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Originally posted by Illusionsaregrander
I do think that God is the totality of "All that is" and I do believe that each "thing" within that totality is a fragment of God, serving as "cells" in God being as a loose analogy.
Originally posted by Astyanax
Fine, so long as one doesn't expect this God to actually do anything.
Originally posted by Astyanax
Since this exchange, Illusionsaregrander has made it clear that she does not, indeed, expect her God to do anything Godlike. It just sits there, emanating divinity, and that's that.
Originally posted by Astyanax
My own criteria of divinity are decidedly more stringent. God must be all-seeing
Originally posted by Astyanax
and all-powerful. He must lay down the laws of creation for mortals to follow.
Originally posted by Astyanax
He must also be able to break those laws (ie perform miracles) if and when He chooses.
Originally posted by AstyanaxThese are the common attributes of God in all religious cultures. Illusionsaregrander interpreted the opening passage of the Rig-Veda entirely after her own lights in this post, pretending that the description she quotes is one of God. In fact, it refers to the formless chaos out of which the universe is said, together with the gods, to have arisen.
The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe.
Who then knows whence it has arisen?
Whence this creation has arisen
- perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not -
the One who looks down on it,
in the highest heaven, only He knows
or perhaps even He does not know.
Originally posted by Astyanax
This is made abundantly clear in the text itself. The Rig-Veda insists that the beginning is unknown and nameless. It is Illusionsaregrander who has named it 'God'.
Originally posted by Astyanax
It is not the same thing as showing the futility of making rational statements about God. The second is what I have been trying to do throughout this thread,
Originally posted by Astyanax
by showing that all definitions of God--all definitions, at least, that demand Godlike behaviour from the entity they define--are irrational and paradoxical, and therefore futile. God is either beyond rationality or beyond existence.
...the Christian God, which I assume by your description is the one you advocate...
(My conception of God) would be (all-seeing), if you use "seeing" interchangeably with "aware of all that is."
Technically, even an unaware universe (lays down the laws of creation for mortals to follow).
Originally posted by Astyanax
He must also be able to break those laws (ie perform miracles) if and when He chooses.
The gods came afterwards
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You demand irrationality. And so, if someone offers rational argument, there is no point. Some people can have rational arguments about God. I did on my little quiz. It was completely logically consistent. And it did not require deviation from reason. YOU cannot have a rational argument about God, and thats fine. But your God is only one version of God. And I would suggest to you that the remarkable similarity you see running through ALL religions (you claim) is probably due more to the fact that what we read about ALL religions tends to be filtered through a Christian culture before it gets to us, or, as in Tibetan Buddhism, other religious beliefs were merged into the core teaching to make it more palatable as it moved around geographically and displaced other religions.
Even the ten commandments are entirely rational, if you view them for what they are. A manual for playing the game of group selection and winning. The Christian God is little more than Nature anthropomorphized, given a beard and the temperament of a pissy child and sent up into the sky. Hardly "Godlike" as I see it.
Originally posted by Astyanax
You disappoint me, Illusionsaregrander. I'd taken you for someone with more perceptivity than that. No wonder you've been doing your best to mug me. You've been gnawing at the wrong end of the stick from the very outset.
Originally posted by Astyanax
I am, in functional terms, a scientific materialist. An atheist.
Originally posted by Astyanax
I grant that God--in the sense of a being with creative and other Godlike powers--theoretically could exist, either immanent in or even separate from the universe, but that is neither here nor there; it makes no difference from the human, empirical perspective unless this God actually does something Godlike.
Originally posted by Astyanax
No, that is not the same thing. I speak of a universal omniscience, not of some discrete, fragmented 'awareness'.
Originally posted by Astyanax
True, but irrelevant.
Originally posted by Astyanax
He must also be able to break those laws (ie perform miracles) if and when He chooses......
And, as you say, that is the sticking point. Not because the Christian God (not my God, please) allows evil, but because your 'God' is impotent.
Originally posted by Astyanax
The gods came afterwards
don't you understand?
Hinduism is a diverse system of thought with beliefs spanning monotheism, polytheism, panentheism, pantheism, monism, atheism, agnosticism, gnosticism among others;[63][64][65][66] and its concept of God is complex and depends upon each particular tradition and philosophy. It is sometimes referred to as henotheistic (i.e., involving devotion to a single god while accepting the existence of others), but any such term is an overgeneralization.[67]
Originally posted by Astyanax
To me God is essentially a human phenomenon--an evolutionary, psychological and social phenomenon. It should be conceived of as such. But all such God-concepts are fundamentally irrational. God is an irrational concept.
Originally posted by Astyanax
Please don't pull the Mysterious Eastern Philosophers card on me, because I can trump you with an entire deck. I am South Asian.
Originally posted by Astyanax
I have been on terms of close acquaintance with Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic faith and thought since my mid-teens, when I first began getting curious about things like that.
Originally posted by Astyanax
You are talking to a well-travelled brown-skinned atheist with a lifelong interest in and fascination for religion.
Originally posted by Astyanax
He is in no sense originally a nature-god, concerned with growth, fertility and natural processes, but a war-god whose original covenant with the Jews was 'worship Me, only Me, and I will make you forever victorious in battle'.
And yes, I do demand irrationality. Because God--any God that is not a flaccid impotent lump-thing--is an irrational concept. The world, as I said before, is rational. God is not.
Originally posted by RainCloud
A human brain react to something that happen. The China Brain doesnt react to anything, they work/interact by themself from the start aka busy mind.
The brain improve overtime with new input. CB on the other hand doesnt need any new input, a good example is (cough) North Korean Brain. Almost 100% isolated from the rest of the world and yet they still can build ermm buildings, same goes to Bushmen Brain, still manage to be alive.
Another problem is, how do you explain an ancient civ the wiped from the earth before they even manage to communicate with other civ, and yet still manage to finish uhh few mega pyramid project?
Another proof of not cognitive entity is civil war. A war happen only if there are 2 different side with different ideas. Does your brain have civil war within itself ? CB might and can have civil war.
If earth is cognitive entity, then we sure a helluva of a neuron, able to learn by itself.
A better comparison for your discussion would be jellyfish/starfish, where each nerve react by its own and yet still function as whole.
Originally posted by Astyanax
So God is dull, aggressive, stupid, wasteful, cruel or at least unintentionally brutal, and so slow in His thinking that one of His thoughts takes over ten times his age in years to get from one side of His brain to the other.
Sounds just about right to me.
The virtue of the character of this god-concept is certainly not a central feature of the idea. It doesn't make sense to use any of those kinds of adjectives outside of a moral-laden social context.
Why go around calling anything god at all? (Because) I'm interested in this idea of larger-than-brain cognitive entities (AIs, cybernetic systems, extended- mind hypothesises), and I think there's a real issue worth discussing here... I think these large cognitive entities, if they exist, are as close to god as we're going to find in reality.
Presumably, in the universe scale mind, the state of the universe would be parallel to the mental state of the universal mind. What can a human thought be mapped onto in the brain? Certainly nothing that travels from one side of the brain to the other.
Jaynes' point is silly... In any cognitive entity of any size that fits this whole China brain, loose neural network model (including real brains), thoughts are not single particles or electromagnetic transmissions. If the thought could exist as the transmission alone, the network wouldn't be needed. Just like in a human brain, the thought is the state (either in whole or substantial part). There is no single stand alone bit that is the thought.
I am assuming you are arguing a Christian god. Since you are insisting, much like Christians do, that there is only one possible way a God could be.
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Originally posted by Illusionsaregrander
In polytheist cultures there is often an overarching Divinity, and then lesser "gods" who meddle in material and human affairs. The end of that hymn actually directly mentions the One God that oversees and encompasses all.
The great sage Yajnavalkya was once asked by his disciples to describe Brahman. 'Neti neti,' he replied which means 'not this, not that'.
An attempt to use our minds to understand Brahman is said to be futile, as it is beyond the reach of the senses or the mind. Describing Brahman can be likened to describing the colour red to someone who has never seen it. You know what it looks like, but you cannot describe it.Source
Originally posted by Astyanax
reply to post by OnceReturned
Hello yourself, OnceReturned. Welcome back to your own thread. Where have you been hiding?
I beg to differ. No discussion of God can avoid the moral dimension. You cannot redefine 'God' as having no divine attributes, as the indignant lady with the fractal avatar wants to do. If you call something God, you attribute divine powers to it by definition. And divine power implies moral responsibility. This is inescapable.
[...]
No problem. I take it we're still talking about material entities, not 'spiritual' ones.
Originally posted by stevcolx
Pliny The Younger wrote alot of the stories in the bible as well as other roman emperors.
Originally posted by Astyanax
Despite your ridiculous and somewhat hysterical accusations, there is less dividing us than you think.
Originally posted by Astyanax
The rest of your post is shrewish yatter, which I will not dignify with a response.
Originally posted by OnceReturned
This is a good point. There is clearly not an obvious, satisfactory human analogue to civil war, except to some extent cognitive dissonance.
Even though it may seem that having a lot of synapses is a particularly good thing, the brain actually consolidates learning by pruning away synapses and wrapping white matter (myelin) around other connections to stabilize and strengthen them. The period of pruning, in which the brain actually loses gray matter, is as important for brain development as is the period of growth. For instance, even though the brain of a teenager between 13 and 18 is maturing, they are losing 1 percent of their gray matter every year.
Giedd hypothesizes that the growth in gray matter followed by the pruning of connections is a particularly important stage of brain development in which what teens do or do not do can affect them for the rest of their lives. He calls this the "use it or lose it principle," and tells FRONTLINE, "If a teen is doing music or sports or academics, those are the cells and connections that will be hardwired. If they're lying on the couch or playing video games or MTV, those are the cells and connections that are going to survive."
Resorting to sexism? How..........................weak.
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I only wish to say that the LCEs resemble in actual manifestation what I would expect an object of worship or a god to be like. If someone is going to say that some real thing is god, an LCE is the best candidate, better than the sun or the moon or the king.
I feel like you're still going to have a problem with that and tell me that it's stupid...
Originally posted by OnceReturned
The simple idea to take away from this experiment is this: The function of the brain can be correctly characterized as many individual nodes communicating in a complex way, connected in a complex network. This is a functional description of the brain; the thing that gives you a mind and makes you a cognitive entity.
Originally posted by orangutang
i prefer the indian yogic view that the mind interpenetrates the brain, attaches itself to an organ of sense relating to for example the eye and interprets what it sees...