Define God Thread

[Kharakov]

So the first part of your definition of God would be:
1) God is the creator of heaven and earth.

What is heaven (imagination?)? What is earth (nature?)?
What is the evidence that God created heaven and earth?

Is this a debate thread?

How about a nailing down individual definitions of God thread, with the goal of recording or refining any inconsistency in people's definitions of God.

Atheist definitions are easy- to them, God is an imaginary entity in the mind of believers.


Theist definitions are a bit more nuanced. If they're going to believe in someone, they had better be willing to have a refined definition of what the being is, and a well established way of knowing that what they think of as God is not simply a creation of their imagination, created with 'information' from myths passed down through the ages.


If you have an inconsistent definition of God, it might be refined if you accept that your definition is not consistent.

So if someone says they get their definition of God from the Bible, and that the Bible is literally true, they'd have to address things like:

The Bible is literally true, word for word, yet Chronicles and Kings have 2 different descriptions of the same event (they do).

For the Bible to remain true, it would have to describe more than one world, however it doesn't say that specifically anywhere. I suppose we could assume that people knew the MWI of QM 5000 years ago- but I wasn't taught that that was the case (although I accept that it might have been).

 

[blastula]

God is the transcendent ground of being, who is a person who watches you masturbate.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

God is the transcendent ground of being, who is a person who watches you masturbate.

So this kind of God, how does that fit in the God Zoo? A metaphysical God? A form of pantheism? God as an impersonal force?

 

[another1]

Is your brain outside your mind?

That is a loaded question, Kharakov. A better phrasing for my personal view would be "is my mind outside my brain", but at any rate, our minds and brains are the same thing, aren't they? Are our minds outside our bodies? Where exactly are our bodies? That question has been loosening dandruff in my beard for a while. I just stare at it for a moment (to make sure it isn't lice) and then blow it into the rug. Same with all unknowables. The most frustrating unknowables are the ones that you feel everyone should instinctively know already. Like the existence of God. Affirmative or negative, the energy is taxing and all of that energy goes to God, which is one of the most frustrating aspects of the fuss, in my opinion.

We are of course inside our bodies which hold our minds. That is what we are. The thing typing is what. But is, is but random access memory. Not a lot, either. We remember things completely differently than they actually happen. Stock photos from somewhere. Our own? Maybe we all remember the same looking omelet this morning, but when we check on social media... we remember - oh the leafy thing was on the plate. Up until we saw the leaf, we were just suffering lack of data.

Most of the wrinkles and folds inside the brain may be for shock absorption, later use in evolution... a plethora of reasonable uses. The data necessary to experience any given moment (while thinking several things) is relatively small. But data from where? If the leaf was in our minds the whole time, why couldn't we see it? Sorry I don't have a better word than data, but that seems to be the way to put it nowadays. I think the details in moments we remember are a good way to study this, whatever we're talking about. Relating it all to computers gets old, but it gets points across quickly.

 

[Keith&Co.]

God is the transcendent ground of being, who is a person who watches you masturbate.

So this kind of God, how does that fit in the God Zoo? A metaphysical God? A form of pantheism? God as an impersonal force?

God as the source of guilt to motivate socially awkward behavior.

 

[rousseau]

A meme in the minds of human beings

A story.

Someone once said: yea some intelligent mind probably created all of this.

Someone replied: yea, you're probably right.

They told all of their friends.

Enter religion.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

A meme in the minds of human beings

A story.

Someone once said: yea some intelligent mind probably created all of this.

Someone replied: yea, you're probably right.

They told all of their friends.

Enter religion.

Many early religions have a primordial sea or primordial chaos emanaingt the first Gods, plural.
No God, singular here. The idea of a single, everlasting God who creates all is a much later theology.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

God is the transcendent ground of being, who is a person who watches you masturbate.

Or as my parents believed, ...the unseen host at every meal, the silent listener to every conversation...

 

[abaddon]

God is the transcendent ground of being, who is a person who watches you masturbate.

So this kind of God, how does that fit in the God Zoo? A metaphysical God? A form of pantheism? God as an impersonal force?

The 'source of all being' personified as voyeur or prude or both. So a metaphysical-whatever and Big Brother and nanny in one… a trinity.

 

[Tigers!]

For the Bible to remain true, it would have to describe more than one world,

Why would the Bible have to describe more than one world to be considered true?

however it doesn't say that specifically anywhere. I suppose we could assume that people knew the MWI of QM 5000 years ago- but I wasn't taught that that was the case (although I accept that it might have been).

What is MWI?

 

[Keith&Co.]

Why would the Bible have to describe more than one world to be considered true?

Imagine that there's a world where the geologic record shows only 6000 years of geologic strata, including a single global sediment event; where dinosaur fossils were intermixed with grizzly fossils and bronze tools and unicorns.
TO the scientists on hypothetical Earth Two, the Bible as we understand it is historically true.
Of course, on THAT world, their Bible probably contains a book of Darwin...

 

[Kharakov]

Why would the Bible have to describe more than one world to be considered true?

The discrepancies within it, describing the same events.

David "took" 1700 horsemen in 1 Chronicles 18:4, and 7000 in 2 Samuel 8:4.

however it doesn't say that specifically anywhere. I suppose we could assume that people knew the MWI of QM 5000 years ago- but I wasn't taught that that was the case (although I accept that it might have been).

What is MWI?

 Many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

 

[Random Person]

I didn't read the entire OP or any of the other posts.


That's my definition of God.

 

[Malintent]

so the OP asks about gods and definitions, and Lion IRC feels compelled to spout a paragraph of platitudes...

Not platitudes. It's the Nicene creed. It was the product of the seminar Constantine called to figure out just what his empire's mascot religion was and wasn't.
Whether the official dogma was to believe in one god that did everything, or two gods: one that did all good things and one that did all evil; whether they felt Jesus was god or related to god or human working for god; whether Christ was actually crucified or managed to duck out and get Lucifer nailed to the cross in his place; All the various dogmas held by one or another religious tradition that held itself to be Christain.

So, really, when asked to define God, Lion offers a definition of Christain.

Oh.. Thank you for educating me. I didn't realize he wasn't even being original. figures.

 

[Learner]

The discrepancies within it, describing the same events.

David "took" 1700 horsemen in 1 Chronicles 18:4, and 7000 in 2 Samuel 8:4.

Probably from the KJV but as you see below from the earlier Septuagint the writings are in sync.

Sept. 1 Chronicles 18:4 And David took of them a thousand chariots, and seven thousand horsemen, and twenty thousand infantry: and David houghed all the chariot [horses], but there were reserved of them a hundred chariots.


Sept. 2 Samuel 8:4 And David took a thousand of his chariots, and seven thousand horsemen, and twenty thousand footmen: and David houghed all his chariot [horses], and he reserved to himself a hundred chariots.

 

[Lion IRC]

Even the people who suspect its a copying error agree that's not the only possible explanation for the difference. The two accounts can be taken as separate reports of the same event from different perspectives and they are not mutually exclusive.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

A deeper problem is not the numbers of chariots here, but the very different tales of how David came to be known to Saul.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

A deeper problem is not the numbers of chariots here, but the very different tales of how David came to be known to Saul.

Well, that's just because the historically factual "They met at a gay orgy" was viewed as awkward by the writers of that time, so they needed to invent a new meeting place.

 

[Kharakov]

sol So, from one perspective, there are 1700 horsemen, and another there are 7000? Wow... good drugs back then. Wonder if people saw burning bushes, and other stuff?

 

[Lion IRC]

There's an argument that the historian was accounting the 1,700 as part of the overall 7,000 and that a change in the actual fighting function of a combatant during the course of the battle made the reported number open to change depending on what stage you were at.

...how many foot soldiers - 20,000
...how many tank drivers - 7,000
...how many tank drivers after all the tanks got bogged - zero

Lemme guess. The number of foot soldiers just rose to 27,000 right? - only if you exclude the reinforcements who just arrived.