Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
What if god is still in the process of evolving - as is everything - and has no concept of self but just a giant, amorphous, all/us-ness?
An ever-growing consciousness sponge.
I still don't see any advantage to such a belief. It wouldn't explain experienced reality or predict what one can expect from it, and it wouldn't be testable. It's simply a speculative idea about what a god might be like.
What I'm fishing for, really, is just what this does for you. Does it give you hope? Give you an explanatory framework for anything? Provide some form of transcendence? You clearly choose to believe it rather than not to. Why?
I still don't see any advantage to such a belief. It wouldn't explain experienced reality or predict what one can expect from it, and it wouldn't be testable. It's simply a speculative idea about what a god might be like.
What I'm fishing for, really, is just what this does for you. Does it give you hope? Give you an explanatory framework for anything? Provide some form of transcendence? You clearly choose to believe it rather than not to. Why?
You're telling me why you believe in an afterlife, which has nothing really to do with why you believe in a deity, which is not really my question either.
I grant that you believe in a non-interventionist, impersonal, indifferent and possibly absent god. My question is, how is such a god different for all practical purposes from no god whatsoever?
Such a deity would do nothing for humanity, would make no claims upon it, and would not intervene in the affairs of men. So ... what's the point of such a belief? Why hold it, as opposed to going full atheist?
You could be an atheist and still believe in an afterlife with a naturalistic explanation. Many people believe that an afterlife is just part of the normal operation of the universe, much like a parallel dimension or something, or they believe that consciousness is somehow conserved someplace according to natural laws that we don't currently understand or know about. So belief in an afterlife is a separate matter from belief in a deity.
I cannot mentally separate the two, mordant. In my mind it's like separating a Cartier watch I found from realizing that a "something" or a "someone" made this watch--that the watch didn't just make itself. I think your question is valid: what's the point in believing in a God if this God doesn't do a thing? I cannot get that far in my thought process. I piece the two together and it doesn't make any sense to me either. My faculties only carry me as far as the the universe is here; it operates with some sort of synchronicity; we're here; I see no way we evolved from a clump of molecules that grew into a highly organized assembly of approximately 2 trillion molecules, which this cell in turn infused itself with life and then learned to replicate itself into a highly organized organism of an extremely specialized group of diverse cells that learned to work together to create a human being and not just one, but two that fit perfectly together to mix their chromosomes to make a new version of both of them. This is a huge digression but I just want to voice the incredible complexity of everything we see in this world--the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, how both are symbiotic and cooperate with each other in most instances. When I try to reason all this out I just don't see all this coming about without some guiding hand.
Also I wonder what this "Light" is that all NDE'er say they go into. It has to be some kind of loving Being that has intelligence. I can't get beyond that. I just figure there enough testimony to make me think there's something there. One has to listen to these thousands of testimonies of a wide diversity of people who swear this experience was more real than real. Dreams just don't carry that kind of conviction in a person's mind. Clearly these millions of people from all over the world didn't get together and conspire to make all this up.
My point was, how is the concept of a god you described above any different (for all practical purposes) than no god at all?
How would an impersonal pantheistic thing, whether it changed or not, be relevant at all?
It seems most humans cannot loosen their grasp on what a god is "supposed to be" even if they don't believe one exists.
Is a newborn relevant? It can't do much of anything. Can't communicate (in words). Is virtually immobile. Even rudimentary math is beyond its ken.
But of course none would classify a baby that way. It may be nothing more than a crying, drooling, pooping blob to an alien but we understand that the baby will one day evolve into an adult and be unrecognizable from its current form in virtually every respect.
A god-thing, maybe a sort of Cosmic Consciousness, may be in its infancy and if we are in some way a part of it, it seems logical that as we evolve, so must it. As our understanding of the universe broadens and deepens, so might our understanding of what constitutes God.
It seems most humans cannot loosen their grasp on what a god is "supposed to be" even if they don't believe one exists.
Is a newborn relevant? It can't do much of anything. Can't communicate (in words). Is virtually immobile. Even rudimentary math is beyond its ken.
But of course none would classify a baby that way. It may be nothing more than a crying, drooling, pooping blob to an alien but we understand that the baby will one day evolve into an adult and be unrecognizable from its current form in virtually every respect.
A god-thing, maybe a sort of Cosmic Consciousness, may be in its infancy and if we are in some way a part of it, it seems logical that as we evolve, so must it. As our understanding of the universe broadens and deepens, so might our understanding of what constitutes God.
Maybe.
Any thoughts on what may have birthed this Cosmic Consciousness?
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
