By the way, that was all just my opinion. YMMV, etc.
I’m with Polycarp on this one. I don’t tell authors that, despite what they may think, a story must take place over the course of a single day in accordance with Aristotle’s rules of theater; why then should I tell theists that they must hold to the animistic concepts of God?
Were I a theist, when I was a theist, the animist approach appealed most to me; but I’ve certainly got no authority to tell theists what they believe. That’d be really, really stupid.
Secretary of Thought. Is that in the Department of Homeland Security?
Daniel
El Escorpio:
True. And I think genuine spiritual understanding is also not fundamentally different from atheism, if your big-picture worldview as an atheist includes some awarenesses of certain abstract qualities that pertain to direction and choice in life.
If, hypothetically speaking, you were the first person in your tribe to have thought much beyond the immediate requirements of the day, and you came up with some understandings about how the tribe and its members should be, and you felt the urge to share these contemplations with your fellow tribespeople, you’d have to get creative with vocabulary in some fashion. I do not think it would necessarily result in a description that we, reading back on what you ended up saying, would necessarily call a “theology”.
Although it might. Aside from which, if the things that you taught were subsequently taught by the tribespeople to their children and continued to be passed along long after you were dead, it is possible that the material might take on more of a theological character, with the ethical principles and aspirations obtaining some Proper Nouns and becoming a bit anthromorphized.
This could happen if only as a consequence of parents desiring to teach The Important Thing to their children. I referred to babytalk versions of God. I suspect they got rooted culturally because it is hard to have a discussion with a young child about abstractions, especially abstractions involving the possibility of communication and communion between you the individual and that which all of this is about (see how awkward my own language becomes just trying to avoid the easy metaphors like “what the Universe ‘wants’ from us”?).
Problem is, the babytalk doesn’t cause the kids to “get it”. They may even feel the abstraction as a thread of thought/feeling running through their own contemplative moments and not associate it in any way with the babytalk God they were told about. And you end up with a contingent of people after awhile who believe in what they were taught without any firsthand experience or understanding of it, and then they go on to teach their kids and at this point there’s no longer a parent struggling for the right words to make a complex concept accessible to a child, there’s just a superstitious parent passing along Invisible Pink Unicornisms.
But back to you atheist folks — umm, yeah, it’s not impossible to believe that throughout history people have embraced and codified these silly belief systems and made a huge freaking deal about their importance in the overall scheme of things without there ever having been any legitimate content to it — I’ve enough cynicism about my species to say that that’s possible.
But my own experiences have sufficient resonance with much of what’s said (if I treat what’s been said as complicated contemplative insights by adults) to convince me that it was experiences such as my own that has inspired people throughout time to try to explain some of what they’d seen. Beginning with “seen”. Seeing with the head, not with the eyeballs. A vision, but not of the everyday sort. Behold, I have a revelation, I bring a message. From whom? say the people.
So again I suggest: there was, now and then throughout the history of this God-belief phenomenon, a range of special human experience that the rest of it arose from. I want you atheist folks to understand that I completely agree with your dismissal of the silly babytalk being hawked in shrinkwrapped Get Saved packaging, Invisible Pink Unicorns and all that, but meanwhile consider the notion that there’s some substance originally underlying most of it.
And if you do, and develop of sense of that, you will more likely than not continue to consider yourself an atheist, and I see absolutely nothing wrong (in any sense of “wrong”) with that.
Dammit George, there onto me.
To be honest, that view smacks of a certain amount of arrogance to me. You seem to be saying that if another person doesn’t share your beliefs, it is because he is less mature than you. I don’t buy that. You argue that they have “stopped trying”, but they might just as easily argue that you are inventing rationalizations to bolster your faith. They’re just differing views; I don’t think one is intrinsically more mature than the other.
I would disagree with much here. God is not an abstraction; He is present at all times in all matter, organizing it. He is present in all people, guiding them.
To write down percieved truth and to attempt to rationalize it so as to make it logical - these are not errors. Humans need to externalize thought to perfect it. It is only trhough the written (or spoken) word that we can truly comprehend the divine. This may not help us see the divine, but will aid in our understanding of it.
It strikes me that a particularly apt description mgiht be:
;When I wa s achld I thought a a child and played as a child. Now that I am a man, I have put away childish things."
Indeed, popular conceptions of God are most adept and useful for children. It enables them to comprehend quickly, if inaccurately, a complex theological notion. For the innocent mind, it may rightly be called astute. As people grow more complex, they must grow their conception of God. If they fail to, it must then seem small and mean to them.
In other words, if you are going to think about something, do so professionally, not amateurlly.
Lord Ashtar:
Maybe I am not being fair to this perspective. I guess for me the babytalk descriptions never filled any important glassware with any good liquid. Once upon a time I believed in God who lived Up There in Heaven and made us and the world, and I also believed in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy (I don’t think I got taught about the Easter Bunny), but none of them were important aspects of my mind as I developed consciousness of moral and ethical imperatives and why they were imperatives and what made good “good”.
(There may be parents who hope their little kids will go aroung being good all year out of conscious concern for the Santa Claus payoff, but I didn’t and I don’t think other kids did either.)
If your spiritual growth took a form such that you gradually moved from the simplistic child-like understandings of God to a full, adult-sufficient understanding not at odds with an adult understanding of the world as per physics and other natural sciences instead of casting aside the child-size waterglass as a silly cute kid’s cup and coming to your adult understandings independently, then I’ve been unduly harsh and critical of those babytalk versions of God.
In my case it probably didn’t help that as I was reaching the age of serious and undeterrable questions, more and more of the religious folk I ran into were insisting on an even more literal and babytalkish God than the one that had been offered to me as a younger child. Maybe if I’d been raised Jewish and had spent those years discussing Talmud with other 14 year olds, who knows? But for me, the spiritual waterglass was never important when it was sufficient for my age and capacities, so when I had more water I started with a fresh glass.
I quoted this in another thread recently, but its apt to the OP here as well.
I don’t disagree that ideas are abstract. But I disagree that this means they are “spiritual”. This thread seems to be about expressing your ire at atheists who dispute the traditional concept of God as a physical being, and ignore your definition of God as a collection of social mores. But what’s to refute? I’m not aware of any atheists here who contend that social mores do not exist. We just don’t label them with the name “God”. Nobody’s refuting your concept of God, because "God’ is not the name we use for that concept.
I’d suggest the OP read some of the current threads on God, which do not include the simplistic definitions he complains about. In fact, those who go with these get challenged very quickly.
The IPU is not so much a parody of the Hairy Thunderer model as a challenge to those starting with the assumption that God exists and wants this or that. These people typically have a different level of proof for their god versus other gods.
More common are those who believe god is real and who has a set of properties depending on the believer. Another common belief is like yours, which seems to be identifying god with some good principles.
The real cultprit here is the Bible, which is the source for the existent god you object to.
As for you, do you pray to this abstraction? Do you get guidance from it? If so, how is this guidance different from what you would get if you searched within, reasoned ethically, and consulted books to guide you?
Where they become spiritual, for most of us, is through the experience given (among others) the name of “prayer”. One does not typically think of ideas as something one communicates with.
How does one “get an idea”? Certainly one can get an idea from being exposed to it in print, in conversation, etc. But how about an original idea? Is there a “search” process going on within the head? It’s not a deductive process that I refer to, or a logical process where you could point at the steps and explain how you derived your idea from component parts.
For me (and I will let others chime in, if they’re so inclined, to say that it is true for them as well), the central process by which the specific range of ideas that pertain to “how things should be” and “how I should be” — ethical stuff with an imperative backbone stirred in — feels like communication. There is a sense that “self” does not always refer to me-the-individual but extends, there is communication, as if I were speaking with someone, alhthough “speaking” is metaphorical here just as “seeing” and “vision” in my post #23 of this thread. (If you were strolling by you wouldn’t hear me saying words). I get “spoken to” and there’s an emotional impact and then things start to make sense in a new way.
Of course, just as you need not use the term “God”, you need not refer to this process as “prayer”. I suppose, therefore, you could also decline to consider this “spiritual” as well, but…
…why am I having this conversation with atheists then? (One might well ask). To bridge gaps and increase mutual understanding. One form of dispelling ignorance doesn’t involve unlearning wrong things so much as recognizing commonalities with what you’d previously thought of as an incompatible viewpoint. And because, in that spirit, I value your opinion 
But as God exists outside of time the Baby Jesus exists concurrently with the Adult Jesus.
Kinda’ like golden age Superman, and Golden Age Superboy.
But what? Either you believe that there is an actual physical entity that is somehow communicating with you, or you believe that the ideas emanate from your own mind. If it’s the latter, then I don’t see the reason for attaching the word “God” to that process. It may very well “feel” like something, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is either one or the other. To me, defining God as “feelings you have that emanated from your own mind” just confuses the issue.
This analogy makes the baby Superman cry.
Daniel
In my Pagan youth, I sometimes found it helpful to invoke the god El-Ahrairah to get me through some situation. El-Ahrairah is the god of the rabbits in Watership Down.
Did I believe El-Ahrairah was a real entity? That was absolutely the wrong question, for two reasons:
- It didn’t matter whether E-A was real, for my purposes; and
- Like the old riddle*, answering the question would break the spell/negate the helpfulness.
Our brains respond richly and powerfully to symbols sometimes. If someone finds satisfaction in working with a particular symbol, I’ve got no need to criticize them for it. Not even if they don’t consider it to be a symbol.
Daniel
- Q. What is so delicate that saying its name can break it?
A. Silence.
I profusely apoligize. I did not intend to come across as arrogant, or to demean anyone else’s beliefs. I meant to chronicle my own growth from “babytalk God” to “adult God” (as I define them for myself). Looking back at my post again, I now see how it can come across. I was rude, and I’m sorry.
It did, but it certainly wasn’t a painless process. My acceptance of gays and evolution have only come relatively recently. Believe it or not, this board has helped me tremendously, since this is where I’ve gotten to hear coherant arguments against fundamentalism that I didn’t hear growing up.
At the risk of tooting my own horn, I’ve matured spiritually quite a bit just in the last three or four years (I’m in my mid-20’s). For example, if I look back at some of my earliest posts here in GD, I cringe at my own ignorance. Thank God that part of my life is over!
As for the MSP and IPU people I think it’s completely fathomable that religion can mature as one grows. For these people and many others their religion matures to the point that Gods of the IPU variety become very unlikely–maybe even ridiculous.
All that is left at that point is considering God to be an Ideal or metaphor or something similarly abstract. These sorts of definitions of God are totally valid in my view. Pan-theism is also a sensible conception of God. As for the existence of these type of Gods; it’s very hard to show that the Universe, or the Ideals of Love and Goodness don’t exist (unless you’re Liberal 
). If this is your definition of God then yes; God exists.
It is the idea of God as an active participator in the events on Earthh–as a being that is interested in our lives and intercedes in human activities that I have a lot of trouble accepting.
For anyone keeping score, the latter idea of God is the one that I would compare to the Invisible Pink Unicorn, for they both have an equal chance of existing and/or being proven to exist.
Some people get so bent out of shape if someone opines: “There is absolutely no evidence of God’s existence.” They are thinking: “Oh yeah? What if I think God is my refigerator magnet? OBVIOUSLY that exists! This IPU spouting guy is an asshole!”
To that I would say: yes, your refrigerator magnet certainly does exist, but that wasn’t the idea of God I was talking about. That presents an easy out for believers of an active, “living”, interested God: “A ha! So you admit there are many different notions of God, you can’t dismiss them all!!” That is true. I myself only dismiss the ones that purport God is anything more than or seperate from anything in the Universe.
But you pulled a switcheroo on me. I wasn’t criticizing AHunter3 for his beliefs, I was defending against his criticism that, in the context of a discussion about whether God exists, that one is wrong for not including his view. I have no problem with whatever you want to do in the privacy of your own thoughts; I always say, “Whatever floats your boat”. But if you criticize me for not including, in a discussion of whether God exists, your non-standard definition of the word “exists”, I think that’s unfair.