Powerful Argument to bring Atheist to Spiritual Line

Interesting.
I think he is proposing the only idea of god that I have a prayer of supporting.
The god that can be imagined is not god.
I'm pretty down with that.

 

I can support many versions of gods, some imaginable, others, conceivably not. Quite possibly the god he suggests, but not for the reasons he presents.

 

I agree with you there. The Pascal's Wager argument holds absolutely no water with me, but the idea of god he is suggesting is quite in line with mine, and that is more important to me. There is no doctrine to be a slave to or embarrassed by. God is the great unknown.

 

However, there is a semantics problem here. You can put the label "God" on pretty much anything. Some say that existence is God. I believe existence exists. If "unimaginable" is the only condition you put on God, then sure, I can believe that, but that indicates a lot of things I'm not sure Dattaswami means to imply. For instance, that means that God is, among other things, a square triangle, an object which is not itself and existing and nonexisting at the same time. The problem then lies in the fact that from this conceivably reasonable God, Dattaswamit then reads other things into it. According to his site, he advocates the truth of the Vedas, that the caste system is good, that one's bond to one's children and life are bad, that one should believe that monks can go indefinitely without food, that meditating is an accurate form of data acquisition and so on.

This is why I always ask for a definition of the God in question. A definition tells us exactly what needs to be provided in order to justify belief, and exactly what things we should believe as a consequence of the belief in that God.

However, I'm not even sure Dattaswami has read so far into my posts that he knows I've been asking for this definition since February.

 

This makes absolutely no sense as do most of your posts.

Pascal's Wager is just silly, so why try to poorly reword it?

 

My agreement with him is very narrow and focused. Believing in god without being able to conceptualize him/her/it. The idea of a four sided triangle, though impossible, is understandable in its impossibility. God even escapes that. Totally removed from the human discussion.
As for the rest, these are the same devotions to doctines that others have about biblical matters and do not have my support, either. But he is closer to my understanding, or lack of same, of god than anyone else I have read here, in a very narrow sense.

 

But what if it's part of my job to specifically not believe in stuff that there is no evidence for? I'm not very well going to be swayed by this bet am I? I'll take the fire because there being fire there doesn't make any sense. If I get birned, it just means somebody played a cruel trick on me.