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Author Topic: God is Reality Personified, Not a Person
koinotely
Jedi Master
Posts: 89
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Post God is Reality Personified, Not a Person
on: June 23, 2012, 13:30
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Interesting website.

"God is not a person; God is a mythic personification of reality. If we miss this we miss everything. 

Birth, life, death, the cycles and rhythms of Nature, the elemental forces of the Universe—these are undeniably real.  Like it or not, we humans have always been in an inescapable relationship with a Reality that we could neither fully predict nor control.  And given the nature of our brains, there's one thing that people in every culture and throughout history have instinctually done: we've used metaphors and analogies to understand and relate to that which is unavoidably, undeniably real and/or mysterious.  We can't not do this.  Consciously or unconsciously, we will always interpret via metaphors. 

ALL images and concepts of God are more or less meaningful interpretations and personifications.  And it didn't take a genius to figure out that if you trust, or have faith, in what is ultimately inescapable, your life works better than if you judge or resist what is real.  This is not theological rocket science."

http://www.thankgodforevolution.com/node/2010

Maya
Administrator
Posts: 51
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Post Re: God is Reality Personified, Not a Person
on: June 27, 2012, 12:04
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Thanks for posting this, koinotely. Personally (heh) I think that last paragraph its the cosmic nail on the head. The key words to me are "meaningful". Our conceptions of God are, of course, imperfect to the extent that our apprehension of anything beyond our own experience is imperfect. But they are still meaningful if they allow us to have a relationship with what is "ultimately inescapable". And of course, I love the comment about it not being theological rocket science. :)

Maya
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Posts: 51
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Post Re: God is Reality Personified, Not a Person
on: June 27, 2012, 12:29
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After reading the original article, I had a few more thoughts on the subject:

"ALL images and concepts of God are more or less meaningful interpretations and personifications. And it didn't take a genius to figure out that if you trust, or have faith, in what is ultimately inescapable, your life works better than if you judge or resist what is real. This is not theological rocket science."

I think he's right, too, that this is not rocket science, but sometimes we (striving to be) human beings focus so much on the minutiae that we miss the larger issue.

To say that faith is about having a right (and rich) relationship with reality, puts it elegantly. But in a sense, it is about the supernatural, in the explicit meaning of the word. We humans are supernatural in the sense that we daily defy, alter, or manipulate the laws of physics that other animals are subject to. We have no wings, but we invent machines that allow us to fly. We are slow afoot, but we invent machines that allow us to move faster than the fastest animal on land or sea or in the air. We routinely invent places and people and other beings that do not exist (in fact, that's what I do for a living) and we conceive of things that are outside of nature ... IF we narrowly define nature as being those things that are directly sensible.

This fuzziness around the definition of "nature", I think, lies at the heart of many disagreements over whether God (and the human soul) are supernatural entities. I am personally comfortable with the idea that God is at once the most natural reality and yet beyond nature.

Krishna provides this wonderful portrait of the ultimate Reality that I have always loved because it is a metaphor that I can "grok" as a writer: "All the visible universe comes from my invisible Being. All beings have their rest in me, but I have not My rest in them, And in truth they rest not in Me. Consider my sacred mystery: I am the source of all beings, I support them all, but I rest not in them." — Bhagavad Gita 9:4

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