a literal "god" in a metaphorical interpretation of the religion?

The mind is naturally abstract and it's contents, a symbolic representation in every respect.

There is only one real state and it is represented by ourselves, metaphysically. We make it up.

 

Can't you see God is real I see him everywhere I go. God live's behind those who truly try and understand because we are God. Animals Worship us can't you see that. who else can tame a Lion, Learn to fly, Resurrecting the dead, Healing the sick, and even Walking on water. God is the Apex Predator can out preform any living species. It was are our only way of thinking. Don't count on computer's to find our meaning for computers are our own reflection. All we have to do is believe and we can achieve. Before the bible we didn't know we could Tame a lion or Fly, But we believed that somehow this one man could calm a animal and sore to the heavens. Once we have it in our minds we use that as an understanding. Life is infinite, but our story is coming to a fork in the road. If we keep our old ways we will surely come to a screeching halt, but if you decide to change then we can evolve to a even bigger story or we could just start all over again. I'm sorry tree huggers we can't hurt this earth.

 

Can't you see God is real I see him everywhere I go. God live's behind those who truly try and understand because we are God. Animals Worship us can't you see that. who else can tame a Lion, Learn to fly, Resurrecting the dead, Healing the sick, and even Walking on water. God is the Apex Predator can out preform any living species. It was are our only way of thinking. Don't count on computer's to find our meaning for computers are our own reflection. All we have to do is believe and we can achieve. Before the bible we didn't know we could Tame a lion or Fly, But we believed that somehow this one man could calm a animal and sore to the heavens. Once we have it in our minds we use that as an understanding. Life is infinite, but our story is coming to a fork in the road. If we keep our old ways we will surely come to a screeching halt, but if you decide to change then we can evolve to a even bigger story or we could just start all over again. I'm sorry :devil:we can't hurt this earth.

 

One thing I find amazing is that we are here having this dialogue. Because evolution is full of contingencies, like Pikia surviving the Burgess extinction. According to evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould, our existence is a fluke. The fact that there is any conscious, intelligent being asking questions about God and the universe is a fluke. Or is it? I can't prove that it isn't, but intuitively, I'm impressed, and therefore am inclined to bet it isn't. As for the "amazingly powerful being", it's strictly an inference to account for an amazingly coincidental universe. I think things "just being", when their "just being" is highly improbable, is too good to be true. But the Guy in the Sky "who has the ability to create everything"? That's a pretty anthropomorphic rendering of God. I don't believe that.

 

But the opposite is not true.

 

Absolutely. But I interpret it metaphorically. And my belief in God is separate.

Right. But "God" isn't "an expression that can mean anything", even though the term has a variety of meanings. The relevant meaning to me is what I mean by it when I use the term, consistent, of course, with usage by other respected thinkers who have written on the subject: e.g., Paul Tillich, Karen Armstrong, Paul Davies, Marcus Borg, Bishop Spong.

 

Well some of us are content with just the universe.

 

that's kind of the problem. thinkers have their definitionS of "god". christianity has theirs. hindu's have theirs. some people think it's "mother nature"... etc. but "everyone" knows what a traffic light is.

furthermore, christianity seems to be pretty centered around the concept of "god". so i don't think it makes sense to simply ignore their "god" and still be christian. that seems like some major "cherry picking".

 

That is all anyone needs, but those who believe otherwise want more. They want the impossible.

 

Sure everybody knows what a traffic light is, but does everyone know what Liberty, Justice or Democracy are? And yet, important as trafic lights are, its Liberty, Justice and Democracy that people have been willing to give their lives for. "God" is the same kind of concept. John Dewey defined God as the summation of human idealism, and from a pragmatic standpoint I think that has a lot to commend it.

I don't think it makes sense to ignore God, but what is "their" God--the Dude in the Sky? Since the earliest days of Christianity, there's been a lot of disagreement on the nature of God, with a degree of uniformity being imposed by the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages. Since then, the uniformity has fallen by the wayside (thank God!). I don't feel bound to accept Catholic and fundamentalist concepts of God--certainly not to accept the formulations in their creeds, which were more a function of politics than spiritual insight. As a matter of fact, I think those conceptions are wrong. My views, however, are pretty much consistent with Progressive Protestant Christianity. That's where I'm coming from, and I'd argue further that these views are more consistent with the teachings of Jesus than the others; the Sermon on the Mount, the parable of the Good Samaritan, Love they neighbor, etc.

 

they are both concepts, but the concept of a literal "god" doesn't have any practical value. this to me is more pragmatic.

ok, but progressing towards what? i don't want to lose track of the discussion topic. literal "god" in metaphorical interpretation of religion. not the other way around or another variation. if this is what Progressive Protestant Christianity is then i would say that is a name that signifies the incompatibility, which i'm talking about.

 

Practical turns out to be what we practice. Is there a literal good?
Our accounting of good determines the amount of good that we perceive.
Fundamentally our practice is to obtain our good. My good, my god, is transcendent and infuses the fabric of reality in every sense and position.
My good then appears to me from every corner of life.

 

It's funny how egocentric fantasy-realities can't predate their 'eternal' hosts.

 

Does eternity have a date? I don't get the joke.

 

If your mind makes up the "only one real state" then you are either eternal or delusional.

 

I mean one practically accessible state, our life. And what you call your life and the lives of those you know, as opposed to all life, is bound by your conceptions about or narrative of. We arrange our lives according to abstract principles. The human details of life are concocted, most often, unfortunately, to deceive genuine nature.

 

if you interpret "god" as synonymous to "good" and reality. then it is expected that you will encounter it everwhere. it sounds like a metaphorical interpretation.

 

The concept of a factual God, i.e., one who actually exists, could have, at minimum, the same practical value as a valid theory of cosmology. Mathematicians and physicists get excited about the possibility of developing a TOE (Theory of Everything) which would unify general relativity and quantum mechanics to explain and tie together in an elegant series of mathematical equations all known physical phenomena, and predict the outcome of any experiment that could be carried out in principle. I'd call that practical! Some physicists believe that 11-dimension M-theory or Superstring is the TOE. According to this theory, everything in the universe is made up of loops of vibrating strings, whose vibrations account for particle differences. Is this to be taken literally or metaphorically? I'd say metaphorically. There is no empirical confirmation of the existence or characteristics of these loops, nor any known means of obtaining it. Give Superstring a beard and you could call it Yahweh, but would we actually believe that our conceptualizations are likely to describe reality in any but the crudest of approximations? But is it then an illusion or a useless abstraction that we might as well discard? I don't think so. I think we might learn a great deal as mathematical physicists refine the concept.

Kant demonstrated centuries ago that we are prisoners of our perceptions and mental categories. The best we can do is rely on our "practical reason", and act "as if" it's true. The Toltecs say that our knowledge of true spiritual reality (nagual) is clouded by Tezcatlipoca, the Smokey Mirror (a metaphor). We see through a glass darkly, and cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker might be right that evolution has played a trick on us by giving us the ability to ask the Big Questions without the capacity to answer them in any but the most rudimentary way. But I think it's worth trying, like Sisyphus (another metaphor). That's what being human is all about.

 

i haven't seen any reliable predictions, that come from "god" theories. i consider myself making considerations about something, as a way of trying something out. it's one of the advantages of being human.

 

As a practical matter then, finding our good is job one. If you expect that I would encounter it everywhere, (good), considering my minds application, then there is pragmatic demonstration of the value of such perception.
And, as I said in post 21, everything we see in our minds eye is a facsimile, an interpretation of reflected light. Perception is not knowledge but perception can lead to it.

Is there a physically objective physical constituent called good or a physical reality called bad?