Dear fellow mind-brainians,


If any of you have followed the material I have posted here and in the poetry forum, you will gather that I search for answers. In time honoured fashion I found the best way to achieve this is by asking questions.

This thread is a sort of poll, but I do not wish to constrict you by only giving a specific list to work from. Real answers come when you allow people the entire spectrum of a question to choose from.

So with this in mind and without any prompting from me about how I could wish you would answer, here is the question :

What three attributes do YOU think a God/deity MUST have as a requirement to be justly called a God/deity ?

The floor is yours ladies and gentlemen of the forum

J

Come on bill Play fair !

Your top 3 please (rolf)

J

God needs but one attribute: Totality

John, you're probably thinking along the lines of omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience, but these are all parts of the Whole, of the Totality that is God. There is but one God, and that God encompasses all, is contained within all, and is the Totality.

Ok !

This is so typical !
Everybody reads the question, but doesnt understand it, they all start to think the way they would have put the question and answer that instead.

Look, dear members, I will ask you again, but this time read what I write and not what you think I have written.

what makes A god, A god ? STOP ! 3 attributes !

I am not asking what you know "The Almighty" has to be to be considered a God. Read the question and then aswer JUST the question.

Highly educated people ALWAYS think they have to come up with complex answers for simple questions, well stop it, please.

omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience is of course the three I was looking for but in another forum the answers are so different.
To be able to perform miracles
To heal
To smite their foes with the wave of a hand
To create life
etc....

I ask questions, and I receive answers, all theatres have different expectations. I am sorry to say this forum is victim to its invisible but never the less vividly apparent false expectation.
Maybe I should have written a list to choose from, it seems as if, when the entire spectrum is available, people avoid the question.

Thanks for replying

J

That tautological premise has been exploded for a long time. The pubescent arrogance of this is almost insulting to the writer.

god is love ,forgiveness,humility

J, why ask questions if you only want ppl to confirm your expected answers?

The anthropomorphed ego God or Bible thumpers are delusional.

You say:

Nice to see you, if you felt insulted a "big grown up fella" like yourself would have shown restraint and not bothered to post, but as this seems to be your "thing" to put down others, then at least here you have the right.


I said it is an insult to THE WRITER - I have spent a long life listening to proselytes and debating them - they make me laugh and do not insult me even though they try. Next thing you'll say will go something like claiming I am the Devil Incarnate as you refuse to address the facts.

Dear Bob,

It seems as if I owe you an apology, I mis-read and mis-interpreted you post

For that I apologise for my pubescent arrogance. I am human and by god I make mistakes.

I know I am pathetic at times and this has been one of them.

As for calling you the Devil Incarnate, no, too many people have thrown that around in my direction



J

Dear -Unknown-

Apology accepted.

What makes a god a god? well, if you view god in the polytheistic way a god is simply a being who has 2 main attributes: immortality(or at least eternal youth), & dominion or control over 1 aspect of reality( fire, water, etc).

god is a power, god is the ability to comprehend what goes on, and why it happens. God has knowledge, and has proof. That is god (in my opinion)

Excellent analysis. But is there a Purpose or collective which meets the criteria that man has called god and some men have always known was a mere 'representation' for the uninformed who will not study?

Yes. The humanist view is that an individual's purpose ought to be the purpose of mankind, and extending this view, the individual's purpose is the purpose of life in general, and extending it further, as life is an extension of the universe, the purpose of man is the purpose of the universe. That is (to sum up) life is good and more is better. Or to paraphrase the US Army recruiting slogan, be all you can be.

Dear Rick

I suppose I should chuckle at your response which avoids the question I posed.

Philosophy and man will not get to Purpose through simple values or ethical constructs such as social studies and humanists. Rather they will get there through seeing the Design in all as per Dembski or other research into what really is collecctively and affinitely available through the application of energy and the ways it interacts with Intelligence (or something akin to that).

So are you saying that "seeing the design" and the ways it interacts with intelligence isn't humanistic? Humanism merely holds that man is able to know everything worth knowing.

The definition you use for humanism is foreign to me (the alchemists were called Humanists and still are). Man can not know all that is and certainly the claim is arrogant at a minimum.

I am saying the 'DESIGN' is science in action which follows Laws of energy and purpose.

From Dictionary.com, humanism is defined as:

"A system of thought that centers on humans and their values, capacities, and worth."

Centering on man, and taking infinite evolution into consideration, our capacity is without comparative limit: anything that can be known, can be known by man, eventually. Pride is human, but arrogance is a vice.

I understand what you mean by the term "design" but what are the laws of purpose? The humanist view is that man is the measure of all things, including purpose.

Dear Rick

Don't tell me you think dictionaries are adequate reference too. Please.

For one thing - they take only current usages and language is ever-changing.

Let me try to illustrate what your words communicate to me.

Centering on man, and taking infinite evolution into consideration, our capacity is without comparative limit: anything that can be known, can be known by man, eventually. Pride is human, but arrogance is a vice. {This statement proves the arrogance of man's anthropomorphic self-centeredness. Although it is a remote possibility that man in some billions of years from now when he is far different than he is at present - that some collection of men would know most of what could be known - it is arrogant in itself. I will go get you some MIT scholars who write a book called Darwinism Evolving to illustrate some of the underlying humanistic richness missing in your world view and relative to the topic of what is para (there is no such thing - but that does not mean we know it all).}

I understand what you mean by the term "design" but what are the laws of purpose? The humanist view {Says who? Your dictionary? The Humanists or sages are all alchemists and they were not so arrogant as you can tell from the Socratic method - questioning.} is that man is the measure of all things, including purpose.

PURPOSE is like Divine Providence at its Convergent apex or zenith wherein all that IS is known.

EVOLUTION: More surprising to me as I consider where my intellectual head-space has been on this issue, which is central to theological ideal; is the fact that I have become more of a creationist. Skeptics may say that God doesn't exist and I am inclined to agree he/she isn't within our purview to limit and say we know; HIM, or even what it is that really goes on, in the world about us. It would be difficult to say there is any one humanistic discipline or theology that fits with my perception. Teilhard de Chardin's 'templates' and 'quantum many worlds' join Lamarckian science, that requires uncertainty and values mystery and uncertainty principles with purpose. In the final analysis you can put me in whatever 'cubby-hole' you want and there�ll be agreement and respect for the truth therein expressed. I see a lot of people sounding like they disagree and yet I see little difference except when they seek personal gain by it. Surely science has given a great deal of support to the concept of consciousness existing in the very smallest parts of energy, and in the ways it performs what was once considered miraculous, or magical. Here are the thoughts of two very scientifically oriented people from MIT in a book called 'Darwinism Evolving':


"They also made it harder for the scientific worldview to be received with equanimity by other sectors of culture. Indeed, since the reducing impulse undermines fairly huge tracts of experience, people like Wallace, who feel deeply about protecting phenomena they regard as existentially important, frequently conclude that they have no alternative except to embrace spiritualism, and sometimes even to attack the scientific worldview itself, if that is the only way to protect important spheres of experience that have been ejected from science's confining Eden. In response, scientists and philosophers who feel strongly about the liberating potential of a spare, materialistic worldview began to patrol the borderlands between the high-grade knowledge scientists have of natural systems and the low-grade opinions that in the view of science's most ardent defenders, dominate other spheres of culture and lead back toward the superstitious and authoritarian world of yesteryear. 'Demarcating' science from other, less cognitively worthwhile forms of understanding was already a major feature of Darwin's world. A line beyond which the Newtonian paradigm could not apply was drawn at the boundary between physics and biology. We have seen how hesitant Darwin was to cross that line and what happened when he did. Twentieth-century people are sometimes prone to congratulate themselves for being above these quaint Victorian battles. They may have less reason to do so, however, than they think, for the fact is that throughout our own century, the same sort of battles, with emotional overtones no less charged, have been waged at the contested line where biology meets psychology, and more generally where the natural sciences confront the human sciences. Dualisms between spirit and matter, and even between mind and body, may have been pushed to the margins of respectable intellectual discourse. But methodological dualisms between what is covered by laws and what is to be 'hermeneutically appropriated' are still very much at the center of our cultural, or rather 'two cultural', life. Cognitive psychologists and neurophysiologists are even now busy reducing mind-states to brain-states, while interpretive or humanistic psychologists are proclaiming how meaningless the world would be if mind is nothing but brain. Interpretive anthropologists are filled with horror at what would disappear from the world if the rich cultural practices that seem to give meaning to our lives were to be shown to be little more than extremely sophisticated calculations on the part of self-interested genes. Conflicts of this sort would have given Darwin stomachaches almost as bad as the ones he endured over earlier demarcation controversies.


The rhetorical pattern of these battles is still depressingly similar, in fact, to Huxley's confrontation with Wilberforce. Hermeneuts ridicule scientists like Hamilton, Dawkins, and Wilson when they suggest that nothing was ever known about social cooperation until biologists discovered kin selection. Reductionists in turn criticize hermeneuts, now transformed largely into 'culturists,' for bringing back ghosts and gods, just as their nineteenth-century predecessors were taxed with being 'vitalists' every time they said something about the complexity of development. Humanists identify scientists with an outdated materialist reductionism. Scientists insist that hermeneutical intentionality is little more than disguised religion.


Perhaps, a way out of this fruitless dialectic between the 'two cultures', can be found if each party could give up at least one of its cherished preconceptions {Or just give up the science that rejects certain facts in favour of convention or the 'Toilet Philosophy'.}. It would be a good thing, for example, if heirs of the Enlightenment would stop thinking that if cultural phenomena are not reduced to some sort of mechanism; religious authoritarianism will immediately flood into the breach. They should also stop assuming that nothing is really known about human beings until the spirit of scientific reductionism gets to work. Students of the human sciences have, after all, been learning things alongside scientists ever since modernity began. Among the things they have learned are that humans are individuated persons within the bonds of culture and cultural roles, and that as recipients and transmitters of cultural meanings, they are bound together with others in ways no less meaningful and valuable than the ways promoted by strongly dualistic religions. By the same token, it would be helpful if advocates of the interpretive disciplines would abandon a tacit assumption sometimes found among them that nature is so constituted that it can never accomodate the rich and meaningful cultural phenomena humanists are dedicated to protecting, and that therefore cultural phenomena 'ought never' to be allowed to slip comfortably into naturalism. Humanists seem to have internalized this belief from their reductionist enemies, whose commitment to materialism is generally inseparable from their resolve to show up large parts of culture, especially religion, as illusions. These opponents, we may safely say, take in each other's laundry." (7)


Ego and protecting territory abound in the internecine warfare that academics who seldom DO anything, often fight over. Meanwhile the real DOERS explore the boundless and awesome 'waves of the marvellous'. (8) We should accept even the ridiculous possibilities that come to mind as having merit or avenues to understand, rather than constantly fighting to make black and white answers that support our ego and limit the people who put forward possibilities. The real rule should be something along the line of 'if it hurts no one, why not enjoy the possibility? There are ample evidences that every supposed correct point of view or paradigm is short-lived unless backed by force and some kind of authority that limits rather than supports god and his/her purpose. Then an open-mind obtains new insight and finds the templates of reality even in exploring what first appears to be utterly absurd. I admit I often have found the idea of creationism absurd, and yet as I said at the start of this entry I am now on the side of creationists through evolutionary forces with intentional creative inputs in the Intelligent Design or Interventionist mode. The next entry will seem absurd to most people and few will think it deserves inclusion in a segment purporting to have anything to do with science. I must include it in honest presentation despite the ridicule most people will attribute to it, and me.


EXORCISMS: - No, I don't believe it has anything to do with devils and those who project such evil images and intents. These people are the ones who claim only they can exorcize the very devils they manufacture, in the hallucinatory and delusional or vulnerable people they treat. 'The Devils of Loudon' by Aldous Huxley exposes these Catholic masters of the art of deception. That doesn't mean there are no spirits or dimensional entities with consciousness. To say such a thing would fly in the face of all the science we have presented. The soul would have no immortality as the Keltic Creed and Mandukya Upanishads that Eugene Wigner thinks explains quantum reality tells us is real. To deny such phenomena is the kind of thing reductionists in love with logic and certain of their omniscience will assure us they know. How can shamans create herbal concoctions that chemists can't create? How can we doubt the actual results of the 'dowsers' and Tesla's great achievements from visions or his 'non-force info packets' which allow such 'free energy' to be manufactured in something called a vacuum. NASA assures us the ingredients of life are �everywhere� and that could even include a vacuum. What kind of avoidance of fact or 'easy answers' do you have to find in order to explain away reality and what you can observe with your own eyes? You would have to attribute the construction of 'henges' or the Nazca Lines to aliens or gods!


We don't reject these possibilities but they would only serve to enhance the probability of spirits that can possess our physical and complex body with all of its conscious atoms and coordinated centers of energy known as chakras. The science and medicine of the ancients assures us that these things exist and these scientists have a solid track record of performance. They DO the things others can't explain - then they explain how 'chhi' or Shakti is in every part of everything in the universe, and have suffered the guffaws of know-it-alls who are usually wrong. This energy with consciousness is open to direction and will avail the trapped or confused soul without awareness and unwilling to go on with life, an opportunity to hang on as ghosts or in the bodies of those they have shared life with. Sorry to disappoint the authors of 'Darwinism Evolving' but I knew this was fact even before 500 watts were extracted from a vacuum by machines built on the principles of Tesla. Those of us who have first hand knowledge of 'the waves of the marvellous' like Bucky Fuller and Einstein need no peer approval from those who deny god, the soul and ESP.

So are you saying that the human quest is hopeless, give up?

The humanist tradition goes back to the ancient Greeks, including Socrates, and I would characterize it more as optimistic than arrogant. "Man is the measure of all things" is a quote from one of the early Greek philosophers.

Dear Rick

You have bought the farm.


Socrates was not the first alchemist or sage.

For example - Pythagoras was in the Bardic Tradition's University System headed by Abaris the Druid (abaris means Rabbi). By this time it was already watered down and spitting into various systems that Divine Kings were trying to control. You can see that one of those offshoots is the Rabbinical or Pharisaic. The Pharisees were well respected throughout the Roman and Parthian Empires.

The Druids and their Tree of Knowledge and other shamanic arts are also found all over the whole world which was becoming more and more under control of elites who wished to keep people in Dark Age type of worship. For example after they fought in 19 separate theatres of war in the Trojan era there is a known 400 year Dark Age. Back and forth the forces of Empire have railed against Brotherhood and often within the same families.

Michael Grant is the top Historian of the area and in The Rise of the Greeks he notes (and I have put it here) that the Thoth/Hermes and Imhotep/Asklepios syncretic systems were the paramount intellectual systems in the millennia before Jesus. The family of Jesus always has a top alchemist since the time of ML (chi) zadok. They are ML or Milesians like the Stuarts and Bruttii and you find their name on the translation paid for by Cosimo De Medici in the 15th C of the Corpus Hermeticum. And yes, Hermes and his namesake Hermes Trismegistus are far older still.

Asklepios is a Gnostic writer of the Gaedhilic Alexandrian Schools of Christology. Chriost long pre-dates Jesus who probably accept the Jesus title but did not accept the Chriost title.

Further

Pythagoras learned from the Great Pyramid of Iesa (Jesus) in a time before Socrates and moved to get away from the Divine King elitists to a city called Bruttium in Italy. Bruttium and Bruttii are also the Brix and thus the name of the title of that book translating the Corpus - De Brix.

The ancients were not infallible. For example, Aristotle thought that a stone falling to Earth accelerated because the stone knew it belonged in the ground and so it was anxious to get home.

Dear Rick

You say:

The ancients were not infallible. For example, Aristotle thought that a stone falling to Earth accelerated because the stone knew it belonged in the ground and so it was anxious to get home.

I say:

Aristotle had to write lies for priests and he was not ancient by any stretch of the imagination. Like Thales (who had a steam engine) before him he was reporting on far more ancient knowledge. After his protection died (Alexander) he too had to get out of Greece (Dodge).

Pseudo-Aristotle writes about the Carthaginian edict telling all people they can no longer come to America.

Aristotle to Aquinas and the Platonist cover-ups like Atlantis (There was no ONE place) are all part of the 'farm' that people have been fed.

From the Prologue to Diverse Druids at http://www.invispress.com (which it would appear no one here but Trip has read unless they are people who have read the book and followed me here).

It is my hope that you can assist the enlightenment that must occur once you see some of the forensic and archaeological information now available. Perhaps more importantly I hope you will find roots to all religion which must develop tolerance and ecumenicism if we are to endure as a species on this planet hurtling ever faster through the unlimited creative and awesome universe we are blessed with.

Some academics decry the Post-Modern era where the knowledge is available for all to make their own judgment about. I have no definite opinion about most things and I hope we all can strive to find the answers together. I look forward to seeing these academics tear apart what I have done as I present information hidden or not employed in any other book. I await the inevitable outcry; but I am sure there are reasons why the great sage Lao Tzu went to see the Ancient Masters of the Tarim Basin where the Red-Heads developed most of the technology and other social systems that we are now finding spread around the world. My speculations that seek to integrate various facts of sciences are not the final answer and I look forward to the reader assisting me in helping bring the �Brotherhood� back to the forefront of life on Earth.

Has anyone seen the lion king, of course you have

Once there lived a great mufasa and he got run over by bad forces
And we all know the saying "Hakuna Matata" Why worry about something you can't change?

When the world turns its back on you, you turn your back on the world right?
sh*t on you people that sing about love and don't make love
sh*t on you people that celebrate christmas and slap their children
sh*t on you people with all your philosophy, science, you've all gone astray

God doesn't even know himself anymore, he's gone crazy, mad I tell you
but somewhere in this world, somewhere in his heart- he holds a love song.

That's all he needs
That's all he knows
That's all what matters

Amen

He doesn't care about prayers
He doesn't care about war
He doesn't care about nature

HE DOES NOT CARE ABOUT YOU!!!!!!!!!!!

He cares about love

The page opened so slowly that I forgot what I wanted to add more.
Oh yah:
How it would be nice if God personally could register and drop some words about his attributes.
By the way, can NMG category Gods [see above] use Internet as a tool to impart their words to people? I think it is very interesting question.

A god is everywhere and can do all things. nothing can escape his knowledge or be too powerful for him to control or stop. he knows everything, his knowledge is superior to all oters. he is the cream of the crop.

HIS goodness
HIS GREATNESS
HIS graceful looks
HIS kindness hooks
all these things
make GOD GOD THE GOOD
[email protected]

there are two ways to approach the question. One way is to assume that 'god' is real and therefore describe what you think of this dude, the other way is to assume that 'god' is a psychological construct and therefore describe why a person would engage in such a construction.

FOR ME: G-d is all-that-is in the ongoing NOW. In time and space, we and G-d are partakers in process of becoming...etc., etc., etc.

G-d dwells in every cell of mine, as Goodness, Order and Design...inspiring me to find divine perfection--physically, mentally and spiritually.

For NOW, this is my definition of G-d.
=============================
I call myself a unitheist. Unitheism is not unlike pan-en-theism. Google search on Marcus J. Borg--His book is, The God we Never Knew--beyond dogmatism. A contemporary statement about G-d.

G-d (note the Jewish Orthodox spelling) for me, is that which is total, universal and all-encompassing, in which, as Paul puts it, "we live and move and have our being", quoting Greek poets. For me, G-d is ineffable, immanent and transcendent being, not A being. John quotes Jesus as saying, "God is Spirit...God is love". G-d is the source of faith, hope, love, truth, beauty, justice, peace and is as real to me as the next breath I take.
=================================

G-d--a short definition--is the What in things, the When in time, the Where in space, and the Who in humans. G-d is the Why, or meaning of life, and the How to integrate that which is physical with the mental, using the power of love resident in the spiritual.

Here's a thought: We could say that before the first humans, God was the total collective unconscious (Read Carl Jung), struggling, suffering, and evolving as minerals, vegetables and animals are doing even to this day.

Then, in my opinion, when G-d entered into what we call the first homo sapiens--man the thinker--G-d became one with our collective consciousness and began consciously suffering with us, including Jesus and all the g-d-filled prophets. As part of the process of being and becoming, this is still going on. By our willingness to participate we can play a conscious role in speeding up the process of evolution--physically, mentally and spiritually.

THE UBIQUITY OF G-D

G-d has the power to be ubiquitous--present everywhere, visible and invisible, at the same time.

If theists say, "So does God!" then, let us not quibble, we are talking about the same idea, or concept.

By the way, in my opinion, I do not need to ask (to pray to) G-d to come into my life; G-d is already there. And this is what the Bible teaches, over and over. However, I have the "awful" power not to accept that this is so.

Form my point of view, I have the "right", if I am foolish enough, to shut G-d/God/god out, not to tune in, to connect.

Why would any sane person, consciously, decide not to see, hear, taste, touch and smell, to sense the fullness of life--physically, mentally and spiritually?

Could it be because their brains simply do not have the hard-wiring required to sense G-d? Perhaps.

For more details, see the Family Life Foundation link http://www.flfcanada.com

G enerating [srushti]
Organising [sthithi]
Destructive [laya]

acts of almighty confirms was /is/will be of GOD
[email protected]

Is any familiar with the work of Alfred North Whitehead--mathematician and philosopher--who wrote about process theology?

A friend of mine gave me my first introduction to the full ideas of Professor A. N. Whitehead.

Here is the very first sentence in an essay he wrote for me: "Process Theology is based upon the philosophy of the British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead...ultimate reality was not BEING, as Greek or traditional metaphysics called it, but BECOMING, or a FORWARD MOVING PROCESS."

This process involves "continuity and spontaneity", "repetition and novelty". This process involves organic elements--even atoms, rocks, vegetables, trees, animals, etc., and even human beings. It involves valuing interdependence and social interrealting with one another, bottom up, not imposed from the top. The cosmos is not just a great clock, or a machine, made by the master clockmaker whose only job now is to wind it up and let it operate (deism?).

On page 492 of his book, PROCESS AND REALITY, Whitehead defines his "God":

"It is as true to say that the world is imnmanent in God, as that God is immanent in the world. It is as true to say that God transcends the world, as that the world transcends God. It is as true to say that God creates the world, as that the world creates God."

GOD IN TWO NATURES

First, God as primordial nature. Whitehead looked upon the world as the body of God. However, because God is primordial in nature, God is independent of the world, which is dependent on God. Thus Whitehead avoided pantheism (everything is God) by pointing to pan entheism--everything is IN God. But as a persuasive lure, not as an overpowering force. [This is the first time I was introduced to PAN ENTHEISM. It was in the early 1970s. Now I realize that my exposure to Fox's teachings came later.]

Second, is the consequent nature of God. Way back, Isaiah wrote about 'Emmanuel'--God being with us. We sing the carol: O come! O come! Emmanuel... every Christmas.

God here changes, is relative, is dependent. This leads to actualization and to the conservation of values--love being the highest good. Thus God is love and, in spirit form, operates as a companion (literally, one who share bread with...) and one who experiences all that we experience, even our pain.

In the 1960s, two respected theologians, among others, embraced and wrote about process theology: John B. Cobb, Jr., wrote , GOD AND THE WORLD; and Schubert Ogden wrote, THE REALITY OF GOD.


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/#9

Another 'psychological' reason to believe in God is, of course, as an explanation of origins. However, this explanation is fundamentally plagued by the very problem it purports to solve; namely, where did God come from?