Who is “God” ?

Religion and Secularism
521

I’ve responded to your “Moon” thing, which I don’t think you are applying correctly, and to your other abstractions and the “great lengths” that you go to.

Instead of finding other words, or responding to my posts in a way that at least shows you followed my logic, even if my logic is wrong, or simply admitting that these are difficult concepts, instead, you make an accusation about political agendas. That’s what I was referring to above when I said baggage comes with this sort of talk.

With Christians, when they get can’t their beliefs across, they say you should go back and read the Bible and pray. With you, you say you are being clear when you say, " the a-priori infinitude of unlimited potential and the singularity of Entirety. All phenomena co-arising in interdependent synchronicity".

522

Just as the potential for existence is not an example of existence, same with qualities. All you need to understand what I’ve been saying is to acknowledge and factor in that the infinitude of the undivided Whole, and the infinitude of Nothing , are not two different infinitudes.

Absolute infinitude being the non-relative absolute context. Realty-as-it-actually-is, not your reality and my reality, which are emergent, and therefore relative effects.

You choosing not to acknowledge this as a-priori, and citizenchallengev4, along with lausten blatantly enforcing opinions against the use of the term “God” and then imagining themselves to be serving logic, and not the politics of an atheist/humanist forum, is beyond my ken.

Lets see if miriana manages to help us navigate the mess and clarify what is going on before I bail once again.

523

lol… sounds like one of my deepities… :rofl:

524

I thought I was pretty clear in my examples. There is a commonality between religious groups and non-organized-religious groups (or just anyone having a philosophy or whatever) that claim to offer something that, after investigation, they are incapable of producing. There was a cult in Tennessee that got you in by getting you to take care of rescued cats. The leader convinced people it was a path to them being better people. It’s the same thing.

Again, I don’t think you are trying to start a cult, but you spend a lot of time telling us how we are “enforcing opinions”, or being illogical, or refusing to understand or consider your words. If you have something that can be taught, you shouldn’t need to do that.

525

Nah! Like Robert M. Price, I like to read a lot of things, including religious text. Even studied them at a University- Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism, etc. Religion was my second bachelor degree’s minor. Also like Robert M. Price, we are both former Episcopalians (or we’re heretical heretics, not sure which, because we’re both atheists) and the Episcopal Church is where I met the late Bishop John Shelby Spong. Through my studies and journey to humanism, I met many others. If you name it though, then that’s not it. People think they know, but they do not, not even those who worship the Sun of God. Not even I know.

I’m an agnostic atheist, who once ran into gnosis and it hit hard, causing me to realize what I was told was God was not. Human deities do not actually exist, except in the minds of humans, and if one does exist, no one can ever know for sure who or what it is.

526

I once had a Buddhist professor who talked about the “snake” in the dark. When morning came, it was just rope.

527

:rofl:
Do you actually believe that?

… you would be trying harder to make yourself understood.

Instead of absorbing critique and utilizing it to improve your enunciation, you are offended.
Why not try harder?

Instead, I’m suddenly doing the MAN’s bidding, even though if you’ve read any of my stuff, you should be smart enough to figure out I’m running on my own agenda.

https://confrontingsciencecontrarians.blogspot.com

https://citizenschallenge.blogspot.com

528

But you make it sound as if there are no other rational answers to the question of “how things work”.

You seem to point to a metaphysical consciousness pattern, but there is a whole new understanding of the natural relational properties that are possible between quantum values in biological organisms.

This happens to be my hobby horse and if it elicits a spark of interest, check out my thread on " Microtubules the seat of Consciousness
This new field “Quantum Biology”, is based on the age-old question of levels of “consciousness” and by extension the existence of a sentient universal God.

This is a recent publication of an adherent to SOM (Subject-Object Model) and ORCH OR (Orchestrated Objective Reduction) and how that may explain the emergence of an experiential biological quasi-consciousness that consequently evolves into a fully self-aware experiential observational ablity.

529

There are infinite windows into “how things work”. I’m not talking about how things work. Simply trying to get an agreement that the absolute context is immeasurable .

What does “Entirety” mean to you? What did it mean to Bohm?

530

A very simple term; “Wholeness”

The title of his famous book is “Wholeness and the Implicate Order” :

(Note that there is a free PDF or Printable version download from Wiki.)

and the underlying philosophies:

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531

Buddhists are encouraged to be atheists too, but that in no way dispenses with Śūnyatā and Bodhicitta.

The words of course are just words.

532

More than one? If not, then the essential a-priori of absolute infinitude would not have been ignored. You didn’t mention it for a reason?

533

Infinitude is an undefined object, an infinitude of what?

OTOH, the term “Wholeness” defines an object, a dynamically expanding geometry of spacetime.
A dynamic object that can be described mathematically (the Implicate order).

I like the concept of a fractally expanding spacetime fabric as theorized in Causal Dynamical Triangulation (CDT).

Causal dynamical triangulation (abbreviated as CDT)

theorized by Renate Loll, Jan Ambjørn and Jerzy Jurkiewicz, is an approach to quantum gravity that, like loop quantum gravity, is background independent.

This means that it does not assume any pre-existing arena (dimensional space), but rather attempts to show how the spacetime fabric itself evolves.

There is evidence [1] that at large scales CDT approximates the familiar 4-dimensional spacetime, but shows spacetime to be 2-dimensional near the Planck scale, and reveals a fractal structure on slices of constant time. These interesting results agree with the findings of Lauscher and Reuter, who use an approach called Quantum Einstein Gravity, and with other recent theoretical work.
Causal dynamical triangulation - Wikipedia

The Universe is not an infinitude, it is an infinitely expanding object…difference.

1 Like
534

An object implies other objects…and Wholeness is a distant memory.

We were talking about Entirety…if this is what David Bohm was talking about I need to stop referencing him and scrap his terminology.

(note: when you say “an infinitude”, you are implying at least two. i.e. a relative infinitude, and therefore an emergent characteristic. Finite in its relativity to the absolute that Entirety implies.)

535

[quote=“brmckay, post:534, topic:7931”]
We were talking about Entirety…if this is what David Bohm was talking about I need to stop referencing him and scrap his terminology.

I don’t know what you were talking about. Infinitude is your term and can mean the infinitude of Nothingness.

OTOH, Bohm speaks of the objective wholeness of the expanding geometrical spacetime, not of an infinitude of nothingness.
Don’t get confused about Bohm’s “holographic universe”. That is a different beast altogether, although it addresses the wholeness of the physical universe.

(note: when you say “an infinitude”, you are implying at least two. i.e. a relative infinitude, and therefore an emergent characteristic. Finite in its relativity to the absolute. Which is what I meant by “Entirety”.)
[/quote]

I never said infinitude, you did.

"brmckay, said; “Absolute infinitude being the non-relative absolute context.

Are you including the infinitude of nothingness?

Then you added “entirety” . Thus you have already 2 definitions of that object you call God, and “infinite entirety”. And exactly what does that even mean ?

The expanding universe is not infinite , it is infinitely expanding into “Nothingness”, that infinite timeless, dimensionless permittive condition, that cannot be called the “Wholeness” of something, especially in reference to a creative agency.

infinitude

noun

in·​fin·​i·​tude in-ˈfi-nə-ˌtüd

1: the quality or state of being infinite : INFINITENESS

2 : something that is infinite especially in extent

3 : an infinite number or quantity

536

That’s poetry, . . .

537

He is right about that. It was one of the more difficult phrases, a couple days ago.

" And how have I said something different? Entirety’s infinitude being the significance of the elegantly evolved theology expressed in the statement “There is Only God ”. "

1 Like
538

If God includes the infinite nothingness, I still disagree with that statement.

A nothingness means exactly that ; NO THING !

C’mon, there is no scientific term “God”. God is an undefined metaphysical concept that has no demonstrable properties. Just like Thor, God is an imaginary entity that lives somewhere “up there” and makes things happen.
Get real.

539

That’s a great segue into what I’ve been wondering about this evening thinking about this thread and the refined word smithing that brmckay is presenting,
what’s it got to do with living our lives and making sense of it and our place in the universe?

540

There is Only Reality-as-it-actually-is. The singularity of the undivided Whole. Its infinitude not something different than the undivided potential of No-Things.

That religion of yours that you call “science” is included, but does not itself define immeasurable Reality.