are you an atheist?

I think science has revealed certain truths of the universe. Quibbling about what constitutes a truth isn't something I have any interest in discussing, sorry.

Then have a good day, sir!

there are like 3 different tiers of debate here, and the lowest tier is prevailing, as with most religious/atheistic discourse. and matt p is inexplicably rottweilering the voice of greatest sensitivity and sophistication. fucking ilx eh

am interested in what signifigance Coastline Paradox has for you here

can we get more people in here to give their meta analysis of the thread, that's always super fun and useful

about to respond to some of the writing upthread? just wanna make sure the thread isn't quite wasted by the time I've typed it up

no one cares

that you're a prick? probably not

I think I'm up to bat. What did I miss?

What makes you think science can access truth?

― The Whittrick and Puddock (dowd), Wednesday, April 2, 2014 5:50 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think science is better equipped to try than anything else. There is a trajectory of successful scientific discoveries that have been replacing "god(s) were angry"-style explanations of the past. Probability seems to suggest that this will keep happening. We haven't detected a god force playing a part in a process, instead it has been a placeholder variable in equations many of which we've found out the element really at play. Not to seem like I'm pitting science vs. religion but it ends up looking like every great mystery is essentially "OK class: solve for 'god-did-it'"

right, anyway

The crisis-laden self-dissolution of the Middle Ages can be linked to the systematic relations in the metaphysical triangle: man, God, world. This presupposes an ambivalence in Christian theology. On the one hand, theology’s theme is anthropocentric: the biblical God’s concern, within history and beyond its eschatological invalidation, for man’s salvation is transformed with the help of the received Stoic idea of pronoia [providence] into an idea of world government and the coordination of nature, history, and man, which is fully unfolded in the Scholastic system of pure rationality. On the other hand, there is the theocentric motive: the dissolution of Scholastic rationality through the exaggeration of the transcendence, sovereignty, hiddenness, fearsomeness of its God. The first motive holds the metaphysical triangle of theology, anthropology, and cosmology together; the second tears it apart. The ability of the second motive to prevail shows at the same time that the systematic consistency of the structure constituted by the first motive is insufficient, that it is superficially harmonized heterogeneity.

a synthesis can be achieved between man, God and world imo, but this involves an embrace of transcendence - an understanding that man, God and world are the same endlessly-mirroring convocation of quantum uncertainty, adrift in a cosmos of asymptotically (un)approachable rationalisations but for a unifying principle which might be Gravity, might be God, but will never be fully known. it is when one begins to ascribe moral, or better Aesthetic, motivations to this principle that one encounters religion at its most essential - for rather than a despotic God, a figure of terror and dominion, it is a sublime and elegant being - the assigner of tasks, the conductor of meaningful human choice - which seems to emanate from within our own imagination but is the result of the aforementioned synthesis - it is not so much that we are God as that God is of Us, and I write Us as inclusive of every particle and photon in existence. it is justified through its acts, the beauty of its narrative, and the asymptotic approach it makes to an eternally-denied discovery of its identity. a crime against God is therefore an act or acts which violate Aesthetic flows of discovery, be they human slaughter, galactic collisions or anything which leads to the closing of any conscious mind

At least three responses to the primary dilemma of transcendence are conceivable. The first response is silence. The second response is to distinguish between ways in which the transcendent is beyond names and ways in which it is not…The third response begins with the refusal to solve the dilemma posed by the attempt to refer to the transcendent through a distinction between two kinds of name. The dilemma is accepted as a genuine aporia, that is, as unresolvable; but this acceptance, instead of leading to silence, leads to a new mode of discourse.

the fourth is what I said above - the acceptance that it will never have a name, followed by the expenditure of as much creative and collaborative energy as possible in working towards a name (if only, at first, by discounting possible names, before we even attempt to discern a few characters from the real one) - the joyous & self-correcting pursuit of futility - the celebration of nothing-as-everything that, as I have already said, is both a sign of an Aesthetic transcendent and a coherent undertaking of an infinitely-small fraction of its infinite demand (infinitely-small, but not unheard by this Divine, for it is able to integrate down past its own infinite limit to our cosmos, much as we cannot differentiate to its). this applies to science as well as religion, of course; it is high time we stopped pretending the two are any different.

I guess I really am an atheist because reading that is like reading heiroglyphs to me.

Not to be dismissive, but it just doesn't hold any meaning for me.

by name do you mean the tetragammaton?

This, however, is precisely what is meant by the concept of revelation, if it takes the inviolability of the word as the only and sufficient condition and characteristic of the divinity of the mental being that is expressed in it. The highest mental region of religion is (in the concept of revelation) at the same time the only one that does not know the inexpressible. For it is addressed in the name and expresses itself as revela­ tion. In this, however, notice is given that only the highest mental being, as it appears in religion, rests solely on man and on the language in him, whereas art as a whole, including poetry, rests not on the ultimate essence of the spirit of language but on the spirit of language in things, even in its consummate beauty. "Language, the mother of reason and revelation, its alpha and omega," says Hamann.

I'm said that I'm "a Theist"....not that I'm A-theist!

--Jay-Z

There is a well-known story about the famous 18th century Chassidic master, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, who was well known for his empathy and non-judgmental character. One Rosh Hashanah he invited his neighbor to come with him to synagogue. The neighbor declined, saying, "Rebbe, I’m an atheist, I don’t believe in G-d. It would be hypocritical of me to step foot in a synagogue." Rabbi Levi Yitzchak smiled and replied, "The G-d that you don’t believe in, I don’t believe in either."

I think that thinking of or attempting to relate to "God" or theistic concepts can be a very helpful way of coming to terms with the truth, love, and beauty that backgrounds our own most intimate sense of existence and strongly-felt encounters with the world. Personifying God, whether as Saraswati or Christ or YHWH, helps (me at least)to remember that reality is manufactured out of unalloyed love, and that no matter what happens, we are all always okay. We all share in this experience of Being, and for a reason! To incarnate more love into the world.

That is the only task we have been charged with, essentially.

We are incarnating love into this world, all of us. Hence the whole project of creation. Aside from that, the very concept of "God" becomes redundant.

There are genius aspects to every tradition I think. Part of the genius of the Christian tradition that I was raised in, is the acknowledgment and promotion of the idea that, being flawed, being vulnerable, being flesh, is not in anyway some mistake or fatal flaw. On the contrary, our limitedness and vulnerability is what in part makes love possible and encourages it. Our shadowy aspects, our foibles, are not even remotely the problem. What becomes problematic is our tendency to emphasize the sense of separation, e.g. the egoic felt sense of being. Which feeds off of guilt, shame, fear, and associated judgmental emotions. The entire arc of lovelessness. So for me, a theistic view makes it easier for me to bring the medicine for that into my own experience. I don't necessarily concretize the Divine, but rather relate to it as a precedent for what is possible.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Shefa_Tal.png

Settled in southern India, Nityananda gained a reputation for creating miracles and wonderful cures. He started building an ashram near Kanhangad, Kerala state. The local police thought he must be producing counterfeit money to pay for the building, so Nityananda took them to a crocodile-infested pool in the jungle. He dived in and then produced handfuls of money, which was apparently enough to satisfy the police.

Which is the same as the story of Jesus getting angry and overturning the moneychangers' tables in the church. It has nothing to do with money per se, but with the economy of grace... Jesus wasn't angry b/c ppl were selling indulgences, or engaging in commercial enterprises in the house of God, as much as he was upset b/c there was an implication that God's love, God's grace could ever be reduced to a commercial transaction. Or the rules thereof. Same for Nityanada, who dove into the river past the crocodiles' mouths of fear and judgement and went straight to the source of all being, which is simply love, the limitlessness.

"Nityananda" mispell. A-nanda.

So, I like theism b/c it is a limited form, teaching me that God's love is limitless.

P sweet posts imo dell

thanks darragh. i guess it's a cliche of sorts that ppl who bang on about "love" all the time are some of the most awful ppl in the world, but sometimes I can't seem to shut myself up. when it comes back to haunt me then at least I was wasting my time talking about "religious experience" and not video games. not that there's any difference... I am completely serious about all of the above tho, even though it feels truly threatening to me and I am kind of scared of the implications, of being loved by myself, or a conceived deity, or a person or xbox

last yr I had an Experience, in which I lost some things all at once that were dear to me, but it was hammered home very strongly to me that, as shitty of a person as I may be, or may always be, it is completely impossible to be separated from love, no matter what. this came in the context of an interaction with my personal deity of choice, theistically speaking... but, I don't think that it had anything to do with a god or goddess or whatever, so much as it had to do with my faith in the general qualities of love and devotion. If you genuinely want for love to come into your life, then the shakti will overwhelm you. It has nothing to do with any sense of personal volition. A current will come into your life that utterly humbles you. In a good way.

everything that I just wrote I basically cribbed from Richard Rohr. he is a great writer about stuff in this territory im o

and he introduced the term "spiritual capitalism", which I think is as important as "spiritual materialism", or spiritual narcissism. another element of the equation which keeps us feeling separate and feeling shitty.

I had a conversation w my mom last wk, where she was all like "you are so non-judgmental". as a compliment. and I was like a. I am so judgmental in my mind,constantly, so... and b. if there is a heaven, it's not like it's some country club where they arbitrarily exclude some people! that defeats the whole point of love. If there is a theistic Person than I strongly suspect that they are all about using our flaws to bring us towards them. It would be a weird setup otherwise. Meister Eckhart said that God knows and IS in fact us better than we are ourselves. Which I think all mystics have pointed out. When we are spoiled with the love that is the actuality of things, when we are immersed in it once again, then everything, the mindstuff, is recognized as garbage and distraction, the proverbial Unfall in die Strasse

I think that, as human beings on this planet, we are so conditioned to run with the experience of trauma, which most of us are not lucky enough to have reached adulthood without... such that the idea of investing faith in a deity figure who gives love, w/o limit, without fear, is too good to be true? and so our entire approach to life is poisoned. there must needs always be a price. but that is not reality. reality is in fact based on the economy of love. speaking as dell, I know that, anytime I've exercised unswerving, childlike faith in the practice of love and faith then I've been ridiculously rewarded. But, for the most part people have been so traumatized by life that approaching anything in that way smacks of total delusion. But that is just perpetuating the entire arc of lovelessness.

And people are brutalized by the model of capitalism. But that isn't reality in the slightest.

The heart of reality, when you are ushered past life and death, is purely about recognizing who you are, and being instructed as to how to love. That is why we die and live and incarnate. 2013-2014. Just so.

oops

strictly by virtue of living in the world, we produce the world. in a very literal sense. without, the world has no existence. whatsoever. I have confirmed this for myself. both on drugs and off.

there is no "world". just like there are no persons. but there is an experience playin out, based on vasanas. it is undilute consciousness, awareness appearing as "the world". there can never be a thing! there is only ever the awareness. Gaudapada was right.

The Ashtavakra Gita and Ribhu Gita and Advahuta Gita agree on this point, vehemently in fact. the world is pure awareness.

"There is no substance whatever which is by nature unlimited. There is no substance whatever which is of the nature of Reality. The very Self is the supreme Truth. There is neither injury nor non injury in It."

You are Parabrahman.

I'm too wishywashy to be that bald about it, like my ex is. He's of the "when you die you die, there is no soul, we're all atoms" persuasion, and I still have a smidge of "but what if...?" in me I guess. Not a god thing - more like a "hey how do we explain human thought and reason and collective unconcious and etc etc?" stuff.

Trayce's statement here kind of encapsulates what I feel about it all. Maybe I'm deluding myself but I'm agnostic not in the fence-sitting sense but in the how-can-we-really-know-anyway sense.

When people say "we're all atoms" they may be superficially correct, but most of them have no idea what an atom really is or have thought much, if any, about how that statement connects to anything else they believe they "know". If nothing else, the identity of mass and energy should engender a revolution in their thinking about their own identity and what is doing their thinking.

Responding to a couple of things Mordy sent me in response to my post upthread now. First, this: http://www.chabad.org/library/tanya/tanya_cdo/aid/1029167/jewish/Chapter-1.htm

And so it is with all created things in the world— their names in the Holy Tongue are the very "letters of speech" which descend, degree by degree, from the Ten Utterances recorded in the Torah, by means of substitutions and transpositions of letters through the "two hundred and thirty-one gates," until they reach and become invested in that particular created thing to give it life. [This descent is necessary] because individual creatures are not capable of receiving their life-force directly from the Ten Utterances of the Torah, for the life-force issuing directly from them is far greater than the capacity of the individual creatures. They can receive the life-force only when it descends and is progressively diminished, degree by degree, by means of substitutions and transpositions of the letters and by Gematriot, their numerical values, until the life-force can be condensed and enclothed and there can be brought forth from it a particular creature

OK - so the Ten Utterances are the Word of God, but are encrypted, recalibrated and recast into the stuff of life? I like this very much - but then it is somewhat ruined for me by the utterances being in the Torah - the mystery to be revealed, the Divine manifest and attainable. It strikes me that anything that can be written or understood immediately resigns from true divinity and permits itself to be deconstructed in the faulty world of matter in which resides the human mind. I would prefer it if the Torah was a ghost of God, an account of an unusually narrow brush with God or even a glimpse of what might have been God, than a positivist, entire guidebook to how we may complete our approach. For are we not imperfect? Is life not imperfect? How, then, may we complete any approach to what is infinite? Better to be the encryptions, the reflections of a cosmos which obeys laws unknown to itself, translates messages it does not itself know, and do so with as much elegance and efficiency as possible...

Of course, the Torah is not only a Holy Text but a work of poetry, of verse and of tradition. I think it serves to convey a pure awareness of the divine, as dell writes upthread, but is not the divine explained. Hence my frustration at the decryptions. Unless this is a very clever Jewish parable and the decrypted representations of God are themselves challenges to keep staring further, keep searching harder - tricks that in their very revelation imply without doubt further tricks, further layers...

Up next, Walter Benjamin. This'll be fun.

according to abraham joshua heschel there are two version of the torah. the torah on earth and the torah min shamayim (from heaven). the earth copy is a rough translation of the divine document - a distillation of non-corporality into human language. http://www.amazon.com/Heavenly-Torah-Refracted-through-Generations/dp/0826418929

How, then, may we complete any approach to what is infinite?

Except through faith in the elegance of the divine to grant our participation in reality the same inclusivity & grace it grants everything else...as it is of us now, it will surely be of us forever...

Oh! Interesting notion, thanks :) and it backs up what I'd been hoping.

For some reason the concept grace hits home for me in a way that a lot of other religious language doesn't. I'm not stirred when people talk about God or the divine, but grace is a beautiful union of connotations: gratitude, graciousness and gracefulness. When Wettstein says, "The real question is one’s relation to God, the role God plays in one’s life, the character of one’s spiritual life", I feel like I can accept it all just by substituting grace for God.

That is because Grace is an Aesthetic rendering of the divine mandate, and thus the rendering we are best-equipped (imo) to approach :)

They fly towards Grace

I suppose im too much of a Calvinist (or "theocentric") at heart to get with such Romanticist notions of the Aesthetic, or any notion of synthesis really. I'd insist to the last that science and religion must be separated (and this is not to say they aren't "coupled" as I said above), and that any synthesis or totality founded on consciousness, intuition, or Imagination should be rejected as inadequate "anthropocentric" (and thus infinitely short of the divine) constructions. here's more from Blumenberg on cusa, which comes close to my own understanding of transcendence:

“Transcendence is no longer related to an objective topography, a cosmic ground plan. It appears precisely when man, in the manner of Scholasticism—as though upon the ladder of the hierarchical cosmos—wants to pursue his argumentation to a successful conclusion and in the process has an opportunity to experience the incomprehensibility of the world’s form, the infinity of the finite; transcendence is a mode of negation of definitiveness of theory.”

anyway that's gist of what i mean when say religious experience is a "premonition of form free of content." this is the sense in which theory begins and ends in contingency.

also it occurs to me regarding the "airplanes are truth" discussion above that heidegger's "question concerning technology" is apropos to thread.

I'm too wishywashy to be that bald about it, like my ex is. He's of the "when you die you die, there is no soul, we're all atoms" persuasion, and I still have a smidge of "but what if...?" in me I guess. Not a god thing - more like a "hey how do we explain human thought and reason and collective unconcious and etc etc?" stuff.

why does there have to be an explanation? just because we're capable of asking the question doesn't necessitate that there's an answer beyond the fact that we can ask the question.