Religion is not About God

[Reflex]

Religion is not about God, but about us. It's about personal wholeness and social coherence — that is, it's about developing healthy and robust personalities while at the same time constructing harmonious and cooperative social groups by constructing and maintaining shared worldviews composed of cosmological and moral elements that tell us who we are,where we come from and how we should live. Religion, in spite variegated and often contentious nature, gives us an orientation towards an ideal that is universally and exclusively human. And in spite of its sordid history, there is plenty of evidence to the point that there has never been a coherent human culture without a religious tradition.

Two things I've learned:

1) The power of any idea lies, not in its certainty or truth, but rather in the vividness of its human appeal and

2) it is what one believes rather than what one knows that determines conduct and dominates personal performances. Purely factual knowledge exerts very little influence upon the average person unless it becomes emotionally activated.

My current beliefs are very different than what I grew up with and continue to evolve because my desire for a comprehensive understanding of Ultimate Reality — of what must be in order for what is to be as it is — is more fundamental than my belief that God IS. Still, I would be foolish to claim that my beliefs are not conditioned by my personal history, culture, natural inclinations and what have you. In the end, however, God is what I want God to be.

Now, although it's just a blip on the radar screen of historical theism, virtually every discussion with respect to the reality of God that I've seen is in regards to what some philosophers of religion call “theistic personalism” or “neo-theism.” It is this kind of debate between atheists and theists, more than debate between theistic personalism and classical theism, that prompted me to favor the latter because with it I can have God without being saddled with all the reasoned objections that comes with former.

Because of what classical theism takes God to be, there is something so fundamentally absurd about God's non-existence that questions posed by scientific discoveries are superfluous or distracting at best, and circular at worst (as science cannot explain the lawful order it presupposes in order to explain things) are meaningless. Neither does it does much matter whether religious experiences are just effects of temporal lobe seizures, or even whether an all-powerful, all-good demiurge of the sort called theistic personalism calls 'God' should prevent more evil than is in fact prevented. And whether talking about the Big Bang as a singular event, an infinite number of universes, something from “nothing,” “branes” or whatever, there is always and inevitably the premise of a self-existing and indeterminate quantum field. There is no way of getting around it, and notwithstanding the aversion to calling this field a “first cause” because of its obvious theistic connotation, that's exactly what it is. It can even be said that this presumed first cause of science and the God of religion are one and the same; the former being the quantitative aspect of cognition and the latter the qualitative. But whether we call it 'God' or the 'quantum field,' it is "the circle of infinity whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere."

If all this makes it unacceptably difficult for the proponents of atheism to argue against or offends your sensibilities, that's too bad. If it means to you that I'm not open to alternatives, bear in mind that no self-respecting atheist will posit an argument against something about which he or she knows nothing or without positing a viable alternative. As I said in the beginning, religion is not about God, or even what is factually true, but about formulating a satisfying narrative consisting of cosmological and moral elements that tell me who I am, where I come from and how I should live.

[attofishpi]

Excellent post.

[Skip]

I don't care what you call it. I don't care what it's about. I don't care how you practice it.
As long as you keep it off people who didn't choose it.

[HexHammer]

Completely clueless OP.

It IS about god/s, why did the great flood occur? Because humans have become ungodly (atheistic) ..so yearh, you don't know what you are talking about.

[Reflex]

I don't care what you call it. I don't care what it's about. I don't care how you practice it.
As long as you keep it off people who didn't choose it.

I'll bet you're a proponent of "safe zones" on college campuses.

[Skip]

I don't care what you call it. I don't care what it's about. I don't care how you practice it.
As long as you keep it off people who didn't choose it.

I'll bet you're a proponent of "safe zones" on college campuses.

What the hell are safe zones? College campuses ought to be safe all over. Especially from crap science.

[Dalek Prime]

I have no issues reading mythology, or having it taught on a campus, whether Greek, Roman, Middle Eastern, Hindu, Chinese.... whatever. It's fun stuff. But to base one's whole being on it is another thing. So I'm with Skip on this.

[Nick_A]

Reflex wrote:

Religion is not about God, but about us. It's about personal wholeness and social coherence — that is, it's about developing healthy and robust personalities while at the same time constructing harmonious and cooperative social groups by constructing and maintaining shared worldviews composed of cosmological and moral elements that tell us who we are,where we come from and how we should live. Religion, in spite variegated and often contentious nature, gives us an orientation towards an ideal that is universally and exclusively human. And in spite of its sordid history, there is plenty of evidence to the point that there has never been a coherent human culture without a religious tradition.

You describe the human condition very well. As I understand it, ancient churches were actually esoteric schools in which techniques were taught to help a person to become open to turn to the light as described in Plato's cave analogy. But as we are, people fighting over different conceptions of world views or the shadows on the wall, harmony is impossible. Unfortunately churches become secularized and also become enchanted with the shadows on the wall so lose their inner potency.

I'll enjoy exchanging some ideas on both the God question and the question of the fallen human condition. First I'd like to give others interested in a mind stretch a chance to reply.

[Skip]

Talk is fine. Books - though an awful waste of paper sometimes - are okay.
Just don't try to make laws.

[Nick_A]

Skip wrote:

Talk is fine. Books - though an awful waste of paper sometimes - are okay.
Just don't try to make laws.

I know. That's what the communists do. They make laws and everyone suffers.

[sthitapragya]

True. Religion is about people with vested interests, making people believe in a God and then making those who believe in that God to believe themselves to be better than those who do not believe in that God, calling them unbelievers and then trying to convert the unbelievers or exterminating them. Religion is about money and power. Religion is about conning poor unsuspecting gullible people out of their hard earned money to get even more power and conning even more people out of their hard earned money. It is about greed and fear and power. It has never ever ever been about God and never will be.

[Skip]

Original Sin is experiencing the world as it is, instead of how some long-dead asshole wished it had been.

[attofishpi]

Completely clueless OP.

It IS about god/s, why did the great flood occur? Because humans have become ungodly (atheistic) ..so yearh, you don't know what you are talking about.

Oh dear, gonna have to add you to the fund_a_mental_list.

[Dalek Prime]

Original Sin is experiencing the world as it is, instead of how some long-dead asshole wished it had been.

Original sin is experiencing reality, period. We are the product of it (our individual creation).

[Reflex]

I know how boring it must me to read a post that leaves little room for a sensible rejoinder, so I'll just ignore responses like Skip's and Hex Hammer's.

Upon entering into the philosophy forum, we see being asked, is there is a God, and if so, what is God like? The philosophical Zeitgeist that has all but determined the discussions and debates about God for the last 50 years is theistic personalism,. but I think I've made it clear that classical theism plays a significant role I my worldview. This being so, debating God's existence puerile. As Eastern Orthodox scholar David Bentley Hart puts it: “When I say that atheism is a kind of obliviousness to the obvious, I mean that if one understands what the actual philosophical definition of 'God' is in most of the great religious traditions, and if consequently one understands what is logically entailed in denying that there is any God so defined, then one cannot reject the reality of God tout court without embracing an ultimate absurdity.” For in classical theism, saying God makes the world is not like saying that a blacksmith made a horseshoe — where the horseshoe might persist even if the blacksmith died — but rather like saying that a musician makes music, where the music would stop if the musician stopped playing.

With the first part of the question out of the way, what do I think God is like? Personalists like William Lane Craig and Alvin Plantinga reinforce the idea that God is just one being among many beings. And that's a shame.

I want to emphasize that classical theism is not a settled issue, but a term broadly used to distinguish an approach to God that is very different than contemporary theistic personalism, which I derisively call “superheroism.” One disagreement I have with Thomism has to do with creatio ex nihilo. Ex nihilo does not comport well with, ex nihilo nihil fit — out of nothing, nothing comes. Ex nihilo is subject to the same common sense criticism that Lawrence Krauss got for the title of his book, A Universe from Nothing. An alternative view is creatio ex deo — creation out of nothing apart from God himself. Now, I know ex deo can be interpreted as a kind of pantheism, but it's not. For to deny the possibility of God's volitional self-differentiation amounts to a denial of the very concept of his volitional absoluteness.

God-as-he-is-within-himself is indeed without parts; he is pure act (pure actuality). That is to say, God does not have being but is Being itself. He is not a composite of act and potency (potentiality). It follows from this that Creatorship is not an attribute of God, but rather the aggregate of God's immutable, eternal and acting nature. The universe may go through different phases where the “laws of nature” vary and there may be multiple universes, but God-as-he-is-within-himself is forever changeless.

The cover illustration of God without Parts by James E. Dolezal shows white light passing through a prism and a spectrum of colors coming out the other side. It's an appropriate analogy, especially if the prism is understood as representing God's will. We live, move and have our being in and as the spectrum of God's light, but as composite entities comprised of both act and potency. This is necessary because in order for us to have being, the purity of God's light cannot be evenly distributed. Purity is the goal, not the condition of our existence. One might say that the infinite I AM escapes from the fetters of personality absolutism and achieves liberation from the experiential limitations of unqualified infinity through the exercise of inherent and eternal free will. And this divorcement from unqualified infinity makes it forever impossible for him to act alone as the personality-absolute (or superhero) without acting contrary to his divine nature.

“Anguish” is not necessary, but it is inevitable in a continuously evolving space-time universe that our cognitive ability perceives as having both a quantitative and qualitative aspects — it's almost like being cognizant of living in two parallel universes at the same time. In any event, the fact of evolution implies incompleteness, and what reasonable person decries the imperfections of a ship still under construction? I suppose one can say, along with with Steven Weinberg, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless,” but that point of view has serious implications and ramifications with respect to what it means to be human.