I’ve started reading Rene Descartes and I’m intrigued by his idea of “god”.
Descartes is famous for his " I think there for I am." He doubted everything in life to such a degree that he believed the only thing he knew for sure was that when he was thinking then he existed. However, the second thing he deduced is that he knew this world he existed in, real or demonic deception, was imperfect by virtue of the fact that he can doubt it exists. So he knows he exists while thinking and has a conception of imperfections therefore perfection exists and the idea was given to him.
This perfection is god.
God is perfect in all ways. They are beyond deception because a perfect being wouldn’t need to lie, their reason alone for you needing to believe something is enough.
And to me that’s an interesting conception of god. Its a lot more sterile than the normal Christian stance that god is Love which has a emotionally textured connotation. It positions god as having feelings with which we can relate as opposed to Descartes perfection that is simply beyond our reasoning but also (conveniently) not malicious.
As an atheist, god as love makes more sense. God is the feeling of communal love that comes with a religion. People who care for each other for no reason other than because they’re in the same community has always been beautiful to me. God as mislabeled inclusion and comradely behavior males perfect sense.
What is your god or gods like?
I mean, the bible and a ton of other religious texts also give “God” emotions, which makes him imperfect.
It’s a bit silly to ask religious people what “God” is, because he’s contradictory even amongst most religion’s own teachings.
“God” is what ever the idiots who believe things without evidence need him to be in which ever moment they’re contemplating it. Any more substantial thought leads one to conclude that “god” cannot exist.
I never did understand why other atheists don’t think religions are interesting.
Like obviously a god or gods is an absurd conclusion to jump to in any circumstance, but suspending that disbelief males the idea so much more fun to talk about.
Like the contradictions of the christian god. The implications are very interesting to think about.
God starts off as this incredibly vindictive jerk setting arbitrary and restrictive rules. The only reason is so he can occasionally have an excuse to be a dick head to whole swaths of people or incredibly specific people. But as 4000 years pass he mellows out into the god of love and cooperation that is embodied by Jesus and his teachings.
You can clearly see these weird acting out tendencies in Jesus like his walking on water or creation of flaming orbs above the disciples heads. That’s such pointless but dramatic behavior that old testament god would do. Just toned down and isn’t murder anymore.
So the idea that there is this all powerful, all knowing being that had a fucking edgy teenage phase is really fucking funny.
Even more interesting to me is that the god of our universe is just a selected god as there are more above him according to genesis. The idea that earth is just the Minecraft world of a cosmic toddler who was told to care for humans and he sucks at it is very funny an implication using their own religious texts.
Also we’re atheists. We need to be better than be dick heads to religious people. Our standards should be higher for community engagement
I dunno’ man, when they’re still coming to utterly ridiculous conclusions when taken seriously, I find it nothing but patronizing to attempt to suspend disbelief.
You wouldn’t say we should support schizophrenic delusions so we can make a better mental disorder community, would you? Giving religion a pass literally only harms them and humanity as a whole.
You wouldn’t say we should support schizophrenic delusions so we can make a better mental disorder community, would you?
Actually there are a lot of reasons not to necessarily feed into delusions but there is a fine line between healthcare and torturing the confused.
Alzheimer’s Patience’s for example. They inevitability get to the point where they’re looking for someone long dead because they’re scared and want that comfort person. Is it better to play along with Margaret the 80 year old grandma looking for her dead mother because she’s scared? Or should we perpetually tell her of her mothers death for the first time every single day until she herself dies?
Religion is similar in that we won’t talk anyone out of a religion. Its a naive thought that we can rhetoric someone away from such a strong belief as a creator god. Especially from an outsider perspective. From an unknowing perspective.
Religions are deeper than a facts of the matter reading of their beliefs. I like their emotions of the matter even if the facts are rather absurd
Right, but religious people mostly aren’t equivalent to Alzheimer’s patients. Most are so engrained in their belief because it IS reinforced by others’ feeding literal delusion.
If that were to change, you wouldn’t have nearly as many literally deluded people.
That’s a fair read.
But consider, theres obviously something more to religions than simply being deluded and in a feed back loop. We will never successfully replace religion without understanding what that something more is.
Can we recreate a sense of community like the religious have but more inclusive and more resilient to say political agendas?
What other emotions are encapsulated by religion? Can they be secularized?
I’m personally just fascinated by religions because its not something I had and I don’t believe in them.
But I think people interested in de-programming need to think of religion more empathetically.
I would say community. Though with the death of the Third Place, it’s very much an up hill battle on that front. I think many interests have groups that still have good communities, but many aren’t in person any more. We just need to bring back the Third Place and get the non-specific communities rolling again … somehow.
Sorry, Descartes is simplistic. Also, English mis-renders him.
Cogito, ergo Sum.
Think, therefore Am.
NOT I think, therefore I am.
The self-reference didn’t exist, in his formulation of the meaning, & that may be insiginificant to Western-religion-formed minds ( Abrahamic, or Atheism ), but it is significant as hell in the paradigms which dig into the inner-reality.
Being able to doubt the phenomena-ocean that one is embedded-in, in no way “proves” that it is flawed.
That is … cognitive-narcissism, I think might be the way to phrase it, & nothing else.
Love ( technically, bodhichitta:
- UnlimitABLE ( boundless in pertinence )
- Spontaneous ( you don’t make it happen, you cultivate that it happen, & it happens of its own volition )
- LovingKindnessCompassionCherishing ( English really mis-fits the energy-substance of it )
- Completely lacking in insecurity ( the ancient-texts never mentioned this dimension of it, but it was striking )
) … is a lower-harmonic of G-D. It is knowable by our-kind ( our category of sentience )
This is going to be a bit impersonal, but try rolling with it, to see what the resultant-perspective feels like, OK?
In the beginning is latent-G-D.
No phenomena.
Exactly as Hinduism ( Simon Whistler has a vid on things that were discovered waaay earlier than people would assume, & he notes that both germ-theory & The Big Bang were established in Hinduism, centuries ago… he missed that their linear-measurement-system actually goes down to the size of an individual hydrogen atom, as its smallest-unit-of-measure: nothing’s smaller than an atom, right? They nailed that measurement-referent. )
… stated, OceanOfAllPhenomena/Universe was latent, not extant…
in Hindu parlance, universe was “an egg”.
Then BAM! Big-Bang!
Phenomena are existing!!
OK, but now you’ve got spirits that are wanting to have their own existing, right?
ChildrenOfG-D/CellsOfG-D/Souls…
( jiva, atman, rigpa, eternally-abiding-mind, etc, the label isn’t what’s important, so I’m sticking with “spirits”, for now, since the “Jacob’s Ladder” metaphor uses that term )
The more-conscious one of these spirits is, the more it can choose its incarnation, the phenomena-it-catches-in, but once caught-in-phenomena, cause->effect/action->reaction/sow->reap/karma law is on it.
the less-conscious that one of these spirits is, the more it just catches in whatever phenomena it is that caught its slumbering awareness…
Now Will/Intent is modifying what’s happening, see?
Same as a stillborn baby doesn’t grow, but a living one does, the neutrons, the protons, the electrons, they are identical between the dead & the growing-living, but the immaterial substances, the entanglement/knowing & the probability-wave/will are present among the living, but not present among the corpses…
So, ZILLIONS of spirits are competing-for the phenomena in this newborn universe…
Now you have 3 major categories, see?
- G-D
- spirits
- mere-phenomena
These little-spirits, they “climb down Jacob’s Ladder”, immersing themselves ( the “baptism” symbol-enactment is actually just representing this soul-immersing-in-universe process, btw, & the “Prodigal Son” parable is about an individual soul/spirit doing it ) in phenomena…
Trying to have indestructible-happiness by relying on “the kingdom of the world, without/external”, they keep being disappointed, getting sick or aging or getting injured, & dying.
( Buddha Gautama’s “the nature of samsara/OceanOfAllPhenomena is suffering” was specifically identifying that externally-based happiness always ends )
Eventually, these spirits reach their rock-bottom, turn, & commit to earning the inner-mountain, & they begin “climbing”, aka self-conquering…
Climbing “up Jacob’s Ladder”.
Eventually they reach sufficient realization to be able to intentionally evolve, within-single-life, instead of only unconsciously evolving, between incarnations/lives…
They evolve their way until they “return home”, dissolving back into G-D, but not unconscious, now CONSCIOUS, letting-go of all phenomena, & only BEing, forever, then…
The Hindu statement that “countless lives, throughout endless universes, is just G-D’s way of knowing itself …”
is to me slightly-misleading:
It isn’t G-D’s way of knowing itself, rather, it is the CellsOfG-D’s way of knowing their selves.
What is G-D?
AWARENESS.
The OceanOfAllAWAKESouls.
Individual-lives aren’t its children: they are its grandchildren.
G-D doesn’t, in any way, revolve around human-lives.
G-D cultivates its children, souls/spirits, & they evolve, at a timescale that is unimaginably vast.
Background information:
There are 3 minds, for our perspective:
- SurfaceMind is a mirage projected by ego-distortion of the layer below it, & it dissipates every few hours: it is unsteady, & not-deep.
- LifeMind, which begins forming in conception, & shatters in death, it is operating in our dreams, & it is undertow when we are within SurfaceMind. “Realizing Zen”, in annihilating ego, annihilates the SurfaceMind projection of ego, too: that is why it is sooo much vaster than mere SurfaceMind, according to those who’ve done it.
- Continuum/Soul/EternallyAbidingMind, which is unkillable, but which dissolves-back-into-origin, when it’s finished participating in the battering-between-phenomena game that unconscious-souls play.
Also, I’m Empiricist: I don’t give a damn what any “tradition” says, rely on what TESTS to be true!
Mom had been bringing me up Catholic, but I gained strange memories, in profound-trance…
years-later, discovered that they were soul-memories from lives as … a hornet/bee/wasp, probably in Central Africa, an utterly-brainless fly, who spent an afternoon trying to understand what white lawn-furniture meant, & a particularly stupid fish, with bad eyesight.
IT TOOK ME YEARS to adjust to my worldview being instantaneously-force-reconstructed by evidence, the way that understanding hit me…
The journey continues, obviously…
There’s a Hindu named Ramana Maharshi.
To me, he’s Buddha Ramana Maharshi: he earned dissolution into OceanOfAllAwakeSouls & therefore that’s what Buddha/AwakeSoul MEANS, see?
Anybody who thinks that Buddhism’s all religious stuff, they’ve got to read Huston Smith’s brilliant & profound book “World Religions”.
( that book will exercise you, intellectually, almost-certainly. )
But “Maharshi’s Gospel” is also describing the fundamental-level:
WHEN meditation gets deep-enough, THEN … there’s no “self” anymore.
Awareness, but no Self.
THAT is what G-D is.
Primordial Awareness, see?
( the term Dzogchen is Vajrayana’s rendition of that concept )
So, why evil, then?
Because UNconscious-spirits are self-centered, & therefore they want what others have, & more of it…
I’ve identified that human-evil has at-least these dimensions:
- narcissism
- machiavellianism
- sociopathy-psychopathy
- nihilism
- sadism
- systemic-dishonesty
- displacement-of-objectivity-for-ideology/prejudice/religion
- displacement-of-considered-reasoning-for-ideology/prejudice/religion
Now consider that unconscious-souls are more likely to use these NOT-cherishing-others dimensions in their self-gratification, right?
THAT is where evil comes from: it is simply souls greedy for self-gratification, ignorant-of-any-others’-value.
So, the majority of the souls caught in any universe are at the low-end of soul-unconsciousness, & therefore self-centrism is strong.
& the thinnest-tail of the graph, at the realized-end, is souls who are conscious, & they’re leaving unconscious-catching-in-phenomena…
Therefore, soul-unconsciousness rules the universe, overall.
Now do you see why universes exist?
G-D, latent … doesn’t experience anything, because there isn’t any phenomena to experience.
But creation is a verb, and unless it is infested completely with awarenesses, there isn’t ano point to it, & … it is infested with spirits. Completely.
However, once one has creation, then one has to have evolution, so as to segregate the dead/inert/ignorant ( ie matter, the dead-stuff at the end of a world’s life ) from the realizations, evolved-meanings, insights, all the stuff that spirits “can take with one” beyond death", see?
& when these spirits outgrow caught-in-phenomena, then they … simply dissolve back “home”, to use the “Prodigal Son” parable’s metaphor, into G-D, but AWARE.
This clarifies that there isn’t any understanding of what G-D is, unless there is simultaneous understanding of what souls are, & the nature & function of what-souls-get-caught-in, ie OceansOfAllPhenomena/universes.
& the assymetrical evolution: matter dies, & spirit evolves into ultra-life, simultaneously, in equal/opposite directions & measure.
All the references to “buddha nature” are actually references to a soul’s G-D-nature, its divine/realized nature.
The reason that Buddha stonewalled the “God” question, is simply that Hindu-religion is addicted to religiosity, & Gautama was squelching that.
( as Huston Smith’s book clarifies )
But OceanOfAllAwakeSouls IS G-D.
The sticking-point isn’t that OceanOfAllAwakeSouls “doesn’t” exist, rather, it is that “self” doesn’t exist!
Therefore the entire frame-of-reference of religiosity is bogus, because it all revolves around “self”, & manufactures social-process to keep this “self” entrapped in delusion!
lmao…
Anyways, calling G-D “The Brahman Field”, & calling Continuums/Souls “Particles of Brahman” is exactly correct, but it sooo violates White ideology, that it’ll never happen, in my lifetime.
Which is fine: I’m about done with this world’s ideology-instead-of-considered-reasoning.
Time to move-on…
( yes, it is possible to break a life’s entrapment-in-matter through meditations, & I’m getting closer to breaking the personality “me” : )
Huston Smith’s brilliant & profound book “World Religions”.
I love adding books to my back log.
I do generally like the ideas of awareness as laid out in Buddhist thought. I’ve been practicing my own sitting and being aware. So I started following pretty quick.
To some people, the sublime is god. It is the state of awe that is felt in religious adherence of sorts.
I really liked this idea of the sublime being awe felt at the end of a dedication to something. An almost divine reward for piety.
I used to only get that feeling while hiking. A long arduous walk up a mountain to experience the world in an uncomfortable but beautiful way? Sublime really does feel like the best word for such an experience.
Doing the same but also meditating at the peaks of mountains and the secret grottos. It really is a feeling that I can understand how someone would think there is a god there with them. Some other higher existence seems reasonable.
And I’m just a guy who likes sitting quietly on mountain tops. And my mountains are shitty Appalachian ones!
BTW, I’m presenting that as testably-true.
It is.
ANYone can do the experiments to discover that our Continuums/Souls have memories going waaay beyond our individual-self’s lives.
There are many books, & some systematic scientific research, on reincarnation-memories.
The book “The Boy Who Knew Too Much” would probably be the most-accessible, & there is one about a psychiatrist who discovered that his patient was someone who had tangled with his previous life, & there is some massive-anthology-of-evidences-of-accurate-reincarnation-memories…
but if it is ideologically prohibited that Universe recycle souls, … then … evidence is powerless/irrelevant, right?
So, evidence simply isn’t going to convince anybody, unless some individual is honestly Empiricist…
& the experiment of using meditations/concentrations to make one’s health improve, is doable, too.
Westerners might find that Chopra & Tanzi’s ( Tanzi’s a geneticist ) book “Super-Genes” may give them permission to accept that yes, medical-science has proven that meditation can un-age people…
Maybe then it’d make more sense…
Andrew Holecek’s books are on the meditations-in-dreaming & the meditations-for-improving-one’s-surviving-of-death ( making one’s Continuum/Soul more-awake, in its journey ) & that stuff is sooo far outside what Physicalism’s ideology permits, that it’s … contempted, by Western Scientism.
Nobody’ll spend years doing the experiment, & if anybody claims that the experiment produces actual results … then they ( like me ) are just contempted as mentally-defective.
Which is fine.
As Padmasambhava said: aversion is the ONLY antidote to attachment.
Souls won’t let-go of getting-caught-in-matter until the aversion has destroyed their attachment.
That’s how everything works!
Outgrow it!
That’s the whole point of life: to experience, & to outgrow, trading mattter-life for wisdom-life.
_ /\ _
God is…math, and science, and everything that comes together as so much bigger than ourselves that we have no real concept of fathoming it.
It’s the universe, but less so as some sentient entity with motive and more as a near-infinite, ever-moving mural of existence.
When I say “god” I refer to precisely this concept, and as acknowledgment that everyone’s spiritual beliefs (or lack thereof) help them make sense of the world.
Im an athiest as well. Curiously I had always thought “I think therefor I am” sounded like it was not saying anything. Now I had never really read descartes but later in life I sorta had an epiphany and it started to makes sense. I really need to read him. So I have no god but you mention christians and talking to a guy in college I asked about what if satan had been god and god satan would we think torturing people is good and helping them as evil? He said yes. So his view is it comes from creation and a creator god sets the rules. So in his view a creator god would always be good because he would define good unless he wanted it different.
The poster who called me out for misconceptualizing the “I think, therefore, I am” quote might be right but their option may also be wrong. A good place to start as an atheist is probably the Alex O’Connnor video with a proper Descartes scholar Here. It’s a good listen and the Methods and Meditations writings are genuinely very interesting.
His Methods starts with the idea that anyone can train their “good sense” or reasoning but the biggest hurdle is recognizing that you can be more rational as most people simply assume they have peak reasoning abilities.
It’s really interesting and you can get really nice copies for cheap.
So in his view a creator god would always be good because he would define good unless he wanted it different.
A not uncommon take I’ve seen. I once had a friend in college who was very mad at me because I was learning about the Council of Nicaea where the Christian Bible was formalized in about 300. He was convinced that the Bible is self defining and that humans weren’t involved in the initial canonization of the divine scripture. He refused to consider the implications of his bible being fallible.
So this idea that some higher being is the definer of goodness and god while simply forgetting that it was humans who did the initial defining fascinates me because it’s probably the easiest way to spiral a true believer.
I think it’s rude to do that to people, but sometimes it’s handy when someone is being a dickhead.
For me, I have always understood the catholic and protestant god as society. He defines rules that people live by expecting rewards in the form of miracles and purpose. If other people also follow god/society they are encouraged to perform miracles for others by acting irrationally selfless. Thus god is a self fulfilling prophecy. In real life something as complex as society is hard to grasp so god is an abstraction for it. People have different views on how society should work so there are different gods and the gods also evolve as their devotees views change.
That’s were I’m at in broader strokes. God as a normalizing force to keep a communal cohesion.
It is something that I wish could be replicated without the troubled history as a cohesive human society would objectively benefit everyone.
It’s a shame that repeatng “Hey just be nice to everyone and don’t judge!” Doesn’t work!
God is simply a creation arising from the self-centered nature of humankind.
That’s not an unfair read. What makes it a self centered creation? Is that necessarily bad?
Humans are inherently self-centered, it is a condition of the human psychological makeup that we feel we are the center of the universe. This is by necessity for survival; The human frailty/superpower of cognitive dissonance is what keeps us sane in this largely irrational world, where we effectively have no control over the conditions of our lives.
In order to survive, humans have to feel like they are special and there’s meaning in their lives when there it really isn’t. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
In other words, part of the human psychological makeup is to substitute a more soothing reality to replace the real but scary one, that we are nothing and the existence each of us is entirely random and without meaning.
I wonder what you think of my latest post here.
I’ve been thinking of the milk jug experiment and how rituals and god are coping mechanisms.
Ritual magic is something I practice along with meditation. But for me its just a habit trigger more so an actual ritual or devotion.
To an animal like you God is the mistake that costed you the most
Interesting. What makes you say that?
The benefits to cost ratio is essentially enslavement to the idea of God regardless of its fact or fiction. You are now forced at the philosophical table and usually when an omniscient being is claiming 2000 years they stop being omniscient and start being stupid. The philosophy of an omniscient being cannot fit the philosophy’s of a human so religion is a counter example of Abrahams god and the concept of God itself. It becomes a wet noodle fight over whether or not it’s real when you’re arguing over fiction in some contexts. This becomes a huge long historical battle over which
penisGod is biggest and most real(no surgery for bigger peen). At the end of the day you’re nothing more than entertainment to something that lasts indefinitely.Edit: the problem stems from an argumentative animal trying to find the least argumentative solution to basically speculation.
Whether or not god is real isn’t really what I’m asking about.
I don’t believe there is a literal god, but there is are real feelings that we have all mistaken for god.
For me god is both the sublime feeling I get while hiking or meditating and the feeling I get from being part of a community. It is a feeling of bliss and awe that I can clearly see how someone would mistake that for god. For Descartes, god was the elusive concept of perfection that enables him to doubt the imperfect. For many with a religion, god is simply love. Satanists focus on the higher self as a god. Alcoholics Anonymous view god as just something to strive for as well.
God is a concept with a lot of spiritual or emotional connotations, and I find how people interpret this “god” fascinating.
My answer is the concept itself is like a curse that forces humanity to follow a pathway where God is always a part of the history and conversation. Influences in a way that you have no idea. Always negatively consequential to the majority of humanity.
It’s one of our earliest ideas and has been proscribed so broadly that I think it’s an up-wall battle trying to abandon the concept as a whole.
Always negatively consequential to the majority of humanity.
“Always” and “the majority” are problematic word choices here. I know where you’re coming from, but I can’t agree with this. I’d even be wiling to say that a majority of humans who’ve ever lived have found some comfort in the ideas of a god than have suffered because of the concept. I’m not denying that attrocities have been committed in the name of a god, but they have been committed in the name of secular progress as well often while claiming it was for a god.
