Inspiration ... [ as the basis of 'inductive' 'thought' ?]

[stranger]

Examining the autobiographies of 'great' men who found the answers to questions that shape the very way we live , the answer to their meditation emerges from their revelation of their 'inspiration' with 'new' ideas ...

The typical scenario is that a man intensely involved in solving one problem dissects it and applies all known experience and theories to solving it...

and for some problems then just stops cos' the naswer just isn't there by deduction or prior knowledge ... the man is stumped !!

That might seem the end of the matter , but curiously perhaps it is the very beginning!

Typically the man is NOT going to give up... he wanders off alone to his favourite quiet spot and HAS NO THOUGHT of his own because he has exhausted all thought on the matter...

Thus the man is HUMBLED into accepting that he does not know and cannot FIND the answer of HIMSELF , and in ceasing thought yet still yearning beyond reasonable hope of an answer for the TRUTH , that man is MEDITATING , having almost instinctively soughta quiet place where he is comfortable to do just that [although few maybe would realise that these are exactly the requirements fro meditation!]

And what happens? The answer just comes, in a flash ! No effort by the man at all , but an idea that will perhaps transform the wordl is just GIVEN to the man... as if for nothing more than humbling himself and listening without thought or presumption of knowing ...

It is then unsurprising that many autobiographies acknowledge that the great 'discovery' was GIVEN by God , it did not arise by 'induction' [so-called] in the man but came from 'inspiration' from God ..

Thus, ironically perhaps, God can be seen to guide even science and the very 'foodstuff' of mankind's 'rationality' by which some men deduce to reject God ...

And the deeper irony indeed is that men then apply their rationality to the oxymoron of an idea of 'studying God' , 'theology', the idea that one can build an image of God fromthings of this world ... and the 'atheists' easily knock down the necessarily false images all-too-easily and proclaim they do not believe in God ...

So much we shall laugh at our selves when we finally look in the mirror face-to-face with the 'creator'
So what some have called 'freethought' is for me not thought at all in the sense of deductive thought, but, as many have hinted at here, it is meditation in humility of unknowingness , yearning for truth, and receiving a little, as apprpriate to where we are with Him, from God in inspiration...

that then is the way to love and peace in a man such as is our deepest hearts desire ... peace in a truth that our selves can barely bear to hear as yet, truth that is largely excluded,ironically, by empty faith in te purely relative [conditional!] 'knowledge' of rationality ...

Reason then is more like a pandemic illness than the saviour many men regard it as, not beacause it is wrong, but simply because of the effect it has on mankind's ego, that we lose humility all-too-easily by faith in 'knowledge' that has no value beyond dealing with this world ...

and 'dealing' with this world causes men to become more or less unloving toward at least some other men [and to forget about God who inspired the very things man has faith in ... albeit He 'did' that for His own 'apparent purpose' [as we would see it] ...

and ironically that purpose now leads men to destroy their own way of life [even their own home, this planet ] in the name of 'rational' progress ... the final irony , is it really that men think it rational to destroy their own concluded means of existence on this planet ?

Thus without God to rescue us from our own 'rationality's effect upon us , man would simply exterminate himself by destroying his way of life in the name of progres, convenience, easy-living ...

But from God's perspective, it is simply the way of defeating mankind's ego, to let us fall flat on our faces and then pick us up and say "Do you see now?"

thus 'feethought' or 'meditataion' can be communication with God, the deepest form of 'prayer', wat beyond words, a humble yearning for truth created by the desire for love and truth within men , put there in our making .... and whoever said God did not have a sense of humour in creating such intricate ironies enfolded upon each other in us ...

 

[Tenka]

Every time I turn around Christians seem to be putting boundaries in places like human achievement, species development even the size and scope of the universe. They put these boundaries down and, pointing a spot a short distance from their mark, say "HERE BE GOD" and it must be God because you've placed a limit on what man is capable of so anything extraordinary must be God!

How ingenious, how inspired, how sad

 

[stranger]

Every time I turn around Christians seem to be putting boundaries in places like human achievement, species development even the size and scope of the universe. They put these boundaries down and, pointing a spot a short distance from their mark, say "HERE BE GOD" and it must be God because you've placed a limit on what man is capable of so anything extraordinary must be God!

How ingenious, how inspired, how sad

Rather what is sad is that an apparently finite being doesn't recognise the limits in being finite... there are indeed no limits to the human ego , it grows and grows ... until finally it falls over itself and God recovers His little thought experiment in what it would be like to NOT be God ...

 

[Tenka]

Does it take from God for us to have dreams? to aspire?

Does it raise God up for us to be so low?

Indeed we are mortal, we are finite and in some ways we have limits. But we have not reached them. Not yet. Our dreams, our ego will drive us. Faster. Higher. Stronger.
Ego and innovation have taken us far in evolution and will soon enough take us far from Earth as sure as that which was science fiction is become fact within a generation.

It is the way we are, the way we were made to be if you choose to believe that.
It is, after all, what seperates us from the other animals.

To anounce a limit, no, that we have long since passed ours, is hopelessly underestimative for I belive there are three things which are close to limitless, man's ego, man's cruelty and man's innovation driven be either of those two factors.

 

[stranger]

Does it take from God for us to have dreams? to aspire?

Rather, my own personal view, we 'are' very much like God's 'dream' of what it would be like were He not one-ness, were He individual, finite, bound in time and space, were He serial conciousness , were He subject to death and decay...

Does it raise God up for us to be so low?

well yes indeed it does, since God know what it is to be NOT God and so we appear to live through that process of knowing in our projected time and space ... thus I think we really are just God knowing about what He is not, but we see it froma different perspective , as though we ARE what we APPEAR to be ...

Romans 7:19 For the good that I would
I do not:
but the evil which I would not,
that I do.
20 Now if I do that I would not,
it is no more I that do it,
but sin that dwelleth in me.

Indeed we are mortal, we are finite and in some ways we have limits. But we have not reached them. Not yet.

At 6 billion with aims to go further on a finite planet which has just reached the limit of how quickly oil can be pumped out of it , we have reached our limit , and death rate on the planet will vastly exceed birth rate in the next fifty years [Richard Heinberg - 'The Partys Over']

mMankind really blew its opportunity to live sustainably through sheer greed [dominated by USA at the mo' , but fairly universal in mankind]

Our dreams, our ego will drive us. Faster. Higher. Stronger.

Not without energy and food it won't ! It will drive people to fight in the usual inane unwillingness to share equably what little there is and solve our problems co-operatively.

Ego and innovation have taken us far in evolution and will soon enough take us far from Earth as sure as that which was science fiction is become fact within a generation.

The space program will be one of the first to be cut in the coming world slump ... civilisation is but a thn veneer and it is just about to be tested to breaking point in world slump far more sever than the 1930's ... USA simply cannot survive as it is , the dollar is already almost worthless due to foreign debt whose interest becomes unserviceable by the whole US economy as the oil price inexhorably rises now world demand exceeds max world supply and demand continues to rise ,especially in China and India ...

Man is stuck earthbound and due to revert to primitive tribal society as we find that the dreams based on cheapoil were madness that only pie-in-the-sky traditional economists can paint :-

http://www.dieoff.com/page140.htm

It is the way we are, the way we were made to be if you choose to believe that.
It is, after all, what seperates us from the other animals.

Sure, but you only read HALF the story, it is also explained WHY we are made like that !

To anounce a limit, no, that we have long since passed ours, is hopelessly underestimative for I believe there are three things which are close to limitless, man's ego, man's cruelty and man's innovation driven be either of those two factors.

The ego of men is easily defeated by simply causing his world to crumble around his ears, that is easily seen as being predicted by God tobe headed our way like an unstoppable express train unexpectedly crashing through ones home... most men, like yourself do not expect it, yet it was predicted millenia ago... and now we have direct evidence on how it will come about ... and still men mostly do notlisten even to the scientists making the predictions these days ... the biggest irony then, that it could have been avoided if we had started ten years ago [and Carter did indeed make a start in USA toward a sustainable way of life , but it was thrown out, all the progress made was reversed by blind traditionalism and ego and men went back to what we know is unsustainable ... that which is unsutainable does not grow, it simply and predictably dies suddenly and catastophically ]

[There is a senator Roscoe Bartlett tring hard to urge some damage limitation even at this late stage ... it is too little too late and still men do not see what is coming ....]

God announced the end of the cruelty of mankind with the end of this earth and heavens ... te new earth and heavens is described as righteous, loving... no scope for cruelty to continue there ...

and innovation is driven by God , not by men , as I explained in the OP ....

 

[Tenka]

Rather, my own personal view, we 'are' very much like God's 'dream' of what it would be like were He not one-ness, were He individual, finite, bound in time and space, were He serial conciousness , were He subject to death and decay...

You're perfectly entitled to your own harmless idea of God and the nature of things, It's no stranger <chuckle> than some I've heard.

However, I have trouble imagining a God that is inspiring his own dreams, He creates us to observe what mortality and so forth is like then he gives select few access to portions of his divine wisdom. Almost defeats the purpose from where I stand, very strange. Does God also cheat when he plays Half life?

Is it an issue that unless you are able to quantify the relative difficulty of individual problems that you might decide which God solved for us and which we found on our own, you must assume that God has inspired all breakthoughs. Microsurgical techniques to nerve gasses, Solar energy to ICBMs.
Is this an ethical issue for you?

Not without energy and food it won't ! It will drive people to fight in the usual inane unwillingness to share equably what little there is and solve our problems co-operatively.

There will still be energy, there will still be food. The world will not end when we run out of cheap petroleum just as it survived two world wars followed by a cold war.
This is not to say it won't be a tumoltuous event, but we survived and propered without petroleum for thousands of years prior, we can do so again if need be but most likely we will just switch to another source.
The Eath receives billions of kilowatts of energy from the sun daily.

People have always fought over food/energy/land/religion/resources the end of cheap petroleum will be nothing new, just something recent.

In your OP you seemed to be saying that man is gradually descending into hate and destruction, 'destroying our way of life'.
This is only partly true. It is a process of destruction and reinvention. Cyclic rather than linear.
Man is no less loving now than he has ever been, perhaps he is more so now than ever. Think you that many Spanish gave thought to human rights when their soldiers sailed home, boats laden with gold dripping Aztec blood? Even the bible condones acts that mant would find abominable today.

Sure, but you only read HALF the story, it is also explained WHY we are made like that !

As did I.

and innovation is driven by God , not by men , as I explained in the OP

God is no more required to assist our invention than he is to remind me to remove my hand from a hot stove.

Innovation is not our limitation.

 

[stranger]

You're perfectly entitled to your own harmless idea of God and the nature of things, It's no stranger <chuckle> than some I've heard.

You are perfectly entitled to your own harmless chuckle my friend, and it raised a smile here, but the conception is not mine as you presume ... and by ignoring the 'unreality' of 'things' you simply ignore one option [which is acknowledged by many philosophers] in understanding, arbitrary exclusion which is generally frowned upon in your methodology, since you cannot tell if you are ignoring the truth or not when you simply refuse to even consider some possibilities ....

However, I have trouble imagining a God that is inspiring his own dreams ...

You anthropomorphise my friend by taking my useful analogy too literally, God is not 'trapped in time' as our conciousness appears to be in its serial nature .... God does not dream as we do , rather God knows all things ...

and in knowing things that He is not , He as-it-were 'creates ' them by living through their conception .... and that is what we are, God 'imagining' what it would be like if the spirit could be in time and space ... but our perception then is not as God , but as life in space-time ,a life with is not eternal , but ends with space-time itself [one reason that 'space exploration' tells one more about fear in mankind than it does about space...

Thus all conception is 'harmless' in a sense since it is empty [as Solomon obseved] , but we can impute purpose to things and it stops us getting too bored with nothingness [lol?] ... sooner or later we all discover that love is more important tous than anything else at all ... and that discovery leads to a whole new realm of knowing thatwe only dreamed about when we thought information originated in ourselves ...

He creates us to observe what mortality and so forth is like then he gives select few access to portions of his divine wisdom. Almost defeats the purpose from where I stand, very strange. Does God also cheat when he plays Half life?

If you want to understand then there is no point jumping to conclusions withour hearing the facts , if you prefer the word games of relative knowledge and computer games then carry on exploring the emptiness a while longer till it touches you and you don't like it any more ....

But when you emerge saddened and disillusioned at last , consider that this person has ben through that and did at least try to talk with you about it ... and show you that others have been there before and found the way out ... If God is as-it-were our exploring of what isnot God, then he simply cannot 'blow the gaff' about the whole truth at the beginning else there woul be no exploration, no understanding of what He is not ... so go do your bit of exploring emptiness, I did not actually expect you to be able to understand , it would defaet the very purpose in your life to do so ... but perhaps you will remember our conversation one day and it may comfort you to know then what I was talking about ...

Is it an issue that unless you are able to quantify the relative difficulty of individual problems that you might decide which God solved for us and which we found on our own, you must assume that God has inspired all breakthoughs. Microsurgical techniques to nerve gasses, Solar energy to ICBMs.
Is this an ethical issue for you?

Consider that whilst dreaming, that the dream IS your reality , consider how that changes instantly as one awakes .... now consider what you see as real and apply the analogy .... suddenly miracles are not 'supernatural' any more ,they are no different thanthe impossible feats of one's 'hero' ina computer game , they are virtual .... there is the connection between God and man then, how God is separated [holy] and yet influeces everything we do...

But in mankind's terms, in terms of our 'selves' there is trouble ahead , trouble prophesied beforehand which men mostly simply ignore , until it hits unexpectedly [cos' we made not ready in complacent belief in men!] ... thus the way of men has to end in catastrophe just when man thought that he was coming to know it all... it all disappears ... and the self then shrivels to a more realistic impression of its capabilities, it is 'humbled' and simply yearns to know inacknowledgment of it's child-like lack of 'wisdom' tounderstand ... that then is the defeat of thought that brings about meditation and the answer given as if from nowhere...

Having even once experienced receiving the truth from nowhere a reflective man knows the ower of God over mankind, that the beauty of what is given creates what we do, that the whole idea of an individual is as illusory as our conciousness ...

Thus read about how 'great' men solved the problems of conception ... how they STOPPED thinking and just yearned for truth having exhausted deduction on all lines of previous thought.... and the answer was given because of their humility , not because they knew anything ,but because they asked in unknowingness as a little child seeking truth from a father .... thus the irony of mankind's seeking truth through ego is that the truthliesin defeat ofthe ego once the ego crashes unknowing into its limits... thus the reality of suffering , the self creates the necessity for it cos' nothing else will stop the vanity of self ...

There will still be energy, there will still be food. The world will not end when we run out of cheap petroleum just as it survived two world wars followed by a cold war.

Instead of waving hands inthe air , do the sums my friend [or read someone who has already done them ... there is simply neither sufficient resource, nor the time left now, toput in place the change in infrastructure required to change over to an alternative to oil before our civilisation crashes ... the situation was described some half century ago by King-Hubbert and his predictions have come true against all the scorn of the economists who actually run our crazy world , now we ahve just left it too late and we have but ten years max before the collapse bites deep into our lives [far worse than the 1930's] ... so get some facts [e.g. Richard Heinberg's excellent summary, 'The Partys Over' , or the 'dieoff.org' website ] else there is little point in concuding things before you heard the facts of the matter as you have done above ...

This is not to say it won't be a tumoltuous event, but we survived and propered without petroleum for thousands of years prior, we can do so again if need be but most likely we will just switch to another source.

Again insteda of waving yur hands in the air, look at the increase in population on the earth due almost completely to the work done by oil in providing the easy means to do things for men ... the whole infrastructure of our houses, industry, agriculture, transport,economics, globalisation, all depends on cheap oil and is a massive investment of resource in urning oil into what we need for life .... it just needs to be all re-worked if one uses another energy source ... for instance it would take twenty years minimum and an all-out effort to convert to natural gas ,but we have perhaps ten years tops ... just not enough time ... ALL the alternatives have been explored indetail, NONE is a solution in time to prevent our civilisation running out o energy and collapsing into war and then chaos ... we had the cahnce ten years ago to make a sustainable way oflife at a reasonably high statndard of living , but blew it cos' we wanted more than is there to give .... now we shall end u with much less indeed than we could have had if man were just willing to think ahead and act wisely .... the info was there 50years ago and was ignored, now we have ten years to ameliorate the effects a little,but billions are gonna die in the next 50 years and society will revert to primitive tribalism after our way of life today falls apart for lack of the energy it needs to sustain it

The Eath receives billions of kilowatts of energy from the sun daily.

If only we had built the means to harness it in time before we ran out of energy !! If only we had invested oil in making a high-grade sustainable way of life !! Now there just is not time before it all just falls apart and we have not the means to do it any more thatwas given in oil

People have always fought over food/energy/land/religion/resources the end of cheap petroleum will be nothing new, just something recent.

It is new simply because there IS no alternaive this time and the planet IS over-populated at 6 billion once cheap oil is no longer available [which just happened]

In your OP you seemed to be saying that man is gradually descending into hate and destruction, 'destroying our way of life'.
This is only partly true. It is a process of destruction and reinvention. Cyclic rather than linear.

there are phases my friend, but they are not cycles , we have simply failed to put in place a sustainable way of industrialised living and because it is not sustainable it will end ... thus you might look at itas a cycling back toprimitive tribalism based on localeconomies, but in the meantime the worldpopulation is reduced to less than a third of what it is today, there is world slump, mass starvation, wars, anarchy, plagues ... and it really would have made more sense toaccept a lower sustainable way of living ,since one ends up with a vey primitive way of life altogether this way we chose by being greedy ... and so much misery and death ...

Man is no less loving now than he has ever been, perhaps he is more so now than ever. Think you that many Spanish gave thought to human rights when their soldiers sailed home, boats laden with gold dripping Aztec blood? Even the bible condones acts that man would find abominable today.

it is pretty inhumane that men kill 24,000 people every DAY simply by ignoring the fact that they starve to death in miserable poverty ... it is hard to match that level of unlovingness in all history ... particularly when so many people kill themselves in the 'West' by eating too much food in their selfish gluttony !!

.. but the unlovingness is all prophesied, man is simply brutalised by hisincapacity to cope with the growing uncaring of others, it is like a tide, one cannot stop it, it is 'fated', it is what this word is about for God , it is 'written ' so ... that is how 'inane' mankind is, we cannot even see the truth whenit has been written down for us millenia ago ....

God is no more required to assist our invention than he is to remind me to remove my hand from a hot stove.

Again , rather look at the autobiographies of men who made the great conceptual changes that wrote history ...many of them are more humble and admit that the truth came to them from God , not from themselves .... better still,stp thinking for just a little while in som quiet place and simply yearn for the truthabout something youare moved to know the naswer to, and discover the 'unbelievable' power of God for yourself one-on-one ....

Innovation is not our limitation.

'Innovation' is given , so it does not limit us , but greed is the downfall of the self, that is why self is limited ... but because of ego, the self cannot even use what info it already has to act wisely, it simply blunders on to its own destruction... but that after all is exactly what it is meant to do, and so it does it very well indeed ... it just does not enjoy the last phase where i dreams of endless growth turn into sudden catastrophic shrinking and demise

 

[Tenka]

You are perfectly entitled to your own harmless chuckle my friend, and it raised a smile here, but the conception is not mine as you presume

Oh I hadn't meant to imply that you'd just invented this idea yourself one evening after heavy drinking. I just meant that it's your belief and that's fine, I can't prove that you are wrong anymore that you can prove you are right.

and by ignoring the 'unreality' of 'things' you simply ignore one option [which is acknowledged by many philosophers] in understanding, arbitrary exclusion which is generally frowned upon in your methodology, since you cannot tell if you are ignoring the truth or not when you simply refuse to even consider some possibilities

I'm ignoring hundreds of options, thousands maybe just as are you are. The difference is that I don't think I've found the truth so I'm still looking.
There is nothing random about the beliefs I reject.

You anthropomorphise my friend

I'm sure deists and pantheists would telll you the very same

You anthropomorphise my friend by taking my useful analogy too literally, God is not 'trapped in time' as our conciousness appears to be in its serial nature .... God does not dream as we do , rather God knows all things

Wait, God knows all things ...so why does he need to imagine?
We are begining to dig among the troubles I find with anthropomorphic God ideas.

and in knowing things that He is not , He as-it-were 'creates ' them by living through their conception .... and that is what we are, God 'imagining' what it would be like if the spirit could be in time and space ... but our perception then is not as God , but as life in space-time ,a life with is not eternal , but ends with space-time itself [one reason that 'space exploration' tells one more about fear in mankind than it does about space...

So what do subway systems tell us about mankind?

Thus all conception is 'harmless' in a sense since it is empty [as Solomon obseved] , but we can impute purpose to things and it stops us getting too bored with nothingness [lol?]

Then you've got yourself a religion in the makings.

If you want to understand then there is no point jumping to conclusions withour hearing the facts , if you prefer the word games of relative knowledge and computer games then carry on exploring the emptiness a while longer till it touches you and you don't like it any more

But Stranger, you don't have facts. You have interesting supernatural beliefs that are unevidenced.
If you want to point to a few men who said God gave me the answer, fine, it's not surprising considering a vast majority of the world including many scholars believe in a God of some sort.

But when you emerge saddened and disillusioned at last , consider that this person has ben through that and did at least try to talk with you about it ... and show you that others have been there before and found the way out

I know you meant that in a non-patronising way but that's only because you can't see exactly how patronising it is.

If God is as-it-were our exploring of what isnot God, then he simply cannot 'blow the gaff' about the whole truth at the beginning else there woul be no exploration, no understanding of what He is not

Wait, I want to see if i'm getting this correctly.
God creates us to explore what not being God is like and also to expore himself through us, so he leaves us small bits of understanding without ever telling the whole story because then there would be no point in creating us which there isn't anyway because he already knows everything and exists all the time.
That is utterly insane.
These ideas get horribly messy when people try to fit humanity into them.

I did not actually expect you to be able to understand

You have a self fulfilling prophecy there.

it would defaet the very purpose in your life to do so ... but perhaps you will remember our conversation one day and it may comfort you to know then what I was talking about

I have purpose totally independent of understanding particular God concepts and comfort independent of achieving any purpose.

Consider that whilst dreaming, that the dream IS your reality

I quite often realise I'm dreaming while asleep, is that going to be a problem?

now consider what you see as real and apply the analogy .... suddenly miracles are not 'supernatural' any more ,they are no different thanthe impossible feats of one's 'hero' ina computer game , they are virtual .... there is the connection between God and man then, how God is separated [holy] and yet influeces everything we do

I don't need to consider it really, miracles are not supernatural, they are simply unevidenced which is as good as non-existent.
I don't need to make any assumptions about them because that would be pointless.

But in mankind's terms, in terms of our 'selves' there is trouble ahead , trouble prophesied beforehand which men mostly simply ignore

Doesn't it get frustrating?You tell people the end is near and they ignore you everytime because the darned world continues not to end!

Thus read about how 'great' men solved the problems of conception ... how they STOPPED thinking and just yearned for truth having exhausted deduction on all lines of previous thought.... and the answer was given because of their humility , not because they knew anything ,but because they asked in unknowingness as a little child seeking truth from a father .... thus the irony of mankind's seeking truth through ego is that the truthliesin defeat ofthe ego once the ego crashes unknowing into its limits... thus the reality of suffering , the self creates the necessity for it cos' nothing else will stop the vanity of self

Like who? Newton? he got an idea but oops it wasn't quite correct, Einstein? his world famous math breaks down as we get to the event horizon.
Who has received divine knowledge? Why is it that we have to build a giant new atom smasher to learn about gravity when we could just learn more by giving up?

Your own parent analogy falls apart for me also.
I don't know what sort of parent you make or will make but I would personally be far happier if my child solved a problem on their own without having to come to me, head bowed each time for my help.

Instead of waving hands inthe air

There is no hands in the air, life will not end when oil does.

Life as we know it may, but it was never static anyway.

and it really would have made more sense toaccept a lower sustainable way of living ,since one ends up with a vey primitive way of life altogether this way we chose by being greedy ... and so much misery and death ...

I totally agree, it's the reason I'm studying engineering.

Again , rather look at the autobiographies of men who made the great conceptual changes that wrote history. many of them are more humble and admit that the truth came to them from God , not from themselves

Knowledge is power, being humble is admiting that you don't have all the answers.
I don't see how the addition of saying 'God told me' adds much to the humbleness.

'Innovation' is given

Why? because some men say that it was? Is there a reason to give this any consideration?

but greed is the downfall of the self, that is why self is limited ... but because of ego, the self cannot even use what info it already has to act wisely, it simply blunders on to its own destruction... but that after all is exactly what it is meant to do, and so it does it very well indeed ... it just does not enjoy the last phase where i dreams of endless growth turn into sudden catastrophic shrinking and demise

What?

Stranger, this very quickly degenerated to preaching 'Truth (TM)" and ...things that weren't totally lucid.
I'm happy to keep replying but can you try perhaps to limit the quantity of things you want to say and use punctuation instead of "...." seperating ideas.
Your posts are just very unwieldy it's difficult to keep track of what you are trying to say.
Also, if you could reduce the amount of dramatic rhetoric to concise logical points that we can discuss. Some of your paragraphs are like the literary equivalent of having a brick with a note attached thrown through my window.

 

[stranger]

Oh I hadn't meant to imply that you'd just invented this idea yourself one evening after heavy drinking. I just meant that it's your belief and that's fine, I can't prove that you are wrong anymore that you can prove you are right.

I don't believe in drink, that is simply empty escapism ... and I don't believe in your methods that you call proof , cos' I studied metatheory of logic and philosophy and know what is wrong with them more deeply from meditation that from the formal 'proofs' of the limitations [which are mostly just ignored by most people anyway]...

there would be no point in your suggested contest to see who is 'right' since the answers are not mostly expressable in the language mankind evolved about experienec in THIS world alone ... but there are 'cracks in reality' through which we can glimse our ultimate reality ,albeit not as individual consciousnesses withwhich we are more familair and can talk in terms of ...

I'm ignoring hundreds of options, thousands maybe just as are you are. The difference is that I don't think I've found the truth so I'm still looking.
There is nothing random about the beliefs I reject.

That's not the differenece that you presume... I do not think that that I've found THE truth , rather I am grateful to have been able to condense all reality to a working manageable deescription to have fun comparing things to... and discussing openly ... I do not see why you presume that i'm not still looking , in fact I do little else than keep looking... I even wrote a poem in acknowledgment of that irony that I realised that my life wuld be forever looking beyond finding....

I'm sure deists and pantheists would telll you the very same

I do not much like the game of putting people in boxes with names on since we are all unique ... I am not aware of what youpersonally woyuld mean by deism or pantheism, but I have learned to include all beliefs WITHIN my system of understanding thought and belief , Spinooza for instance was pantheistic in belief yet is was his ideas on the mistaken conception of free-will that most sparked my looking to understand that illusion that dominates much Western thought instead of simply accepting itas most men do in Western culture ... through that I came to see how pantheism and monotheism are actually the same ,but neither corresponds to their original conception because the uniting conception was absent, was not yet given...

Thus the richness of knowingness is in integration , the 'co-operation' or integration of ideas, not in divisive analytic dichotomising ... that then is the extraordinary beauty of meditation, that it progressively integrates all things as one so effortlessly , God does all the work and the only price is giving up ones ego ....

Wait, God knows all things ...so why does he need to imagine?
We are begining to dig among the troubles I find with anthropomorphic God ideas.

God does not need or purpose since He is outside time and could thus not have such things ... rather the problemis that we have no words for things off the spirit [because words are merely pointers and we have nothing to point at , we have little experience of the spirit to have words about]

thus the words are always only used metaphorically and there is no anthropomorphic implication, merely an inadequacy of our experience which can only be made up for by poetic licence in the re-use of words to talk about things to which they cannot refr in their original meanings ... we have mostly only analogies, that does not mean we are being anthropomorphic [but many make that mistake]

[As far as something 'real' of the spirit , consider one's awareness at first conciousness of the one-ness one came from and desired more than anything to be back with ]

So what do subway systems tell us about mankind?

that men reward and arrange for the convenience of those blind men who like to abuse other human beings for a living ?

Then you've got yourself a religion in the makings.

You are not the first to suggest such a thing but you are equally wrong with the others who have suggested such a common mistake ... my belief evolves so quickly these days that it often out of date as soon as i write it into words in attempt to discuss it ... that would hardly do for a 'religion' , creed, or theory ...

If one wanted a true religion one would have to find a saint [one in three million people ] and then persuade him that you were worth teaching [equally unlikely and you would not be able to fool him] .... thus it might be more sensible to accept that things will happen as they will and that there is indeed a time for all things [as Solomon in hs wisdm stated] ... we are what we are , and if that includes illusions in one's mind, then it does , if it doesn't, then it doesn't ... it matters not that we are all differenet , indeed it is inevitable !

But Stranger, you don't have facts. You have interesting supernatural beliefs that are unevidenced.

That they are evidenced is partly what i am here to discuss [since it does seem likely to me that other people have such evidence too ,without being saints ! The problem we may have limiting somewhat our discussing of them is simply that one cannot meditate until one has had one's thought process stumped by finding a problem that is insoluable byany known means... inevitably you will meet such a problem one day and then see how it gets solved for you ...then you will understand that the answer could not come from yourself .... for now maybe you do remember the first moment of cnciousness, do you remember what was in your mind?

Perhaps since you recognise 'heavy drinking' you recognise touching the emptiness, the nothingness of the way of this world.... in which case an examination of one's own heart at such times reveals the desire to love, tobe 'perfect'remains untouched by the unpleasant experience... that is actually a remarkable evidence, well worth considering what it is doing there , much ignored ...

If you want to point to a few men who said God gave me the answer, fine, it's not surprising considering a vast majority of the world including many scholars believe in a God of some sort.

Many of the prophets freely admitted that they had no idea what that which God said to them meant ...thus they were given the answer ,but in coded form so that it was no use to them...in fact in many cases simply saying what they had been given promptly caused the men they told to kill them... it is worth actually studying the evidence before making sweeping conclusions ....

I know you meant that in a non-patronising way but that's only because you can't see exactly how patronising it is.

I do not know anything and I am not teaching anything , so I cannot be patronising ... I only came here to discuss a few things on the basis of what i happen to be seeing before my eyes at this moment ...

Wait, I want to see if i'm getting this correctly.
God creates us to explore what not being God is like and also to expore himself through us, so he leaves us small bits of understanding without ever telling the whole story because then there would be no point in creating us which there isn't anyway because he already knows everything and exists all the time.

Nay my friend, God is 'beyond' time , not existing in time , we are simply the experience in time of his knowingness ...

That is utterly insane.

A highly normative statement that illuminates not one iota except insofar as showing how blind normative ideas are ... not much use in this discussion really

These ideas get horribly messy when people try to fit humanity into them.

Rtaher the mind gets in a mess trying to fit words suitd only to this projected 'reality' to the true reality of spirit which created this illusion [much as we create virtual realities using a computer and may even feel involved in them when playng computer games...]

I quite often realise I'm dreaming while asleep, is that going to be a problem?

Far from being a problem, it is exactly waht i am doing in discussing the matter here, it is one of the cracks in our projeted 'reality' that show how unreal it is ....and which ultimately one must realise are there not by accident!

I don't need to consider it really, miracles are not supernatural, they are simply unevidenced which is as good as non-existent.
I don't need to make any assumptions about them because that would be pointless.

Well we do have some evidence in ters of recorded witness , such evidence is accepted over other things ... but relying on such evidence has its obvious weaknesses so it woyuld be far better to find the evidence in one's own mind fro meditataion.... else one will meet miracles at the hand of the prophesied antichrist and then [sadly] believe inthem because one saw them with one's own eyes , belief in a false god by means of evidence, a final irony for rational men ...

 

[stranger]

Doesn't it get frustrating?You tell people the end is near and they ignore you everytime because the darned world continues not to end!

It ain't frustrating my friend, it is the prophesied reaction, the very thing that causes men to ignore the coming end in fact , more irony ... the pointis thatwe know from modern science that the universe is space-time and thus that time was created ... men havent really quite adjusted to that and its implication that time and the universe end too , that time is not any more an 'infinity' than space is.... thus cutting bits off a piee of string and saying that there is still some left does not mean that there will always be some more to cut off ... in fact one can be SURE that that is not the case ...
expecting growth to continue indefinitely in a finite world is equally completely illogical and yet that is the priciple on which mankind's widespread [evil] money system is founded ... one des not need to prophesy the end, it is imevitable, built in! ... what is remarkable and thus significant is that every time that it has come to the point of collapse in the past that god has given it a new lease of life , up until now ... it would not make any difference if you happened somehow to be right about this not being the last time, since the ned MUST come sometime since time is finite ... prophecies about how it comes about [which are being fulfilled as we speak] thus perhaps become more interesting?

Like who? Newton? he got an idea but oops it wasn't quite correct, Einstein? his world famous math breaks down as we get to the event horizon.
Who has received divine knowledge? Why is it that we have to build a giant new atom smasher to learn about gravity when we could just learn more by giving up?

Simply beacuse that is how it must be, men must fall flat on the egos ,and it cannot happen until man is full of himself ... the function of the few saints who know all things [unlike us!] is simply that there has to be a way back and they facilitate it .

Your own parent analogy falls apart for me also.
I don't know what sort of parent you make or will make

My own son astounds me with his lovingness , far beyond anything i could have shown him, putting me to shame...

but I would personally be far happier if my child solved a problem on their own without having to come to me, head bowed each time for my help.

I think that you missed the point, the point is that one cannot learn anything if you think that you already know the answer

There is no hands in the air, life will not end when oil does.

I never said it would, but the world slump caused by simply greed will cause such misery and death to billions [not just millions] that it provides an ideal scenario for the prophesied extraordinarily rapid rise topower ofa world dictator , the final antichrsit figure ...saviour of the physical world from mankinds foolish complacency ... world unified religion at last! ... except for a few annoying saints who won't convert cos' they say that he isn't God or Christ ...

Life as we know it may, but it was never static anyway.

that is hardly te point, it will be a miserable existence and it could have been so myuch better had we just used the oil to make a sustainable way of life instead of squandering it ...

Knowledge is power, being humble is admiting that you don't have all the answers.
I don't see how the addition of saying 'God told me' adds much to the humbleness.

The difference is that being humble brings the answrs to otherwise insoluble problmes [but not always in the way one might have expected]

Why? because some men say that it was? Is there a reason to give this any consideration?

Simply beacause it is the only way that works , that is the only reasosn for God's way of love too ...

Stranger, this very quickly degenerated to preaching 'Truth (TM)"

Iam not preaching my friend, I am no teacher ... simply stating where i am in hope of some friendly discussion of it ... I'm sorry if you do not like the way it challenges some things you believe in but that is inevitable in good discussion [and for myself I welcome that , even when it challenges my temporarily stable platform ... at other times you might have found me feeling I had nothing to base anything at all upon, bar only a desire to love that I could not realise]

and ...things that weren't totally lucid.

yes .well rationalityalways did muddy the water, but one is stuckwith it in the very structure of the language we ahve touse here [and in pholosophy,and for talkingabout God!]

I'm happy to keep replying but can you try perhaps to limit the quantity of things you want to say and use punctuation instead of "...." seperating ideas.

The quantity is determined by the extent of your relies,I have simply responded to all you replied ... i do not see how I can do less than that without being accused of not replying to all your points ... as for my style , or lack of it, it simply reflects how I express nyself at tha moment...

the '...' exprsses a pause for thought but implies more contnuity than a full stop

Your posts are just very unwieldy it's difficult to keep track of what you are trying to say.

I simply have much to convey, there is no hurry , no required time-frame for any reply [it is the beauty of this medium] ,nor does anyone require you to discuss these things except what moves you ... take your time , there is time for everything

Also, if you could reduce the amount of dramatic rhetoric to concise logical points that we can discuss.

My own feeling is that the 'drama' conveys more than the logic and none of it is rhetorical in principle .... concise woul be nice, I agree, if only I were a saint and coulds ay things nice and concisely ... but that is not where I'm at as yet

Some of your paragraphs are like the literary equivalent of having a brick with a note attached thrown through my window.

LOLOL ... well feel free to lob it back my friend , but I'm afraid I don't quite understand what this extended metaphor refers to exactly ... pehaps if you said it more concisely and literally in logical fashion as you say you prefer ???

 

[Lifesaver]

Every single new theory is the result of an inspiration, a creative leap on the part of the scientist.
The observation of a series of different facts, which we group together based on similarities we perceive them to have, does not logically lead us to the formulation of any theory.

Once the theory is formulated, however, it can be tested. Afterall, this theory makes some prediction about the future, and as such it is possible that this prediction does not come to pass. If it doesn't, we know the theory is flawed. If it does, however, we cannot affirm the theory to be true.

In short, every single new theory starts as a conjecture, a product of someone's creativity in interpreting the facts they observe. This could be inspired by God in some cases, but it needn't be.

What is indeed proof of the existence of God is the fact that the behaviour of objects in the world can be understood and even predicted by the use of reason. Therefore, it is not purely random and chaotic. Therefore, there are such things as organizing principles, laws (perhaps only one with many ramifications). And for such a thing as an organizing principle to exist an Intelligence is necessary.
And it is this Intelligence, the cause of and the organizing force of the whole universe, which we call God.

 

[stranger]

Every single new theory is the result of an inspiration, a creative leap on the part of the scientist.

My point in the OP is that it is NOT by the scientist, the scientists themselves often humbly admit that it came from God ! so why do you say otherwise than the people who had the experience?

The observation of a series of different facts, which we group together based on similarities we perceive them to have, does not logically lead us to the formulation of any theory.

Deduction can be done by a computer, that is not the part we are discussing here

In short, every single new theory starts as a conjecture, a product of someone's creativity in interpreting the facts they observe. This could be inspired by God in some cases, but it needn't be.

show me a single case where anyone got anywhere by guesswork , you just made that up my friend , read what the scientists themselves say in their autobigraphies ...

What is indeed proof of the existence of God is the fact that the behaviour of objects in the world can be understood and even predicted by the use of reason. Therefore, it is not purely random and chaotic. Therefore, there are such things as organizing principles, laws (perhaps only one with many ramifications). And for such a thing as an organizing principle to exist an Intelligence is necessary.
And it is this Intelligence, the cause of and the organizing force of the whole universe, which we call God

God indeed made the universe partly understandable to simplistic minds but God is far more than that understanding , and the undestanding is only there to inflate mankind's ego so that he falls flat on his face [any time now]

Pr 16:18 Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.

thus man has pride in his understanding , faith that he knows when his knowledge is conditional and sketchy at that ... the legacy of self is self destruction through false self-pride ... that is what we shall see very soon now, deaths by the billion cos' mankind got it wrong in sheer greed and complacency :-

Re 19:15 And the four angels were loosed, which were prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year, for to slay the third part of men.

two billion dead, can one even imagine the impact ?

 

[Tenka]

there would be no point in your suggested contest to see who is 'right'

Wha? I said that myself. I can't show you are wrong, you cannot show you are right.

I do not think that that I've found THE truth

So does that mean you could be wrong about the things you believe? The nature or very existence of God included?

I even wrote a poem in acknowledgment of that irony that I realised that my life wuld be forever looking beyond finding.

Fair enough, good luck with that.

I do not much like the game of putting people in boxes with names on since we are all unique

Regardless there are beliefs that fit into certain categories, just as organisms fit into Genus'.

I am not aware of what youpersonally woyuld mean by deism or pantheism

I would loosely define a Deist as believing in the existence of an impersonal God responsible for varied degrees of manipulation of the universe.
A Pantheist I would say believes that God is the universe, humans and everything are a part of God.
Therefore, a God with an interest in humans and seemingly human emotions like love and so forth is anthropomorphic compared to their belief.

God does all the work and the only price is giving up ones ego

Ah definitions.
I see 'ego' as being a troubled term, when christians use it, it always seems to mean pride in a bad way. I don't see it as that nor pride as necessarily a bad thing.

God does not need or purpose since He is outside time and could thus not have such things ... rather the problemis that we have no words for things off the spirit [because words are merely pointers and we have nothing to point at , we have little experience of the spirit to have words about]

There is the possibility that language is inadequet as there is also the possibility that this is just a cop out because what you try to explain makes not sense whatsoever.

thus the words are always only used metaphorically and there is no anthropomorphic implication

Sorry, I find that to be nonsensical.
The bible anthropomorphises time and again, OT God appears to be nothing but a war chief at times and the parent/child analogy is prevalent throughout.
To say that there is no anthropomorphism implied destroys any understanding that could be gleaned from the metaphor in the first place.

that men reward and arrange for the convenience of those blind men who like to abuse other human beings for a living ?

Sorry, it was just a crude joke.

That they are evidenced is partly what i am here to discuss

What was that evidence sorry?
When you claimed that a few men said that God gave them ideas?

Perhaps since you recognise 'heavy drinking' you recognise touching the emptiness, the nothingness of the way of this world.... in which case an examination of one's own heart at such times reveals the desire to love, tobe 'perfect'remains untouched by the unpleasant experience... that is actually a remarkable evidence, well worth considering what it is doing there , much ignored

Since you began with a false premise and extrapolated from there, I don't know how to respond to the rest of this.

If you want to point to a few men who said God gave me the answer, fine, it's not surprising considering a vast majority of the world including many scholars believe in a God of some sort.

Many of the prophets freely admitted that they had no idea what that which God said to them meant ...thus they were given the answer ,but in coded form so that it was no use to them...in fact in many cases simply saying what they had been given promptly caused the men they told to kill them

So?

it is worth actually studying the evidence before making sweeping conclusions

I have no idea how what you said contradicts my "generalisation", It's a simple fact that most of the world is theistic.

I know you meant that in a non-patronising way but that's only because you can't see exactly how patronising it is.

I do not know anything and I am not teaching anything , so I cannot be patronising ... I only came here to discuss a few things on the basis of what i happen to be seeing before my eyes at this moment

But when you emerge saddened and disillusioned at last , consider that this person has ben through that and did at least try to talk with you about it ... and show you that others have been there before and found the way out

Trust me, this is very patronising.

Nay my friend, God is 'beyond' time , not existing in time

I see this being said a lot on these forums, almost always those saying have heard it somewhere repeating it because it sounds impressive but having no clue as to what "beyond time" means.

A highly normative statement that illuminates not one iota except insofar as showing how blind normative ideas are

Nope, just me expressing how futile attempts to fit humanity into an Alpha and Omega God's agenda are. They consistantly amount to non-intuitive leaps of the imagination and nonsense terms.

Rtaher the mind gets in a mess trying to fit words suitd only to this projected 'reality' to the true reality of spirit which created this illusion

That's just twisting it to fit your belief.

Far from being a problem, it is exactly waht i am doing in discussing the matter here, it is one of the cracks in our projeted 'reality' that show how unreal it is ....and which ultimately one must realise are there not by accident!

I trust objective reality far more than subjective, a single mind can easily be tricked.

Well we do have some evidence in ters of recorded witness , such evidence is accepted over other things ... but relying on such evidence has its obvious weaknesses so it woyuld be far better to find the evidence in one's own mind fro meditataion

Indeed, witness is the least reliable form of evidence known to man. How do yo ufind evidence of miracles in meditation?

else one will meet miracles at the hand of the prophesied antichrist and then [sadly] believe inthem because one saw them with one's own eyes , belief in a false god by means of evidence, a final irony for rational men

Atheists really are not the people you have to worry about following a "miracle worker".

It ain't frustrating my friend, it is the prophesied reaction

These prophecies are not particularly impressive, much like "wars and rumours of wars" if not vague then painfully obvious. The end has been predicted since time immemorial,it never happens, people are sick of hearing about it.
Mystery solved.

the pointis thatwe know from modern science that the universe is space-time and thus that time was created

Sorry, no.
Time did not need to be "created" simply put, before the BB there was no time. Time began with the expansion of space, what happened just before then is a matter for quantam physics and M theory to figure out.
This does not rule out the possiblity that this has occured in a cycle countless times before. Expansion ->contraction-> expansion ->contraction etc..
What we don't yet know is what process brought it into happening in the first place, a fact that religion has all too happily jumped at providing. Leaving us with a God-of-the-gaps explanation that is as good as no explanation.

what is remarkable and thus significant is that every time that it has come to the point of collapse in the past that god has given it a new lease of life , up until now ... it would not make any difference if you happened somehow to be right about this not being the last time, since the ned MUST come sometime since time is finite

The end will come eventually ...not impressive prophecy by any standard.

Simply beacuse that is how it must be, men must fall flat on the egos ,and it cannot happen until man is full of himself

Stranger this is embarrassingly reminiscent of dark ages church doctrine. The idea that man cannot learn is not far short of man should not learn.

I think that you missed the point, the point is that one cannot learn anything if you think that you already know the answer

Which no scientist does!

That wasn't your point besides. What you've been saying is that we only find an answer when we admit we don't know at which point God magically gives it to us. I find that a pathetic and demeaning postion totally at odds with a parent/child analogy.

I never said it would, but the world slump caused by simply greed will cause such misery and death to billions [not just millions] that it provides an ideal scenario for the prophesied extraordinarily rapid rise topower ofa world dictator , the final antichrsit figure ...saviour of the physical world from mankinds foolish complacency ... world unified religion at last! ... except for a few annoying saints who won't convert cos' they say that he isn't God or Christ

Great, we'll be able to see how wrong or right you are within a few decades.
I'm excited.

that is hardly te point, it will be a miserable existence and it could have been so myuch better had we just used the oil to make a sustainable way of life instead of squandering it

If that's what you need to believe. I think we'll adapt. This might even be a positive step, increasing shared properity.

The difference is that being humble brings the answrs to otherwise insoluble problmes

I don't know any insoluble problems.

Simply beacause it is the only way that works , that is the only reasosn for God's way of love too

Because because because because because because because because beeeeeeecause!

Iam not preaching my friend, I am no teacher ... simply stating where i am in hope of some friendly discussion of it

Stranger, your OP mentioned 'truth' about 40 times, you've given "because that's the way it is" as an answer multiple times. The gaping logical gaps in your belief are answered with "you can't understand it" rather than "I don't know how to explain it, maybe I'm wrong" or "hmmm actually that does make zero sense".

No room is given for any discussion on most of your points, you deliver "this is the way it is" statements and nothing is up for question.
You aren't here discussing your ideas just stating them in my general direction.

I'm sorry if you do not like the way it challenges some things you believe in but that is inevitable in good discussion

You haven't even begun to earn the right to flatter yourself like that.

yes .well rationalityalways did muddy the water, but one is stuckwith it in the very structure of the language we ahve touse here [and in pholosophy,and for talkingabout God!]

Rationality does the opposite of that, you must be thinking of something else.

The quantity is determined by the extent of your relies,I have simply responded to all you replied

Fair enough, if you take the time to write it, I'll do my best to reply to it.

but I'm afraid I don't quite understand what this extended metaphor refers to exactly

It's like I said earlier in this post, much of the time you simply deliver your opinion to which no discussion is possible because the only answers forth coming are "because that's the way it is" or "you don't understand, I knew you wouldn't".
It's totally counter productive to a good discussion.

 

[Tenka]

My point in the OP is that it is NOT by the scientist, the scientists themselves often humbly admit that it came from God ! so why do you say otherwise than the people who had the experience?

Right, there are no atheists in foxholes and now research labs either!

Stranger you must acknowledge that this is blantant cherry picking of data that supports your position to the exclusion of all others.

Motion to dismiss.

show me a single case where anyone got anywhere by guesswork , you just made that up my friend , read what the scientists themselves say in their autobigraphies

He never said "guesswork", you made that up my friend.

 

[Lifesaver]

Stranger, God created man in His image. To have an intellect and will is what makes us similar to God, though infinitely less.
Each one of us is a different individual, and what sets us apart from animals is that we have a rational soul. To give that up is to become like a beast, it is to fall completely in sin, because sin is always against right reason.

God made the universe intelligible to us.
Wisdom 11:21 "but thou hast ordered all things in measure, and number, and weight."

Plus, as the Bible also teaches us, all that God made is good.

The universe is not God and we certainly are not "little pieces" of God trapped in an evil and artificial "self". This is a gnostic doctrine, and the deity the gnostics worship is in fact the devil (God, the Creator, who trapped the Divine particles in the illusion of self, is evil according to them).

By rejecting reason, we at the same time reject God.

 

[stranger]

So does that mean you could be wrong about the things you believe? The nature or very existence of God included?

Of course my friend , I am only guided by all that apparently happened to my apparent self, just as you are ... in fact my belief that this 'physical reality' that we project is 'virtual' makes it even easier to realise that one could be completely wrong, just as easy as all the rules and beliefs of this apparent reality can be turned upside down in our dreams [and maybe we could learn from that? ... rather than simply ignoring a very 'real' phenomenon in our projected world ]

Regardless there are beliefs that fit into certain categories, just as organisms fit into Genus'.

That is a spurious argument, classifying one thing does not justify classifying something else , classification is simply a 'laziness' brought on by our finiteness of brain ... we classify because we are incapable of complete models [we even talk of 'probability' as if it meant something , based upon categorisation into 'sets with properties']

The inconsistency of the notion of genus has been proven in biology and that rather turns your argument completely opposite to the point you were trying to make

e.g. one group of sea-birds exists woidely distributed from East to West but those in the far West [call the 'W'] cannot breed with those in the far East [call them 'E'] ... although all adjacent populations can interbreed ...
thus E and W are different species but all the birds of this type are the smae species ... an absolute contradiction of the very notion of species ... the situation in plants is even more complex than in these sea-birds...

I would loosely define a Deist as believing in the existence of an impersonal God responsible for varied degrees of manipulation of the universe.

I thank you for that and so would like to discuss the reasons for it sometime , since I am actually mystified at the qualifications [since naively I had thought a 'deist' was just anyone who had an idea of God ]

i am guessing that by 'impersonal' you may mean that God is not a 'human' , that God is not made in our image as many men believe ... my own thought is that we are 'made' in God's image and God is 'spirit' , thus our reality ulimately is spirit [and that's where 'we' came from] so 'physical reality is temporary and temporal and subject to entropic increase, completely unlike spirit ... we know then that we cannot stay being human but there seems a desperate struugle to deny that, to show that somehow we can [breeding children to continue beyond death in a way, space exploration, knowledge exploration, inventing religions, building long-lasting monuments and institutions , etc]

We know temporality is vain and yet we barely explore the possibility that it is not [which scripture and the results of meditation show us is the case]

A Pantheist I would say believes that God is the universe, humans and everything are a part of God.

I liked the idea of pantheism until I found out that they mostlymake the mistake of taking projected reality as ultimate reality... so in a sense i agree with them up to that point that God is not a big intelligent human being in the sky, but rather the source and cause of everything and nothing escapes from Him.... but the difference is in realising that our reality is unreal to God. something that He cannot be, but it is something he can 'imagine and create' as a virtual [projected] reality ... this we can have some awareness of through seemingly deliberate 'cracks' in that reality ... we know for instance that reality is not how we see it , our physics tells us that the solid wall in front of us is simply an energy barrier made up of space and not as 'opaque' and 'solid' as we see it as being at all ... we know other creatures experience and sense things we do not sense [UV and IR light for instance, high and low frequncy sound, etc]

thus if we recognise that out projected reality suffers the same flaws as virtual reality [time lag for instance, our image of the world is behind events 'out there' becuase we know the dealys involved in sensing and perceivng] ... if projected, then 'unreal' ... it is a short step from this to understanding hw God describes our reality to us in meditation...

Therefore, a God with an interest in humans and seemingly human emotions like love and so forth is anthropomorphic compared to their belief.

I hope that is not what my words conveyed , I do not see God as any more than having known through what we live through ... that what we see as our selves, our conciousness ,our individual is simply God exploring what He is not as an 'imagining' ... the difference being that God does not 'imagine' as a process in time in the way we appear to do ...

Thus telling people what is the end of things seems impossible to us, but it is trivially easy if one sees the whole of space throughout time as a complete 4D [or 13D] object ... prophecy is rather easy indeed for God and an integrated crack in this 'reality' that shows that God isbeyond time, 'creator' of time simply 'because' He knows time

Ah definitions.
I see 'ego' as being a troubled term, when christians use it, it always seems to mean pride in a bad way. I don't see it as that nor pride as necessarily a bad thing.

I don't see anything real as a bad thing, bad and good are integral to the illusion [as I think men have now proved, morality is completely relative , personal, subjective .. bad news for ethicists, batting on a sticky wicket ]

but pride has to be moved out of the way as part of the demo , as do 'self' , 'ego', individality, 'free will' , mankind;s 'justice' ...

The distinction seemed to me to be that 'evil' is fundamentally mor destructive than 'good' , and thsu that one might make a metric of human behaviou based upon the rate of entropy production ... it's a partial answer and enlightening, but one cannot get away from the fact that life itself works fundamentally by generating entropy in the nevironment ...

Thus it is incorrect to say that God is good because God is 'better than good' , God is perfect in the same sense as our 'reversible processes' generate no entropy ... God is beyond entropy ...and it is thus only by poetic analogythatone talks of God as the LIVING God , God is not alive in the same way we appear to be, rather he has a life beyond the way our bodies live in physical terms ... the point is described in scripture by such terms as immortality, incorruptibility ,'beyond change' !

 

[stranger]

There is the possibility that language is inadequate as there is also the possibility that this is just a cop out because what you try to explain makes not sense whatsoever.

The inadequacy of language was highlighted by Godel over half a century ago, but it was known to the Greeks too who also simply ignored it in their rush to have faith in rationality as a substitute god/idol for their traditional and largely ineffective superstitious mythical gods... certainly it is seen as a worthy opponent to God by many men and easily defeats the false gods of religionism , so rationality indeed has the greatest claim to be the antichrist of scripture in gaining favour among all men bar the saints of this earth ...

In that context then this discussion of establishing 'external' or 'internal' source of inspiration reflects the dichotomy between meditation and reason and the symbolic struggle between the two cherubim in the scripture , Satan and Jesus ... the outcome is then as sure as scriptural prophecy, but one might note that it goes almost completely in favour of Satan before being pegged back irretrievable to complete and utter 'victory' for Jesus' view ... so it will be interesting in many ways to see how things turn out

Sorry, I find that to be nonsensical.

It would help if rather than saying this, that you just expalined why you think so ... all things are nosensical until one has a model [idol] of them or a revelation[inspration] about them

The bible anthropomorphises time and again, OT God appears to be nothing but a war chief at times and the parent/child analogy is prevalent throughout.

OR one could view it simply as peotic [metaphoric, symbolic] usage of words , never meant to be taken literally at all, then it is not anthrpomorphic [and italso comes to make sense !] ... thus the origial format of scripture [largely lost in translation] is largely as poems ... one gets nowhere in understanding poetry if one takes it literally... Jesus explained that his words are parables , it is strange in a way that men do not believe him who say they believe in him... still more significant is that you should take their mistakes as a valid evidence against God [when God actually said that the mistakes of religionism MUST be and must come to dominate the world .. even belief in the idol of rationality ! [people respect rationality, thus it is an impesonal 'god' responsible for varied degrees of manipulation of the universe ... that curiously makes you a 'deist' according to your own definition and using your own rationality to show it .... !

To say that there is no anthropomorphism implied destroys any understanding that could be gleaned from the metaphor in the first place.

It destroys the false understanding admittedly, opens the way to meditation on the scripture to receive the true understading of it from God :-

2Pe 1:20 Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation.

It is thus a mistake to identify God with the god of ANY religion of men at this time , Jesus himself warned against it ... the irony [contradiction] of christianity [divided and so ,very obviously ,without the very spirit of God that would unite it on which it is supposedly based] is however no reason [even] to reject the possibility of the real God beyond religion of traditions of men :-

Col 2:8 Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.

Sorry, it was just a crude joke.

And the irony raised a smile [as ironies will do ] , but ironies canalso lead to understandings , when one meditates and sees the wider picture, the understanding of why the ironies exist in all human endeavours of the self

What was that evidence sorry?
When you claimed that a few men said that God gave them ideas?

Look at the evidence yourself, it is not a few but many , and these were not religionists, but men of the deepest thoughts and meditations, men whodevoted their life to seeking truth as rigourously and exactly as they could [as they were given to perceive] and there is a possibe cause of why allmen do not acknowledge the source of their inspirations, it is self pride , and it is a cause of delusion, not of truth ...

Equally an anaysis of the information flow in revelation/inspiration would reveal that the human brain is incaple of anything like that rate of flow... mankind's finiteness again shows what man is not capable of in himself and blows the 'scientific' [actually 'armchair'] presumption that inspirations come from a 'sub-concious ' mind out of the water ... mankind has investigated 'expanding' conciousness into all aspects of everylevel of his body and there simply is no part unaccessible to conciousness if one meditates and breaks down the barriers... and in fact the barriers only exist because of the limited capacity of 'conciousness' and the fact that it is easier to'automate' many things handled by the human brain, there is simply no need for 'expensive' conciousness to be involved in much of what the brain does, but it can be caused to be made cncious if one will but train the brain.. [as indeed yogis do]

But there are many other 'cracks' in this projected reality that we take so seriously most of the time... there is its curious beginning , the creation of 'self' , of conciousness , that men largely shy away from studying ... I actually remember that moment and what seemingly was 'before' it , the wholeness , the one-ness , that was shattered in becoming an apparently 'individual' self in a largely uncontrollable 'world' of space and time

hen there is prophecy, which you poo-poo too easily withut considering it in detail first ... a bit too uncareful really if one really seeks the truth

Since you began with a false premise and extrapolated from there, I don't know how to respond to the rest of this.

Well we could begin by discussing why you think the premise is false, there is no need to rush on until we establish the foundations... no hurry

I have no idea how what you said contradicts my "generalisation", It's a simple fact that most of the world is theistic.

According to Jesus , 'Theism' will result inbeief that Satan is God [Rev 13:3-7] in all but a couple of thousand amongst 6 billion ... thus it would be better perhaps if one could understand the God of the very few saints , rather than measuring god by the false idols of religious and rationalistic 'theism' which are actually easily all dismissable as incomplete, inconsistent, etc...

Trust me, this is very patronising.

I regret that you take that stance, I am only telling you the implications of my current beliefs for information purposes in discussion, not to patronise, I am not asserting them, only using them for purpose of discussion [this is not to say that I wouldn't act according to my best beliefs if I could]

 

[stranger]

I see this being said a lot on these forums, almost always those saying have heard it somewhere repeating it because it sounds impressive but having no clue as to what "beyond time" means.

I didn't arrive at it by hearing it ,but by reading scripture and meditating on the meaning of 'incorrupton'... the nearest analogy I can find for 'timelessness' in 'physical reality' is the reversible reaction.... things that go backwards in time just as easily as forwards ... that concept is a little help perhaps in envisaging timelessness.... the otherconception I like is the idea of a holographic recording of the whole of finite time ... one could store the whole thing in a library and just play back any part of time at will
... the whole of time then becomes an object as realas we perceive space to be ... and so then that would be how God looks at space time [if God looked at all!] ,as a completed object, FIXED , immutable , complete, 'finished' ... any part available immediately

The other word used in scripture is 'perfect' , and by ths I understand not subject to degradation , not damaged or damageable ... hence the analogy with reversible processes where entropy is not increased ...

Nope, just me expressing how futile attempts to fit humanity into an Alpha and Omega God's agenda are. They consistantly amount to non-intuitive leaps of the imagination and nonsense terms.

Again the terms one uses MUST of necessity be understood poetically since we have so little experience of the spirit that we have no words touse literally about it... thus the cynicist has a hey-day picking whatever words a person uses to pieces , but never understands what a person is saying behind the words until the inspiration comes and sudenly he wants to use wors thatway too [I know this cos' I did both sides of this now this person was a declared atheist for much of his life ]

That's just twisting it to fit your belief.

Ok so show me the twist you think that you see , I'm willing to learn ...

I trust objective reality far more than subjective, a single mind can easily be tricked.

Philosophy seems to have proved that there is no objective reality , do you reject that? [if so why?]
Biology/Psychology showed us that our conception of reality is simply a projection that is subject to countless [even continual] illusions amd delusions

God has stated [in scripture and meditation] that we come from Him and return to spirit in the end

We have little basis for believeing in 'physical reality' , it is just a pagan myth with as many holes/cracks in it as any other pagan myth ... do not be fooled by its popularity, learn from watching lemmings jump off a cliff hat follwing the masses is not necessarily the best or true way ... even when it comes to what is real and what is not ...

Indeed, witness is the least reliable form of evidence known to man. How do you find evidence of miracles in meditation?

Once one understands that physical reality is just the spirit's version of virtual reality, then one can undestand miracles very easily , and realise that whenmen see miracles 'with their own two eyes' then they will believe in the 'god' who apparently controlls the miracles... so very hard for the saints not to be taken in to by such 'direct' 'evidence' ... it ain't so easy this 'truth game'

Atheists really are not the people you have to worry about following a "miracle worker".

MY personal experience as an atheist in the past,and of other atheists , is that they know more about the 'god' of christianity than 'christians' do [that is why atheists reject that God and 'christians' do not] ... the irony is that it is nt the God of scripture or the God of Jesus ! [God help anyone trying to explain this in words!]

Thus atheists are all-too-easy to fool by miracles since they believe in physical reality, they will believe the miracles when they see them :-

2Th 2:9 Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders

Re 13:3 ...and all the world wondered after the beast.

These prophecies are not particularly impressive, much like "wars and rumours of wars" if not vague then painfully obvious.

Rather if you were to look more carefully you would see that there is DETAILED prophecy that God will reveal for simply asking Him :-

Mt 15:27 And she said, Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters&#8217; table.

Joh 16:13 Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come.
​

The end has been predicted since time immemorial,it never happens, people are sick of hearing about it.
Mystery solved.

There is no better way of lulling people into complacency than this argument, but even a fairly superficialanalysis in any terms reveals that the end MUST come some time ... I see no point in finding ways of denying that ... rather look fr the real signs of the end , there are plenty of them about in the world

Time did not need to be "created" simply put, before the BB there was no time. Time began with the expansion of space, what happened just before then is a matter for quantam physics and M theory to figure out.

I hope you are using the words 'before time' in a poetic sense since that is an obvious oxymoron otherwise ... there is no before time in the literal meaning of the words ...

I think we all have high hopes of M-theory now it got over its teething troubles ... but we have not even digested into language [let alone common knowledge or religion]what other things we already have from modern physics ...

If the BB was a clash of M-branes then it need not be recurrent [or may be] ... what we do know is that as human beings we shall not survive the end of this universe and emergence of another , so how does one explain resurrection to the new earth and heavens as described in scripture ... survival of the individual between univerese in the multiverse ...

Equally consider this possibility , that God is a perfect 'life-form' in a completely different 'Physics' of a parallel universe where there simply is no time or space as we know it ... how can one discount that as the means by which we tarvel to another universe where lovingness dominates instead of the evil in this universe :-

Ec 12:7 Then shall the dust [body]return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.

This does not rule out the possiblity that this has occured in a cycle countless times before. Expansion ->contraction-> expansion ->contraction etc..

That would imply multiversality of time , something which seems unlikely to say the least when time seems constrained to some individual universes, as in ours ,and time is integrally destructive [the 'arrow' of time is entropy increase]

 

[stranger]

What we don't yet know is what process brought it into happening in the first place, a fact that religion has all too happily jumped at providing.

As I am trying to point out, it is a presumption that it is a process in time, in fact it seems impossible for it to be so... that idea is an anthropomorphism of sorts , imposing man's experience o the multiverse... we have far btter analogies than that to project these days ... and one can always actually 'cheat' in the game of truth and ask God the answers in prayer and meditation (once one knows the questions and is humble enough to ask]

Leaving us with a God-of-the-gaps explanation that is as good as no explanation.

Again you presume so without even hearing the explanation of God , just because you heard the xlanation of religionists and rightly rejected it ... no problem, you did better than many of us ...but why not just check out all the possibilities instead of equating religion with God ?

The end will come eventually ...not impressive prophecy by any standard.

Not impressive maybe, but many people believe in infinite time still ,Newtonian fashion... so it is worth discovering that time is finite cos' it has many implications ... and equally you seem to ignore some of the implications already in some things that you have said ...

Stranger this is embarrassingly reminiscent of dark ages church doctrine. The idea that man cannot learn is not far short of man should not learn.

I did not say that we cannot learn, my belief is that the saints will leran all things in this life [John 16:13] and that all men will learn all things in the next life [Joel 2:28] ... but we actually know that we cannot KNOW anything from our 'idols', not even from rationalism ... simply because al knowledge from men is conditional [Relative[, not absolute ... we are all adrift in a sea , out of sight of land, we have no foundation for knowledge and our house of cards falls as soon as a single axiom is proven false [by contradiction for instance] ... in fact also men treat completeness as if it were axionatic when it has been disproven ratonally [Godel 1945] , that is how absurd our faith is in addition to being all-at-sea through faith in relative knowledge ...

For me then, to find that the desire to love will not desert me, gives me a foothold in what is only relative to my being... and i cannot better that as a basis of faith until such time as I receive all truth [if Joel's prophecy is true]

Which no scientist does!

Well I know of some that do so at least some of the time , and there was even a time when the chief physicists in the country announced that Newton was sufficient basis for understanding all things ... even scientists get the same delusions that plague the thought processes of religionists

That wasn't your point besides. What you've been saying is that we only find an answer when we admit we don't know at which point God magically gives it to us. I find that a pathetic and demeaning postion totally at odds with a parent/child analogy.

I have known other of my atheist friends whothink it is demeaning that man cannot find the answers himself, I still do not see it , why should one resent learning from a greater 'intelligence' than oneself?

Great, we'll be able to see how wrong or right you are within a few decades.
I'm excited.

Yes, and I think that I ought to be excited to, but instead I feelincreasingly calm and at times a little sad that the whole edifice built by men must crumble in order to save us from our selves ...

If that's what you need to believe. I think we'll adapt. This might even be a positive step, increasing shared properity.

Yes I see that point, inprinciple man might stop competing and share equably and co-operatively... but seriously what would make men change , rather the world we know will be torn apart [much like what happened in Iraq AFTER Sadam fell] because the individual self asserts its right to fight for the resources it sees are it birthright ... all that wil happen is that the wars are between tribes, just as they were in history [and still are in many places in many ways] ... no mankind will not learn to love all men until God teaches all men, and even then many will have to learn the HARD way ...

I don't know any insoluble problems.

There are many problems that science simply refuses to address [as 'inappropriate'] and so they are insoluble by rationality [but accessible by meditation]

Because because because because because because because because beeeeeeecause!

Yeah , an ugly concept, but one we are stuck with in this medium mostly perhaps ... i sometimes try leaving it out simply because it causes misunderstanding, as it appears to have done here ...

Stranger, your OP mentioned 'truth' about 40 times, you've given "because that's the way it is" as an answer multiple times. The gaping logical gaps in your belief are answered with "you can't understand it" rather than "I don't know how to explain it, maybe I'm wrong" or "hmmm actually that does make zero sense".

I take the approach that it is as well to state my position and then discuss from there, feel free to discuss any statement you wish to , despite the format I am not asserting anything as more than my best estimate of the truth at this moment ... and i am grateful indeed to those who have helped me refine it over the years , not least to God when i am 'shattered' enough to ask Him

No room is given for any discussion on most of your points, you deliver "this is the way it is" statements and nothing is up for question.
You aren't here discussing your ideas just stating them in my general direction.

As I say, it is all up for discussion , although I am very slow at realising critical points for swift resolution of debate ,as some can do... I welcome your critique if you are moved to discuss your point of view and the points against mine

You haven't even begun to earn the right to flatter yourself like that.

I nether seek to earn any such right , nor flatter myself , rather I hate myself and am amazed that God moves me to engage n discussion which I 'know' cannot lead anywhere unless He gives both His truth beforehand ...

Rationality does the opposite of that, you must be thinking of something else.

If you were to stop thinking for a while , you too could see how much clearer things are without faith in rationality ... it really is the most attractive 'god' but one which leads men to great evil ... a prime candidate for thr label 'Satan' or 'the antichrist' ...

Fair enough, if you take the time to write it, I'll do my best to reply to it.

Well that is very kind of you, and I thank you for that contribution indeed !

It's like I said earlier in this post, much of the time you simply deliver your opinion to which no discussion is possible because the only answers forth coming are "because that's the way it is" or "you don't understand, I knew you wouldn't".
It's totally counter productive to a good discussion.

Well let us try more slowly and comprehensively then , perhaps taking one or just a few point at a time ... cos' I thought that I had answered all your points very systematically.... let me try again and you may require an answer of me ... my thoughts onit are that perhaps all we have here is a misunderstanding [which is more than easy in this medium]

 

[Tenka]

Of course my friend , I am only guided by all that apparently happened to my apparent self, just as you are ... in fact my belief that this 'physical reality' that we project is 'virtual' makes it even easier to realise that one could be completely wrong, just as easy as all the rules and beliefs of this apparent reality can be turned upside down in our dreams [and maybe we could learn from that? ... rather than simply ignoring a very 'real' phenomenon in our projected world ]

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That certainly is reasonable, however for you to be wrong about God existing, God must be falsifiable in some way.

There exists the explanation that we dream because it asists our learning process, like the training programs of the Matrix films. Scenarios we believe are real but are just 'simulated' to give us experience. Other animals dream also.

That is a spurious argument, classifying one thing does not justify classifying something else , classification is simply a 'laziness' brought on by our finiteness of brain ... we classify because we are incapable of complete models [we even talk of 'probability' as if it meant something , based upon categorisation into 'sets with properties']

It's not lazy, it is just a result of our pattern seeking brains grouping things by relative similarities. Nothing wrong with it, it makes communication a lot easier and faster.

Everyone may be individual certinly, but nobody is totally individual, similarities are shared.

The inconsistency of the notion of genus has been proven in biology and that rather turns your argument completely opposite to the point you were trying to make

e.g. one group of sea-birds exists woidely distributed from East to West but those in the far West [call the 'W'] cannot breed with those in the far East [call them 'E'] ... although all adjacent populations can interbreed ...
thus E and W are different species but all the birds of this type are the smae species ... an absolute contradiction of the very notion of species ... the situation in plants is even more complex than in these sea-birds...

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The animals are grouped due to shared similarities, an occasional misclassification does not change anything, (besides 'genus' is higher up than the species level). Protestants and Catholics sometimes consider each other heretics yet they both share that same book at the base of their religion.

I thank you for that and so would like to discuss the reasons for it sometime , since I am actually mystified at the qualifications [since naively I had thought a 'deist' was just anyone who had an idea of God ]

i am guessing that by 'impersonal' you may mean that God is not a 'human' , that God is not made in our image as many men believe ... my own thought is that we are 'made' in God's image and God is 'spirit' , thus our reality ulimately is spirit [and that's where 'we' came from] so 'physical reality is temporary and temporal and subject to entropic increase, completely unlike spirit ... we know then that we cannot stay being human but there seems a desperate struugle to deny that, to show that somehow we can [breeding children to continue beyond death in a way, space exploration, knowledge exploration, inventing religions, building long-lasting monuments and institutions , etc]

No, 'impersonal' as in the God does not relate to humanity on a personal level or take any interest in us, sorry for not clearing that up.

I liked the idea of pantheism until I found out that they mostlymake the mistake of taking projected reality as ultimate reality... so in a sense i agree with them up to that point that God is not a big intelligent human being in the sky, but rather the source and cause of everything and nothing escapes from Him.... but the difference is in realising that our reality is unreal to God. something that He cannot be, but it is something he can 'imagine and create' as a virtual [projected] reality ... this we can have some awareness of through seemingly deliberate 'cracks' in that reality ... we know for instance that reality is not how we see it , our physics tells us that the solid wall in front of us is simply an energy barrier made up of space and not as 'opaque' and 'solid' as we see it as being at all ... we know other creatures experience and sense things we do not sense [UV and IR light for instance, high and low frequncy sound, etc]

thus if we recognise that out projected reality suffers the same flaws as virtual reality [time lag for instance, our image of the world is behind events 'out there' becuase we know the dealys involved in sensing and perceivng] ... if projected, then 'unreal' ... it is a short step from this to understanding hw God describes our reality to us in meditation...

Yet the real reality is the one we can demonstrate, we can demonstrate that UV light exists even though we cannot see it with our naturla eyes (well, some humans can actually and their reality is the same as ours). It is a reality that if a bullet is fired from a gun and strikes a person it wil cause pain, tissue damage maybe even death, this is reality regardless of what you believe.

I hope that is not what my words conveyed , I do not see God as any more than having known through what we live through ... that what we see as our selves, our conciousness ,our individual is simply God exploring what He is not as an 'imagining' ... the difference being that God does not 'imagine' as a process in time in the way we appear to do ...

I don't see how it is possible for the Christian God not to anthropomorphic, he is as human as Thor or Zeus, wanting, loving, hating, being jealous etc.

I don't see anything real as a bad thing, bad and good are integral to the illusion [as I think men have now proved, morality is completely relative , personal, subjective .. bad news for ethicists, batting on a sticky wicket but pride has to be moved out of the way as part of the demo , as do 'self' , 'ego', individality, 'free will' , mankind;s 'justice' ...

I think you exaggerate when you say that you don't see anything as bad.

Morality is a rational respose to our situation, people have different situation so different moralities have developed. Japan of centuries past had a huge population and limited agricultural space so being frugal with food was considered 'moral', houses were built with paper walls so being quiet was also 'moral'.

The distinction seemed to me to be that 'evil' is fundamentally mor destructive than 'good' , and thsu that one might make a metric of human behaviou based upon the rate of entropy production ... it's a partial answer and enlightening, but one cannot get away from the fact that life itself works fundamentally by generating entropy in the nevironment ...

I usually hear that life generates order from 'disordered' energy instead of bringing about more 'disorder', life needs to utilise energy not dissociate it.

Thus it is incorrect to say that God is good because God is 'better than good' , God is perfect in the same sense as our 'reversible processes' generate no entropy ... God is beyond entropy ...and it is thus only by poetic analogythatone talks of God as the LIVING God , God is not alive in the same way we appear to be, rather he has a life beyond the way our bodies live in physical terms ... the point is described in scripture by such terms as immortality, incorruptibility ,'beyond change' !

I find it almost meaningless to describe God as being beyond all these things we comprehend, it leaves no way to perceive 'him' let alone relate to 'him'.

The inadequacy of language was highlighted by Godel over half a century ago, but it was known to the Greeks too who also simply ignored it in their rush to have faith in rationality as a substitute god/idol for their traditional and largely ineffective superstitious mythical gods... certainly it is seen as a worthy opponent to God by many men and easily defeats the false gods of religionism , so rationality indeed has the greatest claim to be the antichrist of scripture in gaining favour among all men bar the saints of this earth ...

I think it is not that language is inadequate any more than a chisel is inadequate for the carving of a beautiful statue because the delicacy of the chisel is dependant on the skill sculpter in this case.

A poor craftsman blames his tools.

In that context then this discussion of establishing 'external' or 'internal' source of inspiration reflects the dichotomy between meditation and reason and the symbolic struggle between the two cherubim in the scripture , Satan and Jesus ... the outcome is then as sure as scriptural prophecy, but one might note that it goes almost completely in favour of Satan before being pegged back irretrievable to complete and utter 'victory' for Jesus' view ... so it will be interesting in many ways to see how things turn out

Conclusions drawn from rational investigation yield results that all are able to see for themselves, meditation yeilds a totally subjective experience with conclusions indistinguishable from imagination.

It would help if rather than saying this, that you just expalined why you think so ... all things are nosensical until one has a model [idol] of them or a revelation[inspration] about them

There is no intelligable explanation for anthropomorphisations found in the bible other than God was written deliberately as having human emotions and agendas.

Everywhere you look God loves, God hates, God wants, God has a plan etc.. these cannot be dismissed as "poetic". If you are happy to dismiss the bible as uninspired tribal mythology I am too.

Even the sory of Jesus, this points to a God who is definately not above experiencing human concepts like love, justice, mercy, suffering.

OR one could view it simply as peotic [metaphoric, symbolic] usage of words , never meant to be taken literally at all, then it is not anthrpomorphic [and italso comes to make sense !]

That might fly when it comes to God "speaking" the universe into existence but doesn't work when it comes to God having human emotions and agendas.

even belief in the idol of rationality ! [people respect rationality, thus it is an impesonal 'god' responsible for varied degrees of manipulation of the universe ... that curiously makes you a 'deist' according to your own definition and using your own rationality to show it

This again, why do christians always assume that people must worship something or have some sort of God merely because they do? You claim it's either money, ourselves, logic, science it just doesn't compare. This just comes across as trying to drag others down to your level by making illogical leaps and non sequetors, It simply doesn't follow that respect for rationality makes it a god. I respect humans but that doesn't make them personal Gods to me.

In no sense is my rationality a God, It has no power to create, it has no form physical or otherwise, it has no motive or personality, no ability to innitiate anything of it's own accord it is merely a description for a way we make sense of things.