A flaw in religion? (with diagrams)

Great Debates
21

Bippy

Where I disagree with you is that you seem to be saying that some filters are more important than others - that there have been a number of religious teachers throughout history and each of these teachers has taught us something different about God. Revealed a different facet of God.

However I think that EVERY single person who exists or has ever existed is of equal importance. Different people show different aspects of God and the best way to appreciate God is by considering creation as a whole, all at the same time, instantly. Not by placing one persons words above anothers.

Copaesthetic

I think you are looking at things backwards. You seem to be saying that:

God chooses the filter (eg Mohammed). The filter then relays God’s message to humanity. Since God chose Mohammed then it follows that Mohammed must be right. We don’t actually know whether God really chose Mohammed, we only have Mohammed’s word for it and the word of the religion of Islam that has built up since Mohammed’s death.

So all our evidence for Mohammed being the word of God comes after the fact. “The fact” being Mohammed’s lifespan. So it would look like this:



~~~ ~~~~
~ ~~~~ ~~
~~~~ ~~~      <----------- pre-Mohammed era 
~~~~~~~~
~~ ~~ ~~~

        O              <-----------  Mohammed
       / \
      /   \
     /     \            <-----------  post-Mohammed era
    /       \

In the pre-Mohammed era, nothing definite is known about God. In the post-Mohammed era, everything that is known about God comes via the Mohammed filter.

The above diagram works just as well for Jesus or anyone else, by the way.

You can’t use the (now-existing) religion of Islam to justify Islam. Because this would be judging something after the fact. Likewise with Christianity. It’s backward reasoning. You need to start from the primary source (creation) and work forward.

Polycarp

The people you mention (Pat Robertson etc) are prisms and as such they are just as valuable in understanding God as any other prism.

I’m not sure I’m making myself clear, let me put it this way:

Even if Jesus were the son of God it still does not justify Christianity. Even if Mohammed were God’s messenger, it still does not justify Islam.

God is huge, there is no way that even Jesus (being his son) could convey to humanity the whole of God. All he could hope to do is convey one aspect of God to us. It would be impossible to convey the whole of God using human language. As you say:

“God is greater than any description we can make of Him”

God is greater than any description even Jesus or Mohammed or anyone else could make of him. Maybe if God had given Jesus a lifespan of 1 million years then Jesus might have had a chance of at least conveying something to us.

As things stand, however, Jesus only ministered for 3 years. It seems more likely that what Jesus was trying to convey to us was that all people who live are prisms of God. God can only be conceived by looking at creation as a whole, we are too hung up on procedural matters (eg muslims must do this and must do that, Christians must do this and must do that, Jews must do this and must do that).

You need to look at the body of evidence (creation) first and then move forward. This is the only way to appreciate God before the fact rather than after the fact.

Drastic

Buddhism does have a Fixed Idea, otherwise it would not be Buddhism. What distinguishes Buddhism from other ideas? The things that distinguish Buddhism from other religions are Buddhism’s Fixed Idea.

So in the case of Buddhism, we have things like the five precepts which tell you not to kill any living thing, not to take anything not freely given, to abstain from sexual misconduct and sensual overindulgence, to refrain from untrue speech, and to avoid intoxication, that is, losing mindfulness.

These sound like rules to me. Even if they are good rules which many people may agree with, they are still rules.

Buddhists view the world through the ideas and the prism of Siddhartha Gotama (the Buddha) and so they are limited (sadly because I quite like Buddhists).

No Disguise

I don’t think there’s a problem with viewing God through the prism of your own being - after all, there’s no way around that. All I’m saying is that you shouldn’t have a second prism filtering all the information before it even gets to your own prism.

ps you need to use the


 tag to get pictures. I only just found out about this, I've got a thread going in ATMB about it.

(I'm secretly quite proud of my diagrams)
22

What I’m saying is that according to Mohammed (Here I mean what we know of him, since that’s the only view we’re likely to get.) the archangel Gabriel spoke to him, and told him the express will of God. This has some possible repercussions:

  1. The archangel Gabriel did come to Mohammed, which would certainly make him chosen of God, unless we are to surmise what Gabriel’s nature is. In the least we could say he was chosen of Gabriel. This would give Mohammed’s message validity.

  2. Mohammed was lying/ mistaken about what he saw and heard. Aside from perhaps a passing platitude this would destroy Mohammed’s vision of the divine as false, and thereby no more a mirror for God then anything I might make up myself.

  3. Islam has falsified/ bostered a claim of Mohammed to a significant degree. See above. . .

If Jesus was not the son of God, then he has mislead millions and destroyed any validity from his message.

See, the falsehood makes the prism blacken, obscuring, rather than clarifying the divine. Ultimately, by your theory, we would accept this obscurity with truth, or reject truth and obscurity together, or judge for ourselves the truth. In any case, as a method of seeking truth it has the issue of your own judgement to contend with.

23

Even if the whole thing with filters and whatnot is true, what about people who make up religions out of wholecloth? Or people who get demonstrably wrong ideas (for example, believe that God told them the world is suspended on the back of a giant turtle)?

24

Right–but the thing is, those rules are not taken to be descriptive of any fixed formulation of the divine (or the lack of the divine, or simultaneously the divine and lack of, or…etc.); they’re intended to be a roadmap to reach a place where that full-on experience can be found. Saying “you probably will reach Macy’s sooner if you go straight from here past the next two lefts and then turn right on Fifth and Scotch” doesn’t presume a fixed idea of what Macy’s is–beyond the trivial sense of having a particular location and route by which it can be reached. If those directions tack on, “…and there are no other ways to get there!” or “…and it can’t be reached anywhere else!” that may or may not be mistaken. And while I’m sure some formulations of Buddhism do tack that on, metaphorically speaking, all of them do not do so any more so than all Christian formulations.

Buddhists view the world as any group of individuals do–with ideas and prisms made up of structures of varying understandings of varying formulations of some common religious narratives; shared and varying cultural perspective; and shared and varying experiences of sundry sorts.

Sort of like any arbitrary grouping of people, really.

25

Jojo’s reply to Copaesthetic:

Actually, it does not work for Jesus Christ, as large chunks of an independently-written source, the “Old Testament” of the Bible, refer to and predict His coming. There is no such equivalent for Mohammed, Gautama, Plato, L Ron Hubbard, and so on. This frees the Christian claims from “backward reasoning” as you put it.

That is to say, Jesus Christ claimed to be someone who was predicted to come, and went on to prove it. The rest make no such claim, and for me that proves that they were just men who had (strange) ideas and came along by accident rather than design.

The fact that they all claim the same sort of things for the future, the attainment to a generalised improved state of being, should not stop investigations from digging over why such an one should have been chosen to be a “filter”.