Yes
No
I'm not sure.
It doesn't matter
No idea what that is I am going to go look it up....
No, no God started nor created anything. There is no phenomenon outside of basic physics and chemistry that has given rise to life on planet Earth. There was never a Creater God.
God is a aspect of human consciousness, shared by each person, and is a birth right as a species of great ape with massive brains. God is a conceptualization of this awareness and is a cultural endowment of countless generations before us. In some instances this conceptualization has given form to a societal framework on which we base our necessary beliefs in the parts of our minds that is boundless. These ideas of a creator God are artifacts, even derelicts from another time when the conceptualization was still a widespread illusion. This illusion has simultaneously led to all kinds of harmful endemic delusions as well as many gracious, noble, beneficial and fulfilling acts both at the individual and societial levels. The Crusades juxtaposed to the good work of feeding less fortunate come to mind.
Man's rationality has freed the collective societies from the bondage of such beliefs (but not fast enough) That we have come to this perdiciment is a consequence of 10,000 years of cultural indoctrination in the belief of a separate individual identitity. This was the original fall from grace, self-awareness, from the unselfconcious yet unified awareness within ourselves that we now call God.
In my view does knowing this take away from the personal experience of God? Not at all. It only serves to illuminate the incredible inhereted lineage of our biological selves and the responsibility that follows as an awakened creature in a bizarrely terrifying Universe. A Universe empty of anything except our own perceptions projected onto its canvas. Knowing this experientially was both terrifying and beautiful.
As one forumite quoted to me not long ago "God is all to human".
Last edited by wacey; 03-04-2016 at 10:26 PM.
Yes I have read that now thank-you. And no, I do not subscribe to this amalgamated merging of God and rationality. That is just a transitioning philosophy from one belief into another to increase the comfort of the believers at that time. A creator God that created the Universe and then left it hands off is simply a more subtle and nuanced concept whose roots are firmly planted in the original creator myth. This is just another mythology, albeit an eloquent one. If the Religious could not have their creator in life on Earth, then the next best thing was that he created it and then left it to circumstance, of which those to he also happened to have created.
Man's nature and selective evolutionary pressure gave us the ability to reason, not God.
The Universe exists and we are only now probing its mysteries. It was not created, it just is by virtue of its very nature. That it exists is both cause and effect alone.
That is a tough one for the Religious to grapple with. Because if there is no creator..then who is running the show?
The really scary and freeing part is...no one.
When I think of "God" I think of something more like this
i.e. a singularity responsible for existence. I don't think of this