[posted this at another thread, but this is more pertinent as a separate topic]
What people overlook in twenty-first-century arguments over deity is that so many different concepts of deity, whether Biblical or Eastern or whatever, are still impelled by human/cultural notions, often extremely subject to and reflective of local or topical fads, whether of yesterday's revival tent or prehistoric hunters. It's all well and good to show that the Biblical deity -- or any other scripture's deity -- is rife with contradictions, but that simply reflects the shifting winds of human culture. That has nothing to do with what may or may not be the characteristics of any deity that's real, if one exists at all.
There is some documentation -- independent of any single culture's scripture or canon -- of certain figures who seem to be responding to certain promptings that are viscerally perceived as both highly ethical and metaphysical, in some way. But is that really due to uniform characteristics of this deity -- whatever that is -- or to some uniform quirks in the human brain? We won't know the answer to that until the human brain is fully mapped and tracked and monitored. Surprisingly, technology and science still aren't -- quite -- there. But enough strides have been made recently to make such a goal conceivable at some point in the future.
Ridiculous and inconclusive arguments come round and round on numerous boards on the web, rehashing the old questions surrounding the contradictions in all creedal canons of texts. But I almost never see discussions centering on the single place where all notions of deity have started throughout time: the human brain, which precedes any canon ever written down.
The human brain is individual, not institutional. How come the human brain sometimes generates a highly individual notion or notions of a deity based on a visceral interaction/transaction of some kind? It's that highly individual transaction from certain countercultural ......... visionaries? lunatics? adepts? hallucinators? sages? quacks? ........ where the notion of deity as some external entity really starts. Is that perceived entity really external or all in the head? And whether or not it's all in the head or external, written down texts already have self-serving institutional barnacles on them by the time they're set down, which clutter up the real data from these lone individuals. Get down to the bare bone of these lone individuals, without the self-serving institutional crap, and we might be a step closer to understanding the compulsions that drive these selected individuals.
Truth in advertising here, if I may: personally, I DON'T buy into the frequent notion that individual "transactions with deity" begin with variants of curiosity. I used to assume curiosity as a prime motivator; but a lifetime spent reading up as a layman on the history of those lone individuals who habitually "re-take" what deity is through their own "encounters" reveals, if anything, an obsession with social justice far more than any curiosity about the nature of things at all. In fact, involvement with the nature of things usually appears foisted "on top" of the lone individual's encounter, and at a much later stage in the written texts, after the fact, than is the case with social justice, an obsession with the latter appearing to be much closer to the original "DNA" of a typical lone eccentric's own deity experience.
That pattern was extremely surprising and unexpected to me, but ultimately, I found it too pervasive and consistent to ignore. Consequently, if deity is all in the head, it is clearly so as an adjunct to our notions of fairness much more than as an adjunct to our curiosity. (Some creeds even place their deity/deities as concurrent with the cosmos rather than preceding it, making the whole question of cosmic inception and its causes possibly irrelevant to any question concerning deity.)
Thoughts?
Stone
What people overlook in twenty-first-century arguments over deity is that so many different concepts of deity, whether Biblical or Eastern or whatever, are still impelled by human/cultural notions, often extremely subject to and reflective of local or topical fads, whether of yesterday's revival tent or prehistoric hunters. It's all well and good to show that the Biblical deity -- or any other scripture's deity -- is rife with contradictions, but that simply reflects the shifting winds of human culture. That has nothing to do with what may or may not be the characteristics of any deity that's real, if one exists at all.
There is some documentation -- independent of any single culture's scripture or canon -- of certain figures who seem to be responding to certain promptings that are viscerally perceived as both highly ethical and metaphysical, in some way. But is that really due to uniform characteristics of this deity -- whatever that is -- or to some uniform quirks in the human brain? We won't know the answer to that until the human brain is fully mapped and tracked and monitored. Surprisingly, technology and science still aren't -- quite -- there. But enough strides have been made recently to make such a goal conceivable at some point in the future.
Ridiculous and inconclusive arguments come round and round on numerous boards on the web, rehashing the old questions surrounding the contradictions in all creedal canons of texts. But I almost never see discussions centering on the single place where all notions of deity have started throughout time: the human brain, which precedes any canon ever written down.
The human brain is individual, not institutional. How come the human brain sometimes generates a highly individual notion or notions of a deity based on a visceral interaction/transaction of some kind? It's that highly individual transaction from certain countercultural ......... visionaries? lunatics? adepts? hallucinators? sages? quacks? ........ where the notion of deity as some external entity really starts. Is that perceived entity really external or all in the head? And whether or not it's all in the head or external, written down texts already have self-serving institutional barnacles on them by the time they're set down, which clutter up the real data from these lone individuals. Get down to the bare bone of these lone individuals, without the self-serving institutional crap, and we might be a step closer to understanding the compulsions that drive these selected individuals.
Truth in advertising here, if I may: personally, I DON'T buy into the frequent notion that individual "transactions with deity" begin with variants of curiosity. I used to assume curiosity as a prime motivator; but a lifetime spent reading up as a layman on the history of those lone individuals who habitually "re-take" what deity is through their own "encounters" reveals, if anything, an obsession with social justice far more than any curiosity about the nature of things at all. In fact, involvement with the nature of things usually appears foisted "on top" of the lone individual's encounter, and at a much later stage in the written texts, after the fact, than is the case with social justice, an obsession with the latter appearing to be much closer to the original "DNA" of a typical lone eccentric's own deity experience.
That pattern was extremely surprising and unexpected to me, but ultimately, I found it too pervasive and consistent to ignore. Consequently, if deity is all in the head, it is clearly so as an adjunct to our notions of fairness much more than as an adjunct to our curiosity. (Some creeds even place their deity/deities as concurrent with the cosmos rather than preceding it, making the whole question of cosmic inception and its causes possibly irrelevant to any question concerning deity.)
Thoughts?
Stone
via JREF Forum http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=263151&goto=newpost
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