I answered your questions. It was you who challenged me.
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Is God Effable?
- Thread starter SalixIncendium
- Start date
*smiles* If that's how you wish to portray your intent and your participation in this thread, I'm not going to argue.
sealchan
Well-Known Member
This is Joseph Campbell's basic understanding of myth, that the metaphors used in spiritual stories point to the potential of human experience and draw from an inexhaustible well of inspiration of forms and ideas that can, in principle, bring balance to whatsoever imbalances we experience in our lives.
All comprehensive rational systems have "loopholes" which introduce the problem of self-reference. This includes logical statements which generate illogical proofs. So the idea that a term can be understood as referring to something beyond the scope of terms is merely a sign that human language is supportive of a comprehensive rational system...it can express strange loops.
sealchan
Well-Known Member
I attempted a sensical answer in my previous post.
I always knew you were a closet Hindu.
One may find merit in many sources.
Segev Moran
Well-Known Member
The answer is not
I speak about the concept of God as depicted in the Jewish religion.
The reason why is quite simple.
As we (humans) understand reality in a physical way (our senses), and as our brain works in pattern based mechanism, we are very limited as to what we can actually understand.
Understanding something (at least when i use the word), means to have the ability to connect a statement or description to something we can experience in reality.
Although we are all experiencing God's effects on our reality, we have no ability to "picture" what god is.
A similar thing would be to explain the color blue to someone who never had sight or explain music to someone who never experience hearing.
The closest thing we can do is try and describe its effect.
Lets say i was to describe the color blue to a blind man, i will probably use the terms cold, ocean, skies and things similar to this that can give the man some kind of a way to figure out what it represents, but i will never be able to make him understand the color blue.
Same with the concept of God, the Jewish religion explains to us in words we can somehow interpret to a sort understanding, but we cannot really describe God.
An example might be when saying God is angry..
God id not really an entity that is angry like a human.
It is similar to saying Fire is angry with someone that sticks his hand into the fire.
when you learn the Jewish religion, a lot of explanation is dedicated to explaining this concept and trying to clarify what it really means when God is angry or Wills or Sad.
It is taught that the human was made under Gods image. this is not a physical image, rather a spiritual image.
This mean we share the same abilities as God but are all bound to our physical understanding.
So it is possible you are doing an action that resembles the spiritual concept of God, like get angry
Oh! It's our failing. There you go.
That probably depends on who you ask.
For the most part, though, the polytheistic traditions of our ancestors point to gods simply coming from other gods. They aren't immortal like the one-god of the Bible is - they come into being and pass away. That points to the conclusion that there wasn't really a "divine source" in monotheistic (or monistic) terms. But, as with all things theology, your mileage may vary.
Personally, I regard the Four (Air, Fire, Earth, Water) as the "divine sources" (plural), but that's just my own tradition. As for effability, it's a spectrum. They are quite abstract, though I'm not sure I would use the term ineffable for them. Like I mentioned, complete comprehension is not possible for anything, but neither is total incomprehension. Or rather, the things we can have no comprehension of do not exist for us at all. They cannot be named, identified, or pointed to in any fashion. It's weird.