(March 30, 2014 at 4:45 pm)Ryantology (╯°◊°)╯︵ ══╬ Wrote: God cannot be measured, observed, or scrutinized. Even if we were to dismiss empirical methods, God can't even be interviewed (nor would he be likely to cooperate, otherwise we would know already). God's effects cannot be compared relative to anything God might explain. Even if God actually was the initial source of consciousness, it still wouldn't explain the nature of consciousness. You'd simply be giving up one concept you can't explain for another concept you can't explain. No useful knowledge would be obtained. It puts us absolutely no closer to accomplishing the goal of explaining what it is and how it works.
God has all the explanatory power of a shrug of the shoulders.
Although God is not comprehensible to us in a physicalistic/empirical sense, the most familiar and yet mysterious quality that everyone ascribes to Him (assuming that He exists) when they use the word "God" is that He possesses consciousness, that He has a mind. If He didn't have that then we wouldn't be calling Him "God." So, in our minds the idea of God and consciousness are inextricably connected.
And the consciousness that we ascribe to God comes from our own experience of consciousness, which itself is a wholly subjective state. This means that, epistemically speaking, the unexplainability of God is not something separate or additional from the unexplainability of consciousness as people are thinking here. The mystery of God is caused by the mystery of consciousness and vice versa; they are just different perspectives.
And how much of an explanatory power that God has doesn't just have to mean "scientifically explanatory," in case you were expecting it to be that way. Science itself is a construct of our own minds, yet science cannot explain minds because the mind is more fundamental.
The means of explaining things - whether it is through science, mathematics, religion, philosophy, or whatever - are all inherently subjective howsoever empirical or objective they might seem. The subjectiveness, the fundamental inwardness in ourselves is the only route we can take. Knowledge starts there and it ends there.
(March 30, 2014 at 10:54 am)rasetsu Wrote: Various gods? I've made it clear I worship one god. That you don't even know what I believe and yet you think yourself fit to criticize is pathetic and stupid.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but to me it wasn't clear that you worship only one god, and it still isn't clear.
One thing I know about you is that you said that you follow a brand of Hinduism known as Shaktism which, although there is only "one" supreme being according to that religion, there are also numerous other gods/goddesses co-existing with each other which are said to be diverse manifestations of that supreme god (for example, the goddess of material fulfillment, the goddess of cultural fulfillment, the goddess of destruction, the fierce goddess, the widow goddess, and so on). Those are just some of the principal deities - "deities" with an "s" - each of them having separate functions and their own images and statues.
Therefore, in that regards, Shaktism doesn't appear to be a monotheistic religion to me even if you say that all those gods are manifestations of a single god. There are various gods and not just one god. So you will have to incorporate multiple gods into your religious view in order to regard yourself as a true believer of Shaktism. That is my take on your religion, unless you can convince me otherwise.
(March 31, 2014 at 3:11 am)bennyboy Wrote: Now, we have a conceptual closed loop-- we are using the mind to formulate an understanding of the mind, while treating the ideas we make as representing something other than our experiences.
I agree with you, and I was thinking the same thing while typing my response. I think that what belief in God does is that it sort of closes the loop because God contains all the consciousness, and we ourselves, through the consciousness ingrained in us, are able to associate the consciousness with God Himself who is ultimately the source of that, even though we don't understand Him fully.
The rest of your comments were really interesting and I might ponder on those points for a good amount of time.
