No word can indicate God

Well I think actually I'd have big problems with either Jehova or Allah, as I'm not much into the idea of judgement, damnation, compulsory genital mutilation etc. With JC, he's ok, but once more I would have poroblems believing that a sacrificial death is needed to 'reconcile' me and God.

Anyway, since it's names we're focused on here, it's worth nothing that the names of Krishna are many, and all have specific meanings. 'Krishna' for instance means 'all attractive'. So more is indicated than in the case of either 'God' or 'Allah' etc, which only roughly indicate some limited conception of God.

 

So would I. What does that have to do with Jehova or Allah?

Interesting. So what does the word "God" mean?

 

God has no beginning and no end because God is unimaginable. The beginning and the end must be also unimaginable for an unimaginable item. The beginning and the end of the cosmic energy or space or the creation are also unimaginable. Therefore, the beginning and the end are unimaginable for the unimaginable item like God and also for the imaginable item like space. Therefore, the two points, which are the beginning-less and end-less characteristics cannot help you in understanding the real nature of God. If you start recognizing the God by simply these two points (beginning-less and end-less), you may think that God is an imaginable item like the space or energy or the creation. In fact based on these two characteristics people have imagined God as an imaginable item like space or energy or creation. This concept has misled people to such a low level that people think that God is the very infinite space or infinite energy or infinite creation. Therefore, one should filter the concept of God at this juncture itself. One should think that God has no beginning and no end because the beginning and the end of an unimaginable item are also unimaginable.

Such God desired to create this Universe for entertainment. The very desire itself is the Creation. In view of God this present materialized universe in only an idea or imagination or the very desire itself. Therefore, the desire to create the world is itself the desire and also the created world itself is a desire. Thus the creation, maintenance and dissolution of the imaginary world are also imaginations or desires.

A part of this infinite creation is the individual soul. The soul is like a drop of the infinite ocean of imagination or desire of God. Thus, quantitatively the entire ocean of imagination of God is very huge compared to the tiny soul. Remember that both the Universe and the tiny soul are made of the same substance called as imagination or desire. Thus the force of the Universe is far greater than the force of the soul. Due to such huge quantitative difference of the same phase, the Universe, which is far stronger than the soul appears as a materialized entity for the soul. But this infinite ocean of desire, which is the infinite Universe is a tiny drop compared to the infinite force of God. Therefore, again due to the same quantitative difference of force the entire universe is just the very weak imagination from the view of God. Thus imagination and materialization exist simultaneously true from the point of God and soul.

 

This is what happens when you only respond to the odd trigger word in a post rather than what is being asked in context. We were, you may not have noticed, talking about etymology. Very few words emerge etymologically from nowhere, and scholars don't have the luxury of deciding that a word "has no beginning and no end and is unimaginable".

Fool.

 

The supreme being I suppose.

 

I meant etymologically. Where does the word come from?

 

I think probably from an experience ultimately.

An experience which is had by some in a greater degree of clarity than with others. Hence I'd say the experience of the Hebrew prophets was of a pretty low order, and mixed in with lots of other stuff. In the case of the Rishis of India, the experience was more direct and less mixed.

 

OK. But the word "God" origins from German.

 

You are not an object to yourself

 

Good old German word then.

English is, as I'm sure you know, a kind of hybrid language. One reason I like Indian philosophy is that the linguistic roots of terms used all originate in sanskrit, and are much more clearly defined and elaborated than the, lets face it, somewhat 'gruntish' 'Hunish' 'Gott'. No offence to my German friends!

 

Nicht! Part of myself can become an object to another part quite easily. All it takes is a little bit of reflection.

 

Maybe, but it does raise some issues. Etymology can be quite telling. Previous words are adopted because they fit the definition, because a word is needed... Is it a coincidence that Christ and Krishna sound sorta similar? I don't know. Some languages resist "contamination", or adopt words verbatim rather than Anglicising or otherwise altering them to suit. Their words are trapped in amber.

The reason I'm raising this is that the question seems pretty flawed. All words are imprecise to some extent, purely because they are cobbled together, molested, adapted, etc. to fit a need, rather than designed to perfectly reflect every aspect and nuance of the subject in perfect detail. Does "deity" mean the same as "god", really? English has very few actual synonyms, so I doubt it.

 

...a hacksaw.

 

It is possible that the similarity between the words 'Christ' and 'Krishna' can be accounted for by contact between the ancient Greeks and Indian culture, probably through Persia, in the Hellenic period. Myself I think probably about half of Christianity comes from the Greeks, whatever today's fundies might think.

Incidentally, the word 'Krishna' doesn't mean 'son of god' or even 'God' but 'all attractive'. It is only one of innumerable names which are applied to Him.
Certainly the word 'Krishna' is of much greater antiquity.
There really is no one Indian word for 'God'. 'Brahman' is about the most general, and means 'the reality'.

I tend to agree that the question is imprecise. But I think the problem is that what is really meant is that no one word can actually give us the experience of God, or even any true idea of what God might be. That's different with terms for actual objects etc within our normal experience. If I say 'cup', it's easy for someone to know with enough exactness to serve all practical purposes what I mean.
Even with complex concepts, eg. 'hermenuetics', a person can find out what is meant by study.
I'd say that to know what the word 'God' indicates, you have to have some experience which seemingly, this term indicates in some rather loose fashion.

 

..or its mental equivalent, discrimination.

 

Am I alone in thinking that it would be pretty weird to have a word for "son of God" though? It's a very specific thing to have a separate name for.

Would you say that "god" is any different from the name for any other abstract concept, then? There are non-substantial things that we still understand from their name. We experience time by virtue of its effect on us. We understand space (as in emptiness) because we define it by its absence. In other words, we know of these things, but we cannot see or feel them, only their impact on other things. Is God that different from that? He does not appear to us; we only know of him because we have a world which we live on that, we figure, must have come from somewhere.

 

I think the idea originates in Plato's 'Logos'. See the opening verses of the Gospel of John.

Excellent point. And I agree that with some abstract concepts we can come to know what they are by ordinary experience. But even then, perhaps not always. Take 'love'. Some say they've never experienced it. They have some intellectual idea about it, but not felt the actual feeling. So do they know what 'love' is?

 

And at what point can I indisputably NOT say "you've never experienced love, you just think you have" without being called on it?

Sounds glib, but the main reason I don't like subjectivism is that because people abuse it to that end.

If you get right down to it, subjectively speaking we can never know what another person means; we can only cross-reference the reactions we observe to what we've said with previous reactions to other things we've said, and make an assumption about what those reactions tell us. I know that sounds a bit nuts, and it is, and it would be taking it to an extreme to imagine that nothing we've ever said has been understood, and that's it's just coincidence that we got this far without noticing. But it does illustrate that a word only has mutually established meaning, and that accuracy, articulacy, etc. is a two-way, ongoing process throughout our lives.

 

No doubt you're correct in this view. However, there has to be a kind of consensus about the meaning of language for our practical survival.
With terms like 'God' there's often no general consesus, but groups that hold a kind of sub-consensus, some larger than others, some more intelligent than others.
There are also groups of people who believe the concept to be redundant.

Same with 'love' I guess.

 

Well yes, and we can be 99.99999999999% sure that that consensus has been achieved, but never 100% certain. A complex language, with many nuances and points of reference, improves our capacity to ensure and establish whether we have been understood. That's why English has 100 different words for "big"; in fact, each one means big in a slightly different way, and a good communicator can construct a communication to use more than one such word, to really home in on what they're trying to convey. But we're still not machines, so we only know what has through trial and error worked all our lives. Our words are pretty, but they mean nothing.

But even the latter groups would need some consensus on the meaning. I think that, for there to be this word, there has to be a grain of consensus. You can explain God to a Muslim, Allah to a Christian, but could you explain God to a country that has absolutely no concept of a god of any kind? No mythology, no interest in how it got here, a total understanding of physics and no gaps that it wishes to fill... I could go on forever. It would be a culture we would struggle to understand, as even those who have rejected God must have an understanding of what a god is in order to do so (even if that understanding is not "correct", it's still there).

Here's another: to us, a second is a unit of time. To an alien, a second is no different from 3 seconds, or 3.1 seconds. We can explain it as the time it takes for this clockhand to go from here to here, but whereas to us its a unit of time, to them it's as arbitrary a division as one of their quahluops, which lasts 43.65119 seconds exactly. A second doesn't relate to anything that I know of, but we've grown up with them, and even if we don't count to 60 in 60 seconds exactly, we are still aware of them as things that have a value.

Ramble ramble.