Son of 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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Freebase Dali

Post of the day.

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cardboard adolescent

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.

Son of JayJamJah

I wonder if as the traditional role of God and his home continues the religion and God are not as much dying as adapting. Pertaining to the holes, I'm also not sure that I agree with the presumption the death of good would coincide with some sort of "abandonment of morality". I do believe in any god suggested, suspected or claimed to existence by humans and yet I feel a strong comfort in my moral base. I don't think morality began with the began with the idea or discovery of God and I don't think it will end with God's death.

Is it not possible that with the absence of God comes resolution with death. An acceptance, instead of an uncertainty. The worst part about dying is not knowing when it's going to happen. The worst and best part about anything is the anticipation. What's to stop people from focusing more on their own life and their own wills and motivations without God to steer them.

For all we know our lives are actually the span of the Universe, or the universe is just a creation individual to each one's psyche.

It's Occam's Razor to the umpteenth power but I like to deal with hypothetical using the rules of the World I know.

I love the bullet in the back metaphor and yes everything in life seems to be spherical and a lot of things do end right about where they started.

When\how do you suppose\believe God was created and\or discovered?

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If you're posting in the music forums make sure to be thoughtful and expressive, if you're posting in the lounge ask yourself "is this something that adds to the conversation?" It's important to remember that a lot of people use each thread. You're probably not as funny or clever as you think, I know I'm not.

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mr. goth glam

I happen to believe in the whole Christ/God deal, but that's just me.

However, I have struggled with that faith and in doing so have turned to concepts such as secular humanism, atheism and agnosticism throughout my life, so I'll try to offer my opinion on that question from those earlier mindsets.

When I was an atheist, I assumed that God was born out of that fear of the unknown that you were talking about. Humanity has always had a penchant for creativity, for storytelling, and I believed at one time that God came out of that as a response to that fear of the unknown and fear of what might be out there waiting for us.

I mean, most of us can't even stand waiting to find out what we got for our birthdays. How are we expected to wait and see on something as terrifying as eternity and whatever the hell that might entail?

I also used to believe that the concept of a creator or creator(s) came out of a time when science was incapable of explaining just about everything that made the world and universe as we understood it capable of running, existing and so on. It made sense to create something to answer those questions, to deal with that fear of the unknown and to establish a concept of morality to draw the line from point A., being alive, out and about to point B., being dead.

That was also my answer to different cultures having a different God or even more than one. Although many similarities bind both the cultures and peoples of today and those of the years and centuries gone by, there are also enough differences to demand that each culture, society, whatever have an answer (of sorts) that would work for their own ideas of eternity, morality, the unknown, the spirit world and everything in between and all around it.

I believed that the first concepts of God came out of the first time we ever began to seriously let these questions get to us, and you can probably go back as far as you want for something like that.

I don't believe that anymore, but that used to be more or less my explanation for it.

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cardboard adolescent

i like your super-subjective approach where each individual's life span is the life span of the universe. in that picture, God was discovered probably somewhere a third of the way through. i guess enlightenment traditionally comes after a period of apprenticeship, so probably when the sojourner is in his/her early twenties or something. the how of it would probably be the conclusion of their quest for truth, a 'final understanding' of how things fit together and why anything happens, the true nature of space and time... in this sense then God would be outside of space and time since all these different lives converge and intersect on this one point that is God. perhaps, further, that convergence is what holds time and space together to begin with.

as far as not needing God as a basis of morality, I think that if you examine any morality closely enough you can always trace it back to some principle, say 'love' for instance, which is ultimately in some sense being deified. i sometimes take a 'pantheon' or animistic view of the universe, where i think of each emotional state as being a god, for instance there is a god of pain, a god of love, a god of boredom, a god of apathy, a god of contentment, etc. and all life is the eternal drama between these gods, as they change places, dance, fight, etc.

boo boo

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I may be misunderstanding you here, which is why I will ask you this question. Why do you want to believe this? I feel like you are either over complicating things, or you actually believe that your emotions control you. In that case you have no control over yourself. What value could be given to you then? What can you be responsible for? This sort of attitude makes a human seem like a battlefield. Ultimately, what is the essence of a human then? If your essence is determined, then ultimately one cannot say his reactions to his experience are truly his. They are of the thing that determined your essence.

On the other hand, if we freely choose our essence (existence before essence) those emotions will have originated in us. The emotions will feel more rich because of the fact that they our ours. As a person we feel more consistent. Surely this view must be looked at as more fulfilling then feeling as though our emotions are determined?

One could say that a human has no essence though, and that is ugly and nihilistic. Ultimately we have no objective essence that sticks with us throughout life. I would agree with that. We create our essence in every moment, and the essences of those moments can be grouped to created the best idea of someone's character that we can.

Really, I would just like you to explain the bolded a bit more. My idea is that you use the word god in a figurative sense in that they control all of us.

cardboard adolescent

i see the agency of 'man' which determines his freedom is his ability to focus his attention. a person will inevitably experience all sorts of emotions and see others undergoing the same, but we are free to determine which emotions we enjoy and seek out in the world, as well as which emotions we cause other people to experience through our interactions with them. usually these are similar, because if we embody a certain emotional state we will cause other people to experience it through us. i think the notion of 'control' doesn't apply in a world-picture in which gods are at play. the purpose is simply to continue the play, it doesn't need any aim beyond itself. the individual human essence, then, can be progressively purified as a person identifies more completely with one such 'state,' or it can be developed in multiple directions, and infused with a rich ambiguity. in this sense there is existence before essence, but there are nonetheless essences before existence. ultimately the question 'do we own our lives' seems rather meaningless to me. we affirm life by living it, but we are determined by life... there is no straightforward linear relationship. I is something very ambiguous, a whisp of smoke with a different appearance based on your angle of observation. the more a person defines themselves, and tries to redefine their environment, the more they open themselves up to conflict and struggle.

as for 'why' i would want to believe this, i essentially find it more reasonable to attempt to give a subjective account of the universe rather than an objective account. the reason for this is that i believe all thought is essentially anthropocentric, and i think it's impossible to really think objectively about anything. the thing that characterizes 'objective' elements such as particles from 'subjective' elements such as emotional states is that particles seem 'indifferent' to us. however even indifference is just another subjective interpretation, we really can't interpret anything except subjectively. for instance, we speak of the 'birth of a star.' although we might scoff at the notion with our immodestly modest scientific worldview, we intuitively sense that the process of Birth is the same in a star as in a person. it is a universal allegory which transcends the arbitrariness of flesh and blood. science forces us to realize we are tiny specks of dust in a vast universe, but there is nothing objective about the sense of wonder at incomprehensible infinities nor about the feeling of smallness and insignificance. science does not deliver such sensations, it is something a few steps deeper.