should be done! Perhaps we can learn from the past. I mean, why for christs sake do the cathedrals of the pre-industrial age still provide the most beautiful spaces? A race that cannot build temples is a race not worthy of a place in history. We need to be more imaginative about this whole thing, “The World”. It doesn’t only speak for itself, the beautiful thing about it is that it allows many strange truths to be spoken about it, and it even gives some a chance to play out in history.

Which cultures have survived? Those who believed.
Which cultures believed? Those who created stuff out of deep respect for themselves.

I think that this gaping abyss of religious meaning is a massive opportunity.

I am tempted to post the yippee banana.
:shifty:

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Nice post.
Cannot say I agree with it (all) but it is a damn nice post.
I think this is worthy of the dancing banana.
Thought provoking and reflective and considers many viewpoints without grasping at a single one (at least not much anyway).
Damn Nice Post and so surprised there is little response.

Oh… did I forget to say that it was a damn nice post.

And for you Jakob :banana-dance:

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Excuse me !

You must be new. I’ve been preaching Truth=God here to the point that there are many writing bodies in my wake.

Truth is used as a tool to develop morality. And a lie is not the only choice, acknowledging that we DON’T KNOW is the correct path, if that is in fact the case; and the Truth covers the rest.

Reason without passion is dead. Passion without reason is blind and will be dead soon enough.

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Hello PT,

The Chinese Crested Tern is a critically endangered sea bird with a total population of 50 believed to exist in the wild.
If we want to study the Chinese Crested Tern it is fairly pointless to get a surgical blade and start hacking it to pieces to see what it is made of.
We know what a bird is made of and we can use wisdom to deduce what a Chinese Crested Tern is made of (a very simple matter).
That point of studying the Chinese Crested Tern would be to examine it in its environment, how it lives, and how it interacts with its environment.

Likewise, pulling apart Jakob’s post in such a way defeats the purpose.
Instead of studying it has been killed and made lifeless.
Things exist as a whole and not as individual words or sentences.
Not only do words have meanings, but sentences also have meaning.
Not only do sentences have meaning, but paragraphs also have meaning.
Not only do paragraphs have meaning, but posts also have meanings.

The old saying “Sentence is to Paragraph as Word is to Sentence”.

As a whole I believe Jakob’s post worked well and it inspired and evoked a person’s imagination.
Above all it evoked hope and a wish to move forward (which is what I got from it).
For this reason it did not need to be put on the surgical table and hacked apart.

It is like the Chinese Crested Tern - imperfect and critically endangered but at the same time it is beautiful to observe.

Motivation, Imaginiation, Wishes, Creativity, and Dreams are higly illogical - where would be without them!

From Albert E.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

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Yeah the OP is well written, but the question appears to be strictly rhetorical.

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I did not think I answered any question or gave a point of view about God-proper?
I think I held to the rhetorical nature of the post. Would you agree?

It was simply a well written post that that inspired thought and imagination.
For or against any particular view is irrelevant.

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Roberto: Thank you. That is very generous.

Paineful: before ‘God’ and ‘Truth’ is ‘meaning’. Reducing one term to the other does not expand meaning, which is what I am interested in.

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:laughing:

Then that would make all autonomous beings into gods.

Do you believe in god, Jacob? And do you believe that to be true…that there is no morality or at least no sense of ‘to do no harm’, where there is no belief in god?

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I’m not against that. In as far as they are really autonomous, that even makes some sense, in a Christian or a Kantian context.

I believe that one should believe in the best God, or best lie. I also believe that there is such a thing as a best God, and not just ‘the best for you’. Thus, a hierarchy of Gods is not out of place, here. If I want to outline my belief.

That God is omnipotent, I know to be untrue.
That God is a creator-destroyer, I know to be true, because this is implicit in the definition.
That God lives among us, I believe to be true.
That God is moral, I know to be untrue and true at the same time.
You see, I can list the things I think about God, but it is really about where I set my priority.

A “beholding” of a transcendent God is caused by the sublimation of a persons total valuation of himself and the world into an idea, but the total value is always arrived at from a personal, human perspective.

Which total value? The total value by which evaluation? Where is this God supposed to live? That is the question that other disavowed German philosopher, Heidegger, concerns himself with. He is underestimated. He is the only one who has dared to set the Earth and Mans place on it as a the a-priori intuition, the axiom which forges a proposed and hypothetically outlined physical state of cultural wholeness into a metaphysical model, which renders the non-specific Platonic metaphysical obsolete.

In any case, there is no such thing as an objective totality. It will never be attained. That is why we must set the limits, and willingly so. We can not escape this task if we are to contain our own powers, to the extent that they do not only not destroy us, but are put to work for us as a global race.

Mind is “God”, and its powers, destructive and creative, are divine. The mind is the divine (the medium is the message) - what we “have in mind” determines the God-form we adore and/or fear. But also the other way around: If we successfully postulate a God in our mind, we reroute the way our passions come into our consciousness - we will them to a purpose.

The purpose is not real, in the sense that it will be attained, but the quality and quantity of the foces which it mobilizes are the realest thing we have to work with as humans.

I see belief in God firstly as a trick, like the ignition of fire and the rolling of a wheel around an axis.

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“I believe that one should believe in the best God, or best lie.”

Ignoring everything else, I take great issue with this statement. I believe that one should not believe in God. If God exists, then the reason we don’t know that as a fact is because he does not want us to know. If he wanted us to believe, knowledge of God would be an inherent quality in humans.

If God exists he doesn’t want us to know it. Why do you think that is? Is it because we would rely on him for everything, blame him for all of our problems, even those that we are the cause of? If there is a God he wants us to develop as individuals, to learn to solve problems and live without him.

Belief in God is an insidious thing. Matters of chance now become divine will, bad luck is the fault of malevolent beings, and we start to believe any number of harmful things for which there is no evidence. Instead of looking at situations for what they are, we begin to look for “Deus Ex Machina’s.” Conspiracies are everywhere and rampant, we believe that problems lie everywhere but where they actually are. We do not grow as individuals, because we do not place the blame where it lies.

To a believer, God is the answer to every question. Can’t pay your mortgage? Pray to God. Lost your job? Pray to God. Constipated? You better pray to God to release the demons from your bowels.

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Here you presume to know the mind of God. I only presume to partially know the mind of man, and interpret God as the highest possible concept therein.

This entirely depends on your conception of God of course.
If you believe in intuition as a divine property, or in art as divine - as many do - then God is a welcome addition to our world. So there are other, more far reaching possibilities of a conception of God which improves life.

Practical sense, observation, science should never be abandoned in favor of any notion of God. I’m with you there.
We can see how this happened in Rome, when so much art and craft was lost during the period in which the empire converted to Christianity. Belief in God can be a sign of decay, loss of will and health. But, looking at the other end of that history, the rise of Athens under the rule of Zeus, Athena and their kin, we see that belief in God can also be a great stimulus to establish a life-affirming civilization.

The latter can work, because prayer is a way to manipulate subconscious preoccupations, impacting the organs. But in general the saying goes “Pray to God and lock your car.”

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Jake–

Excellent post first off. But hows-a-bout something like a pantheistic/panentheistic viewpoint where God is considered more impersonal and indifferent? These views don’t seem to provide meaning or purpose to me; they are more of an acknowledgement than anything. I agree that God is probably our most effective utility in ascribing ourselves some meaning or purpose, but it is not the only one. Nor is God necessary to believe one has a meaning or purpose.

I think your idea is much like Kant’s inasmuch as you both realize the importance of belief, or “religion”. Kant said something like: Even if God and religion were not true, they are still necessary. Many of us cannot maintain personal order without these kinds of notions, let alone something on a larger scale like social order. However, I also believe that some people can and do attain the same benefits without appealing to religion.

People need conditioning. I think God is but one way to motivate that conditioning.

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[gvid][/gvid]- this is at the center of the power of religion. Any God that works is specific. “The Universe” is not specific. If one prays to the universe, one has already reduced the universality to a personal notion of complete vanity, because no one in his right mind could imagine that there is such a thing as a conception of the accumulated subjective realities that amount to the purpose of speaking about the “nature” of the universe at all.

There are only specific natures, and the God-form of a time is the most unspecific form of a specific, particular quality of culture and nature, which makes possible a collective love of life. This stands in stark contrast to scientific law, which is the most unspecific form of the unspecific.
As real as the raw the power of scientific, non-specific understandings (“laws”), are, they do not provide meaning. I am not saying the God is the only way of providing meaning, but it has been tried and tested, and I am traditional in that sense.

I also don’t think that all the teachings of religion have been understood – not nearly well enough to see that all religions are not at all the same – they are all different approaches to different things. We are up, but our thing is so – what is it – immense, that the God must be very limited. It must not at all be All.

The intellect should be considered the lower regions of this God. That which can be inferred from God as useful to it. The real God must contain the object of mans main drive, whether this is love, will, sense of duty, creative overflowing, righteous anger or hunger for power. Nobody stands like this toward everything. “Everything” contains a lot of weaknesses and bad shit in general.

The Lord, the Lady, the holy bear in the pin-striped suit, the Jesus, the Mary, the Moses, are good in that they repel the bad. What is bad? Really, turn off the tv, what is unholy? And conversely, what is right? See how difficult this is, without falling into patterns of abstractions? Or is it just me? That is why a symbol must be forged.

“The Great All” can be seen as holy and it will be, by people who are of the reverent type, regardless of the name. If anything is holy, it is that which contains everything. But the more interesting Gods do not stop at being holy. They have qualities that are not so passive, which do not need to be interpreted into them.

Pantheism is the castration of religion, making it into a passive vessel for our desires. We don’t need gods for that, as long as we act, we act in accordance with the universe. Only if we don’t act we don’t act in accordance with the universe. But I am getting Socratic here. Real Gods guarantee meaning to our actions. The Advertizing industry is the realest God we know.

But is void in meaning. It did not use to be, I would day God has efficiently died with the nineties. Everybody was all sarcastic about the apocalypse not happening on the exact minute of 00:00 01 01 2000, but it came anyway. Pretty swiftly and decisively. I’d say our God was effectively dead by october 2003. Western mind has been reduced to a random permuations of Will to Power. What could be the Kingdom of God to us, who are standing on such frenetic metaphysical ground?

The use of a particular God is political - as you say, to condition. It is not moral of itself, it uses morality to change man from fearfully selfish to bravely compatriotic, form sceptic to goodness to the embodiment of it. In this is the emotional self-justification which sets the intellect free from its service as troubleshooter, to do it’s higher purpose, to create. But to create what? First the first act of creation, the God of Man 2.0

Power of appeal, the advertizing industry, pull of the subconscious, objet petit a, the great motion of the masses -to assemble energy and direct it to an imagined and a real purpose at the same time. The manufacturer spins his profit off the generated motion, but this is by long shot not all that is going on, when man is manipulated. I could either quote Mephistopheles or Three Times Great - about he who wills evil but accomplishes good. But what of the man who wills good and accomplishes good? Is he not much more fortunate?