Not sure where to put this...
- I've requested access to the outreach section but there has been no response.
- The philosophy section has been shut down.
- I want to talk with both Christians and non-Christians.
So if mods would move this to outreach and grant me access that would be awesome!
That being said...
If you're a non-believer then you reject the notion that the Bible is God's word. You might even think that it's a very strange book. It presents itself as sort of a meandering history of a bronze-age, middle-eastern tribe who gets delivered from slavery and conquers the land of Canaan, highlighting a few major characters along the way.
Along with this there's a lot of aphorisms, wisdom literature, and poetry. And there's also a great deal of 15th century BC civil law to sift through.
In the NT there's several stories about a Galilean carpenter who taught, healed, died, and rose again. Then this guy Paul writes a bunch of letters to small communities around the ancient world who believe that said carpenter is still alive and is God's son.
In both the OT and NT there's psychedelic, apocalyptic literature about the end of the world.
And that about sums up the Bible.
For a lot of people, this doesn't strike them as the word of God. So my question for these people is - If God were real, and if he were a person, and if he wanted to communicate with us through words: what would his words be like?
brightlights said:
"Would he give us stories, parables, laws, poetry? What would you expect communication from God to be like if there was such a thing?"
In engineering there is something know as a black box which is s component of a system that is unknown how it works. Usually this is because if you use to try to open one of these devices in the past you would destroy it in the process since the manufacture didn't want their competitor being able to open it and still have it working. Anyways trying to distill (or dissect) how God works isn't completely different than figuring out how a black box works in some system that contains a black box; with a few minor catches of course.
The first catch is that if God is really all powerful and all knowing it is impossible to know what such a being is like without being nearly all powerful and all knowing yourself. This is also more or less true of even less God-like beings who may not be as powerful and/or knowing as God. Think of it like this even a person who is a magician can play tricks with your mind to make you see 'magic' if they know something that you don't know until you see how his tricks work. While figuring out such tricks works is simple, human beings from more advance societies and or aliens from more advance civilizations could too perform something that looks like a magic trick, however this time one would have to understand how their advance technology works before being able to understand how they did it. Dealing with God and God-like beings is sort of like that, you have to know bit of what they know before you can dissect how it is they think and do what they do as you would a magician; whether or not their power and abilities comes from technology..or something else.
Since we can't dissect God directly we have another option which is to dissect the works that he left with us. According to Abrahamic religions (and perhaps any other religion that claims to have been form by communicating with God) these works ARE the tools which we are supposed to use to get to know him in a way as if we where trying to know anything else around us. I won't go too far into this method since it is the means in which people either accept such works as the truth or they remain unsatisfied for one reason or another and go on to other means (and since I'm one of the latter instead of the former I can't speak much about how to go about it if one chooses the former). Their is also the possibility of being one who is kind of between the two (believing there are some truths, but not accepting everything) but that might be merely a type two category person than something different enough to worth being noted.
Since the OP was more about the type two instead of the type one (which I don't think has the issue mentioned in the OP), I believe it is best to focus on what one does in such a situation. While there are many ways this can go it is best to say they either choose to fallow some other religious belief (which may ore perhaps may not provide them with the answers they seek in which case they may become just another type one) or they don't fallow any particular religion or know system of beliefs and instead just sort of 'roll their own' kind of system of beliefs unique to them; although when you think of it perhaps we all do a little bit of rolling our own set of beliefs even when we do subscribe to any particular religion.
As one of these kind of people who has kind of rolled their own (either through my own ignorance and/or unable to find truth in tradition Abrahamic religions), I have found that two concepts in Jain/Buddhist teachings (which are part of Dharmic religions) that might help in understanding what God might be like. The first is the doctrine of no one sidedness and the other is dependence arising.
If you know the story of the blind men and the elephant then you kind of already know dependence arising since it is about how our biases causes us not to be able to understand reality for what it is because we can only perceive so much of it at a time. The doctrine of dependence arsing is that nothing is a thing unto itself but is more of an aspect of the web of the combined cause and effect of everything around us. To me the two doctrines are about the same thing where as the doctrine of no one sidedness mostly explains that there is an elephant we as blind men can not see and the doctrine of dependence arising is mostly about how we can compensate some of bias by understanding and being able to see the web of cause/effect relationships create the around us, even if such things are not immediately perceptible to us.
Also what these two doctrines do is give a small insight into how either God or God-like being might perceive things. An all knowing being wouldn't be hindered as the blind men are in the story of the blind men and the elephant since he would be able to simultaneously know and see each aspect of elephant that each person viewing the elephant would see. Since the elephant in the story isn't really an elephant but instead it is a parable for reality itself, I can not say if an all knowing being can actually 'see' the elephant (or the equivalent of seeing) since seeing something in this context isn't about sight, but at least they are aware of any potential means to perceive it; which may be the equivalent of seeing or at least it is the closest thing to it.
While we may not be able to perceive the world in such a way, knowing that God is able to perceive things in a multiple number of ways we are not aware of or perhaps choose not let ourselves be aware of. In the movie "The Prestige" a stage magician makes a bird disappear (and reappear in his hand) after covering the cage it is with a piece of cloth and then collapsing the cage it is in. A kid witnessing this believes he killed the bird (and which his mother doesn't believe him) and the magician counters that he couldn't have killed it since he has the bird in his hand. But later on after everyone is gone it shows the magician opening the table, pulling out the cage, and throwing away the dead bird that was killed when he collapsed the cage around it (and in case your wondering, the other bird was merely one that looked a lot like the first one which was one of many of hundreds of birds the magician and his helpers took care of). The movie goes on to explain that part of any magic trick (or what it refers to as the prestige) is the actual trick itself which either requires something too complicated for some people to understand, or too unpleasant (such as killing a pet bird), and/or a combination of the two. The movie eventually goes on with the magician (because he is in fierce competition with another magician) working with Tesla to create a machine that will teleport things as well as people. While the machine works instead of teleporting the object inside of it, it instead creates a duplicate and the duplicate item or person appears at where they where supposed to go. While this obviously presents a problem the magician decides to not waste it, but requires some .. unpleasant means to deal with the fact that it is a duplication machine not an actual teleportation machine. Just as with the disappear bird trick people buy it since they don't really want to think of the possibility of how he pulls it off; or at least that is until his rival sneaks in to find out what is going on.
Whether God is able to see through such tricks through super natural ability or not being biased is something I don't know, but I helps to know that our own biases can be caused because we sometimes don't want to perceive things to be as they are and we can sometimes fix this by allowing ourselves consider certain possibilities or aspects of reality that might not be that pleasant. While neither I or any other human can see all sides of any issue or always be able to see past the wool that reality pulls over our eyes, it helps to be mindful of such things and take them into consideration; or sometimes while dealing with something too complex to try and step 'out of the box' and see if there is any other way to perceive the situation then what is immediately available. Of course knowing about such things is of little help if one isn't even aware their in a situation where they require an extra way to look at it (like the mother with her son at the magic show), but knowing when there is more to something is just part of the process
