God's purpose

[Emily's Cat]

I know this is a serious derail here, but I've really never understood the conceptual underpinnings of Jesus. In most religions, I can grasp the concept of god that is being used. I can grasp how that particular concept of god fills a social role, usually in the context of determining behavioral norms and cultural mores. I can see the need for an authoritarian Jehovah, a judge and rule-maker. That nature gods, and the gods of archetypes are also easy to follow. But Jesus was always particularly challenging for me.

Here we have a person who is simultaneously God, the son of God, and born of the Holy Spirit who is also God. God-the-Son and God-the-Father don't always agree on everything, and God-the-Son spends a large chunk of his life not even aware that he is God. Then he is executed... and he rails against God-the-Father forsaking him yet simultaneously allows himself to be a willing sacrifice to God-the-Father in order to atone for the sins of all of the not-gods on the planet.

It has always baffled me. It's just such a complicated way to go about building a religion.

 

[Thor 2]

I know this is a serious derail here, but I've really never understood the conceptual underpinnings of Jesus. In most religions, I can grasp the concept of god that is being used. I can grasp how that particular concept of god fills a social role, usually in the context of determining behavioral norms and cultural mores. I can see the need for an authoritarian Jehovah, a judge and rule-maker. That nature gods, and the gods of archetypes are also easy to follow. But Jesus was always particularly challenging for me.

Here we have a person who is simultaneously God, the son of God, and born of the Holy Spirit who is also God. God-the-Son and God-the-Father don't always agree on everything, and God-the-Son spends a large chunk of his life not even aware that he is God. Then he is executed... and he rails against God-the-Father forsaking him yet simultaneously allows himself to be a willing sacrifice to God-the-Father in order to atone for the sins of all of the not-gods on the planet.

It has always baffled me. It's just such a complicated way to go about building a religion.

You are not alone in you're confusion Emily's Cat, and no I don't think it's a derailment. If we can get our heads around that one maybe we will be close to finding God' purpose.

 

[Jodie]

Maybe this is de rigeur in theological debates, where the turgidity of one's belief is all anyone really has to go on, but in science, no. Just no. Even when there may be no way to directly test them, hypotheses can still be falsifiable. They can still be compared for validity with existing models of physics, can still be ruled out by testing the assumptions they'd need to be correct.

I think science beats guessing any day but if the best educated guess is in itself based on a best educated guess then I don't think that's a very strong argument for science.

"Anybody's guess" does not cover it when the guesses can include the universe being farted out of a giant Space Unicorn, on the basis that someone once said so and it feels truthy enough.

Never heard of that religion.

 

[Jodie]

I know this is a serious derail here, but I've really never understood the conceptual underpinnings of Jesus. In most religions, I can grasp the concept of god that is being used. I can grasp how that particular concept of god fills a social role, usually in the context of determining behavioral norms and cultural mores. I can see the need for an authoritarian Jehovah, a judge and rule-maker. That nature gods, and the gods of archetypes are also easy to follow. But Jesus was always particularly challenging for me.

Here we have a person who is simultaneously God, the son of God, and born of the Holy Spirit who is also God. God-the-Son and God-the-Father don't always agree on everything, and God-the-Son spends a large chunk of his life not even aware that he is God. Then he is executed... and he rails against God-the-Father forsaking him yet simultaneously allows himself to be a willing sacrifice to God-the-Father in order to atone for the sins of all of the not-gods on the planet.

It has always baffled me. It's just such a complicated way to go about building a religion.

I don't think it really happened and I don't get it either.

 

[Jodie]

Not how I see it.

Religion (Abrahamic at least): we know how it happened. God told us. If you doubt beyond what we say you can doubt, you'd better repent, because our God is always right and he can get angry.

Science: we don't know how it happened. Here's the information we have currently, so you can see the evidence we're using. If you can come up with a better hypothesis to explain the evidence, publish a paper, and we'll talk about it.

Same net result except I haven't been struck by lightening yet.

 

[Pup]

I think science beats guessing any day but if the best educated guess is in itself based on a best educated guess then I don't think that's a very strong argument for science.

How is anything else superior, though? Religion isn't even an attempt at making an evidence-based guess. If the current advancement in science isn't rigorous enough, seems theonly other thing to do is say we don't know, which is perfectly acceptable in my opinion, if one wants to set the bar quite high.

 

[Pup]

I know this is a serious derail here, but I've really never understood the conceptual underpinnings of Jesus. In most religions, I can grasp the concept of god that is being used. I can grasp how that particular concept of god fills a social role, usually in the context of determining behavioral norms and cultural mores. I can see the need for an authoritarian Jehovah, a judge and rule-maker. That nature gods, and the gods of archetypes are also easy to follow. But Jesus was always particularly challenging for me.

Here we have a person who is simultaneously God, the son of God, and born of the Holy Spirit who is also God. God-the-Son and God-the-Father don't always agree on everything, and God-the-Son spends a large chunk of his life not even aware that he is God. Then he is executed... and he rails against God-the-Father forsaking him yet simultaneously allows himself to be a willing sacrifice to God-the-Father in order to atone for the sins of all of the not-gods on the planet.

It has always baffled me. It's just such a complicated way to go about building a religion.

That's always been the strongest case I could make for there being a real Jesus, or several similar combined ones.

Weird Jewish preacher shows up, gets some followers, and they say, "You're G-d, huh?"
"No, I'm just here to tell you he said..."
"G-d sent him! Did you hear that?"

Time passes. "Jesus, are you really G-d?"
"Well, maybe not exactly. But people say... We're all children of G-d, but... I don't want to talk about it. Let me just preach."

Stories start: "He can do miracles... You know, like Leda and the swan... He's like a G-d right here on earth... Whoa!"

Jesus, finally: "Yes, I'm ready to come clean. It's all true. I have a direct line to G-d, or good old D-d as I call him. People suspected it so long, and I realize they're right." Gets crucified. "What the hell? I'm the son of a god. The King of the Jews--look at the sign. This isn't supposed to happen."

His followers are mortified. They have to pull together some kind of cohesive story where this makes sense. "He must have wanted to be crucified, because they couldn't do it otherwise." "Why would he want...?" "Maybe it was for us. He was such a generous guy."

Working with all the illogical elements, different groups stitched together different stories, then tried to stitch those stories together, until they produced the mishmash that's the New Testament plus some leftovers.

If they could have made it up from scratch and honed it into one smooth cohesive story, it would make so much more sense.

 

[Jodie]

On the contrary fundies do not seem to troubled by evolution, they just outright reject it. The one that do have a problem are the progressive ones, who have the intellectual integrity to agree that evolution is proven, and have to somehow weave this into there dogma. Now this may not be an issue for some lesser known brands of woo, but it certainly is so for followers of the Abrahamic three. Christianity is the hardest hit, as not only do its adherents have to tackle the origin of souls issue, but must also try and get original sin in there also. Without original sin Geebus is out on his arse and Christianity crumbles.

Most of the protestant religions I have experience with don't consider the bible to be literal. I've never run into anyone that ever had a serious issue with evolution except the Pentecostals.

 

[Jodie]

How is anything else superior, though? Religion isn't even an attempt at making an evidence-based guess. If the current advancement in science isn't rigorous enough, seems theonly other thing to do is say we don't know, which is perfectly acceptable in my opinion, if one wants to set the bar quite high.

Certainly not religion, but intuition also plays a part in the direction in which research goes depending on what branch of science your dealing with. I don't have issues with "I don't know" I only have issues with "It can't be because we haven't found empirical evidence for it". That's OK when dealing with concrete things like drug research but I don't think you can apply the same standard to consciousness and how that might relate to spirituality.

 

[Pup]

Certainly not religion, but intuition also plays a part in the direction in which research goes depending on what branch of science your dealing with. I don't have issues with "I don't know" I only have issues with "It can't be because we haven't found empirical evidence for it". That's OK when dealing with concrete things like drug research but I don't think you can apply the same standard to consciousness and how that might relate to spirituality.

If there's no evidence of some anomalie that needs investigated, I see no reason to proceed. If there's something that hasn't been satisfactorily explained, you can bet there are a handful of graduate students working on papers right now.

"Consciousness and how that might relate to spirituality" usually refers to something for which there's no evidence and therefore no need to explain (ESP, consciousness after death producing ghosts, psychic powers, etc.), or for a state of the brain that subjectively feels real but objectively produces no external evidence of anything unexplained (dowsing, ouija, out of body, EVP, etc.).

Unless and until evidence shows there's something that needs explained, I dont see a reason to try to explain something.

 

[Thor 2]

Most of the protestant religions I have experience with don't consider the bible to be literal. I've never run into anyone that ever had a serious issue with evolution except the Pentecostals.

What, none of it literal? Strange crop of Christians you hang out with.

 

[Beelzebuddy]

I know this is a serious derail here, but I've really never understood the conceptual underpinnings of Jesus. In most religions, I can grasp the concept of god that is being used. I can grasp how that particular concept of god fills a social role, usually in the context of determining behavioral norms and cultural mores. I can see the need for an authoritarian Jehovah, a judge and rule-maker. That nature gods, and the gods of archetypes are also easy to follow. But Jesus was always particularly challenging for me.

Here we have a person who is simultaneously God, the son of God, and born of the Holy Spirit who is also God. God-the-Son and God-the-Father don't always agree on everything, and God-the-Son spends a large chunk of his life not even aware that he is God. Then he is executed... and he rails against God-the-Father forsaking him yet simultaneously allows himself to be a willing sacrifice to God-the-Father in order to atone for the sins of all of the not-gods on the planet.

It has always baffled me. It's just such a complicated way to go about building a religion.

Early Christianity was a process of consolidating lots and lots of tiny, scattered cults, whose belief structures ranged from Judaism-plus to Zoroastrianism-lite. It wasn't a single theology that swept through the region, it was welded together in place, and the joints show. See also: the birth narrative, in which Lil' J bounces around the middle east like a haloed pinball to fulfil every single prophecy at the same time.

I think science beats guessing any day but if the best educated guess is in itself based on a best educated guess then I don't think that's a very strong argument for science.

Scientific hypotheses aren't educated guesses. What I posted above is an educated guess: informed, but there's no way to know if I'm wrong.

I would describe hypotheses more as bounded guesses. Just being educated isn't enough. They need to be self-aware enough to describe the assumptions upon which they rest and, this is the important bit, how one could tell if the assumptions or the conclusion were false. That's falsifiability, and it's a really important concept that underlies all of science. If something isn't falsifiable, if it doesn't come with a way to tell if it's wrong, it's not science.

Even the wacky bits of theoretical physics that you probably hear about from time to time where the universe has a hojillion dimensions, the scientists behind them don't just drop some peyote and start writing. They say, here is the model of physics we're deriving these ideas from, here's how it differs from other people's models, here's what those differences would look like if we could test them. That's important.

Do you remember the Higgs boson discovery from a year or two back? Whole branches of theoretical physics evaporated overnight, because they all depended on that particle not being there, the Standard Model being a little wrong, and the universe working a little differently than people thought. But there it was, outside the bounds of the guess. Decades of work evaluated at a stroke, explicitly because it was all falsifiable from the start. That's science.

Never heard of that religion.

I'm starting it now. All hail Princess Twinklebritches! May her love bites ever pass over and hit the poor bastard next to you.

So on the one hand we have conjecture based on our current understanding of high energy physics coupled with empirical observations of the universe, and on the other hoof, space unicorn farts. Which one do you think is a stronger argument?

 

[IanS]

Yes, fundamemtalists have issues with evolution but there are many, many variations of theism. You just kind of lumped us all together so I was responding.


So basically no one really knows so it's anybody's guess.


I call bull on this, the scientific method is the the scientific method whether you are looking at fruit flies or the center of the universe.


In other words, we really don't know but we think we are on the right track. Religions espouse essentially the same opinion on matters of origin minus any application of science. The net result is the same, everyone has an opinion and everyone is guessing.



I understand that and have no issues with educated guesses. I imagine that despite the refinement necessary, one or more of those theories as a work in progress, is correct. Not all theists see that as contradictory depending on what faith or philosophy you happen to follow.

OK .... so you clearly have no understanding at all, and you have absolutely no intention of understanding how and why science does explain all those things (as I have just carefully explained to you).

When you just replied saying "So basically no one really knows so it's anybody's guess." ... I just explained to you that nobody actually "knows" anything in this universe as a matter of certainty. Do you understand that? Because it seems that you certainly do not understand it!

Nothing in this universe, to use your mistaken word "known", is certain as any absolutely fact. But by far the closest mankind has ever come to understanding the most likely and most detailed explanations, are the theories we now have from modern science. No other claimed way of "knowing" comes within a million miles of the accuracy, precision, and apparent correctness that we have now obtained through science.

As I just patiently explained to you - if you wanted to rely on some other unscientific method of attempting to understand any of the things you mentioned, such as the BB and the origin of our universe, e.g. if you tried to use religious belief or philosophy, as people did attempt to use for thousands of years, you would have learned precisely nothing, not a single thing, about the BB, the origin of this universe, the age of the universe, how the energy released in the BB "cooled" to form what we call "particles (i.e. now better described as "fields"), how that led to the formation of stars, galaxies, planets, and eventually life on Earth. If you took away the discovery of science and relied instead on what philosophers, theists, theologians and mystics had claimed, then you would remain a complete ignoramus and know precisely nothing about about the true origin of our planet and our universe, you'd know precisely nothing about human evolution, and nothing about all the billions of other things that modern science has now explained.

If you collected together all the research papers just on the origin of our universe, all printed on A4 paper in bound research journals, then they alone would fill a football stadium. And yet you just dismissed that in one cheap theist science-denier line saying "So basically no one really knows so it's anybody's guess.". If instead you collected together all properly evidenced, properly researched and correctly explained claims of knowing the universe from those other methods of philosophy, theism, theology, mysticism etc., then all their accurate information combined would barely fill the back of a postage stamp!

You were trying to say that science could not explain all sorts of things about the origin of our universe. You are massively wrong, as I have just explained to you. Science has already explained an absolutely vast amount about all those aspects of our universe, inc. the specific points that you asked about and for which you just dismissed it all saying "so it's anybody's guess". Well to repeat (yet again) - we don't actually "know" anything (ever!)! ... but what we have found from science is an absolutely mind-bogglingly huge amount of extremely detailed information and a great deal of highly accurate insight and explanation with very precise models for how all of those universal events probably occurred ...

... against that what you had for thousands of years before science, and what many unscientific people still have today (many devout theists, new-age mystics and the like), are a whole load of mystical off-the-top-of -the-head superstitious beliefs that have turned out (been shown by modern science) to be entirely untrue superstitious nonsense that not even a ten year old should any longer believe.

 

[IanS]

I think there's an important distinction between saying science has the answers to just about everything, which I don't agree with, and the scientific method is the way to eventually find the answers to just about everything, which I do.

Pup - science doesn't have "the answers", as if to say it already has the 100% absolutely correct answer to every conceivable question about anything at all, as if any other ideas & activities outside of science are therefore worthless.

What I said to Jodie was that if we include relatively tentative explanations for the most obscure or most complex problems in this physical universe (eg the origin of the universe and the origin of life on Earth), then science certainly has provided such explanations for almost every physically existing event/phenomena in this universe. And I gave the example of a fairly tentative explanations and models for Jodie's question of exactly how or why our entire universe began in the first place .... there are literally thousands of highly detailed published research papers in mathematical and quantum physics providing a great deal of insight into how that process may have occurred ...

... but in reply to that, Jodie changed it to say she did not think science has the "answers" to such questions (she actually said "I'm not certain science has the answers to those questions. To say science has the answers to just about everything is kind of like saying religions do a really good job of explaining the afterlife IMO. ") .

What I am trying to explain to Jodie is that we are not talking about science providing "the answers", as if that meant a 100% factually correct "answer". What science provides, especially in those most complex and obscure problems that are still a work in progress as a very active area of current research (e.g. Big Bang and Abiogenesis), is at the present stage/date, many thousands of highly detailed research papers describing various plausible explanations, with a great detail of mathematical precision (e.g. in theoretical physics with models of quantum and relativistic cosmology), and in some recent papers, even with highly ingenious and very advanced astronomical experimental results.

The point is - current science most definitely does have extremely good and very advanced explanations for almost every conceivable aspect of even those most complex problems. And it's completely untrue for Jodie or anyone else to give the impression that science is not providing those explanations ... as if some alternative method of "knowing" was providing better or different explanations.

Those explanations are being narrowed down by new research papers literally almost every day. And it's highly likely (as all publications over the past 25 years show), that the final explanation will probably be very close indeed to the central aspects of the various Big Bang/Creation models that we already have ... it's extremely unlikely that the final explanation will be something entirely different.

So it's completely untrue to claim that science does not provide explanations for almost every conceivable real physically occurring process that has been observed or predicted in the known universe. It most certainly has already done that. In fact, just off the top of my head, I can't think of anything where any one of us could not immediately give a perfectly reasonable scientifically based explanation.

What Jodie appears to be trying to do, and what most theists almost always do, is trying to deny science and trying to take what is in fact an anti-educational stance, of claiming that there are all sorts of very important issues which will always remain beyond the reach of science. If she is trying to say that, or if she believes that, then I think she is wrong, and in fact all of science shows why she would be wrong to think that and why religious/mystic-type claims of that sort do not stand up at all.

 

[jimbob]

I know this is a serious derail here, but I've really never understood the conceptual underpinnings of Jesus. In most religions, I can grasp the concept of god that is being used. I can grasp how that particular concept of god fills a social role, usually in the context of determining behavioral norms and cultural mores. I can see the need for an authoritarian Jehovah, a judge and rule-maker. That nature gods, and the gods of archetypes are also easy to follow. But Jesus was always particularly challenging for me.

Here we have a person who is simultaneously God, the son of God, and born of the Holy Spirit who is also God. God-the-Son and God-the-Father don't always agree on everything, and God-the-Son spends a large chunk of his life not even aware that he is God. Then he is executed... and he rails against God-the-Father forsaking him yet simultaneously allows himself to be a willing sacrifice to God-the-Father in order to atone for the sins of all of the not-gods on the planet.

It has always baffled me. It's just such a complicated way to go about building a religion.

Early Christianity was a process of consolidating lots and lots of tiny, scattered cults, whose belief structures ranged from Judaism-plus to Zoroastrianism-lite. It wasn't a single theology that swept through the region, it was welded together in place, and the joints show. See also: the birth narrative, in which Lil' J bounces around the middle east like a haloed pinball to fulfil every single prophecy at the same time.

Yup. Lots of mystery cults around at the time, coupled with several what would now be millennial cults* and then squeezed to fit with the requirements of the Roman Empire. Dying and resurrecting after three days is also not a novel concept.



*The Essenes, being an obvious example

 

[Hlafordlaes]

... but I don't think you can apply the same standard to consciousness and how that might relate to spirituality.

The assumption here - and not at all uncommon - is that spirituality is related to consciousness. In my view, this places consciousness on an undeserved pedestal as some ineffable thing. But rather than go into the science, just a reflection: since consciousness can be turned off and on, it most certainly could not be the same thing as the soul or spirit, ostensibly immaterial and so not subject to such manipulation.

 

[Jodie]

If there's no evidence of some anomalie that needs investigated, I see no reason to proceed. If there's something that hasn't been satisfactorily explained, you can bet there are a handful of graduate students working on papers right now.

Well sure there is a reason to proceed, consciousness studies continue all the time. I think consciousness needs to be defined first before you could question whether it's related to anything more than brain cells and synapses.

"Consciousness and how that might relate to spirituality" usually refers to something for which there's no evidence and therefore no need to explain (ESP, consciousness after death producing ghosts, psychic powers, etc.), or for a state of the brain that subjectively feels real but objectively produces no external evidence of anything unexplained (dowsing, ouija, out of body, EVP, etc.).

That wasn't what I had in mind. You know how you feel when your walking into an area and you suddenly get the feeling it's not safe? Your environment is feeding your subconscious information that affects your emotions and works as a survival mechanism. I'm thinking that as evolution proceeds we ought to develop a more integrated way of thinking so that it's not a matter of picking up on "feelings" without knowing the cause for those feelings. I guess I'm trying to imagine what heightened awareness might include and it might allow us to see more and experience more of reality than we do at the moment.

Unless and until evidence shows there's something that needs explained, I dont see a reason to try to explain something.

If we have no idea what consciousness actually is but people continue to report what we consider to be delusions or hallucinations then I would think that warrants further research. Some of those delusions/hallucinations have clear cut causes like mental illness if they are repetitive. I'm not so certain that's the case with a one time occurrence.

 

[Jodie]

The assumption here - and not at all uncommon - is that spirituality is related to consciousness. In my view, this places consciousness on an undeserved pedestal as some ineffable thing. But rather than go into the science, just a reflection: since consciousness can be turned off and on, it most certainly could not be the same thing as the soul or spirit, ostensibly immaterial and so not subject to such manipulation.

You are right, I'm assuming it's related. Consciousness might be the superficial personality that we have while inhabiting our bodies.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I don't think it really happened and I don't get it either.

Regardless of whether it happened, it's the concepts embedded within it that really make it hard for me to see.

Nature gods - most First Nations, a fair bit of Shinto IIRC, and the first round of Greco-Roman gos (Titans) are the easiest from a conceptual perspective. They're the gods of "why". Why is there scary lightning? Because Thor is fighting someone. Nature gods are primitive man's explanation for all the things in the world that we had no explanation for.

Archetypal gods - the younger generations of the Greco-Roman pantheon, Hindu gods, even old testament Jehovah, also make sense to me. They're the gods of "should" they represent the variations of human emotion and ideals. They're representations of behavioral sets that we, as humans, should either aspire to emulate or seek to avoid. Prometheus is the representation of self-sacrifice in the pursuit of knowledge for the greater good, a very cohesive idea that is fundamental to a functional society.

Jesus is just something different. Something that doesn't fit well within my brain. It may be that he is a representation of a behavioral archetype as well, just not one that I can relate to. I mean, sure there's the whole "forgiveness" thing, but the mythos around Jesus is much more complex than would be merited by it. I think it's obscured by the fact that so much of the christian religion is a pretty strong amalgamation of many other deities.

 

[Thor 2]

What Jodie appears to be trying to do, and what most theists almost always do, is trying to deny science and trying to take what is in fact an anti-educational stance, of claiming that there are all sorts of very important issues which will always remain beyond the reach of science. If she is trying to say that, or if she believes that, then I think she is wrong, and in fact all of science shows why she would be wrong to think that and why religious/mystic-type claims of that sort do not stand up at all.

I have even read theists claiming the objective of science is to attack their religion.