The Concept Of Being "God Fearing"

[buttslinger]

Look, if you've SEEN God,
Then God exists
If you haven't,
Then He doesn't.
Not a problem.

The people who are talked into believing in God,
can just as likely be talked out of it.


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[martin48]

That's just the sort of infantile cartoon that gets this thread a bad name. Shame on you

[buttslinger]

Listen, if you're afraid to give away everything you own, leave all your friends and family, give up sex and fine food, TV.......Then you're rightly afraid of God.

And even a fool as foolish as buttslinger sees this debate as a no-win draw at best.
I contend that the actual Entity of God is standing directly in front of you at this direct moment.
One size fits all.
What kind of reasonable person would try to sell that?

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[hippifried]

1 size fits all, huh?
So God's an asshole?

[martin48]

1 size fits all, huh?
So God's an asshole?

Not a totally new theological argument. The question to ask "With all the shit in the world, where does it come from?" Or perhaps, he (I assume "he") doesn't care a shit.

[hippifried]

Butt aparently, "he" gives one.

[buttslinger]

If I have any weakness it is that I care too much.

[trish]

Trump just quickly drew the logical conclusion to the pro-life premise. If a fertilized egg is a person and abortion is murder, than women who hire abortionists are contract murderers and should be punished. Trump is guilty of two things here. 1) Adopting the pro-life premise (probably for political purposes - because he clearly never gave this issue two minutes of thought on his own). 2) Not having enough familiarity with the issue to know that pro-life adherents have long ago been forced to retreat from the logical conclusion their position entails. Trump got himself snagged by the logical conundrum inherent in position he is forced to adopt if he wants the pro-life vote.

Jesus Christ is usually presented as a kind, gentle and forgiving healer. He intervenes between humankind and the angry Old Testament God. I was taught to pray to God in Jesus’s name. But among the End Times evangelicals today that Jesus is on the wane. The modern Jesus carries a sword and rides a steed. He wreaks vengeance and beheads monsters. He’s more like Gandalf and less like Gandhi.

[Stavros]

It is curious how this thread seems to generate a mixture of baby-talk and incoherence, as if the concept of God were so obscure, or so daunting no rational sense could be made of it. If we reconsider the concept of God in the context of 7,000 years or more of human history, it should not be difficult to see how at one time humans viewed themselves as part of a cosmic, universal system from what they could see on earth to what they thought they saw in the sky during the day or at night. Most systems of belief thus attributed super-human powers to earth, air, fire and water -the earth breaking apart in front of you and swallowing up a village, or providing grain and fruit and other tasty foods. The air that enables you to breathe and live, or carries with it bad smells, or nice smells, or the 'mal-aria' which kills with fever. The fire that gives you roast meat, warmth in winter, or burns your family to a crisp as it comes roaring out of the forest. Water to drink, to live, with which to cook, that floods your home and takes away everything you own. And not so hard to imagine humans making moral judgements on the basis of either a catastrophic event, or a blessing.

The Ancient Egyptians shared with the Hindu as they shared with Australians a cosmology in which they were embedded in time and space across the earth and in the universe they could see and imagine. There was no beginning and no end to time, no limits to space, and a sense in which humans were on a journey and/or that life revolved in cycles again and again. One wonders why people from different parts of the world all had a similar view of their place in the scheme of things, and why it has been so important for others to dismiss it, for just as the baby-talk brigade or the confused prefer to lean on Darwin and dismiss thousands of years of human thought as gobbledegook about a sky-fairy with no relevance to the modern world or the cause of most of its misery, so they walk arm in arm with those religious fanatics who also dismiss thousands of years of belief and practice to insist that their version of Judaism, Christianity or Islam is the only one that matters and that everything since Moses, Jesus and Muhammad has been a mistake or is an error that needs to be corrected. It is a negative reaction to modernisation which cannot cope with the complexity and diversity of human societies, and thus reduces it all to a piece of shit.

One would have thought we also had a more educated cohort of citizens more willing to think deeply about issues be they religious, secular, scientific or political, rather than march arm in arm with those who wish education, like the wheel, had never happened.

So the answer to: "The question [to ask] "With all the shit in the world, where does it come from?" Or perhaps, he (I assume "he") doesn't care a shit" is one that produces a simple explanation: human agency. Just as humans have either created the concept of God as a concept of power, or deduced from the evidence there must be a supernatural power religion has always placed the explanation of human behaviour on human agency -if you are rewarded by God with a life of happiness it is because you led a moral life in accordance with the scripture; if you failed, it is because you wanted to be exempt from the rules. But it was always a human response to human success and failure, the God element is thus, like the law, the benchmark by which human agency is judged. It doesn't take a genius to come up with the idea that the sky is angry when lightning and thunder wake you up at night, and not much genius to use it to organise society as, I suspect, societies want to be organised and look for organising principles to control human behaviour. Thus, whenever there has been a breakdown in state power, when 'the centre does not hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world' in fact humans find a way of organising authority amongst themselves, be it a tribe, a gang, a guerilla band, a coven, whatever it might be.

The role played by violence in the dismissal brigades of religion is a curious one because just as the baby-talkers want to 'bomb the shit out of ISIS', ISIS wants to bomb the shit out of us. The same Christians in the US who want to classify abortion as murder and thus punish the murderers who take away a human life, send adults to the death chamber for execution, or young men and women to a battlefield to fight and die, or sit in a bunker in Ohio while a drone drops a bomb on a village in Afghanistan. And yet the religious texts on which they base their creed admonishes them for the ease with which they kill others, just as Muhammad faced with someone rejecting the existence of the one God would feel sorry rather than angry, and prefer to persuade rather than to kill.

And one does wonder why it is that so many religious texts use literary devices such as metaphor, allegory, simile; and tones of voice such as joy, exaltation, bitterness and sarcasm with which to express the 'word of God' -as recited by man of course. Thus when Jesus in Matthew 10:34 says "Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword", does this mean that a Christian can go to the shop and buy a sword with which to slay his enemies? If you think that the words are literally what they mean, then onward, Christian soldiers, go.

Or could it be that in an age when most people were illiterate, religious thought was transmitted through oral recitation and used literary devices as aids for memory? (cf Frances Yates, The Art of Memory). It does seem logical. Studies over many years of the oral traditions of epic poetry enabled scholars to unlock the means whereby the Iliad and the Odyssey became so crucial to understanding ancient Greek societies and indeed, our own. The moral composition in these poems is the basis of ancient Greek religious thought and uses literary devices, repetition of key phrases in particular, as modes of memory. People remember stirring or moving phrases, they remember that Agamemnon has a 'loud war cry' and instantly know of 'Man-slaying Achilles' and all his attributes, and from the hieroglyphs of Ancient Egypt to the symbology of Ancient America, you find this curious fact that in religion people do not always seem to be saying what they mean.

"Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword" -If a person is not living a moral life or a happy life and they are discontent, they are not 'at peace' and maybe the 'sword' is the 'sword' of justice, or a weapon that will cut through the mire and the unhappiness and release the victim from his or her torment. One can see how the image of the sword is not intended to refer to Valerian steel or an object that beheads unbelievers, yet one can also see how in the hands of the baby-talk brigade, that is what it becomes, just as one can understand how decent people revolt against it, and prefer to make the connection between the metal and the man, rather than the metaphor and the human.

[trish]

In Matthew 25:31,32,33 we read “When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be assembled before him, and he will separate the people one from another like a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.”

Are we to take this literally or is the second coming a metaphor? In either case, people are being likened to sheep and goats. What distinguishes the sheep from the goats?

Matthew 25:34-46 tells us that essentially the sheep are those who treated people with charity even though they were strangers and the goats are those who were uncharitable. The goats will say, “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not give you whatever you needed?” And the Son of Man will answer, “...just as you did not do it for one of the least of these, you did not do it for me.”

One metaphor is made explicit here: every person, even the stranger, is Jesus and Matthew here is telling us that we must treat others as charitably as we would treat Jesus. But why?

Matthew has Jesus tell the sheep, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” To the goats he says, “...depart into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

If this is a metaphor, an implicit analogy, then what is homologue of eternal life? Well-being? Satisfaction? Contentment? Justice? Knowledge that you’ll be fondly remembered? What is eternal punishment? Frustration? Being disliked? Empty? Knowledge that you’ll be forgotten or hated by future generations?

From my perspective, these interpretations work fairly well as providing reasons (albeit selfish ones) for being charitable.

Now suppose eternal life and eternal punishment are not metaphors. Surely the harm done by any being of finite power is finite. Even the destruction of the planet and on life upon is a finite amount damage (especially if every soul on it lives forever anyway either in Heaven or Hell). Why would a charitable God choose to punish anyone eternally for something they did as a finite material being during a tiny, finite window of time spent on this little ball of dirt? Eternal life, eternal punishment, Heaven and Hell on one side of the scale and human beings, ignorant except of whatever conflicting things they’re told by human authorities purporting to speak for the Gods on the other side. Do the scales balance? I think not, not if eternal life and eternal punishment are interpreted literally.

So I’m perfectly willing to accept that the parables, the stories and the advice given in the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita etc. work as metaphors. But does any Christian, Muslim, Hindu etc. take all of these stories metaphorically? Are there any Christians who think the soul is finite? That life after death is a fiction? That the second coming is just a metaphor? Just a way of presenting a story? Or do Christians continue primarily to think in the primitive modes our prehistoric forebears explored? Do they not still walk in those same baby steps, afraid to set out on their own because otherwise the cosmos seems too big, too bewildering? Here in the U.S. Christians refuse to acknowledge that humans give purpose to life and as a result they live empty lives waiting for a non-existent God or one of his earthly authorities to tell them how to live.

I have no interest walking arm in arm with religious zealots who would force others to believe as they do. Conversation and thought are tools enough. As far as I’m concerned people can believe and will believe what they wish. That doesn’t mean I respect all religious belief, or will not criticize some religious beliefs or belittle some religious beliefs.