Just look at this like a 'what if' scenario. You can believe anything you want, but for discussion purposes, what do you think god is like? Use your observation powers, anecdotal evidence, or your own experience. Even atheists can participate.. just make the assumption that there is a god, then tell us what you think he is like based on the world around you. If that is too hard, no problem. 'I have no idea' is a good answer, too. Now, if you have a personal issue with god.. if you have deep seated hostility or anger, i understand. It is hard to be objective with those emotions clouding your thinking processes. But perhaps you can tell us what happened to you, personally, that resulted in your anger with god, & how that colored your perception of him. I'm not wanting theological or denominational descriptions, or quotes from someone else on what they think god is like, but your own personal experience & analysis. I'll start. 1. God is very mysterious. Thousands of years of human history have not brought us to any consensus as to the nature or even existence of god. This is probably the central question for human philosophy, yet we don't really know much about him. 2. God is distant. He has what seems to be a 'laissez faire' view of humanity. Things go on pretty much randomly, with no apparent goal or purpose. He does not seem to be involved in our social processes. He does not intervene if we are stupid or destructive, but lets us do whatever we want. 3. God is not moved by death. Humans are terrified of death. We agonize over it, pace around, wringing our hands over wrongful death, injustice, or suffering. But god seems unmoved by it. The whole system of life on earth revolves around death. 4. God has allowed or provided a beautiful world for us. Beauty & awe are all around us, & move us to powerful emotions. The natural world is both terrifying & beautiful. The variety is amazing, & the nature of the universe is beyond our understanding, even after thousands of years of collective knowledge. 5. God is orderly. Laws of nature are consistent, & dependable. Humans may be fickle, but god is not. Those are a few things to get things started.. this is a philosophical exercise, & we can examine or rebut any offers or descriptions. Please don't take offense FOR god, or anyone else, if someone's description does not meet your standard. I'd like to hear ANY opinions, even far out ones, if they have a rational basis.
God is a circle that it's center is nowhere and it's periphery everywhere (sorry if forget who said that quote) Same can be said about void .
It is rather philosophical and yeah i am an atheist : god is the beginning and the no beginning , everything a nothing, everywhere and nowhere , a presence and an absence , the meaning and the void , love and emptiness , happiness and sorrow . To use a bit of Aristotle our soul is both rational and intellectual , i feel that each time our rationality is pushing god in the gaps our philosophical intellect is expanding those gaps into new horizons. Excuse my poor English , what i am trying to say is that god is our engine since for every piece of god we unveil as nature more god is created through new questions . Think of Sisyphus pushing his rock up hill only that when he reaches to the top instead of the rock rolling down the hill is getting higher.
I'll play. First off I think you have the gender wrong. The Goddess is clearly female. But that femaleness isn't about lacy clothes or reading Nora Roberts. It's the femininity of the living universe, the life force. It includes the femininity of the the aphid and the black widow spider and many other manifestations both light and dark. Gentle at times and cruel at others. There may be a male consort but He is subordinate to Her power, living and dying and being reborn from her in an eternal mutual circle of life. After all maleness is only one strategy that She uses to increase the complexity and therefore beauty of life. Some species dispense with it altogether and some manifest it only briefly. So is She just a symbol? Or is She real? I think BOTH and NEITHER. She's a mystery and as real as a tornado or a newborn faun. She's an evolving Goddess ever changing just as we and the cosmos are ever changing. "The Goddess is in every blade of grass, every drop of rain, every clod of dirt, every breath of air. She is ocean and continent and glacier and coral reef and rain forest and desert. She is our beating heart, our brains thinking, our bowels digesting, our cells dividing. She is the stars and the planets and the moons and the spaces in between. She is being born, growing, living, and dying, and being born again. She is quantum chaos and Einstein's relativity and unified field equations as yet undiscovered. She is outside us wherever we look, and inside us wherever we feel. She is living nature personified,... and, never forget this, She is our heart's relationship to that personification of nature. For that last is where the love comes from! And Her true Power!"
Jesus revealed the father of creation when he said, "I am the truth." Since the son of god is the ideal we call Truth, his father, logically, must be the ever unfolding Reality which sires what is true and forms the body of what is ideally, The Truth.
Not true. On the first hand you say that the center of God is nowhere and the periphery is everywhere. In such a description there can be no void. Therefore the two in comparison are in conflict with one another.
The poor English is not a problem but the leaning on Aristotle is, and that Aristotle citation is also irrelevant to the requirements of the OP. To me in regard to the OP. God is!
I didn't gave an explanation my bad, it was a reference to ancient Greek religion where Chaos and Erevos (void) stood next to each other until love was born and fertilized the universe .
Is that explanation taken from your own experience or is it (as it seems to be) taken from the thoughts of someone else who might have written a statement regarding that subject in the past?
If we take for granted the notion that religion is the attempt to seek God or Godness then we can view all of religious writing as a human attempt to explain the unexplainable. One can conceptualize God as the energy that drives the universe, like the electricity in the wires in the walls of our house that can only be enacted only by our actions. We create godness by our actions.
He" is just jealous of people who believe in Fantasy worlds they construct in order to avoid Reality.
...Istar.... A Goddess who preaches that a face is a fortune for women. The fantasy world of romance and sexual love needs only the handsome prince to acquire it and lay it at the feet of this harlot, whose worship is the mirror, and world is cosmetology.
Who's to say that Kevin Smith wasn't "divinely inspired" in his movie......as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were supposedly "divinely inspired" in their writings? He cast Alanis.....maybe God is a female. Hell, maybe She's Canadian with a nice rack.
God is exactly like Truth. Truth is a spirit of our mind which images, correspondingly, one to one, the real world which exists externally to us. That world insists that "I am," and everything a new born baby does will find a response in kind from Realty. Reality is imaged inside our head as what we call Truth. God is all there is, ie; Reality itself... the whole external existence beyond our mind is the almighty God to which all life must bow: ...Truth inside our head, is the Holy Spirit, the image of God, almighty Reality, and is present inside our mind when our thinking correctly images the TRUTH, or the picture of Reality inside our mind. ////// TRINITY: Our (1) Lord is Truth, in whose (2) Spirit of mind we must commit our lives, in order to face (3) Father Nature, the Almighty Reality, within which we all exist.
But if God is the creator of humans, our flaws are a result of his design failure. To argue that free will excuses God from this is violating the tenant that we are created by God. The fact that some animals are born blind, deaf, others with horrible spinal issues, etc .... is not proof of order. It is proof of very sloppy work. And the failing galaxies and stars around the Universe - what order does this establish ?
Flaws? What flaws? Any flaw in humans or nature is your own limited perception. God is perfect and therefore creation is perfect. It is our inability to comprehend the infinite that leads to judgment.
Supposedly God created the dinosaurs....then they got wiped out. So did He miss the comet on a collision course with Earth....or did He ordain them being wiped out. If the first...He's lazy. If the second...then He wiped out an entire taxonomy of species that HE created, indicating that He wasn't particularly supportive of His OWN creations....a sign of a "mistake". - - - Updated - - - See above...were the dinosaurs "perfect in their creation"?
The Truth is that Reality is like that. The Bible even tells the comprehensive reader this is the case: Gen. 6:6 And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. 7 And the LORD, (the force behind the ever unfolding Reality of the Universe) said, I will destroy man (of these types and species) whom I have created (for the purpose to mentally model my image of Reality), destroy them, (of these types and species), from the face of the earth, (deeming them extinct); both (this species and kind of) man, and (his present abstract idea of) the beast (of the earth), and (his idea of) the creeping thing (of the earth), and (his idea of) the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them (in this process of evolution).
She's a bit rough around the edges. As an evolving and ever changing Deity She has occasional bouts of irrational violence. Cosmic PMS. An asteroid collision, a supernova here and there, a mutant plague virus. Gentle Demeter and Murderous Kali in one beautiful package. In the randomness of natural selection we have reached a point where we can serve as Her junior co-creators on this planet. Clean things up after one of Her bouts of rage, stabilize areas devastated by volcanoes, earthquakes, perhaps even turn deserts into jungles, but carefully, and with foresight, so as not to crack Her Demeter shell. We would function as Her Midol. Of course we can choose the opposite, scar Her face and poison her breath. Then the Demeter shell cracks and the fierce Kali comes bubbling forth to rend and destroy. Extinction is Her way when a species destroys it's habitat. It makes tremendous sense to imagine the Deity as female.
What was imperfect about them. Let's take "God" out of th equation as the tendency is to anthropomorphize the infinite into a deity. What is imperfect about anything in the universe and how do you judge it to be so?
