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Is God Effable?

BilliardsBall

Veteran Member
Is your concept or perception of God, the Absolute, Brahman, or whatever term you use to reference the ultimate divinity, effable in your religious or spiritual views?

If not, why not?

If so, how?

Biblically speaking, Jesus Christ remains somewhat ineffable until one trusts Him or comes close to doing so, imminently.
 

Niblo

Active Member
Premium Member
If I take the label off of a Cambell's soup does it become false soup?

When my cousin and I were kids we removed all the labels from the cans in my aunt's pantry, and mixed them around a bit. For some reason she was not best pleased. :eek:
 

Twilight Hue

Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
Is your concept or perception of God, the Absolute, Brahman, or whatever term you use to reference the ultimate divinity, effable in your religious or spiritual views?

If not, why not?

If so, how?
That would create a paradox givin the way religion is intellectualized and rationalized in those areas where words would be more of a limitation then an asset.

I think I would rather allow the answers to such questions to play out naturally on their own terms.
 

SalixIncendium

अग्निविलोवनन्दः
Staff member
Premium Member
Salix, I'm confused. Gods would be the polytheist variant of "whatever term you use to reference the ultimate divinity." If you intend to exclude polytheism for some reason, that's fine, but that's not clear from the OP. :sweat:

But the answer is yes, for this polytheistic pantheist. That said, human comprehension is necessarily limited and while words can be used to describe the gods, they never capture anything in full.

It is not my intention to disqualifying polytheism. But is there not a divine source; an origin of gods? Didn't the gods come from something, or did they just materialize?
 

SalixIncendium

अग्निविलोवनन्दः
Staff member
Premium Member
Whatever you or anyone else is calling "God" is effable.

Any concept of God is necessarily conceivable. Any perception you call "God" is necessarily perceptible.

Anything that can't be conceived of or referred to is not the concept you're referring to as "God."

If God is inconceivable, then when you use the term "God" in a sentence, you're not expressing meaning; you're only making sounds.

Please demonstrate the truth in these statements by offering up a detailed description of your God concept. Please express what God is to you.
 

SalixIncendium

अग्निविलोवनन्दः
Staff member
Premium Member
God is one member of the set of gods. Since God is a god, anything that applies to gods in general applies to God... no?

If one is defining God as described in the OP, being THE ultimate divinity, your first sentence would not be accurate, rendering the rest of your post inapplicable.

But your thought process does venture into nondual philosophy. :)
 

SalixIncendium

अग्निविलोवनन्दः
Staff member
Premium Member
... meaning it can't possibly be true.

If anything exists "beyond words," it can't be anything described by the word "God."

If the term "God" is meaningful, then the statement "God is beyond words" is necessarily false.

Can you describe what God is?
 

Salvador

RF's Swedenborgian
Is your concept or perception of God, the Absolute, Brahman, or whatever term you use to reference the ultimate divinity, effable in your religious or spiritual views?

If not, why not?

If so, how?

Yes, God, the creator of our genetic coding is very likely effable. The numeric and semantic message of "037" that's been embedded in our genetic coding by our Creator gets conveyed to me who computes with a base 10 numeric system.

This is evident to me by how each codon relates to 3 other particular codons having the same particular type of initial nucleobase and sequential nucleobase subsequently then followed by a different ending nucleobase. Half of these 4 set of codon groups ( whole family codons ) each code for the same particular amino acid. The other half of those 4 set of codon groups ( split codons ) don't code for the same amino acid. So then, in the case of whole family codons, there are 37 amino acid peptide chain nucleons for each relevant nucleobase determinant of how a particular amino acid gets coded. Start codons express 0 at the beginning of 37 Hence, the meaningful numeric and semantic message of 037 gets unambiguously and factually conveyed to us present day Earthling human beings with our genetic code invented by a superior intelligence beyond that of anybody presently bound to Earth.

The significance of the semantic message "037" embedded in our genetic coding is well-explained in the following journal articles: .
Biosystems Volume 70, Issue 3, August 2003, Pages 187-209 "Arithmetic inside the universal genetic code" Author: Vladimir I. shCherbak
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar...4703000662

NeuroQuantology | December 2011 | Vol 9 | Issue 4 | Page 702-715 Masic, Natasa Nested Properties of shCherbak’s PQ 037 and (Biological) Coding/Computing Nested Numeric/Geometric/Arithmetic Propertiesof shCherbak’s Prime Quantum 037 as a Base of (Biological) Coding/Computing

https://www.researchgate.net/public...m_037_as_a_Base_of_Biological_CodingComputing

If we are living in base reality rather than in a computer simulation, our genetic code's Creator "God" might be extraterrestrial artificial intelligence or an advanced extraterrestrial civilization who delivered the origins of life to Earth. If we are simulated conscious beings living in a computer simulation, then or our genetic code's Creator "God" might be post human futuristic descendants of humans from whom we simulated beings are duplicated in an ancestral simulation by our Creator for them to better understand their distant human ancestors who've actually lived before our Creator "God" in base reality.
 
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Samantha Rinne

Resident Genderfluid Writer/Artist
Is your concept or perception of God, the Absolute, Brahman, or whatever term you use to reference the ultimate divinity, effable in your religious or spiritual views?

If not, why not?

If so, how?

Christianity believes in the Trinity for a specific reason, how to understand three very different natures of God:
  1. Fragmented Universal Soul that pervades in everyone like the Force (Holy Spirit)
  2. Ultimate Deity that created everything that is, and is beyond our comprehension (God)
  3. Personal panentheistic avatar of God's will to mankind (Jesus)
One of these appears to us as a human, and not some long dead person, but the person responsible for connecting us to God. When we truly experience Jesus, we understand that he (or she) can appear as anyone, and thus is very much effable. I have chosen to call Jesus as Emily to distinguish this from a historical figure. But even if Jesus were not a historical figure the result would be the same.

God however, is not really effable. Our feeble minds can't think up a name for such a being.
 

IndigoChild5559

Loving God and my neighbor as myself.
Is your concept or perception of God, the Absolute, Brahman, or whatever term you use to reference the ultimate divinity, effable in your religious or spiritual views?

If not, why not?

If so, how?
Can the finite comprehend the infinite?

We can know God in part. We can know some things about God. We can even know God in the sense that we can experience God. But we can't really have anything even close to an idea of what God truly is. We have a vague notion that he is the Creator, the Foundation or Source underlying the entire universe. We have a notion that he is a God of both love and justice. Beyond that? Beyond that our ideas and experiences differ, which means we have our opinions. I have my Torah, you have your Vedas.

There were some blind men that discovered an elephant. One found an ear and said, "This is a fan." Another found the tail and said, "This is a rope." Yet another found its trunk and said, "This is a snake."

I think it is true that the moment we even try to put our experience of God into words, it loses something. "The Tao which can be expressed is not the eternal Tao."
 

IndigoChild5559

Loving God and my neighbor as myself.
... meaning it can't possibly be true.

If anything exists "beyond words," it can't be anything described by the word "God."

If the term "God" is meaningful, then the statement "God is beyond words" is necessarily false.
This is not true. I used to try to put my mystical experiences into words. Not only did non-mystics consistently misunderstand what I was saying, but I found that I could intuit that other mystics had had the same experience, even if they used completely different words that seemed to describe something different.

IOW, for those of us who have actually experiences God, we recognize those others who have also experiences God, even if they define him somewhat differently. It is those who have not had that experience who get hung up on the differences in definition. Why? Because those of us who actually have these experiences know how impossible it is to capture them in words, how completely inadequate words are to describe what we have experienced. Yet we have indeed had a valid, real, spiritual experience.
 

IndigoChild5559

Loving God and my neighbor as myself.
Polytheism is really simply the deification of elements of nature and certain powerful abstractions such as love or war.

Monotheism arises inevitably from polytheism when its philosophers reason that there must be a source behind these elements, that the Tao is the mother of ten thousand things, so to speak. Polytheism tends to remain polytheism in cultures where there is no written language, and so wisdom cannot build from one generation to the next.
 

SalixIncendium

अग्निविलोवनन्दः
Staff member
Premium Member
It's not about "my" God concept. Any God concept is a concept. Any concept can be conceived.

I'll just leave this here...
Is your concept or perception of God, the Absolute, Brahman, or whatever term you use to reference the ultimate divinity, effable in your religious or spiritual views?

If not, why not?

If so, how?

And...
I don't need to. Everything I just said only relies on the fact that "God" is a word.

...I'll just point out that there is a reason I created this thread in Comparative Religion, not Religious Debates. I wanted to compare concepts, not debate them.
 
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