What is God?

[Penumbra]

Wise cracks like that are the reason I started out with a whole page full of technical jargon describing my beliefs in detail,,, so people would know I'm not literally saying I am God in the same unrestricted sense as the Creator. The whole point is that the ontological gap between God and nature is a feeling based on a temporal perception of separation and differentiation. When one recognizes there really isn't a gulf, consciousness is awakened, there is a lifting of the veil over the mind and awareness of reality is enhanced. The perceived duality experienced here in the phenominal realm is hijacked and used as a tool by priests, clergy, preachers and theologians to insert themselves between God and men as His special representatives and administrators. What many call revelation is really whatever they got second-hand from an external religious authority or book. That's not revelation. That's believing propositional hearsay. What religious leaders don't want you to know that there was always both God within and God without. They only want you to know about the God without so they can introduce you to Him and then be the mouthpieces to tell you what He thinks, wants and demands (usually money for church salaries). You may indeed have to be told about the outside God by others, but the God that has always been within is something you will eventually discover for yourself, your true self, your higher self.

But, again, how do you know? Where does this information come from?

Abrahamic religions usually argue that God is a separate being from human reality, whereas eastern religions such as Hinduism generally argue that God is everything. They're two opposing philosophies, so I'm asking you how you know one of the two is correct.

 

[Gukkor]

What makes unity truer or higher than plurality? Why is one illusion and one the "reality?" Is it not just as likely that they are both equally true and equally valid?

Personally, I am a panentheist. I believe that we are indeed all united in God, even as we are separate beings (though I also think God Himself is infinitely greater than the sum of all of Him that is in the universe). However, I don't see the state of unity as being inherently better than the state of plurality, which seems to be the mindset of most people of a mystical mindset that I've encountered. What say you, TBD?

 

[Tube Socks Dude]

However, I don't see the state of unity as being inherently better than the state of plurality, which seems to be the mindset of most people of a mystical mindset that I've encountered. What say you, TBD?

I have a truly dipolar panentheistic concept where Being and becoming are equally real, valid and necessary. I do not seek to dwell in a permanent unitive state. I do not hold to Shankara's view that the world is illusion. I fall in line more with the emanationist cosomology of Kashmir Shaivism than the acosmism of Advaita Vedanta. There is no duality at the highest planes of Reality, yet as I mentioend previously, the one becomes two (subjective/objective) and then multiplicity follows. The difference between Western and Eastern Philosophy is that in the West, God is only the efficient but not material cause of the universe. In some forms of Hinduism and Panentheism, God is both the efficient and material cause.


Here is one breakdown I found of the development of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo....

• Pre-Socratics—question of ultimate origins was not really raised
• Plato—In the Timaeus Plato speculates about a demiurge using the forms as a blueprint for forming a pre-existent matter
• Aristotle—Raised the question of creation, because he had made the cosmos utterly dependent on an unmoved Mover. Thinking the idea of creation unintelligible, he argued that the universe was eternal
• Philo—Combined the Jewish notion of God as a personal being with the insights of Greek philosophy, arguing that the forms were the ideas of a personal divine being, whose word caused creation to occur
• Theophilus of Antioch (late 2nd century CE)—possibly the first to deny the preexistent chaotic stuff (matter), arguing instead that God creates from nothing (ex nihilo)
• Augustine—included the idea that time itself is created. There is no "before creation."

Augustine completes the movement toward the standard doctrine of creatio ex nihilo by making even time a creature; everything is dependent upon God for its being and God is Being Itself.

Below taken from “In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being by Philip Clayton and Robert Peacocke ------

"Harvard’s Jon Levenson affirms a doctrine of creaton out of chaos. Germany’s Gerhard May has shown that creation ex nihilo is also absent from the intertestamental literature including 2 Maccabees and the New Testament. The Christian thinkers throughout the first and most of the second century simply took for granted the standard veiw which was that our world had been created out of chaos with many of them explicitly affirming Plato’s version of this view, according to which although our world is a contingent creation, it was created out of matter in a chaotic state.

As May shows, the doctrine of creation out of absolute nothingness in which our world was the beginning of finite existents was an innovation adopted by some theologians (Theophilus, Hippolytus, Tertullian, Irenaeus) near the end of the second century in response to Marcion’s Gnostic theology which said our world was created out of evil matter. The best way to fight this idea, they thought, was to deny that the world was created out of anything. Although Hermogenes, a Platonic Christian theologian, warned that this innovation would lead people to blame God for the world’s evils, these innovations went boldly, and as I argue in an essay that takes issue with May’s own endorsement of creation ex nihilo, foolishly, forward. The doctrine of ex nihilo soon became the standard Christian doctrine. In later centuries it was also widely affirmed by Jewish and Islamic theologians so that “traditional” theism within all the Abrahamic religions is extreme voluntarism."

 

[Soul_Golem]

Wise cracks like that are the reason I started out with a whole page full of technical jargon describing my beliefs in detail,,, so people would know I'm not literally saying I am God in the same unrestricted sense as the Creator. The whole point is that the ontological gap between God and nature is a feeling based on a temporal perception of separation and differentiation. When one recognizes there really isn't a gulf, consciousness is awakened, there is a lifting of the veil over the mind and awareness of reality is enhanced. The perceived duality experienced here in the phenominal realm is hijacked and used as a tool by priests, clergy, preachers and theologians to insert themselves between God and men as His special representatives and administrators. What many call revelation is really whatever they got second-hand from an external religious authority or book. That's not revelation. That's believing propositional hearsay. What religious leaders don't want you to know that there was always both God within and God without. They only want you to know about the God without so they can introduce you to Him and then be the mouthpieces to tell you what He thinks, wants and demands (usually money for church salaries). You may indeed have to be told about the outside God by others, but the God that has always been within is something you will eventually discover for yourself, your true self, your higher self.

Nah, it was just some friendly fire. I think you would find me regularly open and receptive to listening to whatever you have to say. I just don't understand it, are there some good links you could furnish that explain your perspective in layman's terms?

 

[Tube Socks Dude]

But, again, how do you know? Where does this information come from?Even if I could transmit to you some formula for knowing or descriptive information, it would not come from your own authentic experience. If someone can talk you into something, they can talk you out of it. If an experience of knowing does arise spontaneously, you may then hear descriptions of it from others and then know what they are talking about from within rather than receiving it from outside.

Abrahamic religions usually argue that God is a separate being from human reality, whereas eastern religions such as Hinduism generally argue that God is everything. They're two opposing philosophies, so I'm asking you how you know one of the two is correct.

If God alone originally existed, then made something from nothing that exists totally outside Himself, then what is it that contains the universe? For that matter, what contains God AND the universe? There would have to be something that contains "all there is". If the universe stands outside God, then it becomes an ultimate thing unto itself. It would have to either be ultimate enough to contain itself or something else greater than the unviverse exists that contains it. Then, whatever that is would be another ultimate besides the God that stands outside the universe. If God is truly the Ultimate or Absolute, then nothing is greater or outside of God, because there is nothing that can contain God, yet God contains everything and yet is even beyond that. The way I see it, there are either two ultimates simultaneously existing separately or there is an ontological connection between Creater and created. I opt for the latter where all is in God and God is in all because God is even more ultimate than all. God is Ulimate, both infinately and temporally, primordially and consequentially, abstractly and phenominally.

 

[Tube Socks Dude]

Double post

 

[Penumbra]

If God alone originally existed,

What do you base that assumption on?

If it is true, then what form do you believe God was in before anything else? Was he an intelligence, an impersonal force, or something else?

then made something from nothing that exists totally outside Himself, then what is it that contains the universe? For that matter, what contains God AND the universe? There would have to be something that contains "all there is". If the universe stands outside God, then it becomes an ultimate thing unto itself. It would have to either be ultimate enough to contain itself or something else greater than the unviverse exists that contains it. Then, whatever that is would be another ultimate besides the God that stands outside the universe. If God is truly the Ultimate or Absolute, then nothing is greater or outside of God, because there is nothing that can contain God, yet God contains everything and yet is even beyond that. The way I see it, there are two Ultimates simultaneously existing separately inside something greater than both, or an ontological connection between Creater and created. I opt for the latter. God is Ulimate, both infinately and temporally, primordially and consequentially, abstractly and phenominally.

If there were to exist a God who created everything else, even if things came from him, they could have been made to be permanently separate.

You say that in that case, the universe itself would be an ultimate thing unto itself, but I don't see how that is necessarily true. If a God existed, and then created a wholly separate universe that he himself can control and govern or blink out of existence at a moment's notice, then he could still remain the only ultimate thing despite creating separate things.

 

[Tube Socks Dude]

If a God existed, and then created a wholly separate universe that he himself can control and govern or blink out of existence at a moment's notice, then he could still remain the only ultimate thing despite creating separate things.

But where does this universe exist if it is outside of God? What is it that "contains" these separate things that exist apart of God? Either the universe is contained in something or it has the same uncontained, boundless, infinite Being as God.

 

[Tube Socks Dude]

If a God existed, and then created a wholly separate universe that he himself can control and govern or blink out of existence at a moment's notice, then he could still remain the only ultimate thing despite creating separate things.

May I ask, is this conversation about the difference between my conception of God and that of Classical Theisim, or is this about whether or not God even exists at all?

 

[Penumbra]

May I ask, is this conversation about the difference between my conception of God and that of Classical Theisim, or is this about whether or not God even exists at all?

It could be a little bit of both, I suppose. Much of it would be about your conception of God, ideally.

Basically, I'm just asking where you got your information from, including what assumptions you are making. My questions are about conversation, not necessarily debate. I don't explicitly disagree with you, but with so many people presenting what their idea of God is all over the place, I'm just asking you how you know. It doesn't necessarily have to be against Classical Western Theism, either. It just so happens that East vs. West tend to be the two largest schools of thought on the subject.

But where does this universe exist if it is outside of God? What is it that "contains" these separate things that exist apart of God? Either the universe is contained in something or it has the same uncontained, boundless, infinite Being as God.

It exists within spacetime.

Assuming God's existence, does spacetime necessarily have to be a part of God, or can God create something that is wholly separate from himself and still have control over it? Does everything God create come from himself, or can he call into existence that which comes from nowhere?