God? What is God? (Jesus, punishment, reject, Creator, Earth)

[Guitar's Cry]

Originally Posted by doppelgänger

Actually, quite the opposite in my view. We are born without sin, begin to carve up the world and judge it and this separates us from "God" and others. This separation is sin. Since our ideas about the Universe are never the same as the universe, but always something less, our ideas, no matter how profound and "true" they may seem to us always "miss the mark." Undoing dogma (religious or otherwise) and embracing uncertainty and not knowing is the way to bring one's self back into the state of awakening into the Garden, which still surrounds us. Setting aside the conceit that my knowledge is "truth," puts me in the relationship necessary to once again eat from the Tree of Life and experience connection beyond the separation beyond the false and illusory "reality" of framework, "gloss", and reality models constructed in thought and language.

Which is why the mystics in every tradition have always said that the absolute (whether God, the Brahman, Tao, Nature, Non-local Hidden Variable, etc.) is ineffable, inexpressible. To do so would bring it into the world of things and illusory forms. To do so would be to bring it down to the level of dead things.

Exactly! In fact, I think that the story of the Fall of Man does illustrate it well. The Tree eaten from was a dichotomy: good/evil. It is a seperating, an organizing of things. Sin is relative as well. Being born into sin is being born into a world of relationships that seperate the Oneness of childhood. Being given the relationship of "God" is the gift of mystery that can lead back into the Oneness--the Garden.

"You're born with nothing,
And better off that way.
Soon as you got something they send
Someone to try and take it away." - Bruce Springsteen, Something in the Night

But I think the mainstream view is different. We are born sinful because we don't have these relationships. The relationship with God stops at viewing God as universal. Born without the schemata necessary for religion, we are Godless, and must be given It.

[Sunstone]

"God" is a term for a certain kind of mystical experience that at least some people have.

[doppelgänger]

Originally Posted by Guitar's Cry

But I think the mainstream view is different. We are born sinful because we don't have these relationships. The relationship with God stops at viewing God as universal. Born without the schemata necessary for religion, we are Godless, and must be given It.

I agree. Yet so many religions have as a foundational myth, the hero rejecting the conventional authorities to reintroduce the mystic, and then being killed for it.

The irony is thick . . .

[doppelgänger]

Originally Posted by doppelgänger

Which is why the mystics in every tradition have always said that the absolute (whether God, the Brahman, Tao, Nature, Non-local Hidden Variable, etc.) is ineffable, inexpressible. To do so would bring it into the world of things and illusory forms. To do so would be to bring it down to the level of dead things.

And if you've understood that paragraph, then you now know what Nietzsche meant when he said "God is dead."

Constantin Brunner, a few years later, would echo these sentiments in Our Christ: Revolt of the Mystical Genius:

[The Abolute, God, Unity or Cogitant] cannot be spoken about in the manner in which ideated things are spoken about. It just is not a thing serving the purposes of our living; and it is only things, only relatively as known to us in the form of representation and concept that can actually be spoken about. Of absolute being no intelligence comes into our reason and into our perception. Rather, our reason comes into Absolute Being; and then it does speak and express itself - figuratively! This figurative expression of relative reason modified by the absolute is sensed by the spiritual; not so, however, by the superstitious . . .

Either they must imagine the Cogitant as another ideatum, another thing, as a thing behind their things (as that imaginary thing, the [ba$tard] of thing and nothing) - or else they decide that it has no existence at all because they cannot think it, because it cannot be made comprehensible to them. But to make it comprehensible to them would mean, precisely, to make it incomprehensible, for it would mean removing it from life and moving into the sphere of the ideated thing-like, down to those who lie nailed in the coffin of such thingly thinking. It cannot be converted, it cannot be translated from the living into the dead in order that the dead may live by it.

[Popeyesays]

Originally Posted by Guitar's Cry

Exactly! In fact, I think that the story of the Fall of Man does illustrate it well. The Tree eaten from was a dichotomy: good/evil. It is a seperating, an organizing of things. Sin is relative as well. Being born into sin is being born into a world of relationships that seperate the Oneness of childhood. Being given the relationship of "God" is the gift of mystery that can lead back into the Oneness--the Garden.

"You're born with nothing,
And better off that way.
Soon as you got something they send
Someone to try and take it away." - Bruce Springsteen, Something in the Night

But I think the mainstream view is different. We are born sinful because we don't have these relationships. The relationship with God stops at viewing God as universal. Born without the schemata necessary for religion, we are Godless, and must be given It.

The notion that we are created sinful has always struck me as supercillious. Why would God create imperfections?

My sacred texts tell me we are born Noble, and the only abasement we ever have is self-inflicted by loving the ephemeral more than the eternal.

The garden is eternal abd the gates are never locked.

Regards,
Scott

[rasor]

Originally Posted by PureX

So what? If God exists, and if God created the universe, then I see no reason that God would be manipulating it, now. And I still don't understand why you would be expecting that God should.

Then whats the point in prayer ?