A Metaphorical God
- Thread starter Nick Danger
- Start date
Knot the same kind elements though eh. Is your finger an element of your hand or what?
There are many. I think god is the highest aspiration of the human consciousness. It is not something outside us. It is us or more correctly Us. The bible is more a handbook for human interaction than a holy book. Of course, there is a lot of irrelevant stuff that was put in there by those who would control us. That would be the overburden to sift through.
For me the word "God" has come to represent all the good stuff, beauty, wonder, charity, human insight and potential, truth, honesty, the list goes on. I can say "God speaks to me" in regards to intuitive understanding the same way I can say "Santa brought me a present" or that "Mother Nature" worked up a pretty good sunset yesterday. The idea of a supernatural entity of some sort doesn't really come into the picture at this point, it's just a word to describe a lot of stuff the true nature of which is presently beyond my understanding. That being said, I am certainly not shut off to the idea of something larger than what we know now.
Like the avatar. The raccoon is looking out from behind the leaves thinking, "Is it safe out there?"
The water is fine. There are a few piranha out here but they are mostly toothless.
It's hard not to see hard line atheists as cut from the same cloth as the unshakable believers. Both sides flat out deny the possibility that the other may be right. They are all creatures of black or white in a grey universe. The words "I don't know" don't seem to be in either's vocabulary. Does it not follow to reason that when considering an issue where there is no definitive proof one way or the other that there is no right or wrong?
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One person's truth is another person's BS. There are no absolutes (except in one's own mind, perhaps).
"Nobody is right if everybody is wrong" - Buffalo Springfield
In my world, everybody is right because the truth is relative to the beholder. It is the ones who think they are the only one or group that has the truth that are dangerous to the rest of us.
I heard once that organized religion has done for true spirituality much the same that Alphaghetti did for Italian cuisine.
Is there any text in the Bible that suggests this interpretation? Or by metaphor do we just mean whatever the hell you feel like?
The above was essentially my understanding of the following quote:
'O SON OF BEAUTY! By My spirit and by My favor! By My mercy and by My beauty! All that I have revealed unto thee with the tongue of power, and have written for thee with the pen of might, hath been in accordance with thy capacity and understanding, not with My state and the melody of My voice.'
67th Hidden Word from the Arabic, by Bahá’u’lláh
Perhaps, but that doesn't mean both sides are equally likely to be correct, especially when an extraordinary claim is made for which there should be definitive proof but there isn't. A universe with a deity in it ought to be significantly and detectably different from one without, there should be solid evidence that it exists, but there isn't. There is no evidence that can be offered in support of the claim that there is such a being that doesn't admit of more prosaic explanations. Trying to explain something that's complex and difficult to understand, like the universe, by postulating something even more complex and difficult to understand, like a deity, doesn't explain anything, it just generates something else that needs to be explained.
What a strange world you inhabit; you're flirting with a false dichotomy there. I'd agree that people who claim absolute knowledge and admit no possibility that they could be wrong are dangerous, but it is possible to know that some things are true and some things are false. To hold that position consistently, for instance, you'd have to argue that creationism is an accurate description of reality for those who happen to believe it, and evolution is an accurate description of reality for those who happen to believe it. That's not the way it works.
well if Dex was God that's how it would be. None of this keeping the sheep in the dark crap!
that's why
That is a funny but very appropo way to put it; a more light-hearted way of saying what Bill Maher once said; "religions are the bureaucracies between god and man". Or as I put it a few times; religions give us the Disney version. Meaning, what they say isn't quite what the original story went like.
That's where a metaphorical God shows its worth. The need to explain becomes unimportant, the word God (and by extension the deity concept) becomes just a thought used to describe another thought. I see no definitive proof one way or the other for a deity, in fact given the traditional interpretation of the concept as some sort of supreme consciousness I find the thought hard to take seriously. However I am not so quick to write off the possibility that
something a little more Obiwan-Kenobi-ish where a unifying force of some yet-to-be-conceived description does exist, and in a form much more worthy of the "God" name than some wizened old gent with a big "G" on his sweatshirt. Just like "Santa" and "Mother Nature" can signify a deeper, more expansive force than a simple human-with-a-few-extras concept, "God" in it's true nature is yet to be adequately described.
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That's ok as long as one remembers that neither truth may have any accuracy pertaining to reality.
Um, yeah. What Dex said.