I use the OED definition of reality.
the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them.
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I use the OED definition of reality.
Exaltist Ethan
Bridging the Gap Between Believers and Skeptics
The Universe is NOT The Omniverse. The Omniverse contains every Universe.
If God didn't have divinity there would be nothing and no truly good things in the Universe or beyond.
Yet the things that all religions stresses and teaches in different ways, including generosity, is the reason why God exists.
Somethings in the Universe changes more than other things. I will not pretend like most Omnists that all religions all equally valid. There are certain religions that just seem to do more things right than others, even if you ignore Earthseed and it's denominations. Anyone can look up the words Omniverse or God and I have the ability to describe them fully in detail. And while everything in the Universe does change (as there is no place here which is absolute 0K) I am not going to suggest that it isn't possible there are things outside the Universe that doesn't, which needs to be stressed. God is The Omniverse, entropy and extropy, which develops the Synverse. If there are parts that don't include entropy or extropy it cannot be God, and since entropy and extropy constitute what is change, that is how I describe the God I believe in.
I am always thankful when I hear an atheist acknowledge their atheism as a belief that they hold, and in your case a strong belief.
You are talking about God, not a Yeti. God is not an object like a rock, or a tree, or a Bigfoot. Do you believe God is supposed to a creature somewhere out there in the universe apart from your own being?
You can't treat God as if you were studying a black hole or something with the tools of the material sciences. God is not a material object.
But all of these suppose that God is like what you find in a child's Sunday School book who puts rainbows in the sky and keeps bad things from happening to good children. When you strip away all of that and see God, for instance, as the Creator of the natural order, which includes everything you see in evolution, then the reasons to say God doesn't exist don't seem to apply.
What is being rejected instead, is actually just an idea of God that has to deny reality. What if that idea of God embraced all of reality instead? What would be the reasons to reject it then?
I see myself as an SBNR, or spiritual but not religious. I do however see and understand religion as simply a way to try to talk about the Ineffeble that is our actual reality. It's just a different layer of perception, just like our sciences are a layer of perception on the same thing. I try to see Reality from more than just one, univocal, mono perspective. It takes more than one color to make up a rainbow.
Experience.
Sure, I understand the dictionary definition, and I took that fully into account. Do you not understand how that that still does not change what I said?
Guitar's Cry
Disciple of Pan
Thanks! Good post yourself.
I agree with the personification. I think humans, due to our ability to munipulate the environment to satiate our innate response mechanisms with supernormal stimuli, get to feeling disconnected from the environment they are apart of. It's all the Universe, but we feel disconnected anyway, and so responding to it through symbolism like personification and metaphor is useful.
PureX
Veteran Member
But that's a totally contradictory and irrational definition. Surely you must see that. Existence IS AN IDEA. It's like saying reality is the idea that something exists without the idea of something existing. ... Huh?
This is why it's bad to use the dictionary to back up any proposed logical proposition. All the dictionary collects and presents is our common usage of the words. Including our common biases. confusion, and absurd lack of reason or even common sense.
But this is not the crucial point, here. The crucial point is that the idea of God is a meta-idea. A conceptual paradigm through which we identify and define many other ideas. And if you want to try and understand this 'God-paradigm', and the people that choose it, you're going to have to be able and willing to look at it from outside your own non-God paradigm. Can you do that? I suspect not many people could. It means you would have to be willing and able to recognize that materialism is not the only means of understanding existence and defining reality. Or of living in the world.
And ultimately, that's what it comes down to: how to understand the world so as to live in it, as best we can.
Belief is not necessarily reality
I'm a little agnostic as to anything that might be labelled as God or gods, but mostly I am an atheist, especially with regards any God proposed by and believed in by those who have such religious beliefs. I obviously can't rule out such an existence given that science - our best hope for ever determining such, I believe - still has a long way to go before we do have a more complete understanding of the universe.
It seems to me that it is hardly likely that humans were created by some God, given the extent of the universe, the number of planets we now know do exist, and the timescale for the universe existing. And, from what I know about the various religions, and the spectrum of such, whatever they propose as any God existing is more likely to have come from some less knowledgeable people around then, even if such came from good intentions. This latter though was probably good for the group that believed in such though, and not so good for those that didn't. Hence the conflicts that have occurred over time.
As I see existence, and especially human existence, the vast amount can be explained without recourse to religious beliefs, and these as we can often see, just get in the way all too often as to human progress.
So, I admit that I just don't know whether any God exists, but the certainty of so many in the world (as to their various religious beliefs) seems more like a drag on humanity than anything else, given that our moral nature should be rather more obvious to us all, and for those to whom it isn't, I fear religious belief still wouldn't help them.
And, i am talking about something that is claimed to be real.
In your opinion, there is really no agreement in what makes a god
Atheist!
Why not?
Nope, they suppose what is stated in the Christian bible
So tell the OED. You have your opinion which seems to me to contradict reality
Nobody. They claim they do, but that's not convincing. How could they know their god exists? We can rule out many gods, but not all gods. Nor need we to justify atheism.
How do you know that? I don't consider gods any more likely that vampires or leprechauns, but I also don't say that they don't exist, because I have no observation, experiment, or algorithm that can rule them out. Nor need I. But my language is not that they do not exist, but that I don't believe that they exist because I have no reason to. Why actually say that I know that they don't exist when I don't need to and can't justify it. It's just another leap of faith.
I've never understood just what you mean by this term. How is evidence falsified? Yesterday, I asked the same question of another poster who referred to verifiable evidence. Claims can be falsified (or supported) with evidence. That's what Popper meant by a scientific statement. It's the statement that is falsifiable or not, not the evidence. Is that what you mean?
Same as yours. I'm a critical thinker, meaning that I'm also a skeptic and empiricist, which I consider an asset and a defense against accumulating false beliefs. Incidentally, I use the word unbelief these days to represent my agnosticism and disbelief to mean that one considers a claim is false. It's not standard usage, and I have to define the words explicitly before using them that way, but it's a useful way to think. If you have two distinct concepts and two distinct words, why let both words have both meanings when we can assign them 1:1.
True, but does that matter to somebody else? I've had experiences that I attributed to the presence of the Holy Spirit, then later reinterpreted as endogenous spiritual states. You might say that God went from real to an idea when I made that transformation. God went from something that existed outside my mind and was being experienced by it the way it experiences lights and sound as evidence of the existence of something outside of the mind, to a misunderstanding of a feeling generated by a brain state. My definition of reality includes what really exists and only that. Yes, the idea of a god exists, but that's not the same as its referent existing.
So then you're offering RF as a proof of gods?
Perhaps to the one having the experience, but what behavior in others changes a false belief that they might hold into a correct one? We're reminded of the Christian martyrs who died often horrible deaths for their beliefs and asked to believe that that is evidence that their beliefs were fervently held, which I can agree with, but not that they were correct. There were dead people in Jonestown, Waco, and Rancho Cucamonga who fervently believed that Jim Jones, David Koresh, and Marshall Applewhite were telling them the truth, but their behavior doesn't convince us that their beliefs were valid.
An empirical one. There is no value in calling something real that cannot be detected empirically, meaning, cannot affect things that are known to be real.
Because it's her opinion. Mine trumps everybody else's as well for me. Even when I defer to experts, it's my opinion that that is the best course of action even if others disagree. I see an element of gaslighting in all such comments that ask one to suppress his own judgment and substitute somebody else's. It's the central message in Christianity, and failure to substitute its reality and morality for one's own do is called rebellion, hedonism, or wanting to play God. Be humble, we are told, and stop asserting your will. It's also your message with your frequent referenced to scientism - that the naturalistic position is too myopic and that reality is something different than what the recalcitrant empiricist sees.
You might not know what real is, but I just gave you a concise definition that includes a test. And the question is very useful. It forces one to examine more closely what one means by both God and real.
Sure it is. Theism is a category of belief. And it need not be justified belief, either. Any belief in gods is theism for me. I understand that others use the word differently.
No position but agnostic atheism is justifiable if one is an adherent of the laws of critical thinking and of evaluating evidence. Any other position is guessing.
You might need to personify it, but I don't. My friend is nature, and it's not invisible. My spiritual life results from a direct relationship with nature. That warm feeling of connection, safety, and belonging often accompanied by awe, gratitude, and wonderment can happen while gardening or playing with my dogs or hearing a rapturous passage of music or gazing at the night sky with understanding, and never makes me think of nature as a person or makes me want to give it a name or start performing rituals to it. I simply don't need to inject more into any of that to consider it sacred, by which I mean divine less gods.
Strip the gods out of all of this, I say. They're not too harmful if they are a panoply of nature gods, where they just become symbols for various aspects of experience. The real trouble comes when people start extracting the sacred from nature, and sticking into gods that are separate from nature, especially gods that don't have much respect for our world and give man commandments and received moral codes - the antithesis of spirituality as I have defined it here. That's not your problem. You seem to have avoided that. But be careful of anybody coming to you telling you what God is and thinks and wants you to do. I think you already know that.
PureX
Veteran Member
I worry about this aspect of humanity a lot. We are hairless apes with a great capacity for imagination. So great, in fact, that we imagine that we are not apes at all, but human beings. And this idea is so real to us that we fully believe it.Thanks! Good post yourself.
I agree with the personification. I think humans, due to our ability to munipulate the environment to satiate our innate response mechanisms with supernormal stimuli, get to feeling disconnected from the environment they are apart of. It's all the Universe, but we feel disconnected anyway, and so responding to it through symbolism like personification and metaphor is useful.
And because we fully believe this we actually do have the capacity to transcend our animal natures, and become something greater, as we imagined. And this is wonderful and amazing. BUT, it also means that we tend to imagine ourselves as being something apart from the world of the animals. And something apart from the world at large, even. Maybe even something ABOVE the world, and therefor allowed to "correct it", and to exploit it according to our own desires.
This is the part of the 'humanity phenomena' that worries me. This delusion that we are apart from and above existence, itself. Because we clearly are not. I recognize that the idea of God can be used to help us repair this delusion, but unfortunately it can also be used to exacerbate the delusion, too. And so it seems to have become a 'wash' for humanity overall. (Not individually, though. Individually it can still be a game-changer.)
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Evidence that can be proven wrong
First, I don't find prayer to be futile when we pray according to God's Will, His purpose.
Sickness/ disasters, etc. will continue as we are forewarned at Luke 21:11
( I read on January 24th scientists now set the hands on MAN's Doom's Day Clock to 90 seconds close to Midnight )
This does Not mean No God or that God does Not care.
As in a court of law, Satan challenged God's right to govern, God's way of doing things.
Only time would settle the court case, the issues raised.
Satan challenges that under adverse conditions we would Not serve God.
'Touch our flesh....' (loose physical health) and we would turn our backs on God - Job 2:4-5
Both Job and Jesus under adverse conditions proved Satan a liar and so can we.
MAN's long history shows adverse conditions are often do to MAN dominating MAN to MAN's hurt, MAN's injury.
Bad conditions are a reason why we are all invited to pray the invitation to God for Jesus to come ! - Rev. 22:20
Please notice why to come: Jesus to come and bring ' healing ' to earth's nations - Revelation 22:2
PureX
Veteran Member
That's just a bias defending itself. You define reality as that which can be determined empirically, and then you claim that empiricism is the only proper way to determine reality, i.e., any version of reality not arrived at by empirical methods isn't real. It's an ideological tautology, to be polite.
To you, this makes sense. Because you have chosen empiricism (or what you perceive to be such) as your meta-truth ideal. It is the paradigm through which you now define and verify all your other ideas of reality/truth. But unfortunately, you are going to have to be both willing and able to set that paradigm aside if you ever want to try and understand any OTHER meta-truth paradigm; ... like theism. And so far, you are WAY too busy fighting with and trying to dismiss these other paradigms to ever actually step out of your own way and consider them from their own perspective, or from even a neutral perspective.
Very few people would be able to do this, I suspect. As human nature doesn't normally work this way. It's human nature to do what you are doing ... defend, defend, defend. Presuming that the truth we see must be the truth as it is. How can we presume otherwise? Right?
Unless, perhaps, we are a true skeptic. And have not totally bought into our own meta-truth paradigm.
vulcanlogician
Well-Known Member
Yeah, sure. I think there are limits to what we can know empirically. That's indisputable. But who's to say what exactly happens beyond what we can measure or experience? I could be wrong, but I tend to suspect that the religious are just as ignorant as I am about it.
It could be that I simply don't see what they see. Or it could be that they see something that isn't there. I've tried to listen to them and suspend my disbelief as much as I think is reasonable. I try to be as charitable as I can when considering theists' arguments.
Aside from "direct experience" or mysticism (which itself is a lil' sketchy) few or none of the reasons they believe in God seem to qualify as good reasons to believe.
That doesn't mean that they're wrong. But, as I said before, I just don't see how they're right.
PureX
Veteran Member
Perhaps it's time to let go of the presumption that there is a right and a wrong way to perceive (understand) existence. That there are just different ways depending on the conceptual lens we're using to 'see' with. And the determining factor is the actual value that results, not the truthfulness (righteousness) that gets presumed.
Heyo
Veteran Member
Too wishy-washy and self referential for me. I prefer the functional definition:
Reality is what can be measured by scientific instruments, independently and repeatedly.
Trailblazer
Veteran Member
God is certainly in the realm of the unseen, and is beyond what is empirically verifiable, but the Messengers that God has sent were seen. It thus all boils down to whether we believe these Messengers were sent by God or not. That can never be proven as a fact since God can never be proven as a fact, we can only prove that to ourselves.
If they exist they can be measured