RE: What God's justification for eternal torment?
November 25, 2020 at 10:28 am
(This post was last modified: November 25, 2020 at 10:43 am by The Grand Nudger.)
I think that personal experience is the most compelling rationalization for why a person might believe, but it's no certification of the accuracy of the contents of that experience. That you dreamt of jesus instead of vishnu is entirely cultural. That you imagine a god would be kind or loving or patient or calm or understanding, equally so. Perhaps you've mistaken god for those things based on the expectations your culture manufactured?
Taking the terrible out of god satisfies our ethical impulses, but it erodes one of the legs of the sense of the divine - which is found in dread and tragedy, cruelty and indifference and pain and death. If there's some sacred all then these must find inclusion, else we begin to express our growing inability to believe, fully, in the notion of gods.
It's clear in this example, at least, that your faith (or the contents of your faith described) reduce to what you believe should be true, regardless of what is - and, ultimately, that's the fundamental basis of any religion that people have faith in.
We have come to believe more in our ethical statements, ourselves-in-effect, than we have in the power and being of gods, right down to the faithful. It's not particularly recent - the transition from largely descriptive (and multitudinous) pagan gods to a single declarative god like the abrahamic is the story of monotheism and of man setting out to create the truth he wishes to see instantiated in the world. The imposition of human order to and in contrast to brute facts of nature, which, by turn, fascinate and terrify us. The late pagans called the new monotheists atheists - and not for no reason.
Taking the terrible out of god satisfies our ethical impulses, but it erodes one of the legs of the sense of the divine - which is found in dread and tragedy, cruelty and indifference and pain and death. If there's some sacred all then these must find inclusion, else we begin to express our growing inability to believe, fully, in the notion of gods.
It's clear in this example, at least, that your faith (or the contents of your faith described) reduce to what you believe should be true, regardless of what is - and, ultimately, that's the fundamental basis of any religion that people have faith in.
We have come to believe more in our ethical statements, ourselves-in-effect, than we have in the power and being of gods, right down to the faithful. It's not particularly recent - the transition from largely descriptive (and multitudinous) pagan gods to a single declarative god like the abrahamic is the story of monotheism and of man setting out to create the truth he wishes to see instantiated in the world. The imposition of human order to and in contrast to brute facts of nature, which, by turn, fascinate and terrify us. The late pagans called the new monotheists atheists - and not for no reason.
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