One cannot know "GOD" directly, but only through "GOD's" works. If you love "GOD" study the natural sciences. ................... IMHO Only the lame, lazy, and mentally challenged use a personal pronoun for "GOD".
If you do study the natural sciences, you will disbelieve in the god of the Bible, since they are mutually contradictory.
Isaiah 45:7 "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things."
He commanded the genocide of the Canaanites: Thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is therein, and the cattle thereof, with the edge of the sword. Deuteronomy 13:15 But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth. Deuteronomy 20:16-17 Thus saith the LORD of hosts ... go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass. 1 Samuel 15:2-3 Apologetic websites try to justify the genocide, explaining why the Canaanites deserved it. There were also the cases of hands-on genocide where God didn't rely on any human agents - e.g. the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah.
But if taking the expressions and descriptions in the Old Testament literally, it would become apparent that the semitic God wasn't much different from the author of a novel or designer of a computer game. The key goal is drama (with all its imperfections) rather than a boring, idealized world. The characters / populations are presented as throwaway chessboard props, apart from some of the Author's favorites / protagonists (Hebrews and their ancestors). It's not until the supersentient potency behind it all gets incarnated as a personhood / avatar-hero itself that a semblance of contemporary rights and mercy/lenience, which trumps rigid laws, begins to tentatively appear (such as Christ rescuing the adulteress from a mob). Modern interpretation of the semitic religious account as being demented or pathological, that falls out of the perspective of human social prescriptions, doesn't develop until later in history when those moral explorations finally reach a maturated stage themselves. But likewise, today's creators of virtual realities no more apply the standards and perspectives of the denizens of their invented realms to themselves (in their design of these fictions) than the deities of ancient civilizations did with what they supposedly lorded over. The goal of average storytellers is to engineer a product that attracts interest and revenue from an audience. Uneventful peace and harmony (at either domestic or grand scale) are usually dead-ends on the broad marketplace, though they have specialized value as fashionable icons and symbols -- and the elements of speeches -- in community, spiritual, and feel-good contexts. OTOH, _censored_'s "God as the global processor of the whole of reality" seems to potentially have the apology of sporting an origin which perhaps doesn't have the power and option of immediately conjuring a supposed perfect cosmos, like the old Abrahamic provenance(*). His computer-god might have to gradually work through a very liberal algorithmic sequence or evolve a world step-by-step toward a better future, with the implored cooperation of that reality's claimed "self-determinant" components. [(*) The OT might be contended to have featured a "perfect world" in its original Eden state, prior to Adam/Eve rebelling and being expelled into the intrusive Serpent's parallel universe or prison version for fallen angels. (A PDK-like spin on early Genesis, if nothing else.) Thus the Abrahamic God can be argued to have that capacity for that and other reasons, if it so chose the boring or non-dramatic route.]
I don't consider it spam by simply talking about one's spirituality. I think the guy is serious, and judging from the replies, others think so too.
It's not what he says but the way it was said... It was preaching: there was no question, just a statement of "this is the way of it...". And the regularity of such posts, in one guise or another, from spellbound constitute spam. If he wants to talk spirituality then he is free to raise a thread topic that does just that, lay out his case, why he things what he does etc, and ask for comments, or raise a question... you know, the way it should be done. Not just say "this is how it is..." and nothing else. As said, if people can't complain about such breaches that annoy them then why have the rule in the first instance. If the mods want to act on those complaints or not, that's another issue.
God is love, consciousness, and good, therefore a flicker of that candle in the dark can illuminate and destroy what is false/concept/ false concept/object/actual lies and/or misunderstandings of reality. Laura, God is a concept formulated by language. Before language, God was not conceptualized and not necessary for simple functioning of a human being. Human beings like animals do function without language. Language created God. John, The color red isn't a concept formulated by language. A concept exist only in the mind such as a design for a sailing ship that has no real existence at the moment. Red may be designated as "red" in a given language, but it is so designated because it already exist in the real world around us and may be perceived by others. The designation "red" allows us to discuss with others the "redness" of objects that actually exist in the real world around us. In order to discuss the concept of a sailing ship, one must first of all make a drawing of this concept or actually build the sailing ship being discussed. In other words, actually bring the concept of a sailing ship into the real world around us. It is self evident that the world around us exists, that we are a part of it and that it is impossible to get something from nothing. The root word being "thing". As such it is only logical to assume that the world around us has always existed or that there is an eternal God that has always existed and that this God maintains the self evident intent and purpose the world around us expresses.
Care to support any of those assertions without begging the question? And what "self-evident" intent and purpose does the world around us express? And are you able to support that assertion with something other than question-begging?
S is distributed over S. This is how the self is S, and since nowhere is S absent, He must be in me. And He is therefore "I" as spirit and non-"I", or "God" and non-"God" merged to become the one that distributes over the one. Reality being defined according to God. As I already explained, evil does not exist, it is the absence of God in man's heart, God is love, consciousness, and good. I am that light which shines in darkness.
S being what? How do you get from the previous assertion to this conclusion? What is S? And how can you prove that "nowhere is S absent"? Which means what exactly in English? (I'm assuming that is the language you're speaking here?) I think we can define reality ourselves, but okay, where exactly does God state what reality is? You didn't explain, you stated without any actual support for the claim. Care to provide anything that supports your claim - and again, no question-begging please. I'm sure that means something to you but it doesn't actually answer any of the questions I have asked. Nor, in fact, does any of your post. You claimed that "God is love, consciousness, and good," yet you have to support those assertions. You claimed that the world expresses a self-evident intent and purpose, which God maintains. Please support both of these assertions, first by detailing exactly what you see as being the self-evident intent and purpose, secondly why you think it self-evident, and thirdly please support the notion that God maintains this. Please, no more of your barely-comprehensible drivel. Have the decency to use at least relatively plain English.
Mathematically, the M=R Principle is expressed as follows. The universe obviously has a structure S. According to the logic outlined above, this structure is self-similar; S distributes over S, where "distributes over S" means "exists without constraint on location or scale within S". In other words, the universe is a perfectly self-similar system whose overall structure is replicated everywhere within it as a general state-recognition and state-transition syntax (as understood in an extended computational sense). The self-distribution of S, called hology, follows from the containment principle, i.e. the tautological fact that everything within the real universe must be described by the predicate "real" and thus fall within the constraints of global structure. That this structure is completely self-distributed implies that it is locally indistinguishable for subsystems s; it could only be discerned against its absence, and it is nowhere absent in S. Spacetime is thus transparent from within, its syntactic structure invisible to its contents on the classical (macroscopic) level. Localized systems generally express and utilize only a part of this syntax on any given scale, as determined by their specific structures. I.e., where there exists a hological incoversion endomorphism D:Sà{rÎS} carrying the whole structure of S into every internal point and region of S, objects (quantum-geometrodynamically) embedded in S take their recognition and state-transformation syntaxes directly from the ambient spatiotemporal background up to isomorphism. Objects thus utilize only those aspects of D(S) of which they are structural and functional representations. -Introduction to the CTMU
Request denied! He's forced into using the pseudo gobbledygook language of Langan, otherwise people would realize it's gibberish and, unfortunately for Spellbound, not something deeply profound.
Spellbound, I asked for plain English. I also asked numerous questions about your claims that your cut & paste response on the CTMU does not address. Let's start with the first one: please support your claim that God is "love, consciousness, and good," If you can't address that point, just say so and we can move on.
If you're talking about the monotheistic Abrahamic god, then aren't you placing limitations on that deity? Which is antithetical to the very concept of that deity. An omnipotent god is by definition without limits, including those of morality. And if we're talking non-monotheistic conceptions of god, then you're not accounting for the nuance and variety present in polytheism. In both cases, your statement fails.
In fact your statement is the one that fails. I am not talking about non-monotheistic conceptions of god. You are introducing polytheism to substantiate an already weak argument against me. See my post #9.
But you're separating good from evil. If your god only creates good but evil exists, then you need a creator of evil. You are implying a poly-creator.
