Quote:
Originally Posted by JayJamJah
Cardboard
Do you believe we are killing God?
If so how? and if not how do we go about it?
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there's a couple perspectives i could approach this from. in terms of the 'traditional values' that are associated with the Abrahamic God, the legitimacy of the Bible as a tool to plot out your life, the role of priests in telling you what to do, we certainly care about these things less and less. to actually 'kill God' in the sense of 'killing the Idea of God,' this process has to be carried out to its natural conclusion in which all of morality is progressively abandoned. for instance, love is simply posession, friendship is competition, 'thou shalt not kill' and 'love thy neighbor' are simply ways of promoting personal comfort. this can go even further to the point where personal pleasure or comfort themselves are just seen as momentary lapses in suffering, and are sensed as being just as mundane and pointless as suffering. at this point, when you have sucked the value out of everything, maybe you have 'killed God.' but what do you have left? only an overwhelming terror of Death--nothing matters but better something than nothing.
it's a dead end, unless you kill yourself. it's also, in my opinion, not quite true. you can find the holes for yourself.
now the other sense of 'killing God' with God literally dying, if God exists in the sense of the Bible as a being of perfection infinitely above us, any attempts to kill it would probably just amount to hitting yourself in the face. consider trying to shoot out of the universe, for instance, but having the bullet curve (because spacetime is funny like that) and hitting you in the back. one could argue that that metaphor sums up human existence in general.
however, there is another sense of God dying which I think some Jewish mysticism discusses, namely, that God made all the creatures of the world out of clay and then brought them to life by naming them, but that by naming them he imparted his essence on them and thereby ceased to exist by himself, but only through us. this would be a more pantheistic conception, whereby we have 'killed god' by becoming human.