Like I said: imagination. It’s a power of the human brain.
My ability to visualize what my characters look like is mine, and I’m not giving it up to anyone or anything else that wants to steal credit for it.
You posted in Great Debates. As long as people are attacking your ideas, and not you personally, they are well within their boundaries in this forum. Insulting you is not allowed, but your central thesis is fair game.
And for the most part people are attacking your logic, not the basic idea. You have presented something that could be defended with a logical and internally consistent argument, but you have failed to do so.
I believe that Bugs made frequent references to Albuquerque…but since both Schenectady and Albuquerque are both places, it’s possible that there are the same place, right?
To be entirely fair to him, there are parts to his position that probably can’t be defended, because they’re purely speculative. It’s entirely theoretically possible that all of reality is actually occurring in the imagination of a toddler playing with barbies. “God” is “Self” is the toddler - all the minds of Barbie and Ken are just the toddler doing all the voices himself as he talks to himself.
Similarly, you could have a person single-playing a board game. I’ve done this a couple times, with cooperative games: you have a game that supports two or more players working together towards a goal, but you have no friends, so you just play all the characters yourself. Within the world of the game there are multiple people, but in actuality there is only one person playing all the characters, where each character has its own cards and skills that operate independently of the others, despite there being one mind behind them.
The unifying factor here, of course, is that nobody is real, and reality is way less real than we usually picture it. Our detailed perceptions might be within the imaginations of our single shared ‘player’ as he jumps from one character to another - in reality we might be text on a page, or a collection of cards. When two people talk the player jumps between roles, playing them all; we don’t notice because he wills that we don’t. Most people -anybody but yourself- might be an NPC that hasn’t been developed at all because there’s no reason to, and all of history is really a sketchy backstory printed in a faded manual. And the game could be abruptly ended at any moment when he’s called to dinner.
Objectively speaking it’s not a less meaningful existence than any other, presuming you assume that no possible existences have any meaning to them at all. Which, to be fair, is not a position I’m sure I can refute.
I believe it was Barry Longyear who put out a collection of short stories under the title It Came from Schenectady. He explained that writers mail a request with a five dollar bill to a PO box in Schenectady and get an idea back a week or two later.
What they do is find another body and glom onto it. They do not become the body’s dominant but just crawl around fucking up the dominant and all the other clinging spirit entities that are also crawling around on the body. To deal with this exfestation, one needs to hold onto a pair of empty soup cans attached to an adjustable galvanometer so that your therapist can help you identify and drive off these spiritual parasites.
That was an idea that did not come from Schenectady. Kalispell, most likely.
Thanks for the suggestions.
Well, my purpose was to throw out an idea and see what kind of reaction it got. Maybe there’s a place other than the Great Debates that would have been more appropriate, but here we are. At any rate, it’s just an idea. Take it or leave it; it don’t make no nevermind to me.
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Yeah, seen this excuse before:
If people agree with you then heavy conversation ensues.
If people disagree with you, you claim that it’s no big deal anyway, so it’s not worth debating.
Although, for something you aren’t that enthusiastic about, you sure are pushing both the idea and it’s originator a lot. :dubious:
What exactly do you wish to discuss with me, Czarcasm?
What about all the points others have brought up as to how your idea just doesn’t fly?
I believe I have addressed those points as they have come along, apparently not to your satisfaction. Is there a particular point you wish to discuss now, Czarcasm?
Shall we start here? I don’t think there is much to discuss, since you want to stick to “standard” definitions of God and Life, and I am proposing to change those definitions to suit what Inwould like to believe. I don’t think we’re going to find much common ground here on which to debate. If you want to stick with the “standard” definitions, then it’s just a flakey theory that has no merit. And yet here you are, some 370 replies later. Go figure.
I believe the intent of the proposition is to re-examine the nature of God as opposed to the nature of Life. Life requires no worship nor sacrifice nor pledge of allegiance. Life simply is. If I understand Neale Donald Walsch’s proposition the way he meant it, humans would do well to regard God in much the way we regard Life. I’m not saying I buy into this theory completely, but it makes a lot more sense to me than many other religious ideas.
Witty. I’m not sure what kind of response you’re looking for, but I’ll bet you’re good at mad libs.
You may be more right than you realize.
Also very true, from a religious perspective anyway.
How about that you are very obviously fixated on one very specific god, the Ancient Near Eastern one that somehow became a recent breakout hit from amongst his pantheon? Because the vast majority of all gods, past and present, have nothing whatsoever to do with “connectedness.” The vast majority of all gods that have any remaining traces in history are just Big Humans In The Sky with more powers but with mental and physical limitations of their own, not Cosmic Connectness. Thus, your hypothesis that people originally created gods because they felt The Force falls apart on even the most cursory glance at scrutiny.
I would tend to agree. Can you elaborate on what you mean by takedown?
OK, how so? I regard life in that it’s something that exists, can be studied, can have an impact on myself and the people around me. I have no need for a “God” that fulfills that same role; the natural world does all that just fine. It sounds almost like a Deist definition of God, but one that ultimately falls short in the same way the Deism does. It assumes there must be a God because of poor logic, then fills that perceived gap with something we can’t detect or interact with.
It really boils down to the question of “How do you regard Life?” Because the way I regard Life is purely scientific and rational. If I regard God the same way, I’ve reduced God to just empty concepts. The argument is unconvincing to me (an atheist) because I don’t see and spiritual meaning in Life. The argument is probably unconvincing to at Theist because they see spiritual meaning in God. Either way, I don’t see how this idea makes anyone better off.
Um.