God is "dead"

I've never met anyone who claimed to have seen God outside of a mental hospital. My bipolar mom DID hear him thru the TV set a few times. Guess that requires specially enhanced hearing eh? Bottom line, you haven't seen or heard God at all. So why should I take anything you claim about him seriously?

 

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Magical Realist, have foul language and aggressive attacks always been the "go to" tools/tactics of "Master Debaters"?

BTW, is the picture you Posted of yourself or did you go to the trouble of Posting your conception of something/someone you seem to not even believe exists? Would not your true example of a photo/picture of your seemingly purported "non-existent entity/Deity" be a blank pic/photo?

 

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So Magical Realist, is your rant above some sort of claim that you "came by your attributes Honestly" through congenital deficiencies or inherited genetic traits?

If so, or even if not so, what credentials do you have or what evidence can you provide to prove that any Posters should "...take anything you claim about him seriously?" !?!?

Do you Magical Realist, consider SciForums a forum for discussions/debates or just your own private shooting gallery to practice on targets that do not follow your own religion/views/beliefs?

 

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Why do you think God is dead? Do bad things happen to you, or is it the lack of godly natures?

 

Perhaps that's where God spends his time with those he has touched, The few he thought that may be ready for contact, Perhaps God uses all tools at hand to try and speak to us including the TV which most of us watch but few fully understand,
If i was God and knew that direct contact with me would harm my creations perhaps i would create something like TV to dilute my contact with my fragile creations who i wished to spend time with..

 

I agree that meditation or yoga can and do produce experiences that some (but not all) practitioners of meditation and yoga intepret as some sort of contact with whatever sort of divinity they already believe in.

The problem with regards to this thread is that these kind of experiences still aren't unmistakeable. Even if we accept the possibility that these experiences might be divine revelations, the divinity that's supposedly being revealed is still being coy, still behaving in an ambiguous fashion. After all, it's possible to plausibly interpret the religious experiences as something other than a divine revelation.

 

That's entirely different than actual sight. And it's physically closer to dreaming and/or hallucinating than to sight. Indeed, nearly everyone has had some form of experiences of this sort, but the attribution of them to supernatural phenomena is entirely a matter of superstition, that is, a breakdown in the normal faculties of human reason. The correct conclusion for a normal person is: I dreamed that I saw God. There is a clear distinction between the two ways of thinking, and it's the willingness to entertain fantasy as reality which alarms many of the non-religious people in society. It forces the question of whether religious ideation of this sort is any different than psychosis.

 

3D glasses, MR. That's the trick. Lol!

 

We could go down that road certainly. Posit all sorts of complicated reasons and plot twists why only mentally ill people can hear God thru their TV sets. Why God has to use TVs instead of appearing to us on our own doorstep. Or.. we could just go with Occam's razor and call it psychotic delusion. You do believe there's such a thing as psychotic delusion don't you?

"Religious delusion is a type of cognitive phenomena known to psychiatry. Thoughts, either beliefs or ideas, that are found in psychosis have no basis in reality, and held with certainty and maintained by the person i.e. they are resistant to criticism (incorrigible) (Jaspers) that are additionally specifically of a type that is of the aspect or factor of reality defined as religious."---http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_delusion

 

@ Magical Realist,
Any belief in telepathy or most psi topics must support the notion that we are all connected in some wireless fashion. Any such wireless connection between human minds could be described as mass consciousness simply on its own.

It is my belief that God is "All that is". Imagine the universe itself was capable of awareness. Movement itself constituted life.

Imagine you are a self aware Universe. Then after years of imagining the universe was able to slowly steer evolution to the point where expressive beings could live lifetimes of experiences. Every human soul is a part of god. We are all just fragments of god ourselves. God wants us to experience everything.

God has suffered ever pain from every torture. God has birthed every child. God is everything.

Now...

Since I believe we are all a part of god I suppose I know he is always a cracker in all of its forms. Prayer helps even if you only hope it is placebo effect.

Personifying god with a cane or as a person of any type seems a little naive to me. How could any presence in the Universe survive in our form.

I believe we are all part of god and we can heavily influence our environments and people with thoughts. Faith/Expectation cause reality.

We have creative abilities like gods, and we can think situations into reality.

I think God is simply a part of everything.

 

So God is all of everything and a part of everything at the same time? A chaotic and confusing mélange of old tennis shoes, pig embryos, brain tumors, mafia bosses, galactic clouds of gas, albino donkeys, computer viruses, bubble gum, rusty carburators, termite gonads, seaweed, crime scene photos, fire hydrants, oil rigs, cigarette butts, the number 348, etc and etc? I'm not seeing anything glorious much less divine in the sum total of all the things that exist in the universe. Such a massive and surreal collection of stuff would be the height of mundaneness and banality, nothing like what people have traditionally used the word God to refer to. Why would anyone ascribe personhood much less magical powers and knowledge to all this crap that makes up our reality? And why would you worship such a bricolage of disparate and disrelated objects as some holy and moral being? How could you even impute sane thought and specific enough motivations to this cosmic Lovecraftian behemoth composed of every little thing that exists?

 

Saying tha God is "All that is" is quite misconcepted as by the bible but it is ok.
“One*God*and Father of*all, who is over*all*and through*all and in*all.” – Ephesians 4:6
Are you jewish kwhilborn?
And saying that "God" is everything from Stardust to cigarette butts is quite simplistic also. Quite interesting post this one, right? Ambiguous somehow...
Anyway, "God" is not dead, since it never existed. And, as far as the bible goes. He's just taking some time for us to learn a lesson and he then may comeback kickin' the bucket. Psalms - 37:9-11
Last for kicks and Giggles, on the theory, "God" is an incorporeal being (like a pure consciousness), which existed from time indefinite to time indefinite. Psalms - 90:2.

 

Actually a weaker definition of God is one where he is not everything since the notion of something being inherently separate or outside of God provides the framework for a God with a questionable hold of power in the universe.
Needless to say, it's a popular definition by atheists towing the party line of *god doesn't exist" since they obviously require a backup plan when they are painfully reminded of the philosophical short sightedness that hard atheism (ie.... god does not exist) operates out of.

 

Good one

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Still i tried to, or, went by the parts of the bible i recalled so, pardon me if i did not remember any specific part of the bible that says exactly that 'God is everything'.
I do remember one part of the bible (can't say exactly so i'm not quoting) , where it says that 'God is everything', Psalms maybe? But that implied specifically that "God" was everything you needed and in him you would have all... Something the like. Can't say for sure. If you please, enlighten me.

 

Its kind of like the relationship the sun (the source of power) has with sunshine (the effect of power).
By the power of the sun, the sunlight is "everywhere", but at the same time the sun has a distinct identity from the sunlight.
So IOW you can't discredit the sun for being "inferior" due to the sunlight being present in insignificant places. In this way the sun is "everywhere" by dint of its potency while simultaneously having an identity above and beyond "everything"

... and as an added detail, due to the influence of the sun's potency (the sunlight), clouds can manifest (due to evaporation) which can obscure the sun from our vision. So despite the sun being "everywhere", from our perspective, it can appear not to exist due to the interaction between potencies that are direct attributes of the sun.
IOW in this way, illusion (or the notion that god does not exist) can exist despite god being "everything", while god can simultaneously have an existence above and beyond "everything" and illusion.

 

So In your words, God is the Sun, his presence is the sunshine. By your analogy, there are some places where god, would hypothetically, not reach, as the sunshine does not, rendering him not so omnipresent as taught, the places where shadows take over. Still, that's no point, saying that lack of tangible evidence of god's existence is 'illusion', is a dellusion (if you excuse the play on words). Being oblivious to a fact is a mark of ignorance. And please, i know that you are not the kind of person that says "Oh, you exist, that's enough proof". Besides, being omnipresent does not mean that you are omni..thing...
I understand that our reasoning and our senses are one of the potencies that may hinder our comprehension about the deity (ironically), but that applies only if it actually exists (god), just like the clouds may make it seem like that there is no sun, but the clouds at least we can see. And there is no transcendent feeling leading us to believe that the clouds are there, and there's neither a necessity for us to believe in the clouds, since they're clearly there. The cloud is not the problem, is the being in the clouds.

 

Dazz, not sure if this is what you are referring to, but...:

Revelation 1:7-9 King James Version

7 Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him: and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him. Even so, Amen.

8 I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.

9 I John, who also am your brother, and companion in tribulation, and in the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ, was in the isle that is called Patmos, for the word of God, and for the testimony of Jesus Christ.

Dazz, fifty some odd years ago, these verses were taught to me to mean ; everything that ever was or will be from the dawn of creation until it exists no more - is the physical manifestation of God...so...

Dazz, I quoted it in context - because fifty some odd years ago, what I read and what I was taught that it meant...well...let's just say that I had a few questions...

 

@dumbest man on earth

Hmm. Wasn't that exactly but it is a good one too. I just can't seem to remember and there are a lot of mosquitoes around me keeping me away to get my bible (yes i have one still.. What?). But yea it works fine, i always understood Revelation 1:8 like if he was the very past, present and future, as an immutable counscience that has been the same, always almighty, and will always be, the same might, as god and jesus were always the same, in the past, were always the same in the present (by the time of when jesus lived kind of present), and are the same now, which is the present and was future, back then, AND will always remain like this. Hebrews 13:8

PS: I seriously must disagree with your moniker. xd

 

I don't know what the word superstition means , nor I ever been hallucinated except when I was drunk. under normal condition , I feel the spirit of God in me , which it manifested itself in a contentment and peace over my body,
So if you have had such experience it would be difficult to understand and of course , You would label this as hallucination or whatever. My experience are manifested not all the time but when I am in prayer , do I see God, no but I call it " I feel His presence "..... Look I am as skeptic as you , but I will not blank out the spiritual feeling with my rational, because I don't know what is beyond death , nor any body knows , we can take a strong position , but that is our strong assertion to convince ourselves that know.

 

i was just using the sun as an analogy ... that's why I wrote it as "everything". God possesses numerous qualities that render him necessarily singular and distinct from anything else. Being omnipresent is one of them. I was simply alluding to the pervasive nature of sunlight as an analogy to explain something about the quality of omnipresence ... a quality that necessarily finds no other representation in anything else except god.

Actually I was explaining how a lack of "evidence" affects a particular person in a particular environment due to the superior arrangement of things.
Whether all individuals are afflicted by the same conditions is a separate question

Aside from the point that given certain arrangements an individual cannot see the sun, there was no other "fact" being explained.
IOW I was explaining how a particular individual has nothing else to go on except an absence of evidence

On the contrary, possessing an "omni" quality has a logical necessity to be supreme and singular. IOW you cannot have 2 or more omni-max entities (unless they are borrowing from the same identity ... which is probably an issue a bit too early in the discussion atm)

The clouds are representative of illusion .... which I don't think is such a problematic thing for us to verify

And there is no transcendent feeling leading us to believe that the clouds are there, and there's neither a necessity for us to believe in the clouds, since they're clearly there. The cloud is not the problem, is the being in the clouds.[/QUOTE]
The clouds are not representative of "transcendence" ... rather they are representative of what prevents us from seeing such transcendence