By God I don’t necessarily mean the typical Western idea of God (sitting in Heaven on a divine throne, Christ is his son etc.) If that’s what you think God is, fine, but I’m curious as to what some other ideas of God people have are.
I don’t think of God as a singluar entity in the universe, but sort of as a plane that humans interact with on a not-understood level. To me “God” is the interaction between beings that perpetuates itself, sort of a action-reaction thing.
Another idea I’ve heard that I found interesting is that this dimension (space-time) is an energy well, and that our “souls” leave our bodies and enter a higher-order stream, and that through doing good in this “energy-well”, we can help our souls get there. This is interesting to me because it raises ideas of how thought and energy intertwine. The person I heard this from tied in Christianity by saying that Christ understood this idea of the energy-well, but either lacked the technical terms to properly describe, or had his words misunderstood and recorded improperly. In this scenario Christ is a guide that helps you reach God, which would be the energy mass/stream.
Anyway, I’d like to hear everyone else’s non-orthodox ideas
God does not exist in my world. Souls do not exist.
All the things that we have yet to understand about the universe and physics…the thing that binds all the laws together is as close to “god” as we are gonna get.
“God” is an infinite set of qualia and narratives (and recusrively, the qualia of those narratives) and combination/permutations of those elements which are themselves individual elements. The subsets of the set are both logically incompatible and/or inseparable, depending on what finite subset the “God” label is getting applied to.
From my perspective, God is a collective delusion initially created by overpowered primate intellects that had solved basic causality and that were now terrified by the apparent non-causality of volcanos, lightning, droughts, illness, and so on. The delusion has held on because it serves an important purpose, namely to provide context and comfort in what is otherwise a maddeningly complex and purposeless universe.
If there is a God then he created everything but ditched it and went elsewhere never giving a second thought about what he created. We are not loved or hated, everything is random and meaningless.
I don’t think there is a God or any kind of deity out there who has any command, omniscience, omnipotence, powers over the universe and there never was one. The universe has always existed and will always exist until its heat death or all the protons decay (whichever comes first).
The closest I get to thinking about anything spiritual is that everything has, for lack of a better term, a soul. Being in constant contact with such an anomaly gives people the impression that there is something greater. The thing is that people see the forest but not the trees despite the fact there is no forest.
Ya know, that quote is going to keep me up tonight while I try to figure out just what it means.
If God has a nature, just by observation it seems to be silent. I mean, we’re spilling how much blood in the Holy Lands, you’d think just a little display of omnipotence would just clear things up swimmingly.
But, hey, He has His reasons, I’m sure. You can’t expect humanity to learn to walk properly if they can’t feel the effects of falling on their face when they fail. :-/
I think that the real nature of God is too big for our three dimensional heads to hold. That’s why I think we have to die first and shuck our bodies in order to really understand. Otherwise we couldn’t look on the face and inside the mind (for want of a better word) of God without exploding or something. In the meantime, though, I’m content with waiting to see what God is really like (assuming I make the guest list!).
I have expereinced something that I feel to be an awareness guiding me through life. Coincidences are the words this awareness uses, and if I listen, I seem to be able to draw more and more coincidences to myself. My life has become interconnected in so many ways it really blows my mind some day. Maybe I’ve jut lived in Manhattan for too long - I accept the fact that it may just be a trick of perception, but either way, it’s pretty damn cool when it happens.
This guidance is very non-specific. So I find it hard to understand how others who feel non-specific powers in their lives are able to give it a definite name and history. One thing that seems to be true to me is that their are more things in heaven and earth then in any of our philosophies. It’s a great mystery - what is god, what are we, what is anything - it’s a shame people act like it’s solved already. Reality offers us so much more to test and discover - who knows what we will learn if only we are looking.
A beautiful large red Jello mold, brimming over with Celestrial Light.And Magic. Celestrial Light & Magic being God’s own special effects company.
But, no pineapple chunks.
The one with the pineapple chunks is the Devil.
It might be a good idea to write that down, so you remember–“NO CHUNKS”.
M’kay?
Good.
Glad we cleared that one up.
Based on this response, I’d say I have a future in upper management, wouldn’t you?
God is the force, the intelligence, that defined the laws of physics. God determined that matter is made of atoms, which are made of protons, electrons, and neutrons, and what those are made of and so on and so forth. God determined that a gravitational force attracts each bit of matter in the universe to all other bits of matter in the universe. Etc. Etc. Etc.
God does not care about you, but that’s a good thing. Your actions during life have absolutely no bearing on what happens to you when you die. God really doesn’t care if you steal, murder, or rape anyone (I, however do, and so do most law-abiding citizens, so behave yourself.).
You know, you could quite easily replace every instance of the word ‘God’ in that post with the phrase ‘Random Chance’ and it would make just as much sense. Maybe that is the true nature of God.
I never really bought into the concept of God as this stern father figure judging us from his trhone in heaven. If there is a superior being, why would he care about us any more we care about what bugs do, from a moral perspective?
Still, there is always the question of why the universe works the way it does.
