What Makes A God?

A new consciousness cultural revolution

 

Yes, that sounds right. In thinking on this, it seems that there must be a way. But psychopaths rule the world. My opinion is that, people need to be reminded that, in this life, it is intended that we remain centered on what is before us. There is the ground; there is the rain; there is the garden; there is the cabin; there are friends; and there is desire to create betterment. And then we go about creating what we desire. It is good that we desire the ground, the rain, the garden, tools, the cabin, and friends. It is good that we are centered on these things. However, it is when we move our minds off center that we create that which is not conducive to our true desire, and, consequently, take on the image of something other than what we are.

For instance, if we seek to find anything other than our self and the self’s extension--ground, rain, garden, tools, cabin, and friend--then we create the unreal. If we look for perfect, holy beings, then we will in fact create them. Conversely, if we look for evil, we will create it. But it goes further than that. Whatever you create, you create its opposite. That’s where trouble begins. When ever you look for God, and the more perfect you envision him, the more you create the evil one to the same degree. And this is not to say that there needs to be a balance between these two principles. It is to say that these two principles need not be. But we live in a realm where the vast majority keep creating their beliefs of great holiness, which in turn creates its opposite--great darkness. And this is maybe what they refer to as “free will.” Free will does not necessarily create freedom. It can create Eden, or it can create Hell.

When considering good and evil, it is wise to also consider the duality of the nature of this particular reality. Duality means that everything here has its opposite. There is up, and so there is down; and in fact, the concept of up is meaningless without the concept and perception of down. Big has no meaning without small things. Happiness is usually in comparison to sadness. Happiness is the absence of sadness. In a dual natured reality, everything needs something to play off. Light plays off darkness; love plays off hate. Each gains its definitive value from the other. Strong is judged by using weakness as a benchmark, and vice versa. Old is in relation to young. Death is opposite of life. These are just words, and words fail because they cannot contain true meaning.

It’s not a bad thing . . . this duality thing. But when the duality of things is interpreted as a means to exercise judgment, then the mind has slipped into a trap from which escape is most difficult.

I may be wrong, but I took a shot.

 

I am not sure we can create a god......Look at the cult leaders that tried and made hundreds believe they were the voice of god....and then killed everyone or convinced people to kill themselves.
The only place a god is created is in our own minds.

 

You can't prove that God is only in the mind. How do you know it's not the other way around?

 

I see other species not worshipping anything....Only man's brain does that.
We have created him to fight the notion of death....with which we are constantly aware. read some of Desmond Morris's writings....
There are other schools of thoughts, of course.....I am only here because you imagined me......I am not here...i am just a hologram.....there are lots of theories......

Man has a very active mind and imagination.....maybe that is the god like thing we have...now how do we use it?
That is the question.

 

All of the meaning you assign to that which is around you is created in your own mind. You are the one who assigns value. How sure are you of your assessments? God is a concept I got from a book. And even after I realized that the book was written by some men, and that they basically portrayed this being called God as nothing more than a souped up version of an immature male ego, I still found it difficult to eliminate the concept from my mind. By that I mean that, instead of trashing the concept as fiction, I went ahead and simply assigned more civilized qualities to this being called God.

The problem with the idea of a god is that, sometimes, once injected into the mind, your life and your sense of self becomes secondary to your belief about what God intends for you to be. This is not true of all people, but I remember this about myself and others.

You mentioned animals. The idea that animals have little value, and that it's okay to sacrifice them for the good of mankind, whether by eating them or using them to experiment upon in order to come up with a new drug to counter an imbalance within the human body, is an idea that is borne of the hierarchy system. First comes God, then angels, then humans, then animals, then plants, and then minerals. Any of these things, being integral to the Whole, cannot be assigned a relative value. And as if to accentuate that point, animals, plants, and minerals can get along fine without humans, but humans cannot get along fine without them.

 

I was just searching for Desmond Morris on u-tube. there are countless videos that are fascinating by him there, but I cannot find his pasage about god on u-tube. his two books that made everything pretty clear for me are called the Human Zoo and The naked Ape.....if you read these two books, i guarantee, your thinking will never be quite the same.
If nothing else, they will add dimension to your thinking for yourself process.

 

i have often wondered about other species, especially the more intelligent ones and wondered whether any of them have formed belief systems. for instance what do my fish think about the appearance of food into their tank on a somewhat regular schedule.

 

Not really. The gods of antiquity were potent but not omnipotent. In fact, Christian theologians like Charles Hartshorne and Diogenes Allen tell us that the God of the Bible isn't omnipotent. That's a mistranslation of "All mighty", which isn't the same thing.

 

Yeah, but I think that's a good thing. Humans are the only species capable of the level of conceptual thought that can comprehend God.

 

or Peter Pan......^

 

Fixed, subtle but major difference. It's not like anybody ever proved or found out that actually, Zeus doesn't exist, but Yaweh does. All gods in human history exist as concepts in our minds, and in fact the modern ideas of god professed in this forum of late are often by definition incomprehensible, so to say that we "understand god" misses the mark twice; there is neither understanding (even amongst very particular strands of theism, such as christianity), nor is there a god that we can all point at and say "Lets try to understand that". the "that" at which we point is different for every single person across space and time, because there is no objective (or even subjective) set of observations which lend themselves to a particular object known as "god". There are only professions of faith, that is, declarative statements affirming belief in particular views (though how you can "believe" a view that you can't understand at all, I don't know) and there are theologians practising sophistry and recruitment strategies.

 

isn't that an assumption based on your personal lack of such subjective experience, and I'm not talking drug induced or induced via some other means of manually altering consciousness?
you can not describe or dictate what another persons subjective experience is or what it does or does not lend itself to.

 

Why can't Consciousness express itself through each and every God, no different than the way it expresses itself through each and every person?

Everyone has their own unique way of connecting to the unmanifest world. It is through archetypes that the existence of Gods actually exist. You're not contemplating the inner effect that archetypes have on the subconscious mind.

 

Humans THINK they are Gods and rely on thier own understanding of their existence.


They still follow the lie Satan told in the garden in Genesis

For God knows that in the very day you eat from it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and bad.



Jeremiah 10:23
I well know, O Jehovah, that man’s way does not belong to him.
It does not belong to man who is walking even to direct his step.

 

Based on:

1) My lack of experience

2) The lack of experience of every single person ever who has lacked such an experience and said so

3) The lack of experience of every single person ever who has said they "experienced god" but could either a) not explain what they meant by god or b) were lying completely or c) do not understand the question

4) The complete inversion of ratio between the statements being made and the evidence provided to prove those statements. Why is it that the phenomenon of experiencing the creator and ruler of the universe, the creator of all life, source of all meaning and morality, the source of the afterlife, [insert other particular theistic beliefs such as provider of son for redemption or destroyer of enemies], offers as evidence, "I really felt it was true man".

I will keep returning to the example of purchasing vegetables at the grocery store, because it is absolutely important to keep in perspective just what exactly theists are claiming. You would never purchase your groceries with your evidence being that somebody else told you that they are fresh and ripe, because "it was true for them and besides, you can't prove that they didn't have an experience of your vegetables being fresh and ripe". Yet bring up a discussion about the alpha and omega of existence, that from which all stems and to which all goes, and suddenly its perfectly fine for such a mind-exploding experience to be relegated to a small portion of people who have very real psychological needs for believing in the existence of that entity and professing faith in a particular club.

If this is not a giant red flag for you then you've already decided that you do not need any standard of evidence for exploring the most important issue ever conceived.

"You can't prove that i DIDNT experience god, therefore god! Nyah!" <---- seems to be the level of thought put into the system that people organize their lives around...

Because people are conscious beings while gods are literary figures. You also immediately come upon contradictions when you try to include every single god in your thinking; for example, both Yaweh and Allah cannot both be the sole creator of the universe. Add about 500,000 other gods all having particular attributes and you realize that this really is an exclusionary list. Also, what constitutes a god? How about the islanders of Vanatu who worship an american soldier? Shall we now include Mr. Frum in our list of "gods"? What abou the Flying Spaghetti Monster? What about a god which is believed in by exactly 1 person ever? What even is your definition is constructing this list?

http://www.slate.com/blogs/atlas_obscura/2014/01/22/the_cargo_cults_of_tanna_worship_an_american_wwii_soldier_and_prince_philip.html

Define "unmanifest world"; I only am able to connect with that which is manifest, and so are you. "Archetypes" are classes of mental thoughts. It's a word like "worries" or "hopes". It points to a subset of thoughts and thought patterns. If you're saying it is through this that gods "actually exist", then you are an atheist.
The inner effects that archetypes have on the subconscious mind is a different conversation, one that is scientific. It is not immediately obvious that Jungian psychodynamics is a correct way of looking at mental phenomena. It is a proposition, one which requires evidence to be taken as true; that evidence has never come.

you might as well say "The Devil exists, for sure, because I am worried about The Devil, in my mind, and my worries shape my subconscious mind, therefore The Devil is real". That's how your reasoning sounds.

Just because you can think of it doesn't mean it's real "out there". That's the whole debate China. Your comments are 100% in line with either atheism or pantheism, and are polar opposites of any theistic system, so I don't know why you always leap to the defense of theism, other than to just disagree on principle with me, which is the obvious answer.

 

what about the countless millions of individuals who have had such experiences and manifest evidence of such in the manner of their life, as that is actually the only metric provided by any religion, especially Christianity, by which to measure it's validity.
Then let's consider the millions of individuals who have also experienced things that could/would be deemed "supernatural" by the majority?
You can not simply discount them because it doesn't jive with your ideas on the subject.

As I said in another thread, the volume of subjective reports in and of itself comprises a valid data set to which scientific rigors can be applied.

You keep wanting someone to point at something and say "there is God" but do not see the manifestation of this thing all around you every second.
You appear to want the old magician with the beard and robes, yet scoff at anyone who actually believes in God in that way.


this remark;
"a small portion of people who have very real psychological needs for believing in the existence of that entity and professing faith in a particular club."

again, this is your bias speaking and making assumptions concerning another persons motivation for their beliefs and actions.

You seem also to not recognize the exact same need in yourself, you have simply aligned yourself with a different philosophy.

People have described their subjective experiences, but apparently you do not acknowledge the explanations given by those who have had a subjective experience of "God".
It would appear it is you that needs to provide the framework in which to define God that would be acceptable to you.



So what about those folks who hooked their heads up to machinery and began speaking in tongues only to find the scientific data gathered substantiated their subjective report of their perceptions of what was happening?
what were they experiencing?
They claim it was/is god, and the scientific data indicates that it is a wholly unique experience unlike any other religious practice or exercise.
if you look at the source material; the NT, you find that the experience is essentially the same now as reported then. It has all the same earmarks and uses and has consistently been practiced in Christendom since it's inception.
so if we apply Occam's razor to the problem, wouldn't the simplest answer be that it is a genuine experience of God?
If not, please do tell me what they are experiencing, but do do at least give it a considered answer and some thought and don't just view it as something from "the enemy's camp".
If you were genuinely interested in this topic, you would be willing to investigate all avenues, wouldn't you?
so what are they experiencing?


again, I'm not trying to convince or convert, merely pointing out you don't have it all wrapped up as tightly as you surmise and asking you to give honest appraisal to it as well as your own prejudice in regards to religion.
I asked in another thread why you are so vehement against it, especially Christianity.
Your reply was because working in the mental health field you have seen first hand the damage it has done.
What a bullshit answer.
You are a student of neurology and brain science, correct? Then you know that 99.9% of mental disorders are organic in nature and that those people would have had issues regardless of what time, society or religion they were raised with.
This is what I mean by you allow your own bias and prejudice to cloud your intelligent appraisal of the topic.

 

I would call myself an Agnostic, as it is wholeheartedly honest with saying that I DON'T KNOW whether these deities exist or not. And i also tend to side with Pantheism. I'm defending the "what if" factor of deities at all times. An atheist is arrogantly declaring that they don't exist, and yet saying this isn't a belief of theirs.

 

Clearly atheists are the arrogant ones. :rofl:

 

agnostic here as atheism is against something....now, how can one be against something they do not believe in the first place?