Mental Images of One God

What is God? According to our ancestors, who recorded their beliefs in the Bible, God is an all-powerful and all-knowing entity, living somewhere outside of our world, who created the world and controls what happens in it. My definition of God is slightly different; I tend to think that God is not an entity outside nature, but nature itself, as postulated by a 17th century Jewish theologian, Baruch Spinoza, in Holland.

Our very distant ancestors were polytheists; they invented the idea of multiple gods. Our less distant ancestors replaced this idea with the mental image of a personal--omnipotent and omniscient--ruler. Most people on earth still believe in a personal God, but some try to develop a more recent mental image of the ruler, formulated by Spinoza. All three descriptions refer to the same everlasting entity, no matter how it is called. It is not a sin to think that laws of Nature are equivalent to God's laws, while praying. Do you agree?

An interesting article about Spinoza appeared in The New York Times, written by a professor of philosophy, Steven Nadler:
http://opinionator blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/judging-spinoza/
It generated many interesting online comments. A reader, RMC, wrote: "I know many Christians and Jews who practice their religious traditions although their own beliefs are secular. They make no secret of their sentiments. Spinoza was excommunicated during a time of religious orthodoxy and in that respect his experience is much like Galileo's. When the Catholic Church repudiated its treatment of Galileo, it was not merely saying that the earth revolves around the sun. It was saying that punishing the members of its congregation for thinking for themselves, including about church dogma, was parochial and destructive." With regard to independent thinking, several readers emphasized that traditional religious ceremonies, and respect for legends, do help to keep social groups together, even when people know that biblical legends do not represent historical truth.

Ludwik Kowalski (see Wikipedia)

 

All gods are imaginary so they can be whatever the person wants them to be.

 

good post, but I do have issues with the bolded line. for atheists, there is no entity, everlasting or otherwise. that is to say, we're not 'most people', though we're fast becoming 'most people'

and I do think you're more likely to strike atheists practising religious traditions and rituals in the catholic church and the synagogue, than you are in Protestantism. two reasons .. a) catholics and jews have more traditions and rituals, which anyone can engage in, and b) neither group is interested in converting (therefore non-believing participants have their privacy and opinions respected).

what little there is in the way of traditional and ritual in Protestantism - ie, pretty much nothing, since it was all stripped away by that fun killer, martin luther, and his spiritual descendents - who didn't hold with colour and texture - is preserved for the pious. anyone outside the bubble who joins in for kicks will swiftly be identified and swooped on. if this was just a social eagerness to be inclusive it'd be great, but it never is in a protestant church. they always want to shove the lord up your skirts.

 

Atheists comprise an estimated 2.01%, and non-religious a further 16% of the world populationThere's a possibility that you're deluding yourself.

 

hardly. I live in a place where atheist and/or non-religious already outnumber the religious considrably. If you think the same isnt going to happen in america then I fear YOU might be delusional. It will be the same across most of the western nations which havent already become atheist majority.

 

I live in a place where there are an abundance of blond haired people.....what should I surmise from that? And, since you included "non-religious", include you definition of "non-religious". Here's mine; a 'non-religious' is a person that doesn't subscribe to any particular religious philosophy. A deist or agnostic would fall into that category. And yes, I agree, there are many agnostics, including myself. But explain this:
Orthodox Christianity is Russia's largest religion with 75% of the population belonging to the Orthodox Christian denomination. Islam is professed by 5% of the population. Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism and Buddhism are professed by 1% of the population each.
This is a country that was void of religious practice for 3 generations. What a great opportunity for atheism to grab hold. It didn't.

 

oh my ....

seriously? well I'll go ahead and assume you are. russians never stopped being highly religious. it's fairly surprising (obviously) that you think they did. you're talking about a culture still many decades away from emancipation from subservience and fear of authority (an essential condition for atheism as a broad scale social choice). just like china, such cultures are fertile soil for belief, so much so that even ostensibly compulsory atheism did absolutely nothing to slow it. In fact it probably made it worse.

in the meantime, much information can be gleaned from the fact blonde hair is predominant in a particular region. what an odd comparison

 

What you imply is that when a climate to promote atheism prevails (China and communist Russia) instead of people rejecting religion in favor of state enforced atheism...they become fertile ground for religious belief? Isn't that somewhat a paradox for your 'rapidly expanding' atheism?
My reference to those mythical blond people is simply that because a 'region' has an abundance of 'anything' (blonds, atheists or whatever) it isn't indicative of a worldwide trend. It's an anomaly.

 

Um, while I don't have a bold statement to make in this discussion, I think I should point out that none of the arguments you have presented have actually touched the discussion you seem to be trying to have, that of the long term spread of atheism.

That being said, I believe that entire discussion is off topic for the thread.

 

It's not an anomally! The atheist majority countries mentioned above have only become that way in recent decades. Before that they were just like America is now. If you seriously believe there are isolated pockets of long standing atheism, I suspect you choose to pretend it's not a growing phenomenon in much of the west. I can only guess at why. In the meantime, each new generation is less fearful of the consequences of non-belief than the last, and we gain more and more knowledge about the natural world. Even private, family faith traditions struggle to survive once the external threats are gone. It happened here, and it'll happen there too - eventually. America simply doesn't have a sufficiently subservient culture to maintain widespread religion once all bets are off.

Both russian and chinese cultures are highly conducive to belief. No politics has managed to change that thus far. Wealth and democracy might, one day. But what does that tell you about compulsory atheism as a real driver of actual atheism?

 

Spinoza's god was the one Einstein felt affinity with.

For me, if God is not consciousness, then nothing makes any sense at all. Not talking about ego consciousness, as that manifests from a deeper consciousness, the consciousness from which the material universe came with a big bang.

 

I've also been fascinated by the theory. There is a similar one that says the Earth, itself, may be a living entity. That it lives in a way different than how we understand life, but that it lives, nonetheless. Certainly room to wiggle there, but it's an interesting thought.

 

To me at least...it would seem "God" it the product of human imagination seeking answers to questions that do not lend themselves to rational, reality based thought. What is the "Meaning of Life", would be an example.

 

42. that's the answer.

 

I won't argue that atheism and/ or agnosticism aren't on the rise. But I would venture that the trend is leaning more toward deism than atheism. People simply don't want to cease to exist. Their ego and pleasure centers, once here want to continue 'being here', life is a 'good thing' for most people. They want it to go on in some way, shape or form after the body dies. Religion plays to that which accounts for it's success. Or it offers hope for those for whom life 'ain't all that good'. Atheism is rather empty and anti-climactic. I would imagine it plays well to anarchists and sociopaths.

 

In a more or less unprecedented turn of events, I can agree with a fair chunk of the to Spinoza commonly attributed ideas. However, it is in its essence a fairly tame idea. If treated as semantics, I don't see how it threatens anyone's religious preconceptions, other than semantically.

This is the reason why I can't call myself an atheist, even though it doesn't challenge any of the fundamental ideas that I once thought allowed me to label myself as such. Thus, I can sometimes use the idea of Spinoza's God to see if an atheist is honestly considering the arguments or if he or she is emotionally attached to atheism in the same way as one might accuse theists be attached to their respective religion.

Edit: It also brings up the interesting question that if the definition of God is this loose, then what stops us from taking a religious world view, identifying the God in that world view as merely some being within the world and then applying the word God to the entire world in Spinoza's way (as opposed to just the part that was previously called God)? This is why Spinoza's idea is at the same time quite profound, yet completely toothless. It shows us that so much of our reasoning is anchored in what we think our words mean, but it doesn't actually give us any interesting information in itself.

Edit2: I have many thoughts on the subject and wish that I had more to say, but the OP didn't provide a particularly interesting question. I could regurgitate everything I believe, but that would be very boring.

 

Actually, this answer *though acceptable in the past*, has been replaced by 31 after the claxon rebellion revealed a previously hidden manuscript produced by the tenants of Gargon 14. It is a seldom spoken reality that the planet Gargon was once rented out to the entity known as Jehovah on Earth to conduct experiments from afar before giving up and handing it over to mice.

 

My mental image of "God" has changed....it used to be-







But now it's...

 

bows before greatness

 

Empty and anti-climactic compared to what? the mental masturbation which climaxes with a spectacular "I'M A SPECIAL SNOWFLAKE, and I'm going to live FOREVER!"?

Anarchists maybe where you live, but it takes considerable anarchy to be a theist where I live. Ditto sociopathy. These things are very much a matter of perspective, obviously. Again, unless you're genuinely suggesting that most Norwegians are sociopaths?

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she made a great god

 

Yeah, sorta. Some want to think that they're 'special snowflakes'. Ya gotta admit that. Others want to believe that they're one of those snowflakes that fall on some glacier and will exist for quite some time. Others are happy with 'fall down and melt, WTF there's no point to anything.Actually that's what it all boils down to. Perspective. On one hand there's the 'no point' crowd and on the other hand, the 'is a point crowd'. But you can't have a game without 2 teams.

 

You are on to something that most people will run away from. It is a fact that the human ego doesn't want to see its end. And surely this is the source of most religions that offer a chance for the ego to continue on in some sort of paradise after death. So if god did not exist we would invent it.

Of course this doesn't say that god doesn't exist, a creator, but it does show us in very real terms how religion arose. Out of a yearning for the continuance of the ego after the death of the body.

I am fond of the idea of plants containing DMT as giving rise to some religions, for they show you another reality in which spiritual beings exist, and you even get to experience them. That dude who wrote Revelations was on some sort of drug.

Atheism offers no comfort to the ego, and so it will never be in the majority. When I was in Viet Nam, I saw a few young atheists change their beliefs. Ego trumped all, the fear of losing it. Not saying that all atheists change their minds when facing inevitable death at a young age, but many do. I saw it .

Most of the fierce ancient warriors took with them to the killing fields an idea that their ego would survive in the afterlife. It made dying easier. So, it is a tool for war in most cases.

 

Werp...

 

Especially naked, with that incredibly long hair. Very goddy.

 

What do you make of atheists in that case? Do we lack ego? I would dispute that.