TeaEarlGreyHot wrote:
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Ok. So you don't believe in god. It's more like you suppose that there is cause because there is something.
By your definition of god, I suppose.
Well, if you call God, and say "he" whereas you don't think it is a person, this is kind of schizophrenic. Many people protect themselves from being reproached their atheism by using the word God. But that's only a social consideration.
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I already said I don't believe in a cause.
Nope. You said before you thought it was like fuel. Fuel is a cause. So you are contradicting yourself.
Subotai wrote:
circular wrote:
Well an ultimate cause is just a metaphysical consideration. It's not a person. Whereas God is supposed to be a person, a designer.
For example, you can imagine an ultimate cause that creates an infinity of world, including our own, but that is not a person, not a designer, has no will. This is not believing in god.
http://www.gnosis.org/gnintro.htm wrote:
The Gnostic God concept is more subtle than that of most religions. In its way, it unites and reconciles the recognitions of Monotheism and Polytheism, as well as of Theism, Deism and Pantheism.
William BlakeIn the Gnostic view, there is a true, ultimate and transcendent God, who is beyond all created universes and who never created anything in the sense in which the word “create” is ordinarily understood. While this True God did not fashion or create anything, He (or, It) “emanated” or brought forth from within Himself the substance of all there is in all the worlds, visible and invisible. In a certain sense, it may therefore be true to say that all is God, for all consists of the substance of God. By the same token, it must also be recognized that many portions of the original divine essence have been projected so far from their source that they underwent unwholesome changes in the process. To worship the cosmos, or nature, or embodied creatures is thus tantamount to worshipping alienated and corrupt portions of the emanated divine essence.
The basic Gnostic myth has many variations, but all of these refer to Aeons, intermediate deific beings who exist between the ultimate, True God and ourselves. They, together with the True God, comprise the realm of Fullness (Pleroma) wherein the potency of divinity operates fully. The Fullness stands in contrast to our existential state, which in comparison may be called emptiness.
One of the aeonial beings who bears the name Sophia (“Wisdom”) is of great importance to the Gnostic world view. In the course of her journeyings, Sophia came to emanate from her own being a flawed consciousness, a being who became the creator of the material and psychic cosmos, all of which he created in the image of his own flaw. This being, unaware of his origins, imagined himself to be the ultimate and absolute God. Since he took the already existing divine essence and fashioned it into various forms, he is also called the Demiurgos or “half-maker” There is an authentic half, a true deific component within creation, but it is not recognized by the half-maker and by his cosmic minions, the Archons or “rulers”.
Clearly the term God here is misleading because it contains the notion of social being. Again in this sense, the use of word God is a social strategy, and an improper use, and the phrase "True God" is a paradoxical. You could instead call it the Source or something else.
But anyway, I know that people take refuge in the word God to be socially accepted because it represents a notion of authority, and we are conditionned to submit to this authority, even if it does not exist.
By the way :
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To worship the cosmos, or nature, or embodied creatures is thus tantamount to worshipping alienated and corrupt portions of the emanated divine essence.
This is clearly the proof that this use of the word God is a remainder of the "selfish person that we shoud worship and not others" that is described in monotheism.
If you want to be cool in the way we use words, then you must accept at the same time the words "nature" and "cosmos" to be describing the same thing. Why wouldn't it be possible to consider that the universe is auto-created, while it would be possible to think God is the creator and also the whole world ?
I hope I succeeded in showing how social this issue is.
13 Feb 2012, 5:25 pm
