God

patrickq wrote: lazland wrote: I like the point made about God not wishing to create automatons, but humans with free will. <snip> What’s hard for me to understand is why he would subject us to such misery. You could have free will in a universe without rape, war, mental illness, etc.

He doesn't subject us to such misery. That is the point. We do it to ourselves.

lazland wrote: I like the point made about God not wishing to create automatons, but humans with free will. <snip>

What’s hard for me to understand is why he would subject us to such misery. You could have free will in a universe without rape, war, mental illness, etc.

I like the point made about God not wishing to create automatons, but humans with free will. That is what I believe, but that there will be a case to answer for your actions in the next phase, call it judgement, heaven, whatever.

I have been studying Judaism a great deal in recent times, and have been thinking seriously about converting, or at least trying to live by Noahide principles. Torah speaks to me in a way which the New Testament or Pauline Epistles never have, and I thoroughly enjoy reading the words and works of Jonathan Sacks especially, who combines a deep faith with reason, humour, realism, and the stark truth that we can only aspire to be the best we can within the confines of human nature, and that is the real message of God. The Almighty has provided us, through direct interventions, with a template of how to live our lives, and I appreciate the fact that Judaism, above Christianity, deals with the here and now, rather than with the afterlife.

We all have a choice in life. Follow the path of light, or that of darkness. Life is terribly hard for so many people, and I appreciate deeply the riches and happiness I enjoy, more so as I get older, and more deeply spiritual. It is my belief that mankind simply has to mature. In reality, many of our leaders actions are no better than those of warlords of times past, and Jewish texts deal with that history, consequences, and outcomes very directly. Far too many of us also still follow idiots in power, most of them vain and narcissistic, without any free will, or thoughts as to the consequences of our support, at all.

There will, hopefully, come a time when we can all live in peace and harmony, with riches and peace for all.

There.....I have finished on a nice Jon Anderson note

The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.   - Lao Tzu

 

The god that can be defined is not the eternal God. 

God’s abode is beyond all vibratory creation.  As Jaketejas mentioned, He is not confined by time and space.  God is beyond the little ego’s understanding.  Beyond any thought process; beyond the scope of our imagination.

The human intellect can only get so close with certain attributes.   I think first and foremost should be that of Unconditional Love.  Just think about that- Unconditional.  

There’s absolutely no reason for fear.  Fear will only distance you from that which you seek.

It may also be somewhat erroneous to think that God created the universe, but rather that an infinitesimal part of his infinite being became the universe.

Even though His existence is beyond the material, astral and causal, He is very much present in every single atom in the cosmos.

God is everything; there can be no limitation or confinement.  He is personal and impersonal, formless but can take on any form.  He can appear as Light, Mother, Father, Divine Friend or any other form a true devotee holds dear.

 

Due to the law of cause and effect, free will may not be that apparent.  Karmic reach spans numerous lifetimes and seemingly seals our fate.  Because of our free will we ventured off and subjugated ourselves to delusion.

BaldJean wrote: ... you are confusing two things. if a theologian says "the bible says the earth is 10,000 years old" then this is a theological statement about the bible, and science has to keep out of it. however, if a theologian says "the earth is 10,000 years old because the bible says so" then he uses a theological argument in a scientific debate, which, as I mentioned before, he should not. I hope you notice the subtle difference

What does the word God mean to you?

progaardvark wrote: I've noticed that the "learning camp" idea you mention is also a common theme that is heard from the psychic/medium/intuitive folks. It's more on the lines of coming down to this plane of existence to learn lessons to improve ourselves, review what we've learned when we return to a higher plane (afterlife), then come back for more lessons (reincarnation).

Logan wrote: That's interesting. It seems there was some confusion as I never intended to imply that Occam's Razor is the apparent reasoning behind the quote. Jaketejas was responding to a post I made to Yesesis about his revelation where I brought up Occam'r razor, and earlier in the thread I had responded to his revelation by starting my post with "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof". I feel that both concepts apply to the claim/ revelation. They both relate to what I have said in this thread on a particular matter, and I would argue that one can find relations between the concepts themselves. Methinks that it was a more mundane comment than you inferred. I'm not convinced that Occam's razor always, or does indeed at all, favour divine intervention because that requires the assumption that God exists, the assumption that God is omnipotent, the assumption that God created the universe and other assumptions about the nature of God.   And then one gets into the whole if a God was required to create the universe, was another needed to create God? And so on. It's not as simple as we only require one assumption, God, we then have to make assumptions about God. Are you familiar with the Solomonoff prediction and Occam's razor? I'm going to lazily quote from an article on this instead of trying to explain it in my own words (it's late): https://unherd.com/2018/09/can-occams-razor-prove-god-doesnt-exist/ Tom Chivers wrote: ...the Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne, in a 2010 paper, deployed Occam’s razor when he suggested that God is the simplest explanation for the universe, because God is a single thing. “God did it” is certainly simpler to say than “the universe emerged from quantum fluctuations in space-time”. But I would say that Occam’s razor is an argument against the existence of God. Who’s right? Conveniently, in the 1960s, the mathematicians Ray Solomonoff and Andrey Kolmogorov developed a mathematically formalised version of Occam’s razor. One version of it is known as ‘minimum message length‘, and it asks: what is the shortest computer program that could produce what we’re seeing? Let’s start with a simpler example than the creation of the universe: producing a string of numbers. I’ve taken this example from a Czech mathematician/computer scientist called Michal Koucký. He gives three strings of numbers: 33333333333, 31415926535, and 84354279521. If you wanted to write a program that carried on those strings for a million digits, what’s the shortest it could be? The first you could do very easily: a simple bit of code saying “print the number 3 a million times”. You could do it in four lines of the beginners’ programming language BASIC. The other two look random. But, in fact, the second string is simply the first 11 digits of pi, and you could print it out to a million digits by using one of the many quite simple algorithms which determine the digits of pi. The third, however, is truly random. To write it out to a million digits you would need the program to specify all one million of them. According to the ‘minimum message-length’ version of Occam’s razor, the first string is the simplest; the second is nearly as simple; and the third is the most complex. So what does this mean for Swinburne? Well, the equations needed to describe the Big Bang are certainly complex. But they are sufficiently simple for humans to have written them. The algorithms needed to describe God – an all-powerful, all-knowing being – are not. We haven’t even managed to write software that’s as powerful as a human brain yet. From a minimum message-length perspective, God is much more complex – and therefore unlikely – than physics. The same is true of evolution – you can quite easily write a program that approximates evolution by natural selection. But an intelligence sufficient to design all the creatures that evolution has made would be amazingly hard to program. It also has implications for arguments within science. The “many worlds” interpretation of quantum theory, which says that every fraction of a second the universe splits into billions of parallel universes, sounds complex. The alternative, the “Copenhagen” interpretation, which says that quantum events aren’t resolved until they are observed, needs only one universe, and so sounds simpler. But the program you’d need to create millions of universes would be pretty much the same as a program needed to create one universe – just have an extra line in it which says “do that again”, essentially – while a program that had to keep track of what every human in the world was looking at would be much more complex. According to minimum message-length Occam’s razor, a cosmos consisting of infinite universes can be ‘simpler’ than one that contains just one. None of this means that these arguments are correct. The Copenhagen interpretation might be right despite being more complex. God might still exist; if the evidence shows that intelligent creation is more likely than the Big Bang, then it doesn’t matter how simple the theories are. But it means that you need more evidence for them. William of Ockham was by all accounts one of the finest philosophical minds of his time, but he was also a friar and a Christian. I don’t know if he would be pleased to see me using his razor as an argument against the existence of God. But I think he would appreciate the simplicity of Solomonoff and Kolmogorov’s update of his argument for simplicity.

Interesting! I know little about computer programing, so I will leave this quote from composer Olivier Messiaen speaking of God (paraphrase), "You are complex, and yet you are simple. You are so simple." More poetic than a direct reply to the example, but if humor makes it way into debates, why not poetry?

I'm actually at a planetarium right now

Some people are so literal they believe that dinosaur bones were planted by evil spirits to confuse the humans of today. Or that humans and dinosaurs coexisted. When others read Genesis, they might think ... if I were an ancient person trying to describe the magnificence of creation through something like an evolutionary process of which I had minimal understanding, this is what it might sound like. It really is beautifully written. (Then, a bunch of really nasty stuff happens after that.)