(September 4, 2019 at 3:25 pm)Aegon Wrote: "Mystical" and "supernatural" are terms to describe things we don't understand, things that don't fall into the parameters of how things should be, or how events should occur. They need not hold any greater power than that, and God hardly seems like a reasonable conclusion given enough reflection on the idea. Think about it: how many things did cultures decide to deify, or worship, because they didn't understand what the hell was going on? Thunderstorms were once unexplainable, so a society decided that the gods were mad, and took steps to appease this god so there would be sunny skies. We know why thunderstorms happen now. We no longer need to defer to mystics to know why it rains.
Let me tell you why I scoff at human experiences being evidence, beyond what I already said; we have an EXTRAORDINARILY narrow view of reality. Even high school physics tells you there are things going around us all the time that we can't see, like electro-magnetic waves. Our brains evolved just enough to lead us to become king of the planet, but stopped woefully short of letting us see the true nature of things. At the end of the day, what we experience with our five senses is just our brain's best guess as to what is happening around us. We can't say that it actually is reality...just that it's a pretty good idea of it, since things generally react the way we expect them to. We have the highest consciousness on Earth and yet our perception just scratches the surface. Your perception is wrong CONSTANTLY - when you see something out of the corner of your eye that isn't there, or hear somebody say your name but they were actually saying something completely different - we have these tiny yet vivid hallucinations rather regularly.
We don't actually see everything for what it is, only what makes sense for us to see. Science has taught us, against all intuition, that apparently solid things, like crystals and rocks, are really almost entirely composed of empty space. And the familiar illustration is the nucleus of an atom is a fly in the middle of a sports stadium, and the next atom is in the next sports stadium. So it would seem the hardest, solidest, densest rock is really almost entirely empty space, broken only by tiny particles so widely spaced they shouldn't count. Why, then, do rocks look and feel solid and hard and impenetrable? Our brains have evolved to help us survive within the orders of magnitude, of size and speed which our bodies operate at. We never evolved to navigate in the world of atoms. If we had, our brains probably would perceive rocks as full of empty space. Rocks feel hard and impenetrable to our hands, precisely because objects like rocks and hands cannot penetrate each other. It's therefore useful for our brains to construct notions like "solidity" and "impenetrability," because such notions help us to navigate our bodies through the middle-sized world in which we have to navigate. Moving to the other end of the scale, our ancestors never had to navigate through the cosmos at speeds close to the speed of light. If they had, our brains would be much better at understanding things at that level.
From there, I also contend that "I", your sense of ego, is an illusion, and an incorrect inflation of the human experience in context of the larger cosmos. The same way "solidity" and "impenetrability" are notions we constructed to explain things, countless other ideas we have of our existence fall in the same boat, including ourselves. It's a byproduct of higher consciousness. It very obviously has its place and purpose, and that is why we experience it.
Here is a passage from Alan Watts that summarizes my POV:
"[The ego] is a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that “I myself” is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body — a center which “confronts” an “external” world of people and things. This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated “egos” inside bags of skin."
So now you see, roughly, where I'm coming from philosophically. Reality is so insane and far from simplistic enough for comfortable comprehension, and you're coming at me with God and the Bible? I feel like Christianity is on Level 5 or 6, and the actual truth of reality, whatever that may be, is at Level 50,000. I don't believe in God because God seems fairly obviously man-made. The conception that we have of God, particularly in Judeo-Christian thought, is a reflection of ourselves - well, more specifically it's a reflection of a Jew from the 14th century B.C. God, Jesus, Satan... these are archetypes, stories that man has created not only to explain the unexplainable but also, unconsciously, as a way of expressing our nature and what we think the world and civilization ought to be like.
Books like the Bible are incredible, and have their place in our history, collective psychology, and philosophy. There is a reason Nietzsche was concerned with God's "death." But I have absolutely no reason to think of it as the truth. God, our place, what we should do, what this all means - I mean, you see how I see this as ridiculous? To contend that Christianity is true reeks of egomania on a frankly shocking scale, going so far as to say that: not only does the self exist as a tangible thing, but it is permanent, timeless, and extends beyond your physical death. And that self's path depends on our actions and how well we worship a deity? Wow. We're really that important? Roughly 13 billion years in and our words, our morality, everything we've constructed is really that important? I can't even create something myself that feels further from the truth than that! It is egomania in the truest sense of the word.
There's undeniable beauty in our existence, and the breadth of it is literally unimaginable. There is a great feeling of unity with the nature of reality that can be obtained without a single supernatural claim. And you're not satisfied with that? You still want to shoehorn God in there? I don't get it. The archetype has value, surely. But I just don't see how somebody can really think about this stuff and conclude that there is a God. I just don't get it.
Hope that made sense. May have just been a nonsensical rant.
I am not sure I'd be quoting Alan Watts to support my views, but I nevertheless find myself in substantial agreement with you just the same, given your careful disavowal of the supernatural (which I see as an utterly illogical and useless concept) and your clear statement that God is neither a necessary nor sufficient explanation for anything unknown. I also very much like your understanding of monotheism as essentially an ego inflation issue. I tend to approach it more as founded on a failed epistemology (religious faith) but the popularity of embracing such an unsupportable belief-system IS fundamentally grounded in arrogance -- in other words, a failed epistemology combined with an utter lack of epistemological humility.
