Judaism, Christianity, Islam even ancient Greeks philosophers. Deists and theists too. They all believe in one God. But is He/She/It the same God? I guess I want atheists to chime in too. What do they think?
My own research indicates that organized religions and academia both promote mob mentality with, for example, almost nobody I surveyed informally for over a decade, even knowing the dictionary merely contains popular definitions. Their teachers refuse to teach them how to use a dictionary, share their words, and play nice, which their religious leaders support. The most recent study done, indicated some 90% of Americans are convinced they are above average at spotting misinformation, or bullshit, because they trust everyone so much, they'll believe whatever the hell sounds good to them. Notably, in the thriving democracies today, that have created extensive social nets, a strong majority describe themselves as merely agnostic or spiritual. In other words, neither religion nor atheist academics support genuine salt of the earth politics, and they merely represent the wealthy encouraging everyone to argue over the definition of stupid, and work harder. You could survey people and attempt to figure out if they are talking about the same God, but they refuse to share their words, and just believe whatever sounds good to them at the time. Organized religions and academics alike, encourage everyone to argue over the definition of stupid, so you need to get them to agree on what's stupid first.
Jews, Christians, and Muslims purport to be worshiping the same God, the God of Abraham, although each thinks the other is doing it wrong. Jews and Muslims, in particular, think the Christian Trinity is polytheistic. All of them, though, believe in a "hands on" God, as opposed to the Deists who believe God got it all started and spent the rest of the time on an extended vacation. Theists can be either monotheists or polytheists--the latter believing in many gods. The real difference is between fundamentalists. who think of God as the Dude in the Sky, and progressives who may think of God in less anthropomorphic terms. Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, for example, tells us that God is the Ground of Being, meaning God is not a being at all but more like the creative order, forces, and potential in nature, or as Einstein said:."something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion.” God as “Ground of Being” – Paul Tillich | Religious Naturalism I tend toward the latter way of conceptualizing God, and I think most of the people in my Methodist Sunday school class feel the same way--although the class one floor down is more "Guy with the beard and lightning bolts" kind of Christian. .
I have always made people laugh with this hypothesis, particularly a devout Muslim guy who I worked with. On one occasion we were discussing it for so long that he lost track of time and missed his prayers. Needless to say I told him that next time he was due to pray, not to forget to blame me.
I would say they are the same divinity interpreted and misinterpreted by fallible human beings. These misinterpretations and human interpolations with time may be the reason for unreligious thoughts, words and actions performed in the name of religion. I would say reason and critical examination should be employed in the study of the scriptures to ferret out the truths and leave aside the falsehoods and absurdities. In eastern philosophy Dattatreya, Kabir, Vivekananda and Mahatma Gandhi had advocated the same for this purpose. Every formula of every religion has in this age of reason, to submit to the acid test of reason and universal assent. ~ Mahatma Gandhi
(all the same god-thing, whatever that may happen to be, which could be anything, even a committee of a.i.'s living in an ancient computer that somehow survived the big bang. i do like the idea of there being something self aware that is neither physical nor imaginary, but neither wishing to be feared, nor owing anything to what humans try to tell each other to pretend) the unknown being unknown, and nothing having to be known in order to exist, the possibilities are not zero but infinite.
"...theologian Paul Tillich, for example, tells us that God is the Ground of Being, meaning God is not a being at all but more like the creative order, forces, and potential in nature,.....or as Einstein said:."something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion.” Reference the recently published book, After, by Dr Bruce Greyson. In it, he has studied, very analytically and critically, for forty years, nearly 4,000 episodes of Near Death Experiences (NDEs) in people of many varied backgrounds and cultures. In an overwhelmingly large proportion, they relate coming into contact with something exactly as both Tillich and Einstein write there. An indescribable creative force welcoming a return to another plane of existence. Yet for individual reasons they return to this level for a time. They almost always have difficulty expressing in spoken language the experience. This could hardly be more explanatory of the varied interpretations of 'god'. At least, once it has been cluttered by our meager words and physical-world concepts.
Dr. Greyson has done an outstanding job of compiling and analyzing the subjective recollections of hundreds of cases of people who have had NDEs. NDE's are reported by about one-tenth of people who have had cardiac arrest.Of course, they are all anecdotes, although he argues that data is the plural of anecdotes. We can assume that these experiences are "real", in the sense that the subjects seem to have had them. I am a Christian because of a life-changing conversion experience (moment of clarity; psychotic break?) which was "real" enough to me, although I can't rule out other psychological explanations. I've decided that I like the "new me" better and am willing to live with it. I also have vivid dreams which seem real and pleasant while I'm having them. Often, I have encounters with deceased parents and my brother in them, which is also typical in NDEs. Dream reserchers tell us that dreams were an important influence on the development of primal religions. (Kelley Bulkeley, Big Dreams: The Science of Dreaming and the Origins of Religion). Jung saw them as a royal road to the "collective unconscious" : basic patterns of archetypes and symbols which he thought all of us share by virtue of being human. Most NDEs are of a loving 'welcoming" deity, but a fifth are "bad trips"--disturbing "life review" types consistent with ancient Egyptian and Christian theology. One leading skeptic who had an NDE was the atheist A.J. Ayer, founder of logical positivism which dismissed all statements that can't be empirically verified as "nonsense". Instead of the usual white light typical of most NDEs, he encountered a red light. Uh oh. I don't know how he feels about it now, but the old Ayer would remind us that subjective experiences, no matter how numerous and vivid, can never prove the existence of perceived reality. None of these people actually died, and hypoxia from oxygen deprivation can also produce interesting psychological effects. Greyson's research provides plenty of food for thought about the possibility that mind is separate from the brain and that dying could be a transition from one form of conscious existence to another. But Ayer, at least the old one, would say: "Not verified".
Re Ayer's NDE: Peter Sjöstedt-H He said the red light was "exceedingly bright, and also very painful even when I turned away from it. I was aware that this light was responsible for the government of the universe." After he revived, he said the experience: "weakened my conviction that death would be the end of me, though I continue to hope it will be." Ayer had a real death experience in 1989. Let's hope he's in a better place, or at least not a worse one!
A good companion to Greyson's book is The Handbook of Near Death Experiences, edited by Dr. Janice Miner Holden, former head of the counseling program at University of North Texas. It's based on thirty years of NDE research, and is multi-authored, mostly by participants at a 2006 conference. Noteworthy are Chapter 4 on the dark side of NDE's, such as Ayer's bad trip--experienced in 23% of the case studies; Chp. 5 on NDE's in children and teenagers; Chp. 6 on NDEs in Western countries; Chap. 7 on NDEs in Non-Western countries; chp. 8 comparing NDEs with after life concepts of the major world religions; and chp. 10, authored by Bruce Greyson et al, on explanatory models for NDEs. There are differences, but a surprising degree of similarity, in the phenomenon across cultures. Nevertheless, while leaving the door open to transcendental explanations, the book doesn't resolve the controversy over whether NDEs are the result of physiological processes in the brain or something more spiritual.
I'd say wrong, on both counts. I don't see how the vindictive God of the Calvinists; the loving God of St. Francis; the Dude in the Sky of Christian fundamentalists: the Wakan Tanka, Gichi Manitou, or Orenda (Great Spirit, Mystery, or Life Force) of my Native American forebears; the Tao, Brahman; etc., and the Ground of Being could be regarded as "all the same". They may be different perceptions or misperceptions of some underlying reality or non-reality, like those blind men examining the elephant in Post 4, but for practical purposes, perceptions are what count for us humans. We are all, you included, prisoners of our perceptions. You may think all of these deities are imaginary, and you may be right. But you can't prove it. It all comes down to faith, or what Luther called a "joyful bet". You pays your money and you takes your chances. Nothing is certain, not even that. My own Christian faith rests on a conversion experience that I've decided to bet on. I like to make educated bets, so I bet on things that seem to be supported by substantial evidence, including science, personal experience and as a last resort, intuition. On this basis, I've decided to bet on God, which I'd define in very general terms as a felt presence (note the emphasis on subjective perceptions) of a Higher Power "in whom we live and move and have our being". (Acts 17:28). But I like to make educated bets based as mush as possible on logic, substantial evidence, personal experience. and as a last resort, intuition. I'm impressed by the integrated complexity and fine tuning of the universe, and by the fact that Pikaia survived the Burgess extinction, making out conversations on HF possible. Of course, the complexity might be explained by M-theory, and if Pikaia hadn't made it the consequence would only be that this remarkable multiverse might be going on without intelligent life forms on this planet being aware of it. (Who is Pikaia? An extinct, primitive chordate that evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould tells us was a crucial common ancestor). I'm persuaded by Occam's razor to bet on intelligent design over M-theory and to think that the universe is too cool to go forever unobserved. Whether the intelligent designer knows I'm alive or gives a shit about the universe is another question, so that makes me more of a deist--a Panendeist to be more precise, meaning "any deist who believes that the universe is a part (but not the whole) of God". But as I've said, it's just my subjective take that I've decided to bet my life on. I also disagree that belief in God is all about controlling us. That is admittedly one of its important functions, but the belief is best understood as multi-functional: meeting important needs for us individuals, as well as societies and elites. For individuals, the important functions are cognitive mapping, social learning, and coping with existential anxieties. Current anthropological theories favor cognitive explanations, starting with the basic cognitive functions of "patternicity" and "agenticity". By "patternicity", I mean the human tendency to see patterns in our surroundings--sometimes patterns that aren't really there, like figures in clouds. By agenticity, I mean the human tendency to perceive agency in ambiguous circumstances. From an evolutionary standpoint, both functions are important to survival, although they can lead to distortions of reality. Where would we be without the ability to discern patterns and put two and two together. And when confronting an unfamiliar object that could be a log or a crocodile, it's probably best to assume it's a crocodile and take necessary precautions. Our ancestors who were more empirically inclined probably were eliminated by natural selection, which may be why there are so many believers running around. Social learning, or the tendency to accept things we are told by trusted others, was also conducive to human survival. If the same folks who told us to watch out for the sabre tooth tiger also tell us we must honor the spirit of the rocks, who are we to question? But the last of the personal needs--the response to existential anxieties-- may be the most important, at least to me. I don't particularly need the assurance of some happy hunting ground in the afterlife to give me peace about my mortality, but I do like so have a sense of meaning in my life. I see God, among other things, as Ultimate Meaning. As Nietzsche put it: "He who has a why can endure almost any how." I had a discussion with a friend just last evening who said God and religion were waning forces in this country because they were irrelevant to our lives. I couldn't disagree more. To me, they're of central relevance--almost by definition. Besides being the source of integrated complexity and fine tuning, I think of God , as secular humanist John Dewey put it : the summation of human idealism: Truth, Beauty, Love, Liberty and Justice rolled up into one. Of course it's a human construct, but I think it reflects a higher reality--something to take a chance on as drowning humans clutch for straws.
The ten minute edit rule is a real killer for me. There are typos in the above too numerous to mention, so I'll just leave them as they are an chalk it up to experience. In the second paragraph, I tell your twice that I place my bets on the basis of evidence, experience, and intuition. Pardon the redundancy.
"...the atheist A.J. Ayer, founder of logical positivism which dismissed all statements that can't be empirically verified as "nonsense"...." "...the old Ayer would remind us that subjective experiences, no matter how numerous and vivid, can never prove the existence of perceived reality." Such thinking as this, by it's self-description, is utter hogwash and echos back to the 1800s. I don't want to get into a philosophical discussion, which can go on and on forever, essentially based on semantics, but I'll offer this. Twenty-five years ago, in the fields of Astronomy and Cosmology, things had been and were 'empirically verifiable'. Now the discoveries of even the last ten years have tossed half of that into the trash bin. The fields of Biology and Physiology are equally gaining more and more data, forcing such previously "verifiable" ideas to be re-thought almost yearly. The realm of the human Mind is just as open to new information, which if the outliers are weeded out, still yield a new peak of the bell curve of understanding.
Tisho. "...I've decided to bet on God, which I'd define in very general terms as a felt presence (note the emphasis on subjective perceptions) of a Higher Power..." A bit wordy (as I'd noted it's 'dat ol' debbil "semantics") but a well put effort.
One-ness. Isn't God known by many names... I think God is awesome! and I think that no matter how we know God, we understand that something is at work tying together our traditions and our morality. Making our values stick! Yes, God... Allah, Buddha, Jesus, Yahweh and Yeshua. I think that the idea that one is right and another is wrong is becoming obsolete. But that's maybe a product of me not knowing much about earth.
you don't KNOW that they don't, any more then a religionist "knows" that they do. i would not call trying to encourage people to want to not beat each other over the head, trying to control them. but yes, they are human stories for human reasons, not all of them bad reasons, not all of them good reasons but all of them entirely human reasons. the unknown being unknown does not mean anything can't exist. even billions of gods, or whatever else might see fit to, but it does mean they, whatever might happen to, owe nothing to what we tell each other. personally i'm not terribly fond of death being any more eternal then life. god-like beings are not impossible. just optional. there are infinite many other possibilities then all of those mentioned by any belief. (both baha'u'llah and lao tsu said something very similar to soulcompromise)
