God does nor exist nor do gods exist!

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Ditto the above. Technically you cannot argue that God / gods do not exist, since at the very least they exist as cultural constructs. Says the not-religiously-inclined anthropologist employed by an evolutionary biologist.

From an evolutionary perspective, positive thinking is a psychological asset which aids in survival. For some individuals, religion / faith is a framework for constructing positive thought patterns. So it does serve a purpose, else it would never have been brought to existence in the first place. (Sorry Dawkins, I am with E. O. Wilson on this one.)

^^^ Amen on that, too. :)

I can argue that God exists but gods don't!

because God is not a god. A universal spirit, a whole who we are all part of in the spirit side of existence, fits within modern broad use of the label God, as we use it to denote any universal intelligence, but it is certainly not a god, a powerful magic being as the ancients imagined.

My theory is that the spirit side of existence is an aspect of time. This identity seems to follow because neither time itself nor the experience of it can be imagined to have a permanent ending, though they can have jumps - every time moment is an event, a happening, and that involves change into a resultant state, but the resultant state is another later event, so the chain is unbreakable. There is variable local time and there is a serial history of the cosmos. This makes exactly the same pattern as postulating that each personal being is time in its local particle form, and the total of them together add up to the infinite particle of universal time who is called God but is not a god.

Like Ningishzida! Hail to the Underworld!

So there is something positive about "Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him, but all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves" (Num 31:18-19)?

It seems to me like a complicated history of ancient politics. In fact, one of the great curiosities is that the Greek word for their chief god is etymologically related to the Zoroastrian word for "devil," yet the people of India, who have a historical relationship with the Greeks going back to the time of Thales of Miletus or earlier, call a troublesome set of entities by the same word that the Zoroastrians have for their god, which is descended from the name of the head of the Assyrian pantheon...who was named for a city in modern-day Iraq that was once so grand and proud, its ruin stands today, its archway still intact.



Imagine Ashur at its height, when it was clean, maintained and possibly painted. Imagine the commercial traffic, which continued until...around the start of the European Renaissance period, when the followers of Tengri butchered its populace. An ancient city, vast and wondrous, filled with noise and bustle, the smells of foods cooking, perfume, rubbish and human and animal waste, where feuds and intrigues as ancient as the city itself were carried out between the descendants of those whose hands were involved in building it.

The distinction between an atheist and a humanist is that an atheist merely denies that there are gods. A humanist acknowledges that there are gods, but the humanist also offers a more elegant and more truthful vision of what they actually are.

Almost every story has its humanistic and more technical version - for Judaism is't the Kabbalists, for Christianity it's the Hermeticists such as the Rosicrucians, Martinists, and Freemasons, and for Islam you have varying degrees of Sufism which to my understanding might mean one thing in the standard sense but something much closer to it's own sort of Islamic Rosicrucianism in its organized sense.

People still mine a lot out of the Egyptian mysteries and it seems like they developed their minds quite far in a given direction. One could say that their deities symbolize natural forces and that the stories of Osiris getting chopped into 14 pieces or the subsequent stories of war between Horus and Set all seem to have a spiritual grip on natural processes whether in nature or in consciousness - any religion that sufficiently mystic in nature seemed to work hard on touching base both inwardly and outwardly, ie. seeing reflections of ones self in nature and reflections of nature in ones self (bringing things in and out of that membrane where the pentagram, pentagon, and 5 symbolized the microcosm of man and the hexagram, hexagon, and 6 represented the macrocosm).

Even if there were little more to both western and eastern tantras than neurolinguistic programming and making one's own assorted brain apps with enough creative visualization diligently practiced over years, these religions of old are really a goldmine for positive psychology to probe and reach into. As Naturalist I think was aluding to we have the trouble of essentially living subjective existences and when we try to just jump up and down on that dogmatically we find ourselves in all kinds of problems as our own subconscious minds, animal instincts, etc. retaliate in the same manner they would if someone was an ultra-puritanical or Victorian type of theist. Symbolism, narratives, imaginative plays, these are critical in accessing ourselves and striking the right balance and equilibrium so that doing what we believe is right doesn't constantly have some inward force abrasing against it and making it a losing battle.

The other thing about many gods into one God - seems consensus these days and quite possibly this outlook was as popular in the 1000 BC to 500 AD timeframe in many places also - is that it's considered the living force of the universe branching off into different polarities - first male and female (God and Goddess) and from there every goddess who ever was is an aspect of that Goddess, every god that ever was is an aspect of that God. This seems to have at least been made to be a public doctrine on some level when Isis was addressed as the 'Isis of 10,000 names' and the sequence where Lucian in the Greek classic 'The Golden Ass' is at the end of his rope, trying to get himself turned back into a human being again (from being a donkey) and Isis comes out of the sea to meet him and during her speech to him addresses many of the different names she's prayed to and adored as but ultimately that Isis is, in a manner of speaking, the highest level container of her identity. Someone with enough Catholic or Orthodox background might find a bit more room to call her Sophia and in doing that continue the line by adding Mary to the many high profile identities of Isis.

I still need to do more research on where this starts, I think it's where Kabbalists and Qabalists differ, the later are more theosophic in nature but it seems quite plausible also, particularly if formal Jewish Kabbalists place the 'seven planets' on the Tree of Life (ie. the 10 sphere 22 path diagram) that you also have the 'Seven Elohim' which then, when you look at astrology, aggregates the personality and functional traits of the different aspects of God into each of these spheres and, similarly, right there you have an AC/DC step up and step down converter between polytheism and monotheism. Now that we know that the sun and moon are not planets, we have Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, several transneptunian objects as well as a planetoid right in the more local asteroid belt and acknowledge 150+ moons in the solar system really doesn't seem to effect these being logical structures or containers for certain types of drive, logic, behavior, and different breakdowns and aspects of the human personality. Add the 22 major arcana of the tarot to the paths on the tree of life and it gets even more interesting but... I'll leave that one for another day. Point being - many gods/goddesses are a bit like stalagtites off the one God, and perhaps the three Abrahamics as they've existed for the past 1,500 to 2,500 years really have been an attempt to keep people from sacrificing kids to manmade deities and getting confused for what was spiritually up or down - unfortunately they've had their own mixed blessing and barbarisms (ie. war and forced conversion on one hand - hospitals, education, and charity on the other).

Seems like we might be as a culture at a point where we really need to use our introspective muscles to figure out what we are and where we're going. We already know that ideological barbarism and totalitarianism are bankrupt policies, we also realize that if we get the wrong idea about materialism and outward science we easily come to the conclusion that the best way to solve human suffering is to voluntarily go extinct prior to getting off the planet and spreading because we're decaying in a purposeless existence under that outlook and we're united in common desolation more so than love. That's the conundrum we really have to beat and I think ideologically sorting that out in the public sphere - the properly articulate and 21st/22nd century level of education and human decency sorting out that middle path between religious despotism and society-erasing nihilism. This is where I think psychology and faith will really need to have a very powerful dialogue.

Actually, Yoga was one of the three logical schools of philosophical thought, along with Samkhya and Lokāyata, according to Kautilya. The heterodox sect that bears the same name as the last of those, Lokāyata, is also another name of a school of thought related to that of the Hellenic Sophists, known as Cārvāka and actually pioneered by a contemporary of Buddha, as far as anyone can tell. Yes, there were atheists in the 6th Century BCE...they weren't very popular then, either.

Well, many skeptics make one terrible error in their assessment of religion. Our brains do a large number of things. Constructing in our minds a relatively unblemished mirror for the truth...is only one of them, and it is not always the most immediately helpful. Once you have gotten past that, religion does not seem all that strange.

The Japanese discovered a curious discrepancy between British and American soldiers during World War II. The British took a lot longer to break under torture, and they questioned these soldiers on why they were fighting. The British said, "I am fighting for my king!" whereas the Americans said they were fighting for something like "freedom" or "democracy" or perhaps a flag. The Americans were harder pressed to say why they were fighting.

The fallacy that is held dear my many rationalists is an underlying assumption that humans are, by nature, rational rather than emotional...that we are somehow "above" base animal impulses or self-delusion...that somehow pure reason is a path to eudaimonia. Nay. To deny our more passionate nature is itself a departure from reason, and we thereby guarantee that we will be ruled by it.

Well, the pantheons were a political maneuver, to a large extent. Artemis, for instance, was probably an attempt to integrate northern migrants, who had a bear-cult related fertility ritual going back wayyyyy far back in prehistory, into ancient Greek society. I think there is a possibility that the Greeks were first exposed to Artemis back in the 7th Century BCE when they had the colony in what is now Marseille, France, but as far as anyone can tell, her Gallic counter-part, Artio, might go back to an area near Bern, Switzerland, or it may have origins in Minoan Crete. In any case, it is probably of more northern origin because the holarctic is littered with instances of the bear-cult. We could get a little more playful with conjecture, here, and we could suggest that the Minoans might have originally imported the idea as a consequence of northern tribesmen migrating to them en masse as the changing salinity of the Black Sea disrupted the functions of preexisting human settlements, but then again, that would have been at least thousands of years prior to the dawn of Mycenaean civilization.

The way these pantheons end up getting started is really sort of charming. Tribal peoples would spend centuries alternately killing each other and intermarrying, and eventually, their descendants would go, "Hey, Ugh...why do we keep going to war?"

"I'm not sure, Og. I think it's because your great-great-grandad said that the sun created everything, and my great-great-great-grandad said that water created everything, and both got mad."

"Well, I was thinking, Ugh...both of these ideas make sense, so surely both our ancestors must have been on to something."

"Yeah, maybe they're, like...related?"

"Mine gets to be the chief god."

"Why?"

"Because I've got the bigger club."

"But!!"

*bonk*

I think the answer is to bring back the chthonic gods. *nods* A very wise move, I would think it. Hail to the Underworld!

God is an unfalsifiable hypothesis, and unless people start coming back from the dead, we'll never know.

So is the claim that the universe was created by a giant purple earwig:



The issue is the matter of a deity, not that of an afterlife. It is easy to prove that an afterlife is a foolish notion.

How easily does that proof coexist with the evidence for ghosts?

And with the easily proved impossibility of an end point to experienced time? Because the happening of any time instant is a change into a resultant state, the state where that instant's events have happened, but this resultant state itself is another later instant?

1. You're using cognates in language to say that the two are the same difference. My main issue with that is that you won't find me a single lexicon or concordance that will render the literal meaning of elohim that way. I'm basing my own understanding of it from concordances like Smith's, Thayer and Vine's, Strong's, etc. so I'd like to see if you have a decent source of your own.

2. The entire OT goes out to establish that this is a culture of people whose most prominent literature is vehemently against syncretism. Every example of syncretism is bemoaned and you expect us to believe your interpretation? You're trying to insert ideas into and draw comparisons from a polytheistic to a monotheistic religion.

God?

I don't believe there is -
A being significantly more powerful than us (humans),
That is significantly interested in us.


That leaves just us with the responsibility for everything in our *area, without ANY indication of a SafetyNet in case we f*ck up or give up this responsibility.
No one has Given us this responsibility, no one will apparently do anything about how we handle it.

We will either continue as a species, or die.
Possibly everything else local as well, more or less.

To live, it is clear we must solve our own problems. All of them.



*which kinda makes us the gods, therefore gods do exist.

wut?


btw, Persimmonpudding, love that bit about ..

"My kindly lord that rules over water."

Which tends to support my own view that this tale might have been descended from an ancient ruler who engineered an irrigation system that was relatively advanced for the time.

That's brilliant and insightful, unfortunately it was also Open-Minded which means you're a HERETIC!!!11!1

The only problem with that is that however brilliant and insightful it seems, in the real world facts matter and he doesn't seem to be in agreement with the majority of linguistic scholars. Some of his grammatical observations weren't even correct, let alone his definitions.

The existence of God (the uncaused First Cause) can be proved to be a logical necessity by the observation of the physical Universe and its operation (science) and simple and inevitable deduction.

It's a fact that's been known and well understood for millennia by astute observers and rational thinkers.

It was defined as an article of Faith at the First Vatican Council in the statement (as I recall off the top of my head) "If anyone shall say that the existence of God cannot be known with certainty by the light of natural reason alone... anathema sit". (Anathema sit means colloquially "you are dead wrong and not one of us").

I am astonished at the arrogance and ignorance of contemporary Materialism.

Perhaps that will be enough to get this thread locked too.

FIrstly the previous thread was locked because you broke the rules regarding personal attacks. Secondly I am astonished by your simple assertion that because we do not understand the nature of causation in relation to the universe/universes,you automatically ascribe A priori the existence of a creator God. The arrogance does not lie with those who as a starting point look for a naturalistic cause, rather it lies with those who by demanding the existence of a creator God effectively say "we know all there is to know". Not only this but people who hold this view also claim, once again A priori to know what lies beyond the Universe, which to my mind is positively ridiculous.

If, as the religious believe there is matter of some kind beyond our universe, then it is more than reasonable to dismiss the idea of an all powerful god for non mystical forces of causation.

To ridicule a point of view does not constitute a "personal attack" unless you are the one on thin ice whose backup of fashionable opinions to use as a bludgeon is found inadequate.

It's Materialists who pretentiously claim they know "all there is to know". If you think you know all there is to know I'll be happy to start a new thread and thrash it to death.

Perhaps you missed the post that said I'm not new to this argument. I have been arguing with Materialists ever since I argued myself out of that dungeon.