Brings to mind an interesting corollary:
NO Life = NO God …?
If he defines this “life-force” as the mere sum total of all existing consciousness’s souls, then that would probably apply.
He seems to want this ‘God’ thing to have created the universe, though, which would obviously mean it predates in-universe life in any creation mythology, so that corollary probably doesn’t apply.
To be honest, having this ‘God’ thing create the universe probably blows rather large holes in any notion of it being people’s life-forces: you start barreling at high velocity towards the idea that people are mindless, soulless puppets with no value other than the fact that God is using us as puppets to play house with. But I’ll (generously, optimistically*) give him a chance to clarify his ideas before judging further.
- doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result - that’s totally sane, right?
I know I am now a non-theist and have little to add to this thread but I have a serous question. Growing up I would have considered some belief that a life-force from god was within me and required for life as hubris and that I was forgetting my own own lack of divinity.
This being my own personal understanding, I have always wondered how others do not consider this as a sin of pride.
Is this just a side effect of growing up Anglican? Does this differ across denominations or is it more of a personal finding?
In my understanding original sin was based on a desire to be like God, and that the sin of pride drove all the others.
I appreciate other view points as I have a hard time understanding it with my background.
I’ve always been atheist and the church I was raised in (Mormon) didn’t include the idea that humans were inhabited by bits of god - they thought that human souls were explicitly crafted by god, after which he created earth and human bodies for them to drive around.
That being said, I’ve certainly heard the idea that various parts of the human personality, such as decency or the ability to love, were actually not part of humanity but imparted by god instead. And to me that never sounded like something to be proud of - it was actually saying that humans were shitty immoral monsters, and that only via the external hand of god pushing us or constraining us were were able to be halfway decent. So if you ever managed to go for a week without shanking your neighbor in the back, that wasn’t really something to be proud of - it was actually God’s doing, and all credit would go to him. You remain worthless shit.
(I’d say the model proposed by Biffster has similar implications, if I were actually certain what his model was.)
Again, though, this is the outside perspective on it from a person who never bought into any of it. Other people for whom it ‘took’ might have a more positive view.
I suppose I’d have to say I differ with Augustine on this one. It’s a good question; if I have God within me, isn’t that the same as making myself God? I’d say that’s precisely what it is. But I don’t think I want to be like God…rather, I am God. And so are you. And so is everyone else. The mistake is thinking that we’re somehow separate from God. We’re not. That doesn’t mean we’re all omniscient and or omnipotent, or that we can see through each other’s eyes. Or see through walls. Or raise the dead. I suspect we are more like the remotes of some hive mind, and the experiences that we each have become part of a collective human experience. And no, we are not mindless drones living someone else’s life. We all get to live our own lives. Some of what we learn gets passed on to our family and friends, some gets passed on through other ways. If you publish a paper or write and record a song, for example, that part of you also lives on in other people’s memories, quite literally sometimes.
Please don’t ask me to explain this theory scientifically, because it has no scientific basis. It’s a gut feeling, really. For some people, it’s all “woo” and “deepity,” but for some, it might actually make some sense.
An example: electricity. There are electrical outlets on this side of the wall and across the room on the other side and even upstairs. Is it the same electricity in all of these outlets? We can confidently say yes, if we know something about wiring and all the wires hidden beneath the surface behind the walls. But what about my friend’s house? Well, yes it is, even though the. Wires may not be physically connected to each other, except in a very elaborate way through all the wires that connect houses to each other. But what about on a different continent or a different planet, where these wires are not connected to those wires? Well, it’s still the same principle. Electricity is electricity, and it works the same way no matter where you go.
I suspect God is like that. I also suspect Life is like that. The life-force I allude to is a lot like electricity, or magnetism, or many other powerful forces of nature that exist. It just is and connects things, whether we can see the connections or not. That’s why humans have the capacity to understand and have empathy for other humans; it is the life-force in them that is also in ourselves that we recognize. I don’t know exactly how to explain this without sounding goofy. Maybe it would be better presented as a science fiction story to get the point across. Anyway, that’s my lame attempt at an explanation for now. Have at 'er, but please be gentle. It’s still a hypothesis under construction.
I don’t think we are inhabited by “bits of God”; God as I understand Him or Her or It is indivisible. The God within us is actually the whole God, the alpha and omega, the basic stardust of the universe. While we are living our lives, God has limited awareness. We each experience our own experiences. There is no particular advantage to being God, apart from the fact we get to live another life when this one’s over. I have no scientific basis for this idea; it’s just a gut feeling that I have. About the part where we’re all connected I am certain, even if I don’t see the world exactly through your eyes. I can imagine it. We are All One.
Could be. But when I think of Life, I also extend it to all of Creation, including things that are not technically alive. To me existence is life (waits for arrows and daggers to emerge).
En fin. It’s turtles all the way down…
Okay, so let’s try again to define the model here.
You propose that God is indivisible, and (maybe) omnipresent. So it’s like there’s a thin film of God everywhere, spread like butter. However god ‘the whole’, the sentient entity that created the universe, is always aware of what’s going on with all of his ‘parts’ - because as far as he’s concerned, all of his parts are just parts of/reflections of/he’s everywhere stop asking shut up/ of the whole.
Also worth noting this God entity has his own mind, separate from ours, that includes memories that no human has. For example he remembers the creation of the universe, and what the inside of everyone’s colons looks like (omnipresence has its downsides). God is not merely the sum of everyone’s minds - he has his own mind and self as well.
Human minds therefore can be one of three things:
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Human minds could be limited subsets of god’s mind that he is aware of and deliberately and separately controlling - which is to say, god could be roleplaying us, in a giant roleplaying game where he plays all the parts. God looks at my character sheet and says “yep, begbert2 doesn’t know what Biffster knows, so I’ll roleplay him as confused. Also his character sheet says he rambles a hell of a lot, so when I roleplay him I’ll really cut loose.” I only think I have a complete mind because in the game God is playing he roleplays me that way.
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Human minds could be limited subsets of God’s mind that he is not aware of. This is like option 1, except instead of roleplaying it’s schizophrenia and God is completely insane. He talks to himself not because he’s playing all the roles in the play, but because he’s nuts.
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Humans aren’t subsets of God’s mind at all, and in fact operate completely separate from God. Humans can have thoughts and feelings and desires that are independent of and not driven by God. However God, being omnipresent and omniscient, is always watching. He sees you when you’re sleeping and he knows when you’re awake, and he knows all your thoughts and feelings at all times. Everything you experience is also experienced by God, since he’s the butter spread over your bread, and God notices and remembers it all. God’s memory is a secondary repository for human experience - I say secondary because humans have their own memories and experiences as well. And of course god observes everything, not just what’s in the minds of humans.
I think that those are the only three options that match up with what you’re saying. Which is closest to your proposed model of reality?
Short versions of the above:
- Humans aren’t real.
- Humans aren’t real (and God is insane).
- Humans are real, and you should never take your clothes off again.
Well, these are all very entertaining options and would make good stories on their own. However, a big difference between what you’re saying and what I’m saying is that you seem to view God as separate from yourself. If God really is indivisible, and if you have God within you, then you have all of God within you, not a piece. God is not separate from you. Put another way, you are God. There is no separation. I know it’s difficult to contemplate if you’ve been raised on the idea of separateness, but God is you, experiencing the world, experiencing creation. The reason it’s hard to contemplate the time before you came into existence is because you have never not existed, though you probably don’t remember back that far. Deepity? Full of woo? Perhaps. But it also makes sense from a certain point of view.
Nonsense. I can easily imagine a time when I did not exists, and a time when I will no longer exist. How self-important not to be able to do so.
No perhaps about it.
Not a bit of it. No matter how many times you insist on it.
Does god experience things I do not experience? Then I’m not god. (Unless God is roleplaying me or insane, in which case deliberate or accidental compartmentalization is why I’m unaware of God’s underwear size.)
Note that if god is experiencing what you’re experiencing, then he’s experiencing things I’m not experiencing.
Note: For the purpose of this argument I’m defining “I” as “the self I’m experiencing right now with the memories I have.” For the record I know neither your nor God’s underwear size. And while I’m aware that per Descartes you have no particular reason to believe that I have self-awareness or a mind of my own, I’ll still ask you to accept that I do. Take my word for it.
Well it doesn’t make sense to you, but it does to me. You don’t have to approve of what I believe, and I don’t have to approve of what you believe. It’s called tolerance.
No… tolerance is in MPSIMS. This is, Great Debates.
I’m sure you do. I don’t think we’re normally aware of everything each other is aware of, and certainly we’re not aware of everything that we can potentially aware of. Sometimes different states of mind can help us become more aware. Let me ask you: does your concept of God require being aware of everything all the time? Because I would imagine that would get pretty tedious pretty fast.
Agreement is not a requirement of Great Debates as far as I know.
No, but making a point and defending it usually is.
Well, I believe I made a point 500 and some posts ago and I’ve been defending it ever since. If you don’t agree with the point or the defence, that’s your right. As I said before, agreement is not necessary. I’ve just found that in most of the religious discussions I read, theists and atheists couldn’t find much common ground to actually have a discussion because they were too focussed on semantics. I was hoping this discussion might be different. Sadly I was mistaken.
You started with saying that "God=Life"without giving a singular definition of either God nor Life, and you have yet to give a singular definition of either. Instead you have been rambling through all the possible connotations of each word throughout these many pages, perhaps in hope that one of the many versions of the word “God” will somehow holistically fall in line with one of the many versions of the word “Life”.
I don’t have a concept of God; I’m an atheist. (As far as I’m concerned all gods are fictional.) The question is what your concept of god is - quite literally, that’s the explicit subject of the thread. If I weren’t interested in talking about that I wouldn’t be here. (Don’t ask me what the other commenters are doing in here.)
In any case. You acknowledge that we’re not normally aware of everything each other is aware of. So let’s start with that.
The set of things you are aware of we’ll call B.
The set of things I’m aware of we’ll call B2.
There is a certain amount of overlap between B and B2 - there are some things we both are aware of. Less so if we also consider how we’re aware of them. And in any case there’s a large number of things you’re aware of that I’m not, and vice versa. B =/= B2.
Additionally, there’s the set of things God knows, which we’ll call G. Per your model, G includes both everything in B, everything in B2, and quite a lot else - everything in Cz and QS and ArnldSchwz and sundry others, as well as probably many other things that no human has ever known. G is massive.
So. We can say with absolute confidence that G includes tons of stuff that’s not in B.
Therefore G =/= B. Quod erat demonstrandum.
As for “states of minds” - if my mind is just a “state of mind” of God’s mind, then that’s either option 1 or 2 - either he’s deliberately choosing to have (or pretend to have) my limited state of mind, or he’s doing it involuntarily and constantly talks to himself like a bum in a bus station. So I already addressed those situations - which do you prefer?
Also, is your mind just a state of my mind? Because if B = G and G = B2, then by the transitive property of equality, B = B2. And honestly if here we were all of one mind I think this thread would have gone a lot more smoothly than it has to date.