I think its unlikely that you could really grasp the true nature of the universe with the subjective human mind that would be required to ponder it... whatever "knowledge" ensues would be ridden with the limitations of the human condition. the texts are also touching on those limitations..

I should ask, what is "grasping" in your eyes? Is it having a "correct" thought or idea about god? A supposed moment of clarity (both human experiences)? Or is it experiencing it for yourself? (in which case who is left to "grasp" in an experience of non-duality?)

Fathoming its 'limits, measurements, form" and being able to "utter its name" outside of experience I think implies a more subject/object kind of understanding of god, which is different to the non duel nature the gnostics are touching on.. truly fathoming the above would require becoming the subject in question. Experience is the key.. but can the experience be truly grasped without actually being immersed in the experience itself? My experiences with trying to remember dmt breakthroughs after they take place suggests not.. you get a general gist or narrative of it but the experience itself is mostly ineffable to the human when back to baseline.

Reflection of these things is so vastly differen't to the reality of them - and so I feel the human can never really "grasp" god in their ordinary state of being.

And yeah, i thought "It is eternal since it exists eternally" was an odd choice of wording myself.. perhaps it is better clarified in the earlier statement.. "It is eternal, since it does not need anything." ... this is actually a really powerful statement when you stop and think about it. It implies that transience is a result of deficiency..

Not an easy post to articulate but I hope it made some degree of sense!

How can we know what.. it's.. needs are and what is eternity without a desire..?

Is that where we come in.

God is Everything and Nothing, ergo there is no God; it's a redundant concept.

I think it would at least be fair to say that there is undeniably a "source" of all that exists.. While it may not have any specific form or dominating attribute (as is given to creator deities), to call it nothing is not really accurate, because within it is contained the potential for everything we know.. and this makes it much more than mere "nothingness" imo.. potential is far from nothing - especially when it has the capacity to emanate so complex a universe

Nothing is a pretty flimsy concept..

A good argument I thought about while on psychedelics actually is that "if god exists, he wouldn't make the world such a random place".

It's not that random is good or bad particular, just random. Sure some stuff in the nature are mindblowing, but also hugely disorganized.

Take humans for example, we have came up with a number of ways to turn the gifts of nature into something better and dodging the stuff that treats as poorly.

It is debatable if an intelligent creator made this on purpose for us to use our brains and fill in the errors but I highly doubt it. If I was a creator of some sort the first thing I would fix is the fact that we as humans the supposedly most advanced species wouldn't be completely helpless upon birth.

The stuff I see on a typical Saturday night out is enough to convince me that there is no god. With all the stress, all the bad stuff people wait all weak for this day to act completely retarded with their meaningless drunken fights over something as bizarre as "he hit me for no reason".

I could go on and on how life on earth is plain silly and that it doesn't hold much meaning to it but I think this should cover it for now.

The world is full of flaws.. we can be sure of that. I think there's many elements of it that appear random, but on close inspection nature operates consistently via complex mathematical concepts and there's obviously an underlying order about the chaos of it all. I don't know that this is due to a conscious "fashioning" of the physical order or whether it just 'is what it is'.. the latter hints not at a conscious moral/immoral creator deity but I feel more at some kind of transcendent intelligence that underlies everything.

..just back to gnostic ideas as they are very relevant to your above point AwesomeUsername.. gnosticism regards the creator of the physical order as inherently flawed - and its creation reflects those flaws. The creator in this narrative is not god though.. but a lowly emanation from a transcendent and "unknownable" source. As I mentioned earlier most of the mainstream religions don't so much address god in the true sense of the word but something more along the lines of this "demiurge" or creator deity.

The reason I mention gnosticism so much in this thread is that much of its mythology addresses this whole notion of "how can there be a god when there is so much suffering/stupidity in the world" .. its a very interesting lens for studying the issue

One thing I think should be expanded on, is this notion of "emanation". I like the word because it isn't burdened by the notion of intention that is often attached to ideas about god and the word "creation" (which causes a knee-jerk cringe reaction for many folk). the definition of emanation is "something which originates or issues from a source". Whether people buy into the big bang or not... it seems very logical to me that universe and its laws are by definition an "emanation" .. it seems we just can't get to grips with the nature of its source.. because it must be so far from what we are and know (but maybe closer than we think ..)

for something to exist, does it not need a greater body to exist within? This seems to be the case with matter.. does matter and its various forms not require just the right conditions for their existence? Could this apply to the universe as a whole? What is the right "environment" that supports the universe's existance? And could we call that environment god? I am no scientist.. so please, correct me if I am spreading a false logic here..

"God", whatever pointer one wants to give the Source of Existence, must be Everything, included perceived emptiness.

However, Nothing (No-Thing) is not really emptiness, as some like to think, rather it is formless potential.

interesting point.. thanks Valmar. I was going to say that potential could be regarded as a "thing" conceptually.. but the reality of it is much deeper as it has no specifics other than its definition. I suppose "potential" is the environment that I toyed with the idea of in the above post. What a magical word to ponder!

No thing could be spirit. The powers that be must be spirit of some kind and spirit would be timeless, and eternal not being created.

We are spirit I would argue, the spark of our consciousness. The grey matter dies away but spirit always remains. Does there need to be a Godly figure, perhaps spirit is the first mover, un-created but how that would work I don't know.

Is there a spiritual side interfaced with the material world and is it molding creation from the inputs of our being? We are it too.. I guess. And this spiritual wisdom is the wisdom of the ages. The Buddhist views, Taoisms, etc, and so on.

Perhaps we are evolving to newer more advanced material creations.

The Universe is vast, there might be multiverses.. how amazing that is..all out there and spirit is backing everything and is even vaster/deeper/ intelligent.. and eternal.

Or so I'm guessing.

This is fun when it's kept open to all possibilities..

Maybe we are nothing but an Alien creation, some kind of vast biologically entity being manipulated buy the machine Elves.

Who made the machine elves, maybe they know.

It's all our is-ness.

Point is though, that any argument for the existence of god, would need to prove that there has to be such a thing as a god. Wich is equally impossible.

So, when it is not reasonable to assume that there could ever be any clarity on this issue, would it be reasonable then, to assume that, if there would actually be a god, and he would indeed be the creator of this world and everything in it, he would want us to be religious?

I think not.

Therefore, i don't think bothering about the existence or non-existence of god can ever be very relevant. Because either there isn't a god, and then being religious makes no sense, or there is a god, but then he wouldn't nessecarily want us to be religious, and then religion would not nessecarily make any sense either.

So whether you should be religious or not is in the end just a matter of personal preference.

From here we know what we know from our inner lights perhaps.. to be religious or not.. is just a matter of personal preference.

People are moved in different ways. However, what God would want, or not want, I am not able to say without becoming religious about it?

So I won't.

If you hear the name of the Buddha go wash your ears out with soap and water.

A Zen masters words I once read that stuck to me.

I think we mean the same thing.

I wasn't suggesting that i think i know that god doesn't want us to be religious. What i meant was that we don't have any reason to assume that, if there indeed would be a god, he would want us to be religious.

So you where right when you said that any argument against god should prove that he doesn't exist, or it isn't a proper argument.

But an argument against religion doesn't have to prove that much. Only that there is no objective need for religion. So that it is only a matter of personal preferences.

So what i hope my argument showed: people are free to believe whatever they want. There is no way you could ever Judge a person, with proper arguments, for believing in what feels right to him.

Yes..I get you now.

I have inclinations to a personal God and that's my flair. It's shadowed me all my life. As close to me as my breath, and as far away as the stars.

Very personal, we have talks.

My no name God. And the funny part is that I don't even know if this God is there... but it's like habit to me.

Taking this away from me would be like taking away the breath of my life.

There might be no God, there might be a God.

The thought either way makes me feel very humbled before life.

I disagree, I think its an important and natural thing to ponder where we come from. But we are obviously pondering completely differen't concepts here. The relevance of the above issues you outline depend very much on your definition of god. The human attributes you assign to it (or him in your case?).. eg morality/wants/desires.. require a much differen't definition of "god" than what is being discussed in parallel here.

Personally I think that its hard to logically deny that there is some kind of "source" that is behind all that exists...I think its a mistake though to assign human attributes to it, for it would be so unfathomably alien to what we as humans can possibly grasp. Personification was a likely catalyst for a lot of church dogma down the ages.

As nen said ealier in the thread... define god.

"God" doesn't want anything from us, because we are merely fragments of "God", "Dao", "Brahman", "Void", "Source", "Oneness", "The All", whatever.

Our spirits, our souls, our egos, all are fragments of "God", an "infinite fractal".

So... really, what "God" wants is equal to the totality of what every Being wants, on every level of every plane of Existence. Hence, what our puny egos think that "God" wants is only a miniscule fragment of what "God" wants.

When we, as ego, claim to speak of knowing what "God" wants, we may as well be claiming that this is what the entirty of Existence wants, and believes. Which isn't true.

Ergo, no-one can claim to have the "Truth" of anything, because the "Truth" is something no ego can handle... maybe no soul can, either.

There's no "God" in the religious sense. There is no personal god. The whole idea of a personal god is merely a safety blanket for our fragile egos. To have some divine being on our side whom our egos create to feel superior to those that don't.

As a prime example, Yahweh, the Judeo-Christian god, was (and is still) an incredibly violent and cruel tribal war god, created by the Jews to justify war and revenge against those they perceived as their enemies. Hence the dogma of the Jews thinking they are the "Chosen Ones" and that "Israel" was their "Promised Land". Which is delusional bullshit. They created a history for themselves that never happened, when cross-referenced with other accounts of history.

Most of the dominant religions define god as some kind of supreme being. My logic is simply that if this god would indeed exist, and if he would be the great creator of all there is, and if he would have wanted us to be religious...he shouldn't have created THIS universe.

For there is nothing, absolutely nothing within this entire universe, that could possibly give us even the slightest certainty about his existence. Within all of this universe, there is nothing that proves without a shadow of a doubt, that we should be religious.

So no person who believes in the type of god as depicted by Michelangelo, could possibly have any argument that would prove that anyone who doesn't subscribe to his particular religion would therefore be immoral, acting against the will of god, be a sinner, a lesser being, or be otherwise deplorable.

It is simply not reasonable to assume that there is a Michelangelo-painting type of god that wants us to be religious. So there is no basis to Judge or stigmatise people, based on what some people think a michelangelean (if that's a word) type of god would want.

p.s.

Or to Judge people who do believe in thattype of god.

Yeah, I totally agree that there is no reason to assume the existence of a deity-like figure.. and dangerous to put faith in such a figure (especially encouraging others to do so too). But that doesn't really have much to do with god in the true sense of the word..because while the dominant religions ascribe human or moral tendencies in god, they still attain that god is the primordial "source" of all that exists.. so I think "primordial" and "source" are probably the two qualities of god that we can all agree on.

I guess my point is that the arguments against the god figures of the dominant religions are more so arguments against the pretty ridiculous human traits assigned to them, rather than necessarily being against the notion of a transcendent source.. the notion of a human-figure existing outside the confines of space and time and creating the universe is mostly I think what rubs atheists the wrong way

We can debate this and that trait of god.. but one thing that is difficult for anybody to deny is that something very mysterious has brought the universe into existence - and that is imo, the heart of the debate on god.