And this upsets you?
Not as much as these constant stall tactics used to avoid having to support your meanderings.
It upsets me - clarity in conversation matters.
Suppose I opened up a thread claiming that horses eat people, and when everyone objected I claimed that, no, I was using a different definition for the words “horses” and “people” and under those definitions the idea that horses eat people totally makes sense.
By the way, what do you think of the fact that horses eat people?
Could you please provide us with a single definition of “God” and a single definition of “Life” that you think are roughly equivalent to each other?
For vegans, it would be pretty weird. Surely you must admit that horses are a lot easier to define than god or life is.
I don’t have to admit anything! Bwahahaha!
But seriously, have you ever tried to define a horse? In such a way as to include all variety of horses, but exclude all deer, elk, wolves, mice, and coffee makers? There are number of attributes that you need to describe in relatively clear terms to clarify what, specifically, you’re talking about.
And it doesn’t help that as far as you know, when I say “horse”, I might mean something closer to a coffee maker. It’s hard to say, really.
Also, vegans would find horses eating people weird but others wouldn’t? Er, is english your first language?
I meant considering horses are vegans. Unless you know something I don’t. And I would imagine a dichotomous key of some sort would be needed to narrow down the attributes of a horse. Still, far easier than defining god. Or life.
Nope, because I don’t believe single definitions do these abstract nouns justice. But to get in the ballpark, I’d say that the creative force that makes cells divide and waterfalls flow and accounts for electromagnetism is the same force that powers each of us as living things. Some call it life; some call it god. Whatever it is, it’s a part of all of us whether we believe in it or not.
Which brings me back to the point of the original post, which many people seem to have missed. The point had to do with reimagining god not as the supreme deity that we all bound down before, but rather the basic life force that is in all of us. Most people don’t seem to have an issue with believing in life; if life and god were the same, then people wouldn’t have such an issue with believing in god, and god wouldn’t be so scary. I find the thought comforting personally, and I’m a little surprised by all the semantic dissection that has come. Oh well. It’s not really THAT complex an idea, and it is just meant to be something to ponder. If the idea doesn’t resonate with you, that’s okay.
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I can define A god, quite easily. The problem with generally defining the term “god” is that virtually any and everything has been called a god at some point - spirits with lots of power, spirits with little or no power, physical things with lots of power, physical things with no power, immortal things, mortal things, visible things, invisible things, tangible things, intangible things, real things, fictional things.
Providing a general definition for the term “god” is hard.
But nobody is asking you for a general definition.
All we’re asking you to do is describe what you think your god is like and what it does. Doing this is easy. Every religion you’ve heard of does it. Every role playing game with deities does it. I’ve done it. (I once had a styrofoam cup that was a god. It did cup things. It was a god. Done!) Ask any christian and they can ramble on for hours about what their god has done and will do. This is not hard.
Even life isn’t that hard to define. (And “Life” is even easier - the only sort of ‘life’ where persistent capitalization is justified is the board game; you can google the rules if you like.) It’s hard to completely describe life, down to the cogs and gears, but in this thread you don’t need to do that - even a minimalistic descriptive definition would do.
I do not think that your failure to define and clarify your terms is even slightly justified. And while I’ve spent some time entertaining myself trying to tease out and piece together what you could possibly mean, I really shouldn’t have had to do that, and my having played around with that doesn’t justify your failure to lay out your thesis clearly.
I don’t think the forces that make cells divide are the same forces that make waterfalls flow, unless you generalize it all down to “physics”. And I don’t think that any of those forces, or the collective of life (by any definition I can think of) composes a single sentient being. Certainly not one I would worship, or worry about, or be comforted by.
(Heck, the forces of nature aren’t comforting at all. They created Australia, of all things.)
I don’t really understand what you’re wanting me to do. I just explained how I thought god and life are connected a couple of posts ago. That doesn’t seem good enough for you. Well, I tried. My god is a little blurry around the edges, and my understanding of god does not simplify to one simple thing for me, unless that simple thing is life. If that answer doesn’t satisfy you, then sorry, but that’s all I have for now. As I’ve said before, it’s a work in progress.
There you go. God is physics. Australian physics, where water swirls the other way down the drain.
Fine then; I’ll disregard this entire thread to date and work with that previous post alone.
This doesn’t help.
You seem to be doing two things. First, you’re positing some kind of “creative force” which does what many of us think physics does. Mindless, disconnected, unthinking physics. Getting us to believe there’s a homogeneous force doing physics-type stuff instead is going to be a hard sell - something akin to telling us a trailer is being pulled by a horse when we can all see that a car is pulling it. So a hard row to hoe, so to speak.
But let’s put that aside for a moment and presume that, yes, there’s a homogenous force that makes reality work (as opposed to gravity, chemistry, and electromagnetism). Fine. I can entertain the idea of a flat earth on turtles, I can entertain this.
But then you call this phsyics-like force God, and expect me to infer things from it.
To be fair, if the idea is to present “God” as being unscary, there are worse approaches. But the question is, what do we gain from calling some force “God”? Is the name merited? Does the force do godlike things? Do I have any reason to care about it, beyond determining how it works well enough to avoid blowing my face off with firecrackers or accidentally visiting Australia?
Supposing that this life force exists that is called “God”, then there is one big, huge question:
So?
Why is the equivalence necessary?
What negative impact would you suffer if you changed your world view such that?:
Life =/= God
It seems to me that you insist on putting the cart before the horse. You admit that your definition of god is fuzzy and that this is all a “work in progress”. Yet, somehow, you’re convinced that your equation, L=G, is correct. No proof, mind you. Just a hypothesis that isn’t even testable.
Exactly. There is no need to live your life in fear of eternal punishment, which if you’re atheist, you probably weren’t worried about. Neale Donald Walsch’s idea, if I understand it, is to make god a whole lot more accessible and everyday. Something akin to life itself, which we do not fear and which makes no demands of us. No sacrifice required. Some people might find this kind of God too impersonal and might prefer the anthropomorphized god, but nonetheless this is what he proposes. The idea that god grants us eternal life is not that unusual of a tenet; this is just going one step further and suggesting that god IS eternal life, another thing that you may regard as fictional. I doubt we’re going to agree on very much here. Except the God of physics and Australian meat-eating horses.
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And? Suppose Life =/= God. It really changes nothing for me. Either way, I am not living in fear of eternal hell fire, and my rationale for doing good things that help others is not because some invisible deity is looking over my shoulder. I do them because I choose to do them.
And that’s laudable. No-one is suggesting you’re not a good person.
You’ve put forward a hypothesis that is, at best, internally consistent, i.e.: you believe what you believe because you believe it. But you chose to share it and continue to defend it without a shred of supporting evidence, except to play fast and loose with meaning of otherwise generally well defined words and concepts. That’s a technique commonly associated with New Age sophists. Some of us believe that it’s disingenuous to twist commonly accepted meanings of words and concepts into a kind of pseudo-science. I suppose it gives some people comfort, you among them. But for those of us who cannot believe, it not only comes across as irrational but as an irresponsible, possibly harmful obfuscation. Thus, if rejecting your initial premise of L=G does not harm you in any meaningful way, consider the possibility that it may possibly benefit you and others in your sphere of influence in some small but meaningful way.
Well, it’s a “what if” scenario. What if we regard God as life itself? How does that affect our view of God? For someone who does not believe in God in the first place, the scenario is irrelevant. That’s the kind of reaction most of the atheistic thinkers have presented here, it seems to me. The replies tend to focus on definitions and semantics, which is okay, but again misses the big picture. If we believe in life (and who doesn’t?), then what if God were really the manifestation of life? It’s not that complex a thought puzzle that requires total dissection; it’s a different way of thinking about God. That’s all. The need to explicitly define either God or Life (which tend to be harder to define at the best of times) is irrelevant to this thought exercise.
Are you honestly and truly trying to say to us that you really, honestly don’t think the definitions of terms matter when you are discussing a subject? Are we really supposed to work with a definition of life as “your feelings and the things that happen, plus animals and volcanoes and rocks and shit”? you honestly, truly believe that this rises to the level of even “extremely minor debate?”
How many times have you watched The Empire Strikes Back, anyway?
Well, “what if” bagels=donuts? Is that just a different way to think about torus shaped food?
ISTM that most of the objection to your hypothesis isn’t based on atheist views on god, but on your playing with meaning of well understood concepts and language. You insisting on looser definitions for those concepts does not help your hypothesis because, by saying well defined terms are “irrelevant to this thought exercise”, discredits your entire argument.