Does God get a fail in the love category?

[Greatest I am]

Does God get a fail in the love category?

All will agree that in loving someone, that love must be shown in works, deeds and actions. This allows for reciprocity which is what makes what would be a one way corrupted love a true two way love.

Believers see God as the greatest lover of mankind yet he does no works or deeds to show us that he loves us.

Love, like faith, without works and deeds is dead. That’s scripture. Love, to be true love, must be shown by works, deeds and actions. The fact that God does not show his love by works, deeds and actions at a personal or collective level means that God does not love us. Some are going to point to the notion that God created them but remember that that is not a provable claim so please do not offer it. Remember that way too high of a percentage of us are born with defects.

Do you believe that God loves us?

Why or why not?

------------------------------

God is also said to love us unconditionally. Yet if we do not love, honor, obey and believe in him, we are condemned and punished. Those are all conditions we must meet to get his love returned to us.

Does God love us unconditionally?

------------------------------

Love and morals developed to enhance interaction and living within groups of people and perhaps other entities.
God was alone and did not need to develop morals and could not love anyone because he was alone for untold millennia.

Is God even able to love?

Regards
DL

 

[Mrs.PatsFanInVa]

Without getting into a whole theology discussion I'll cherry-pick and answer a few of this, if I may.

Believers see God as the greatest lover of mankind yet he does no works or deeds to show us that he loves us.

How can you say that? There are oceans and canyons and lily-of-the-valley flowers....there is rain and wind in the summer and an infinite number of unique snowflakes in the winter. There are pit bull puppies and hairless kittens and fat waddling ducks and graceful stately swans. There are human babies and there are 100 year old veterans.

All you need to do to know that God loves you is look out the east window at dawn and the west window at dusk and watch the run rise and set.

No two days are ever alike. Ever.

If that's not God putting on a show for you, I don't know what is.

Remember that way too high of a percentage of us are born with defects.

We're all born with defects. What's your point? That's the price of humanity, isn't it?

Do you believe that God loves us?

Why or why not?

Sure, why not?

God is also said to love us unconditionally. Yet if we do not love, honor, obey and believe in him, we are condemned and punished. Those are all conditions we must meet to get his love returned to us.

Does God love us unconditionally?

I love my children unconditionally, too....but if they do something wrong, they get punished. Doesn't mean I've stopped loving them or I love them any less - just means I care about them enough to stop them from hurting themselves or others.

------------------------------

Love and morals developed to enhance interaction and living within groups of people and perhaps other entities.
God was alone and did not need to develop morals and could not love anyone because he was alone for untold millennia.

Assuming, for the sake of answering, that this is true, it would logically follow that He could not have devoloped an inability to love, either.

 

[Greatest I am]

Without getting into a whole theology discussion I'll cherry-pick and answer a few of this, if I may.



How can you say that? There are oceans and canyons and lily-of-the-valley flowers....there is rain and wind in the summer and an infinite number of unique snowflakes in the winter. There are pit bull puppies and hairless kittens and fat waddling ducks and graceful stately swans. There are human babies and there are 100 year old veterans.

All you need to do to know that God loves you is look out the east window at dawn and the west window at dusk and watch the run rise and set.

No two days are ever alike. Ever.

If that's not God putting on a show for you, I don't know what is.



We're all born with defects. What's your point? That's the price of humanity, isn't it?



Sure, why not?



I love my children unconditionally, too....but if they do something wrong, they get punished. Doesn't mean I've stopped loving them or I love them any less - just means I care about them enough to stop them from hurting themselves or others.

------------------------------



Assuming, for the sake of answering, that this is true, it would logically follow that He could not have devoloped an inability to love, either.

You recognize the truth then that the God described could not love.

:singing:

Regards
DL

 

[anditsgood]

Does God get a fail in the love category?

All will agree that in loving someone, that love must be shown in works, deeds and actions. This allows for reciprocity which is what makes what would be a one way corrupted love a true two way love.

no, measuring what someone (or something) does for you shows you have self love and you do not know the concept of it

Believers see God as the greatest lover of mankind yet he does no works or deeds to show us that he loves us.

are you trying to measure by a specific act, work or deed? see above

Love, like faith, without works and deeds is dead. That’s scripture. Love, to be true love, must be shown by works, deeds and actions. The fact that God does not show his love by works, deeds and actions at a personal or collective level means that God does not love us. Some are going to point to the notion that God created them but remember that that is not a provable claim so please do not offer it.

There is a strawman argument if i ever saw one. again see above

Remember that way too high of a percentage of us are born with defects.

what is a birth defect? how is a body suppose to be perfect? If you are give two perfect hands but never learn to use them, what good are they? If given two eyes with perfect vision but yet you cannot see what good is that? Some may see how others have it better but dont realize how much better they have it. Again we are give eyes but can we really see?

Do you believe that God loves us?

No Doubt

Why or why not?

As Mrs PinVa stated above, Sometimes you have to punish those you love so they can learn

God is also said to love us unconditionally. Yet if we do not love, honor, obey and believe in him, we are condemned and punished. Those are all conditions we must meet to get his love returned to us.

no, those are conditions that are said if you want eternal life. which is a separate discussion

Does God love us unconditionally?

yes, when you understand what love is

Love and morals developed to enhance interaction and living within groups of people and perhaps other entities.
God was alone and did not need to develop morals and could not love anyone because he was alone for untold millennia.

Is God even able to love?



Regards
DL

Greatest love is when we grow out of self love and love something unconditional and not measure what we get back in return,

 

[Greatest I am]

no, measuring what someone (or something) does for you shows you have self love and you do not know the concept of it



are you trying to measure by a specific act, work or deed? see above

,

How do those you love know you love them and is the God you follow doing whatever you are doing?

Or do you not do nothing and hope that they know you love them?

How do you know if they love you in return?

Regards
DL

 

[DisgruntledTunaFan]

KJB
1Corinthians 13:1 Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
1Co 13:2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.
1Co 13:3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.
1Co 13:4 Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,
1Co 13:5 Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;
1Co 13:6 Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;
1Co 13:7 Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
1Co 13:8 Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.
1Co 13:9 For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
1Co 13:10 But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
1Co 13:11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
1Co 13:12 For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
1Co 13:13 And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

 

[DisgruntledTunaFan]

Word [charity] :: Search the 1828 Noah Webster's Dictionary of the English Language (FREE) :: 1828.mshaffer.com

CHARITY, n.

1. In a general sense, love, benevolence, good will; that disposition of heart which inclines men to think favorably of their fellow men to think favorably of their fellow men, and to do them good. In a theological sense, it includes supreme love to God, and universal good will to men.

 

[Greatest I am]

Are you planning to opine on the O P or just post garbage?

Regards
DL

 

[PatsFanInVa]

I've expounded before on my thoughts on God, which I'll try to recap in a nutshell here, and connect to question above regarding God and love.

First, with apologies to the better half, I must say we differ on the nature of God. I can't believe in a personal God separate from us, and in this I differ with the mainstream of my own religion. I do think that consciousness, in fact, a conscious cosmos, is a very good match for God in my own thinking at this point. That includes a consciousness not which created and planned everything, but which is everything, down to the subatomic level... I think of the various scriptures we trade with one another here as lending insights into this great underlying unified universe... and often giving insights into the great thinking which we don't parse properly at our individual, illusory levels.

The stronger one's yearning for an exclusion from this reality, to me, the more one adds to one's own anxiety. At least that's so for me. The more that one accepts that the omnipresent and omnipotent being must be all, not a part, the more one realizes that omnibenevolence simply can't be a condition. That is the hardest thing to realize and accept -- that if God is in the innocent gunned down in fervent prayer, God is also in the shooter. Or rather both are in God.

To say that God loves us is to say that we love ourselves and one another and other select aspects of creation; to protest God's lack of love for us is to say there are those who do wrong, and there are wrong actions.

I don't posit an afterlife, necessarily -- only that in this life, I am a tiny part of an immeasurably larger mind. You are not a brain, you are a neuron.

Does God love? At that level, I am boggled at what the thoughts must be. We are tiny tiny parts of God; I don't think there's a personal God standing back from creation and saying "I think I'll do this. I think I'll do that." I think rather that the universe, or many universes, are interconnected from the beginning, that if you like, that interconnection, that coherence, is love, and that we hear its echo in the words of our loved ones, and feel its echo in our lovers' arms. But every being, "be he ne'er so vile," and more than that, every animal, plant, and rock, are linked to this great mind of a much higher order.

The vocabulary here is full of symbols and characters that make for wonderful stories and arguments. We assign God that name in English, or a number of other names in Hebrew or another in Arabic. Then we have these other characters - Satan, Jesus, etc. They're all very solid and very easy to discuss and make up if/then statements about.

By contrast, God -- the God that includes all things -- is very hard to talk about; in fact, talking about God is impossible, and we proceed immediately from error. Our description cannot describe that greater self in which we partake. Yes, death must too be part of God, even an evil death, as I'll say it using the vocabulary of the scale of each of our lives.

So I arrive finally at a conclusion a lot like the atheist's: Do good for goodness' sake. I think I have a heretical idea as well, that the enormous all-encompassing being called God, of which we're part, can have a little better day or a little worse day -- and more heretical yet, can be more and less complete, as we accept more or less that we're of him. Wherever consciousness arises, he is there, or rather, there is a bright neuron firing in his mind, rather than the dull just-thereness of the more inert parts which are nevertheless of him.

Falling back on my human understanding, I think that hate hurts him; it is like peeling off your own skin, to use a gross anthropomorphism.

Prefer whichever deity you prefer; it simply cannot be true that God loves us in the sense that he will cure all disease, stop earthquakes from happening, etc. etc. etc. -- because the bad things still happen. Is he conscious of us? Yes. Perhaps that's why one needs a mind spanning the whole cosmos -- simply to have a grand enough mind to know all its constituent parts.

As to punishment, it's irrational to explain the more serious tragedies of life as punishments -- they happen to good and bad people without real discrimination. The bad guy beats the good guy. The children die, the shooter lives. The village dies, the SS guards live. However you want to express it.

It doesn't matter which character you saddle with these things. They persist, and they cannot be solved.

The name for this greater God of all things, for me, and English-speaker, is God. I also think of his proper name, from my upbringing, as the name we don't write or speak aloud out of awe. Forgive me my primitive heritage; I find it appropriate, however, not to try to name a being I can at best tell vague approximations about. Awe doesn't begin to describe all that there is -- all that I am, in that I partake in the all.

Now then -- in that I have insufficient thought, and insufficient vocabulary, to describe something of this scale, please understand that everything I have written here is, by necessity, a lie -- but it's one of omission rather than commission.

Exult in your self, in that your self partakes in something limitless and more complex than you can begin to comprehend. Exult in your fellow men and women, as they do as well. We represent spirit that's achieved consciousness... much more so than the rest of what's on this pathetic little wrong in an unfashionable backwater of a mid-size spiral galaxy. Exult in all of us, and in all of it, and in the beauty you see and the greatness you can become - the more of the all you embrace, the closer to the all you become, the closer to God you are.

And if that's loving the sunrise and sunset, the newborns and the veterans, the stories we all tell each other of our lives, understand that every moment of connectedness is a moment of greater closeness to what you/we all really are -- supremely connected. Every moment you push those away, close your ears to the stories, miss the sunrises and sunsets, deride the other, or commit unnecessary cruelty, you are separating yourself further from what you are, part of a connected conscious all. That's not what we're for.

That's what I think.

 

[RI Patriots fan]

I've expounded before on my thoughts on God, which I'll try to recap in a nutshell here, and connect to question above regarding God and love.

First, with apologies to the better half, I must say we differ on the nature of God. I can't believe in a personal God separate from us, and in this I differ with the mainstream of my own religion. I do think that consciousness, in fact, a conscious cosmos, is a very good match for God in my own thinking at this point. That includes a consciousness not which created and planned everything, but which is everything, down to the subatomic level... I think of the various scriptures we trade with one another here as lending insights into this great underlying unified universe... and often giving insights into the great thinking which we don't parse properly at our individual, illusory levels.

The stronger one's yearning for an exclusion from this reality, to me, the more one adds to one's own anxiety. At least that's so for me. The more that one accepts that the omnipresent and omnipotent being must be all, not a part, the more one realizes that omnibenevolence simply can't be a condition. That is the hardest thing to realize and accept -- that if God is in the innocent gunned down in fervent prayer, God is also in the shooter. Or rather both are in God.

To say that God loves us is to say that we love ourselves and one another and other select aspects of creation; to protest God's lack of love for us is to say there are those who do wrong, and there are wrong actions.

I don't posit an afterlife, necessarily -- only that in this life, I am a tiny part of an immeasurably larger mind. You are not a brain, you are a neuron.

Does God love? At that level, I am boggled at what the thoughts must be. We are tiny tiny parts of God; I don't think there's a personal God standing back from creation and saying "I think I'll do this. I think I'll do that." I think rather that the universe, or many universes, are interconnected from the beginning, that if you like, that interconnection, that coherence, is love, and that we hear its echo in the words of our loved ones, and feel its echo in our lovers' arms. But every being, "be he ne'er so vile," and more than that, every animal, plant, and rock, are linked to this great mind of a much higher order.

The vocabulary here is full of symbols and characters that make for wonderful stories and arguments. We assign God that name in English, or a number of other names in Hebrew or another in Arabic. Then we have these other characters - Satan, Jesus, etc. They're all very solid and very easy to discuss and make up if/then statements about.

By contrast, God -- the God that includes all things -- is very hard to talk about; in fact, talking about God is impossible, and we proceed immediately from error. Our description cannot describe that greater self in which we partake. Yes, death must too be part of God, even an evil death, as I'll say it using the vocabulary of the scale of each of our lives.

So I arrive finally at a conclusion a lot like the atheist's: Do good for goodness' sake. I think I have a heretical idea as well, that the enormous all-encompassing being called God, of which we're part, can have a little better day or a little worse day -- and more heretical yet, can be more and less complete, as we accept more or less that we're of him. Wherever consciousness arises, he is there, or rather, there is a bright neuron firing in his mind, rather than the dull just-thereness of the more inert parts which are nevertheless of him.

Falling back on my human understanding, I think that hate hurts him; it is like peeling off your own skin, to use a gross anthropomorphism.

Prefer whichever deity you prefer; it simply cannot be true that God loves us in the sense that he will cure all disease, stop earthquakes from happening, etc. etc. etc. -- because the bad things still happen. Is he conscious of us? Yes. Perhaps that's why one needs a mind spanning the whole cosmos -- simply to have a grand enough mind to know all its constituent parts.

As to punishment, it's irrational to explain the more serious tragedies of life as punishments -- they happen to good and bad people without real discrimination. The bad guy beats the good guy. The children die, the shooter lives. The village dies, the SS guards live. However you want to express it.

It doesn't matter which character you saddle with these things. They persist, and they cannot be solved.

The name for this greater God of all things, for me, and English-speaker, is God. I also think of his proper name, from my upbringing, as the name we don't write or speak aloud out of awe. Forgive me my primitive heritage; I find it appropriate, however, not to try to name a being I can at best tell vague approximations about. Awe doesn't begin to describe all that there is -- all that I am, in that I partake in the all.

Now then -- in that I have insufficient thought, and insufficient vocabulary, to describe something of this scale, please understand that everything I have written here is, by necessity, a lie -- but it's one of omission rather than commission.

Exult in your self, in that your self partakes in something limitless and more complex than you can begin to comprehend. Exult in your fellow men and women, as they do as well. We represent spirit that's achieved consciousness... much more so than the rest of what's on this pathetic little wrong in an unfashionable backwater of a mid-size spiral galaxy. Exult in all of us, and in all of it, and in the beauty you see and the greatness you can become - the more of the all you embrace, the closer to the all you become, the closer to God you are.

And if that's loving the sunrise and sunset, the newborns and the veterans, the stories we all tell each other of our lives, understand that every moment of connectedness is a moment of greater closeness to what you/we all really are -- supremely connected. Every moment you push those away, close your ears to the stories, miss the sunrises and sunsets, deride the other, or commit unnecessary cruelty, you are separating yourself further from what you are, part of a connected conscious all. That's not what we're for.

That's what I think.

Interesting take on your....um...."faith".

In your world, who decides what is good and what is evil? How exactly do we "accept' this "God" of yours when we can't be sure of what he wants from us?

Quite frankly, if there is no afterlife and no punishment or reward, why should we care about anything other than our own well-being? Why should we forsake our own self interests for a "God" who doesn't care about us? Can you honestly say that you have ever changed your behavior because you felt that you might "hurt" your "God"?

How exactly did this "God" come into being if he is matter since all matter has a beginning and an end? If there is no personal God and I am a tiny part of God then I must be "divine".....why not just worship and serve myself?

And why exactly should we care what your God has to say if this world is the best he can do......death, suffering, inequality. How can the child dying of malaria in any 3rd world country "exult" in themselves? How can the girl forced into prostitution "embrace the all"? How can the child born blind not "miss the sunrises and sunsets"?

To me your "God" sounds cruel, impotent and valueless.


Thank God for his son ************.

 

[PatsFanInVa]

Wonderful questions to ask of your own idea of God.

But you don't ask them, RI. You may look them up in the Catechism, if they're there. But you don't ask them.

Yisroel means "struggles with God." I struggle, and to date, this is a great deal of what I have come up with.

Others have struggled, not just in my own faith but in all faiths, and societies without faith. All come up with similar social goods, so I do not rely on my own personal observations of truth to cure the ills of the world.

As to God curing said ills, he does not.

If he is a conscious God, and a creator, and we judge him at our scale, he has designed all life to devour life; He has devised conquests and ordered his people to begin their life in genocides. I have learned much from the scriptures of my youth, but I am a 51-year-old man.

Your own faith, and your underlined bolded proclamations thereof, evidently impress you to no end. They do not impress me.

Your first commandment seems to be "Thou shalt be satisfied, triumphant, and confident in a set of pat answers, and shalt question not."

To me, this is worse than nothing.

PFnV

 

[Greatest I am]

PatsFanInVa

Seems that you have taken a decent road to God from a moral standpoint but you do not do anything for you if you give all that thinking to the God you chose.

I prefer, by necessity thanks to my apotheosis, the way Jesus actually taught about finding God.

I know you think yourself a neuron but Jesus says you are a brain or mind.

1A Hidden Meanings In Bible - YouTube


To your last post, yes, people have forgotten to -----

1 Thesalonian 5;21 Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.

People have become sheeple.

Regards
DL

 

[Greatest I am]

To me your "God" sounds cruel, impotent and valueless.


Thank God for his son ************.

You mean thank Rome for creating a pacifist God instead of the war God the Jews were praying for.

This book tells a compelling story.

Caesar's Messiah Promo - YouTube

Regards
DL

 

[RI Patriots fan]

Wonderful questions to ask of your own idea of God.

But you don't ask them, RI. You may look them up in the Catechism, if they're there. But you don't ask them.

Yisroel means "struggles with God." I struggle, and to date, this is a great deal of what I have come up with.

Others have struggled, not just in my own faith but in all faiths, and societies without faith. All come up with similar social goods, so I do not rely on my own personal observations of truth to cure the ills of the world.

As to God curing said ills, he does not.

If he is a conscious God, and a creator, and we judge him at our scale, he has designed all life to devour life; He has devised conquests and ordered his people to begin their life in genocides. I have learned much from the scriptures of my youth, but I am a 51-year-old man.

Your own faith, and your underlined bolded proclamations thereof, evidently impress you to no end. They do not impress me.

Your first commandment seems to be "Thou shalt be satisfied, triumphant, and confident in a set of pat answers, and shalt question not."

To me, this is worse than nothing.

PFnV

I have the answers to those questions in the person of Jesus Chirst. When you have a relationship with ************ (God in flesh) and allow him to inhabit your soul, the struggle is not to know "of" God but rather to bend your will to his will. That is the struggle of a Catholic.

Struggle??? What struggle?? How can you struggle with something that you don't even believe exists?


"I can't believe in a personal God separate from us" - PFV


Clearly, by using "can't" the struggle is over. You don't struggle with the God of Israel anymore. You struggle with the worldly gold that you use to forge your own God in the image of your own "consciousness". A God who never challenges you but rather a God who stays on the sidelines and lets you be in charge.

So when you say that you're struggling with God, at least be honest and say that you're struggling to forge your own God.

Why would I care if you're impressed or not? I'm just challenging some guy from VA on his beliefs in an internet forum.

 

[Greatest I am]

So when you say that you're struggling with God, at least be honest and say that you're struggling to forge your own God.
.

I think that that is a given. Did you not have a hard time forging your own?

Most do unless they take the easy way out as most do and just follow daddies God and granddaddies God and great great -----

Who or what is your God and if he came easy to you it is likely one you picked up from someone else and that means that you have not done the work of writing the laws of God in your heart.

Counterfeit Gods || Spoken Word || Jefferson Bethke - YouTube

Regards
DL

 

[PatsFanInVa]

The neuron and brain is a comparison of scale; and I cannot but believe this to be true. And I don't think it only a matter of degree, but kind, of thought. We're part of something infinitely more grand.

Since neither of you are monotheists, you do not share my own specific cultural bias. Not surprisingly, my monotheism matches precisely what I grew up with; it's only matured with age.

So when I hear Shema yisroel, adonai elohanu, adonai ehud, as a grown man, what am I to think?

That God is one... and I'm something else? That God is one, but he's so small he's not in the dust, or in the trees, or in my cat, or in my person? God's omnipresence, I think, must be all-permeating and all-inclusive.

The kabbalists did a great deal of work, painting with a medieval palette, as it were, to try to keep away from that box. I think many Jewish sages did the same. They were as horrified by pantheism as they were by polytheism and idolatry.

In fact, this last might explain one source of that horror, without worrying about what happens to one's special relationship to God if God is everything, everyone, and everywhere.

Consider the implications for idolatry: if God is indeed in the dust, the rocks, the animals, the trees, the people, every atom, every neutron, every quark and photon... then he is indeed in the idols. Just not in the way the idolators think.

Abraham was right to smash the idols; idolatry was an attempt to reduce to a single physical object the grandeur of an infinitely greater presence. There's no special rock, or statue, or figurine, or man, who encompasses all that is. God does - or rather, God is. I run into the language barrier very quickly, but it's more that God Gods -- the verb which doesn't exist in our language but should, not the plural.

Of course, as I stipulate, these are the observations of a monotheist. I do not expect them to hold sway over trinitarians or over other polytheists. And PS, don't bother, RI, I know you think you're a monotheist, but if you have a divine Jesus, "God the Son," you're not. More than one divine consciousness at one time = polytheist. It's okay. It makes no more or less sense, I suppose, than monotheism. A materialist would think we're both dolts, so there you have it.

As to my Jewish faith, I'm certainly not outside its bounds, and I'm glad for that. I won't be publishing any of these posts in some Lubavitcher paper, but I can live with that

PFnV

 

[PatsFanInVa]

By the way... the other guy (or "everybody but me") are never "sheeple" or you just can't have the conversation. Of course, I'm the one who just called the trinitarians polytheists, so I'm one to talk.

 

[RI Patriots fan]

The neuron and brain is a comparison of scale; and I cannot but believe this to be true. And I don't think it only a matter of degree, but kind, of thought. We're part of something infinitely more grand.

Since neither of you are monotheists, you do not share my own specific cultural bias. Not surprisingly, my monotheism matches precisely what I grew up with; it's only matured with age.

So when I hear Shema yisroel, adonai elohanu, adonai ehud, as a grown man, what am I to think?

That God is one... and I'm something else? That God is one, but he's so small he's not in the dust, or in the trees, or in my cat, or in my person? God's omnipresence, I think, must be all-permeating and all-inclusive.

The kabbalists did a great deal of work, painting with a medieval palette, as it were, to try to keep away from that box. I think many Jewish sages did the same. They were as horrified by pantheism as they were by polytheism and idolatry.

In fact, this last might explain one source of that horror, without worrying about what happens to one's special relationship to God if God is everything, everyone, and everywhere.

Consider the implications for idolatry: if God is indeed in the dust, the rocks, the animals, the trees, the people, every atom, every neutron, every quark and photon... then he is indeed in the idols. Just not in the way the idolators think.

Abraham was right to smash the idols; idolatry was an attempt to reduce to a single physical object the grandeur of an infinitely greater presence. There's no special rock, or statue, or figurine, or man, who encompasses all that is. God does - or rather, God is. I run into the language barrier very quickly, but it's more that God Gods -- the verb which doesn't exist in our language but should, not the plural.

Of course, as I stipulate, these are the observations of a monotheist. I do not expect them to hold sway over trinitarians or over other polytheists. And PS, don't bother, RI, I know you think you're a monotheist, but if you have a divine Jesus, "God the Son," you're not. More than one divine consciousness at one time = polytheist. It's okay. It makes no more or less sense, I suppose, than monotheism. A materialist would think we're both dolts, so there you have it.

As to my Jewish faith, I'm certainly not outside its bounds, and I'm glad for that. I won't be publishing any of these posts in some Lubavitcher paper, but I can live with that

PFnV

I guess that's the beauty of Pantheism......."God" allows you to call the shots.

So as a Pantheist, if you want to believe that you are certainly not outside the bounds of the Jewish faith, who can call you on it? After all you are God and part of God, so how can you possibly be wrong?

By the way, good job on the Trinitarian theology. I guess being "God" gives you a unique perspective that us Trinitarians simply can't fathom.

But one question for you since you're a monotheist.......if everything is part of "God" (As you said..... "That includes a consciousness not which created and planned everything, but which is everything, down to the subatomic level") and you and I and every other person have a distinct divine consciousness, then how exactly can there be only one God, since you made the claim that "more than one divine consciousness at one time = polytheist"?

Seems to me, that if everyone has their own consciousness and we are all part of God since God is everything than there can't be one God because there is more than one divine consciousness (since "more than one divine consciousness at one time = polytheist")

It seems, PFV, that based upon your own beliefs that you are the Polytheist.

 

[Greatest I am]

Good point of logic on your last.

I hope the reply from PatsFanInVa deals with it.

I believe in a Godhead that is more of a cosmic consciousness and our destiny after death. Within it, we are all distinct but are lower case g gods if you will. But when consensus is reached by the individuals, then it can be said that the group of g gods in unison have one voice, so to speak, and we can then say that the cosmic consciousness as an upper case G God can speak as the God of that realm.

Regards
DL

 

[PatsFanInVa]

I'm part of one God, "based on my logic." The sparks littered about the universe, brighter (like me) or dimmer (like, well, we'll say dust, to keep things civil,) are constituents of something greater. The totality of consciousness is God's, and the totality of what we'd call unconscious matter.

But your quibble, as a polytheist, is that by believing in this one God, I damn myself as a polytheist myself. In philosophy, I believe this is known as Sed quid ego te? or, "I know you are, but what am I?"

Your contention is that to say that two competitors for the title of God having a conversation is the equivalent, in kind if not degree, of billions of consciousnesses here and probably many times that number elsewhere, are all capable of subjective consciousness, and by participating in God, are thereby each a separate, distinct deity -- in this, you follow GIA's lead. I differ from GIA in that regard.

My contention is that the multitude of subjective consciousnesses we know are constituents parts of God -- as are all things. It's similar in this regard to the Indian religions (Hinduism/Buddhism,) which regard all people as manifestations of one underlying spiritual source. But I have no need or desire to stick a few million extra Gods in there (the Buddha seemed to have little use for them too, by comparison with the Hindus.)

There is no God but God, as the Muslims would say. And He is in -- in fact, He is, all of us, I'd add.

The etymological roots of the Tetragrammaton are in the causative stem of the verb "to be." In the Torah, God says "I am that I am." He's left us to discover the extent of that being. That which is, is God.

But as you'll note, God is quite literally a verb, in the above. The stories we tell the children have God -- some large and powerful but not omnipresent or omnipotent being -- creates everything, quite apart from himself, ex nihilo. The Kabalists say first he had to create Nothingness in his midst, and then create everything in a very big-bang-like moment. They're much closer to my understanding, but they still require Creation to be separate from Creator.

Part of the divergence is because most of us can't fathom that the most evil things, people, events, etc. on Earth, must needs be part of God. "The problem of evil," they call it in theology. But in truth, they must. You may put them outside of God, make up a competing deity and another split in your Godhead, but you just end up with a splitting godheadache. Then you need a whole apocalypse to put things right, have the bad god vanquished, unify it all, etc.

Think of God as verb, and you understand that the continuous creation is the manifestation that we can understand and observe of the great thought -- of which we are simultaneously constituent parts.

But the difference in scale and kind between our own vaunted thoughts, and the Divine thought-that-subsumes all, is beyond our capability to imagine.

For a time I wondered whether God is consciousness or pure spirit without consciousness. The difference from our standpoint is ineffable. It may look like pure spirit to us, or simply like a collection of particles and forces, if we prefer. I am convinced that whatever the Whole is, it subsumes our thoughts as -- as I said before -- a brain subsumes neurons.

So in sticking to your slightly-bigger-but-manlike god, together with his man-god son, you've got a couple of essentially human but much more powerful characters. The Holy Spirit may be said to be similar, but it's always apart from man, and it's always got nothing at all to do with evil or dust or dung beatles.

For a monotheist, all of these things must be God.

Your complaint is that two divine consciousnesses at once -- indeed, my words -- constitute polytheism. There is One divine consciousness, however, of which we are parts and in which we participate. We may sometimes have a glimpse of the One, the constant creative consciousness we subdivide into "you" and "me" and "that tree" and so on. We have found that at root, reality is in an always undetermined state until observed -- and even then, we are always uncertain either of what it is or of how it is moving.

Those tiny particles are at the root of us, as well as the root of all dust and dung and stars; we cannot even, as "individuals," even fully see them. They are constantly coming into being as probabilities resolve into realities. The entirety seems like nothing so much as a great thought process, in which "our" tiny constituent parts are inarguably swept up.

Who's the observer, then? The One, observing within Himself. Why can our observations cause the collapse of probabilities into positions? Because we are constituents of, not apart from, the One -- and our thoughts are like drops in a great ocean of thought/spirit.

As I always say: because I attempt to put into words something so much greater than my own limitations, I inevitably lie. But it's certainly a lie of omission rather than commission.

I hope that's helpful to you, RI.

As to your concern that nobody in Judaism can tell me not to think that... sorry, no Pope. Cope.

PFnV