On 12/10/2016 4:31 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Fri, Dec 9, 2016 at 8:36 PM, Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote:
On 12/9/2016 2:51 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Fri, Dec 9, 2016 at 2:22 AM, Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote:
On 12/8/2016 3:52 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Fri, Dec 9, 2016 at 12:38 AM, Brent Meeker <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 12/8/2016 3:31 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Thu, Dec 8, 2016 at 6:47 PM, Brent Meeker <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 12/8/2016 3:29 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Mon, Dec 5, 2016 at 7:26 PM, Brent Meeker <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 12/5/2016 1:31 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Mon, Dec 5, 2016 at 3:38 AM, Brent Meeker
<[email protected]>
wrote:
On 12/4/2016 10:45 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sat, Dec 3, 2016 at 6:03 PM, Brent Meeker
<[email protected]>
wrote:
and by doing so you drag in a lot of baggage. There was a group
of
atheists in the Dallas area which for a time formed a church and
claimed
to
be a religion for tax purposes. They defined "God" to be
whatever
was
good
in the world. The IRS disallowed their claim.
I assume that evoking the American IRS as a a scholarly authority
on
such a matter is a joke, right?
But they are as good an authority as any. Unlike theologians they
have
to
make decisions that have real consequences - not just mix word
salad.
But this is not a discussion about theology, it's a discussion about
the historical and cultural variations of concepts of god -- it
falls
under anthropology and history.
OK, tell me about a historical or cultural variation in which "god"
doesn't
not refer to a person/agent.
Anything pantheistic. Taoism, several gnostic cults, certain native
Americans I think, sufi mysticism, certain denominations of modern
judaism... Ah and the force in Star Wars.
But they don't use the word "god". It's an abuse of language it say
that
"god" means "whatever one's religion worships". Paul Tillich tried
that
maneuver in the '60s. He said "god" meant whatever one valued most:
money,
fame, power,... If you cut a word lose from common usage then, as the
Caterpillar said to Alice, you can make it mean anything you want.
So you are saying that "god" is reserved for judaic-christian style
deities.
It's not "reserved"; it, like any word, is defined by usage, and the
usage
overwhelmingly denotes a being who is immortal, has supernatural powers
and
knowledge and should be obeyed and worshipped or placated. It includes
the
gods and godesses of Egypt, Greece, Mesopotamia, India, Scandnavia,
Mayan,
Aztec,...
I hear people say stuff like "God for me is Nature" all the time. Don't
you?
No, I don't. But if I did, I'd take it as metaphor, "I worship nature." I
hear people say, "Time is money." and "Valentino Rossi is a motorcycle god."
but I don't take them literally.
I was raised a catholic and had to go through 6 years of Sunday school
until my father put an end to it (I'm forever grateful to him). Even
there, I could tell that some people were more literalists while
others saw god as "more of a concept". I have the impression that more
educated people had a more abstract and less interventionist
conception of god. Many did not believe in heaven or hell or miracles.
Or that the universe as 6000 years old or any of that nonsense.
And some of those believed in a god, a deist god perhaps. But those who
believed in an impersonal order or force didn't believe in a god - because
"god" refers to a person. It's just a matter of not distorting language.
Noun 1. God - the supernatural being conceived as the perfect and
omnipotent and omniscient originator and ruler of the universe; the
object
of worship in monotheistic religions
2. god - any supernatural being worshipped as controlling some
part
of the world or some aspect of life or who is the personification of a
force
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/God
Well if you go here you get a different picture:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God
It's not really different. It equivocates on "god" as "sometimes described"
as abstract. But all the examples are of persons and agents.
I am not trying to cut the religious any slack, by the way. I think we
agree on a lot of things.
But isn't it obvious to you that the concept of god was invented as a
personalization of forces like storms and volcanoes and light. That's why
early religions were animist; there was a deer spirit and a wind spirit and
mountain spirit...
I agree that this is a very compelling hypothesis, and I would be
surprised if it didn't in fact play a large role in the origin or
religion.
I think however that this explanation misses the big picture. Yes, the
"miracles" of nature are used as evidence that something transcendent
is happening, and if you can point at a specific "miracle" then maybe
you can convince other people you are particularly in tune with it,
and that you know what god wants and so on.
I think you have jumped over millenia of human experience to arrive at
industrial age angst. I wasn't referring to 'miracles' of nature.
Miracles can only exist in contrast to a mechanistic model of
un-miracleous nature. For thousands or even tens of thousands of years,
humans tried to see agency in nature because that was a way of
understanding it. There was no division between science and religion
and magic, they were all just part of understanding and dealing with
nature. The shaman explained why the storm came because the North-sky
God was angry that you had not sacrificed part of the last kill to Him
(by giving it to the shaman). The shaman could make small objects
vanish and he could make elixirs that allowed you to see the gods.
Nobody worried about "the meaning of life". They worried about finding
enough to eat and having sex. Primitive religions usually assume that
ancestors linger about as spirits in some way. Have you read Jaynes,
"The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"?
This is the mechanism, but
it is not the payoff. The payoff is two-fold: freeing people from
existential crises and enabling civilisation by resolving prisoner
dilemma scenarios (e.g. fear of hell).
Fear of hell is an invention of the priesthood. Primitive religions,
and even Judaism, don't teach punishment in an afterlife. It seems to
have been invented by Zoroaster; who at least made the punishment limited.
I think you have the cause and effect backwards. Agriculture made
civilization possible - tribes didn't have to move and so could build
cities. Religion adapted by going from explaining nature to explaining
why the city had to be ordered around certain principles of behavior and
ownership, and why there was a leader who the gods would favor in war
with other cities.
People had no prisoner's dilemma when they lived in tribes. If you
didn't cooperate you'd be ejected from the tribe. Existential crises
result from questions about "meaning" and "purpose" which were invented
along with religions. All good marketers know that to sell something
you first create a demand for it.
People don't lose sleep at night because they don't know how the wind
works,
For millenia they lost sleep worrying about whether a storm would kill
their flock or blow away their tents.
they lose sleep because they feel that they are unimportant or
that their lives are meaningless.
Only since they became comfortable and secure from the wind.
If you can provide some solution for
this, that is what people will really mean by "god", not the
ridiculous wind-person itself. That is why anthropologists and other
social scientists argue that things like money and fame play the role
of god, are in fact "gods" in a deep cultural sense. In that sense
this is not just playing silly word games, it is an attempt at a
deeper understanding of what if really going on.
But this is just abuse of language. It's like Tillich trying to
redefine God to mean "Whatever gives you life meaning." Then children
are God, money is God, love is God, patriotism is God. "The role of God"
in society is varied. Some people use God as weapon against their
enemies (those godless commies). Some people use God as an imaginary
friend for solace. Some people use God as an explanation for "what is
really going on". But ask yourself why this would work as an
explanation? Isn't it because by conceiving the controller of the
universe as a person you can intuitively relate to events - it's just
like seeing the storm as anger of the sky-god. People experience anger,
so they think they have understood the storm. They don't understand
fluid dynamics (at least until very recently).
Militant atheists, who are actively trying to free the world of
religion, need a non-fuzzy target to hit.
And the religionist, trying to keep their comfort and influence, keep
fuzzing up the target and spreading it out because it's center keeps
getting hit by facts.
So they get really annoyed
when one enters into such nuanced discussions of what people mean by
"god".
Listen to any preacher in any religion and tell me how often he says God
is to give meaning to your life...and that meaning is to serve God.
Even to write it out is to show how ridiculous it is.
They get annoyed because they think that such understanding of
human nature is of secondary importance compared to the more urgent
goal of ridding the world of silly bronze-age superstitions that are
impeding progress. The irony of the situation is that they are
thinking in exactly the same way that priesthood classes always did:
what people need is to take the correct actions, the rest is not that
important. If they need to believe that the statue of the dog-god of
Alpha Centauri bleeds from the eyes every full moon, let them. If this
is what they need to not choose "defect" when confronted with prisoner
dilemmas, it's not a high price to pay. Militant atheists play the
same game with culture.
How so? The atheists I know are all of Hume's opinion, "Belief should
be proportioned to the evidence." Are you saying that human nature
demands fairy tales? I don't think so and I know a lot of humans to
prove it.
This is all human nature and I don't find it particularly important. I
was a militant atheist myself, until I managed to forgive organised
religion for intellectually bullying me when I was a kid. I guess it
just became a bit boring to hate them. Will I resist if they try to
force me or others to live a certain way? Of course.
But will you resist them spreading beliefs that imply you should live a
certain way? The authors of the Holy Inquisition were quite rational
and humane. Given the terrible torture that awaited anyone who died in
unbelief it was perfectly justified to burn heretics at the stake less
they spread false beliefs.
What I won't do is pretend that religion was not evolutionarily
selected *because it helps the species survive*.
Certainly at the level of civilization it helped some cities prevail
over others. I don't see how you can maintain the religion of
Australian aborigines or Aztecs or ISIS helps humans survive as a species.
We still have the
same fundamental problems to solve that we always had, even now that
wind gods and dog gods are dead: meaning and cooperation.
You've bought into the myth of religionists that without God we will be
at one another's throats - yet that is exactly where religion puts us.
As Voltaire said, "Man will cease to commit atrocities only when he
ceases to believe absurdities."
We are
possibly witnessing the early stages of collapse of western
civilisation because too many people find no meaning in their lives,
no sense of belonging to anything at all and no reason to cooperate.
We cooperate because if I help you and you help me we can both achieve
more of goals than if we each acted alone. Of course that assumed we
have goals beyond just cooperating or serving someone else (however
divine). As George Carlin quipped, "If we're here to serve other
people, what are those other people here for?"
It seems to turn out that a society can't run on money- and status-
seeking alone. We are so smart that we figured out that the gods are
bullshit, but unfortunately not smart enough to solve that one...
You may think you need God to give your life meaning, but ask yourself
what that meaning would be? If it's not /*your*/ meaning then what use
is it? Would it give your life meaning to satisfy my demands? To say
one gives one's life meaning by serving God is like giving oneself style
by donning the Emperor's new clothes. It's abdictating responsibility
while assuming moral superiority.
Brent
As civilization developed it seemed that humans were
superior and dominant over all animals and even over some of inanimate
nature - so the concept of god shifted to a great, superhuman person, a
great leader and law giver - especially one who led his worshippers to
victory in war. And of course there must be one greatest leader (who
happens to be the one we believe in). It is only because science in the
broadest sense has shown these ideas to be parochial and contradictory and
incoherent that theologians have been forced to retreat into abstractions
and poetic circumlocutions; while still currying support from the hoi polloi
with images of a stern father or loving mother god. As Bertrand Russell
notes they don't want to speak plainly of an abstract order, which might as
well be Noether's theorem, because their prestige and influence depends on
the idea of a personal god, a concept that people can understand because
He's like them. He's vain, He loves worship and He gets angry and He
demands good behavior and He saves them from death. So the modern
theologians use of the word "god" is basically dishonest. They are using it
as a diversion and they know it. If someone wants to study or speculate
about the foundation of the world or morals or purpose; that's great. But
if they can't show it has personal, human attributes, it's just fraud to
refer to it as "god".
I highly recommend the little book, "The Religion Virus" by Craig A. James.
Brent
You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out
that God hates all the same people you do.
- Anne Lamott
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