Sageous,
I think you took what I said too personally. If you were a Christian academic, then I'd think it would be important to you to know what the Bible says or doesn't say about eternal life, since the concept is so central to Christian theology. But you didn't invest your life's effort in interpreting and supporting Christian doctrine, so I don't see the issue.
As far as defending the intellectual honor of other Christians....These are the same people who categorize my gods as evil spirits, and who teach that I am damned and am seducing other people to damnation. If they find my view of them to be offensive, that's a farce, they dish out ten times what they have to take from me. Of course there are individual Christians who are thoughtful and open minded. I'm talking about Christian theology in bulk. There just isn't any way to parse it that upholds the core teaching of John 3:16, as promulgated by Paul, and doesn't at least implicitly depend on the damnation of people like myself or yourself who reject that teaching.
To me it's not about 'winning', it's about progress. If what I said was wrong or irrelevant, that's another matter. It is relevant to me because my faith in God, such as it is, is not coupled to a hope for an afterlife. And historically that has been true for a lot of other people also. That doesn't necessarily undermine the essential point of your post, which is to suggest that God is largely a human concept. But it is relevant to better explaining who God is to me, which is something I hope to get to. I think that a person who metaphorically has an experience like Jonah's believes in God. It's direct, personally real, and not a matter of yearning for immortality.
Originally Posted by Darkmatters
Something like archetypes then? Ok, that makes perfect sense. I suppose believing in a god would activate an archetype or a group of them. An archetype is very real and very powerful, much more so than mere personal thoughts, but only at certain times - usually times of crisis or some powerful emotion. It's like a complex, like a persecution complex for instance. Real or imaginary? Well, it's actually just as real as any other thoughts in the person's head and more powerful than them because it comes from deeper and directs thought and emotion.
I don't know much about archetypes, but yes they would be related. A point I would like to emphasize is that the god has actual life and will and intelligence and power, including supernatural power. It does not act merely by influencing human thought and behavior, it can act in the world directly. Though the human mind is an important part of how it acts, and I do not know if it can exist without the activity of human minds. If there is a dependence on human thinking it is not strictly temporal though, the god can reach beyond the lifetimes of his people.
I really don't have an overreaching theory about how any of this works, I'm just describing what I think must be true based on what I have experienced. The gods that I have some direct awareness of are a lot smaller and weaker than the more universal ones that I vaguely sense acting through them. It's like a big fractal of spiritual identity. The 'big' gods don't necessarily exercise power in ways we would easily recognize. The're more like intelligent gravity, almost undetectable when dealing with small, individual objects, but producing big results through an accumulation of subtle effects. They don't talk to us in human ways more than they do because it would give us the wrong idea. We'd make an idol out of an image of the experience. Is there a single unified God running through it all? I guess there must be, but I try to keep my mind free of hard beliefs in things beyond what I consciously deal with, so that I don't close myself to discovering more.
In regards to the meditative "who am I" question, which I think is relevant to relationship with God, I think that for now I am the one who must deal with my human experience. As I finish that, I'm stages, then the scope of who I am may change accordingly. But it is important for the scope my awareness to be appropriate for my responsibilities. It is paralyzing if I am aware to too little or too much. This is a large reason for ignorance about God I think. We can't process too many messages at once, and in various ways we're all struggling to face ourselves.
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