thread: 2007-03-02 : God Q&A
On 2007-03-04, NinJ wrote:
God, for me, is a challenge set up by my ancestors. The idea represents a bunch of complex questions, like these:
??? How come schizophrenics have visions? What's the difference between these and prophecy, and if there is none, doesn't that mean that our whole religion is based on the words and actions of people who we'd now institutionalize? And/or does that mean that we should figure out some other way to view schizophrenia than as mental illness? Why do schizophrenia and epilepsy so often go alongside mystical visions and genius?
??? Why does the Universe appear so orderly if there's no intelligence within it? And how else could the Universe possibly exist, given that the very concept has to do with that order? That is, is the question"Why does the Universe have order?" a tautology?
??? God is represented in wildly different ways in Tanakh. Does this mean that God has moods? Personalities? Isn't the point of monotheism that the Universe has some sort of Grand Unification Theory that makes it all work together? Obviously, different personalities are written by different authors, all of whom had sociopolitical agendas. How does this influence the truthfulness of the impressions given in those documents?
??? Humans clearly have agency to act with or without God. Doesn't Occam's Razor state that we require substantial, non-assertive evidence to say that God has anything to do with anything?
??? When I have a mystical experience, and given that it's God I'm talking to in a meaningful sense, does it matter if God exists?
??? A particular mystical tradition states that Torah gave God the letters of the alef-bet with which to build the Universe. This is deliberate mystical paradox and it's a koan I'd like to crack.
??? If the existence of God makes me act more morally, then thinking that God exists will make me act more morally. Ergo, God is irrelevant to the discussion.
??? God exists outside of, yet permeates the Universe. Like Julia Child exists outside of, but has her fingers in, a pie. This is a powerful exercise for visualizing the scale of the Universe and God. It makes me pretty certain that God doesn't care if I jaywalk.
??? Great scientific minds ??? Mosheh ben Maimon and Isaac Newton, for instance ??? have been motivated mystically and have achieved great things with those tools. Occam's razor says that they were onto something.
??? ?? and phi. Are these messages? Do they only appear that way because my brain is built to find messages? Does the fact that my brain is built to find messages only add that fact to ?? and phi? Is apophenia a way of truly seeing God because we're using the tools God gave us to see God? Or is apophenia a malfunction in my nervous system that builds order out of Chaos? Does that mean that all order is a malfunction of the Universe? What does it mean for a Universe to malfunction?
Without the concept of God, these become unaddressable questions. If you consider yourself an atheist and still wonder about the self-ordering principles of the Universe, I think that you're confusing medium with message. The beauty you see in the spiral of a galaxy and the spiral of a shell is the mystical experience. To so much as wonder why they're that way is religious study. To apply those questions to action ??? even voting for someone because you think they'll fund the NSF ??? is religious practice.
(Vincent, a long time ago, I said "God is a question, not an answer," but I didn't elaborate. This is what I meant.)
