DLH
Theoretical Skeptic
Define God. Simple request. What is a god? Simple question, simple answers. Define what a god is. This should be pinned. to the top of this forum on Existence of God(s) IMHO.
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Define God
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Jarhyn
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Thread 'Ripping Open the Mysteries of gods' https://iidb.org/threads/ripping-open-the-mysteries-of-gods.28236/
You could have, you know, actually opened up the existing thread on the topic. That i linked you do last time you came here. And which you appear to have ignored.
You could have, you know, actually opened up the existing thread on the topic. That i linked you do last time you came here. And which you appear to have ignored.
DLH
Theoretical Skeptic
How old are you? How do you remember that? I don't remember you. I don't remember anyone here except for @pood and only that for the avatar and odd screen name. I'm 58 years old. Had a heart attack at 40 and have been heavily medicated (beta blockers, statins) for over a decade. They really have fucked up my cognitive abilities and memory. I used to have a memory and mental ability like a well oiled steel trap when I was in my 20's. Somone on a forum would tell me trivial details about where they like to take vacations, what they did and the name of their pets. Years later after a long departure I would tell the same person what I remember and they would be like "I don't know who you are."
I joined this forum in 2015. I don't remember that. I don't remember how long I posted. I joined again as RIS last year. I don't remember that. I don't remember any discussions I've had. I don't remember any of you. Except for pood. Isn't that horrible? It is. I hate it, but it's the truth. It's life. My life.
But anyway, quickly going over the OP you've linked I will say, this isn't meant to be that type of discussion. I want to keep it simple.
Jarhyn
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There is no way to keep this conversation simple. My discussion over there is WHY it cannot POSSIBLY be simple: it is a complex topic.
If you want to treat a complex topic as simple... You are doing it wrong.
At best, treating complex topics as simple will confuse some, give others the wrong impression, and degrade your own ability to handle it as "complex".
You cannot simplify this topic because the topic is already excessively over-simplified.
I sent you to a link where it can be discussed with precision, where all the proper care has been taken to start "teasing" apart your conflation/equivocation.
I sent that link to you last time and clearly you didn't read it.
People here understand it on MY level of conversation, by in large. They understand the differences between these usages and they damn well know folks around here are going to annoy them to be precise.
I made that thread in fact specifically to handle people like you.
DLH
Theoretical Skeptic
I see. I'm responding to that even as we speak. But I'm going to have to disagree with you on the complexity of the subject. Albert Einstein said If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.
I didn't say I didn't read it. I may or may not have. I don't remember.
Here I want a simple definition.
Mine, for example, has been driven into the ground in other threads at great length and detail, but it is simple; a god is anything or anyone attributed great might and respected (i.e. venerated, worshiped). That is what a god is - all gods - whether literal, physical, spiritual, natural, supernatural, fictional, metaphorical, ironical, etc.
Jarhyn
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Albert Einstein was a human fully capable of saying stupid and ignorant shit.
Reality does NOT allow for simple explanations to be correct of any complicated topic.
I explained it in the most simple way that is available.
You are a child, looking at it with the eyes of a child and seeing it as children do.
Please put away such childish things.
ideologyhunter
Contributor
Well, this is easy. Referring to another thread, a god is anything or anyone, because "anything and everything can be worshipped." So it can be a deluxe pizza, a Hershey bar, Eric Clapton, a painting by Breughel, hell, it can even be shit. See, with the wonderful world of multiple meanings, we don't need this discussion at all, because the turnstiles are open, no one's checking IDs or selling tickets; it's all good.
However, if you want a more meaningful, defined discussion, let's limit it somewhat: that force which directs my life and occupies my thoughts and full attention, at least on Sunday mornings, when I'm tuned in to it. My dick.
However, if you want a more meaningful, defined discussion, let's limit it somewhat: that force which directs my life and occupies my thoughts and full attention, at least on Sunday mornings, when I'm tuned in to it. My dick.
steve_bank
Diabetic retinopathy and poor eyesight. Typos ...
The question for you is what does god mean to you as a 'bible believer' and what you think that god tells you what to do and then what you do.
An extreme example is Zionism in Israel. The land in and around modern Israel Gaza and the West Bank was given to Jews by a god so it is theirs by dive right.
Other extremes of religion the Islamic theocracies in Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and now Syria.
Here in the USA the Christian anti abortion crowd who claim god says all life is sacred so abortion is against what god wants.
Or priests and minsters who violate civil law saying they obey higher laws of a god. None of it explicitly written in nay scripture but they know what god wants.
God is wherever a Christian makes he, she, or it to be
The god of the ancient Hebrews was a reflection of the male patriarch.
As mythology gods are a reflection of culture and imagination.
The bible gd was a vengeful destroyer. Upset with humans destroying with a flood.
The modern liberal friction of god is a god who loves and hugs everybody, includng gays.
Why not start by saying 'God to me is ... barbecue ....'
An extreme example is Zionism in Israel. The land in and around modern Israel Gaza and the West Bank was given to Jews by a god so it is theirs by dive right.
Other extremes of religion the Islamic theocracies in Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and now Syria.
Here in the USA the Christian anti abortion crowd who claim god says all life is sacred so abortion is against what god wants.
Or priests and minsters who violate civil law saying they obey higher laws of a god. None of it explicitly written in nay scripture but they know what god wants.
God is wherever a Christian makes he, she, or it to be
The god of the ancient Hebrews was a reflection of the male patriarch.
As mythology gods are a reflection of culture and imagination.
The bible gd was a vengeful destroyer. Upset with humans destroying with a flood.
The modern liberal friction of god is a god who loves and hugs everybody, includng gays.
Why not start by saying 'God to me is ... barbecue ....'
DLH
Theoretical Skeptic
So are we.
An explanation wasn't requested or required. Only a definition.
Oh boy. Don't go metal guru on me just when you were starting to look like the voice of reason in a rolling sea of insanity.
DLH
Theoretical Skeptic
Stop diverting and define a god is in YOUR own words.
DLH
Theoretical Skeptic
God is homosexual tendencies?
Jarhyn
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Capable of. But the difference is that, right here, right now, I'm right about this.
As I have said elsewhere, asking a highschooler to define prime numbers will give you a simple and wrong answer. Asking a college professor at MIT will get you a much more complicated answer.
The problem here is that definitions of philosophical topics call out for semantic completeness, or at least isolation of something fairly well assumed to be semantically complete.
I would invite you to look at the axioms of ZFC and try to understand that to really something like "the square of a number" from those axioms, you will be presenting something complicated.
The first thing you will learn in any advanced class on science, biology, and math, is that the concepts you learned, even the very definitions, are meaningless trash. You will have different definitions offered, harder ones, more complicated ones, ones that will drive rightly half the class to drop it because they can't even parse the text of them let along GROK them.
Oh, I am a voice of reason. I'm just also someone with a lot more experience than you.
Also, none of the folks around here are insane except for a few of the MAGA hats kicking about, and you have been quite disrespectful of the very concept of this place in ways that are disappointingly familiar.
Imagine instead of being "the one and only you", you are the seven hundredth. Sure, you don't remember having come through here because each time it's a different copy that still hasn't been here yet... but it's always some admixture of definitional dickery and Pascal, sometimes with a dash of Kalam.
Instead of taking the time to expand your understanding of the subject, you demand simple definitions. Well, there aren't any because people use the word for such vastly different things that they must be differentiated clearly.
DLH
Theoretical Skeptic
You are right about a simple definition being impossible, Einstein was capable of saying stupid shit but incapable of providing a simple definition of God?
Okay. Right now, though, we need the highschooler approach. Can you manage it?
If you ask a college professor of theology if the Bible teaches the immortal soul he would say yes, but the highschooler would point out Ezekiel 18:4 and Matthew 10:28.
Ah, but you see, that isn't what we are doing here.
Then you are overqualified to participate in any meaningful way? And can't give a simple definition of what a god is. What it is to be a god.
DLH
Theoretical Skeptic
Lord appears where the scribes removed the name Jehovah from the text and replaced it with the generic term adonai, LORD. Lord means someone or something having power, authority, or influence; a master or ruler, God means an adored, admired, or influential person, is that what you are saying?
Ford
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That's called "getting old." I'm 59, and while I've been heavily medicated for hypertension for the better part of a decade, I don't blame that for my lapses in memory. I'm just getting old. For example, I can tell you all about a woman I dated for awhile back in 1994. I can tell you where we met, who introduced us, who was in the car when we went to the club that first night, where she worked, what she made me for dinner the first night I spent at her apartment, where that apartment was (red door at the end of the row on the 2nd floor) and what she was wearing when I broke up with her.
Her name? Nope. That's just gone. Memory is funny like that. It's never a "steel trap."
As far as your OP, that's kind of along the same lines. "God" is what humans use to fill in the gaps in their lack of knowledge. God is a placeholder. Can't figure out what the Sun is or where thunder comes from? "Well that must be the work of the sun god and the storm god, respectively!" Planets that don't follow the paths of the other celestial objects? Well those must be gods, too. Fast forward a few thousand years and we've figured out that the Sun is a star and the planets are worlds like ours? "Well...okay, they're not gods, but surely god created everything outside of that!"
Can't grasp the vast diversity of life on this planet? Surely, god created all of it in a magical *poof.* Then we figured out evolutionary biology and next thing you know people are saying "well of course god didn't *poof* it all into existence...he designed it to unfold in a way that looks indistinguishable from evolution!"
"God" is a placeholder for that which we don't yet understand. Much in the same way that "the devil" is a scapegoat for human inadequacy.
Define God. Simple request. What is a god? Simple question, simple answers. Define what a god is. This should be pinned. to the top of this forum on Existence of God(s) IMHO.
god - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
That probably covers most people's gods.
DLH
Theoretical Skeptic
Where in HELL have you been?!
Me too.
I get you, and it isn't just the medication, each of which lists in the inserts that it causes short term memory loss and mental confusion, but it also has a lot to do with diet (see video at the end of this post).
Oh, yeah! I know, memory works in strange and mysterious ways. It doesn't record the details; it leaves those for us to fill in. For example, we can remember some event from our childhood like it was yesterday and, in our mind, picture the clothes we were wearing, then see an old photo of us at the event with different clothes than we remember. We get the clothes part from somewhere else. Like maybe a Motley Crue T-shirt instead of the turtle neck sweater we thought. That's why I never intentionally memorize scripture to impress people. You remember it wrong for the wrong reasons. There was a brief period in my life where I did a lot of - shall we say chemical enhancements - which couldn't have helped much but I don't think as much as the medication and diet.
I don't remember that either. Actually, I never do. I follow the notifications and whatever the message says I respond to. Not according to the messenger or the context of the OP.
[Sigh] C'mon Ford (Prefect?) Everything is that. That's sort of my point.
I'm not familiar with that specific colloquialism. It could be math or grammar, both of which I have always sucked at.
Now look. The problem with that sort of "science minded atheistic" thinking is that it, like God in Douglas Adam's HGTTG, it vanishes in a puff of logic. Some examples:
- Moses lifespan: Thousands of years ago (Psalm 90:10; 1513-1473 BCE) Moses wrote that the average lifespan was 70 years. 80 if you are fortunate. Since life expectancy was allegedly about 35-40 years during the "Dark Ages" it is assumed that it must have been at least the same in Moses' time or less (20-30 or 40-50) if you were fortunate enough to survive childhood. So, people have this Hollyweird (Monty Python's Holy Grail: Bring out your dead) image of everyone dying at a very young age when actually Moses was saying that everyone (having survived childhood) lives to about 70-80 and science says if a person lives to 80 years old, but they had 4 siblings who died at age 0 (infant mortality). The total years lived by all 5 siblings is 80 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 = 80 years. Divide that by the number of siblings (5), and the average lifespan is 80 ÷ 5 = 16 years. So, despite one person living to 80, the high infant mortality drags the average down to 16. Then you have the question of how it may have decreased from the 1400s BCE to the "Dark Ages" because in the dark ages they were living in filth with animals who shat in their drinking water - they were drunk from childhood to the grave. Domestic animals. When the Europeans came over to lands where that wasn't a thing, where they were hunters instead, they brought the diseases they had become immune to wiping out the population by the millions.
- Celestial Revelation: Science minded atheists think the celestial phenomenon in the book of Revelation was the product of an ignorant primitive superstitious people. That's because they are ignorant of the text. It was actually a metaphor for social and political upheaval. The same exact language was used in much earlier Hebrew texts describing the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 609-607 BCE. New government, new people, new environment. In Revelation it's just on a grander, global scale. Instead of the destruction and subsequent rebuilding of Jerusalem it's the same for the entire world. New government (Jehovah's) new people (Jehovah's) and new environment (Jehovah's)
Maybe the bloke would think "Oh, that's an interesting rock, I think I'll add it to my collection." Or "That's not a bad watch. Not as good as the ones I used to have on my home planet of Betelgeuse, but still." Or "Cool, I like that bone, I'll tie it into my beard tonight when I'm rubbing shit in my hair."
Which brings us back to Hitchhikers. We modern-day men of science - a couple thousand years after nailing a man to a tree for saying how nice it would be if we could all just get along - think the digital watch, or more contemporaneously, the cell phone with GPS is a pretty good idea. Thankfully we aren't like those primitive people who were so confused about life, the universe and everything. But those people didn't have the strange ideas science projects at it in near abject ignorance. They lived in that universe. They were concerned with survival. Not the right exit to take to get to 5th avenue on the weekend when you want to walk around in women's clothing. Put the modern man out in the desert without their cell phone along with the primitive man and I promise you the primitive man would fare far better than the modern.
The telegraph would, it was thought, improve national discourse and prevent wars. The opposite happened. The cell phone, you would think, would greatly improve communication. Until you walk into a doctor's office with a room full of zombies staring blankly at their cell phones playing solitaire.
See what I did there?
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