on discussing god and religion

The Good, The Bad and Theodicy
John Holroyd on the pitfalls of academic debates about God and evil.

Or, perhaps, one can just quit the philosophical/theological debate altogether and take a leap of faith to that deemed [subjectively] to be evil “out in the world”. That which you are convinced causes human suffering. That which you decide to do something about.

But this gets all tangled up in the actual options that you have; and in calculating the consequences of doing something rather than nothing. Then the part where the consequences spread out to others. Including those you love. After all, if you take on the behaviors of those that you have convinced yourself bring pain and suffering to the world, they might not take kindly to it. They may choose to fight back. And that brings on the existential risk embedded [potentially] in all sorts of ominous consequences. The part where you are outraged at what some do but in acting on the outrage you bring about the very real possibility of blowback. The rage/fear syndrome as a friend once called it.

Each individual’s set of circumstances here is different. So there will always be an inherent gap in communication.

In particular if you are not able to believe in God. With God, the leap you take is backed up with the promise of immortality and salvation. With No God, you’re on your own.

Thus…

That’s simply how it works. When you are able to think yourself into believing in a God, the God, my God [or if others manage this for you], you are able to subsume any and all discussion of evil in God. Let the intellectuals debate theodicy. God has His reasons. And [in most cases] being a loving, just and merciful God, it will all make perfect sense in the end.

The Good, The Bad and Theodicy
John Holroyd on the pitfalls of academic debates about God and evil.

Here though the assumption of most is that evil does in fact exist as something able to be demonstrated. Call it logically demonstrable or something else, but one side is said to be right and the other side said to be wrong. That way the most important task for the religionist becomes to [somehow] square secular morality with ecclesiastical Sin. Thus leaving theodicy for the theologians to rationalize. Bottom line: An all-good, omnipotent God can [somehow] be reconciled with the Holocaust. Just don’t expect mere mortals to ever grasp it. At least not on this side of the grave.

What my own findings clash with, however, is objective morality itself. God or No God. To pursue it is at best to embody a particular existential leap at a particular time and place to particular “gut feeling”. At worse it is to feel hopelessly fractured and fragmented.

No, the complexity revolves more around the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein here such that what one comes to believe is no more than an existential contraption ever subject to change given new experiences with different people introducing you to new ideas.

And here I tend to focus more on the limitations of reason – philosophical or otherwise. Meaning becomes no less constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed as we carom amongst ourselves weaving in and out of contexts teeming with contingency, chance and change. That in my view is about as “genuine” as these exchanges between us are ever likely to get. We can only appreciate the lives of others up to a point. And even if we overlap in many respects in our own community, there are always going to be others in very, very different communities to challenge us.

God merely becomes one of many convenient shortcuts to consensus.

The part where human interactions revolve around any number of “for all practical purposes” compacts aimed at sustaining the least dysfunctional communities. And, for some, the “best of all possible worlds” here revolves around moderation, negotiation and compromise.

Give or take whatever particular political economy happens to prevail where you are now.

Why would God make his son Yeshua or Jesus suffer so much? Even if it leads to the best possible good, what if God would never allow that much suffering to begin with, despite the forging of the highest future? I would say that the pains of the present are not worth the glory of the future.

What if it was actually the begging and mercy seeking nature of Satan, or Lucifer to make Jesus go through so many trials of will whereas we already would’ve been saved without such a sacrifice, that is, if the devil could play fair?

The devil was already scheduled to perish a long time ago I might wonder, but he somehow reversed the laws of existence. Still, because of Satan arguing all the time with justice, he may have lost his ability to keep advantages in arguments.

And about the eternity of the soul, or the necessity of Jesus dying to save us, why can’t we just find salvation anyway? Why does there have to be a ceremonial answer to it? I thought that our souls are energy, and that energy can neither be created nor destroyed.

It’s fascinating to think about these questions, to wonder what lies beyond the veil. Is it flowers and rainbows, or learning and progress? Only time and wisdom will tell.

Here you are now, popping up in thread after thread insisting that a world of words such as this one is true merely because you believe that it is!

That’s the beauty of it for minds like yours. You have thought yourself into believing this “story” about God and the Devil and the soul. Or, perhaps, others first indoctrinated you into believing it whole cloth.

You offer no substantiation for any of it. And even though you must know there are hundreds of hundreds out there sharing your own belief in God, it’s not your God they will tell you, but theirs.

And, sure, a God, the God, your God may well be the one. But if this God is as smart as the True Believers say He is, He’ll either have respect for a mind like mine or He won’t. And, if He is omniscient, I could not actually have a mind other than the one that He Himself sustains on into eternity.

We are all part of the mind of God. It’s part of individual, personal polarity. To connect with the all luminous, the all ascended can cannonball us far up the waterfall of meditation. Nobody can hate God. God actualizes all forms, the complete manifestation of the divine intellect. His Knowledge of all things gives birth to infinite love, allowing him to appreciate the all magnificent and consuming qualities of all things and phenomena.

But some parts of God are unnecessary. Although the ultimate blueprint of laws, experiences, and axioms has been made, some of life is meaningless and random. And not even in a magical, possibility opening way. More like a wall that dooms half hearted efforts without nobility to failure.

The power of belief can create entities. It’s our soul in things that makes them more possible. If we press for the supernatural, then it may begin to seed.

And, speaking of seeds, our highest cosmologists tell us that there may be a multiverse. So, for that limitless spectra to crystallize, God has to see the spring of pure spirit. This makes it harden, solidify from the endless potentiality to make worlds.

So, my interpretation of quantum mechanics at the macroscopic level may actually entail God as the observer, the actualizer of all worldly bubbling brane possibilities. God is real, and he is beyond definition. He’s so far reaching, so infinite, that his victory will be more beautiful than the devil’s deepest revenge.

God will be your salvation! Pray to your god to save your soul… SYS, or SOSs… the choice is yours.

And on and on and on and on you go in post after post after post asserting things like this as though in merely believing it that makes it true.

Okay, fine, if that works for you…if it brings you considerable comfort and consolation…you are one up on me, that’s for sure.

But the focus of this thread revolves more around examining the relationship between your spiritual/religious beliefs, the behaviors that you choose on this side of the grave, and how you connect the dots between that and what you imagine your fate to be on the other side of the grave.

Can you go there?

If not, sure, by all means, contribute your own thoughts here on the subject of God and religion. But I’m not interested myself in beliefs that lack any actual existential components.

The Good, The Bad and Theodicy
John Holroyd on the pitfalls of academic debates about God and evil

Choosing to take that approach is one thing. But actually being able to reconcile or resolve conflicts regarding where one stops and the other begins, is another thing altogether. Not only that but grasping in turn where genes stop and memes begin. And where I stops and we begins. And where we stop and they begin.

And it’s not just a question of lowering the discussions to subjective assessments, but also in including the subjunctive components in turn. The emotional and psychological me intertwined in the more primitive parts of the brain. And not always consciously.

After all, one of the most important functions of God is to make all that go away. As long as He knows where it’s all been, where it is now, and where it’s going, we can just go along for the ride. As obedient souls.

Still, from my point of view, the New Atheists are no less entangled in the components of my own moral philosophy. Whether God or No God moral narratives. The fact is that the intellectual contraptions promoted by all sides here have got to take words like “moral hazard” and “good” and “duty” out into the world as we know it from conflicting sets of political assumptions about the “human condition”.

Which is basically why someone like me takes flack from them all. I’m not arguing for God or No God here. I’m arguing for a fractured and fragmented self unable to sustain any really substantive moral commitment at all.

The depth of the soul or the death.

Clearly, when the evolution of life on earth brought into existence brains able to create minds able to become conscious of themselves as being creatures with brains able to become self-conscious of themselves as “I”, “I” is then able to contemplate what no other conscious brains in no other conscious creatures on earth can: Why?

Why ontologically. Why teleologically. And, here, you can take it back to nature [to the gods] or, as science becomes more and more able to comprehend the laws of nature themselves, back to that which transcends everything. The Creator of it all.

And while “modernity” has banished the gods from the minds of some, it is not able to banish God from the minds of those who recognize that all the science in the world doesn’t make oblivion go away. Or create a font from which morality can be garnered in preparation for salvation.

The “I” you speak of is one of the gods, the hero of modernity no less, who “thinks therefore they are”. The principle myth of modernity. “Oblivion” you brought to the party.

“I” was intertwined historically with the gods in ways that were either similar to or different from the way it is intertwined with a God, the God today. Death is always around and any community of human beings needs to sustain the least dysfunctional interactions by enforcing one or another set of behaviors.

But: there are then the countless social, political and economic permutations awaiting any particular individual out in any particular world construed from any particular point of view.

What always remains the same however is the extent to which what one thinks is true about “the human condition” is able to be demonstrated as either true objectively for all or only deemed true by some subjectively.

And here, more than a myth, we’ll need a context.

I thought we already had a context: the modern myth of the conscious rational ego as a hero slaying the irrational monster of received religion.

By context I mean a specific set of circumstances. A “situation” familiar to all of us. One in which we can discuss “the modern myth of the conscious rational ego as a hero slaying the irrational monster of received religion”.

After all, the “conscious rational ego” seems unable to establish once and for all the distinction between the right thing to do and the wrong thing to do in a specific set of circumstances.

Not is it yet able to determine what the fate of “I” is after we die.

Which is why for hundreds of millions, a leap of faith is still better than the alternative.

We’re already discussing God and religion on a thread entitled “On discussing God and religion”. How many more iterations of meta do we need? We’re enacting the conscious rational ego slaying the irrational monster of received religion on this very virtual page.

Uncertainty seems unavoidable for anyone who reflects on ethics seriously. But I can’t be certain about that. :wink: I’m not big on afterlife fantasies. But, hey…go for it! Thinking that we can comprehend the “leap of faith” of “hundreds of millions” involves a leap of imagination.

As I iterate from time to time, this thread was created in order to explore the existential relationship between the behaviors that we choose on this side of the grave, what we imagine our fate to be on the other side of the grave, and how our thoughts regarding God and religion pertain to that.

Contexts embedded in that.

“Meta” – as in “more comprehensive…transcending” – is there [in my view] only when we go out to the very end of the reality limb: solipsism, sim worlds, dream worlds, the matrix; or in regard to questions revolving around human autonomy; or the human condition going all the way back to a comprehensive understanding of existence itself.

Or, of course, “I” if there really is an existing God. A god, the God. The overarching reality behind any particular individual’s “self” if God does exist.

Sure, if, in regard to God and religion, that frame of mind works for you then, by all means, stop there [here] and move on to the parts that revolve around actually living your life from day to day.

Me, I’m interested in whatever others think about these relationships insofar as it does impact on the behaviors that they choose after they leave this discussion and go about the business of living their lives. With or without a belief in God.

But there’s a certain literal-mindedness in that isn’t there? As if some of these words on the virtual page are privileged to be more than mere words on the virtual page. We’re back to the myth of the heroic ego-- the one personification of the mind who is charged by modernity to take itself as literally real. And that culturally reinforced mainstream Western ego is thereby locked in. Only I am real. Other putative entities are real to the degree that they think like I do. Otherwise they are in the " hundreds of millions" outgroup.

The Meaning of Life
Daniel Hill argues that without God, life would be meaningless.

As in, for example, defining it. A definition that comes closest to a technically correct understanding of it if you don’t actually take into consideration the things that you do in the course of, say, living it.

Assuming first that we can pin down the precise definition of definition itself. As that relates to an epistemologically sound understanding of what this means to those who take philosophy seriously.

And, some suggest, that can only revolve around the manner in which the human mind begets human perceptions beget human conceptions about life in regard to the shadows on the cave wall. Not life en soi. Not life going all the way back formally to one or another transcending font. God say.

And this is crucial pertaining to any discussion of determinism. Meaning may well be whatever nature evolved itself into construing it to be. It simply is nature itself.

Then this part:

But that only brings some of us back to the gap between the mind of the questioner and the minds of any particular individual providing an answer and a comprehensive understanding of existence itself. How are we all not stuck there?

What assessments like this bring me back to is encompassing the word meaning in a context in which explanations are able to be communicated back and forth such that reasonable conclusions can be derived. It means this or it means that. We just have to understand what the intent of the questioner is in regard to understanding the particular context.

On the other hand, in the is/ought world, the conflicting meaning that we give to words that encompass our value judgments, may or may not be resolved with a dictionary.

Not at all sure what this point has to do with my point.

In my view, we would use words on this thread in an attempt to connect the dots between the words we choose and the manner in which we can persuade others that they might be applicable to an understanding of their own lives. As those lives revolve around morality here and now, death and what comes after it.

Do you suppose the human beings are fully aware and autonomous? Do you think you’re fully transparent to yourself? When you look around at others, don’t you see that their apparently free decisions turn out to be effects of forces that are unknown to them? Do you suppose that you’re immune to these lines of force?

Well, my argument here is that in the either/or world, we may in fact be incorrect in our thinking about why things are the way they are. But: there are others able to set us straight as to how all rational men and women are obligated to think one thing rather than another. In other words, in regard to mathematics, the laws of nature, the empirical world around us and the rules of logic pertaining to human language out in that world.

So, no, we don’t have to be fully aware here as long as others are. As for autonomy, are there any among us able to demonstrate that in fact they are fully aware of all the variables that would go into demonstrating that the human species existing in our own infinitesimally tiny speck of the universe, are free to think and feel and say and do what they choose to of their own volition?

Instead, the crucial distinction I make is between “I” in the either/or world and “I” in the is/ought world. Now, if we lived in a wholly determined universe as I construe it “here and now”, “I” in the is/ought world embodies just the psychological illusion of freedom. The is/ought world would be no less an inherent/necessary component of the either/or world.

The human brain/mind here would [it seems] just be the most sophisticated matter of all. But no less subject to the immutable laws of nature. Unless of course, as some do, you count God. The main focus on this thread.

But even given human autonomy, “I” in the is/ought world is no less an existential contraption interacting with others as “I” have come to encompass this in my signature threads.