Let's assign "God" a value of "Omnipotent, omniscient creator of all there is" - that would be in the ballpark for a lot of theists...
Why, thank you.
In this case, we return to the following proposition, which is apparently confusing, or so I'm told:
▸ See that religious person over there? Yeah, he believes in God. Unreliable. Right? Okay, so, why do you let him define "God"?
For most of us, arguing that God doesn't exist is, functionally, a political argument. What we are actually arguing is whether this or that poseur deity exists, and therein lies the hook:
Why?
Let's try a different definition for a moment, but it leads right back to what we're discussing: It is pointless for me to remind someone like Kim Davis, the infamous county clerk from Kentucky, to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's (
Mt. 22.16-22↱); for many people, basic function is shunted to the back of the bus if it's allowed on at all, so they will define according to aesthetics. To wit, there are many conservatives for whom Caesar is the pompous dictator they would caricaturize pretty much any Democratic president to be, but we have an actual, objective Caesar in the United States of America. And that's the difference. Railing against Caesar often seems attractive if denouncing the opposition leader who won, but it's a lot harder to get a thrill out of being seen denouncing the Constitution itself. Naturally, the bulk of these went on to elect a president who wants to be a dictator.
(No president wants to be Caesar, and we might wonder which of our neighbors needs the spoiler alert.)
There is a functional definition: We have an asserted and recognized
supreme law of the land↱. Shall we render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's? We can focus all we want on defining rendering or that which is Caesar's, but who or what is Caesar? It makes a difference.
Just like the question of belief or disbelief is what it is, but what do we mean by "God"?
Why would I let Kim Davis define God?
There is also a question, according to the dualistic proposition at hand—
• There's either a belief or there isn't - you can't have a middle position. (
#54↑)
• One either believes in "god" or one doesn't. (
#64↑)
—of why
anyone would let an atheist define God, but perhaps more important is the point that even still, I mean, what?
Whether or not you or I or anyone else believes in something that this other person over here has precisely no comprehension of is actually irrelevant to anything on any given day. The only reason it becomes relevant is if someone insists.
Thus, for our purposes, the absolutist dualism I call fallacious. What you've done, trying to corral all the miniscule godlings of earthbound religion under particular paradigm, is, indeed, a pretty common starting point.
Now, then, I need to clear something up, first:
Do you, or do you not believe in God (as defined) T? Or do you "sort of" believe in this instantiation of "God"?
Believe it or not, the question is irrelevant. That the answer is,
of course not, not so much permits, but, rather, obliges me to point out that there really is no point in saying so since there was never any reason to doubt in the first place except for the fact that nobody ever really pays attention to anything when discussing these subjects. (Or, just to be fair, there is obvious reason, since I violated the creed, code, and cult of evangelical Atheism by challenging an article of faith and failing to recite the proper stations.)
And if you don't like that definition of "God", provide another. At which point, I will ask: "Do you believe in that "God" or not? Or sort of? See where this is going?
As others seem to be wrestling with, how does one "sort of" believe in something?
This "sort of" bit people wrestle with is, to the one, answered reasonably and comprehnsibly enough by our neighbor
Iceaura↑.
To the other,
and this is the general answer to this issue: The word for what you're describing—
Let's assign "God" a value of "Omnipotent, omniscient creator of all there is" - that would be in the ballpark for a lot of theists...
—is "monotheism", though, in truth, I'm pretty sure that, quite technically, you already knew that. And here is a random thesis more general than you in particular:
Actually, in the context of people who would claim, as Dywyddyr suggests, to know my record, perhaps some instinctively dodge direct address of monotheism. I can't actually say that's what happens, but the thing is that these are among the only relevant religion-related pronouncements I've made over the course of recent years, so it's always weird when people precisely miss what is at the heart of what we're all supposedly able to recognize so simply. Believe in God? What do we mean by God? Should I be surprised if an evangelical atheist can't answer that question? To the other, most believers in monotheism don't actually believe in a monotheistic godhead; they abide a subject deity, one constricted by rules,
i.e., an authority greater than the subject godhead. What do we mean by God? It makes a difference.
There are a couple times in the preceding discourse I used a line about studying and learning about religion. It really is important, because, while there are many ways to define religion, one inevitable aspect is communal expression, and we generally only remember to think about that when making political complaints about religion. You're familiar with dialectics, and, yes, I do find it strange how there seems to be a tendency to shy away from the word in my society even while people engage, and also seek to understand, the processes. But they stay away from the fundamentals for two reasons: Hegel is long and boring, even in the short volumes; Communists love dialectics beyond love, and we might suggest, as a generalized prejudice, an abusive relationship. American society, for instance, pretends to not like Communists, so we're constantly rediscovering what we refused to pay attention to the first time around. Or, you know, the most recent; I personally believe the historical cycles are accelerating, the periods contracting. (It's a mass media thing, and I keep foolishly expecting some manner of stabilization.)
Aside from dialectics, you might be one who remembers me using the phrase, "psychoanalytic meaning of history", a post-Freudian concept derived by classicist Norman O. Brown in the mid-1950s.
And in either case, it's something pretty much everyone does, anyway: When we consider history, a significant portion of our analysis is given to interpretation. Here are four important words:
monotheism, henotheism, kathenotheism, panentheism.
Sometimes it is hard to see monotheism in henotheistic or kathenotheistic expressions, but that's part of the point; if one is a monotheist, henotheism and kathenotheism can be very, very easy. Judaism and Islam alike account for this. What most recognize as the First Commandment can serve for persecuted Jews as dissimulation (al taqiyya) provides for Muslims. Christians, at least in my lifetime, don't seem to recognize this, and weirdly enough it all revolves around our
metaphorical hearts: The First Commandment is to keep God in your heart: Do what one must, but don't dare forget Him for a moment. No, really, that's the point of the words "before me". And dissimulation? Imagine hiding all your outward symbols but reciting your prayers inwardly and maintaining your appropriate observations internally. There is actually an important story in American literature exploring notions of inward religious ritual, but in a manner similar to Twain, the reader is not so much instructed in the volume, but advised in another story, to not treat such stories in that way. That is, while I generally hew to the advice, neither am I allowed to make the rule that the one thing I'm not supposed to say here is anything that refers to
Franny.
The Sufi, incidentally, would agree that I probably shouldn't say anything. But that's beside the point. What I'm after is that I don't think I'm actually raising any extraordinary issues. But the Sufi does purport to pursue a particular context of truth and reality; the rest, as the saying goes, is the balance of religion. And here we come back to Iceaura:
Possibility: One may harbor the belief that there is something to this God business, some obscure or suggested but very important truth or insight that is or appears to be misrepresented by all available descriptions or attributions of deity and is difficult or impossible to describe for oneself.
My version is that it simply doesn't matter if God exists or not. These petty godlings could, if we wish to entertain fantastic speculation, be derivative of extraterrestrials, but generally speaking, we humans invent them for the sake of our own necessity.
(To assuage the religious Atheists, we might make the specific point that if one of the gods earthlings do or have worshipped actually is an extraterrestrial intelligence, there is no direct evidence to properly suggest the possiblity regardlesss of our lacking direct evidence to properly suggest extraterrestrial intelligence. Wow, what a wasted sentence.)
―End Part I―
