Quote:
Originally Posted by Odyshape
I agree with this. I think our vision of a God needing our love and embodying a loving nature goes to show how man made many Godly figures really are. How would we know a God would need love? Giving an omnipotent being human qualities seems quite ridiculous to me.
@At Cardboard.
Don't you think it is possible that we can be unified with out a delusional sense of higher purpose or is it really useful for unifying the human race at all? I understand there are many benefits of security in feeling like you really believe, especially among a community. But this interpretation of things we cannot fully understand and making claims we cannot prove has separated people for a very long time. This is because people do not subject their beliefs to true criticism and non-superficial common ground cannot be made among people with very conflicting beliefs.
Also thanks Janszoon.
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i don't think it's a matter of lower purpose or higher purpose, it's just... purpose. i have defined love in the most abstract terms possible, as the phenomena of two becoming one. when a bee unites with a flower to extract its nectar and pollinate it, that's love as much as it is love when you see someone begging for money and feel their distress and decide to help them out. it's a universal force, one that applies to all beings, and which ultimately
is Being. because every thing that lives is dependent on all the other things that exist... often people look at nature and say how amazing it is that this species or that is so well adapted to another and in a sense it is amazing, but at the same time it is simply the miracle of existence: nothing exists on its own, everything has evolved interdependently with all other things. everything is connected because everything is energy redistributing itself and trying to find a state of equilibrium. socrates believed that the root of evil was ignorance (as did the buddha) because it is only out of ignorance that we believe that we are separate from the rest of existence, and strive for our own ends at the expense of others'. it is only by setting our sights to the whole, and recognizing that there is a unity underlying all this diversity that we can participate constructively in existence. this incredibly simple truth can manifest in many different ways to many different people based on their understanding of the universe, and it's only by focusing on this superficial diversity that we lose the utter simplicity of love that grounds it all. one person might see visions of angels and devils and another might think of it in terms of resonating geometries, but ultimately it's all the same. the sorts of things i'm discussing are only "incomprehensible" because it's like asking "what's the meaning of meaning?" it's only a problem because you've made it one, the meaning of meaning is meaning and we all know what that means :P
God can be a man because anything that empties itself of itself can be fully filled with love, and God can be an equilateral triangle because this symbolizes a state of perfect harmony in which all forces are fully themselves but also balanced and cancel each other out, and God can be a Void because this represents what cannot be represented, the paradox of existence: a no-thing that becomes everything in which somethings emerge only to return to the bliss of no-thing-ness. those last two are tricky to understand, and i think one of the models of hinduism makes it easier to intuit: they posit three gods, Brahma (creator), Vishnu (preserver), and Shiva (destroyer). these are the three manifestations of being itself, it has a beginning a middle and an end. because the three counterbalance each other perfectly, they imply a static nothingness which is at the same time a dynamic everythingness, and this is Brahman (the ultimate, the Godhead) who is the dreamer and the dream, the paradox which is forever beyond our reach and yet at the root of everything.
in hinduism these three Gods form the divine syllable, AUM (a is brahma, u is vishnu, m is shiva) and this parallels Genesis, in which God is accompanied in eternity by the Logos, the eternal word, which is creation--a mirror/manifestation of God, but nonetheless separate. hare krishna sects believe that buddha, christ, and krishna were all manifestations of vishnu, and this makes perfect sense since they all sustain creation while at the same time pointing beyond creation back to the source.
i think that perhaps the most important thing to remember is that ultimately it's a matter of your personal relationship with God, not about your relationship with this religious institution or that, or this political or religious conflict or that. those are all worldly matters that persist precisely because we keep trying to offer final solutions to them. when our primary concern is God we will learn to only be involved in the world to the extent that we can reasonably expect to bring love into it and so can truthfully say...
God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.