(November 7, 2014 at 3:31 pm)lweisenthal Wrote: By invoking God's "attributes," you are needlessly introducing dogma and doctrine. God's "attributes" are much less definable than God's simple existence. For the present purposes, God is simply a higher order of sentience, capable of communicating with lower orders of sentience, the latter of which benefit in terms of comfort, solace, inspiration, courage, escape from addictive behaviors, perseverance, happiness, and even longevity -- all of which have been documented in the peer review medical literature to be benefits of religion, including "spirituality."
Which means that the only way you can prove god- in the most hypothetical, navel-gazing way possible, I might add- is to strip away most all the defining characteristics of one, until you're left with "a higher mind." But you could do that with anything; if you no longer have to work within the parameters of what a thing is in order to prove it, then proving anything becomes both trivial and meaningless.
Hey look, I just proved the existence of the philosopher's stone! But only if I define the philosopher's stone to mean this ordinary rock here!
Besides, you're going to run into trouble right off the bat by the simple contention that not all higher orders of sentience are gods. You're just slapping an impressive sounding label onto something that doesn't warrant it; why god and not, say, satan? Both are higher orders of sentience, and if that's your only qualifier for what a god is then you have no good reason to avoid the same kind of definitional stripping back with other concepts.
Or hey, why not give it a new name, since it doesn't do the sorts of things we commonly understand gods to do, like create universes or life, or perform miracles? Why not just call it Jimbob the space weasel?
Words have meanings. It might be ideologically favorable for you to ignore whatever fragments of those meanings you like to define whatever thing you please into existence, but that doesn't obligate anyone else to play by the definitions you're using in this one single scenario alone.
"YOU take the hard look in the mirror. You are everything that is wrong with this world. The only thing important to you, is you." - ronedee
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Want to see more of my writing? Check out my (safe for work!) site, Unprotected Sects!