Thread: Who or what is God to you?

I used to think about God as person... but... things changed... I think god is immaterial thing behind, uncaring. Maybe even not personal... maybe it is just a force.

It could be that we simply can't comprehend him or them similarly like a bacterium can't comprehend us. It could be that there is many, many steps in evolution to close the gap. Blind beliefs are not the way. I feel, that the way is very personal. I feel the comprehension comes with work and personal experience.

An evil villain that re-occurs in a series of books called the scriptures. Not worth the read though, it's full of plot holes.

God is what you want him to be, Heaven is your World your Canvas, God is in your Heart.
I don't belive in hell say If you belive in Hell and you think you are going there you will be in your hell.
Some people who don't want to goto heaven or hell they will be a ghost. God is just a Force depending on what you want him to be.
He could be a dog, human, cat, a tall giant with a grey beard, father of jesus, jesus, you know anything. But everyone's heaven is connected so you can visit their plain.

Originally Posted by blazingnyancat

God is what you want him to be, Heaven is your World your Canvas, God is in your Heart.
I don't belive in hell say If you belive in Hell and you think you are going there you will be in your hell.
Some people who don't want to goto heaven or hell they will be a ghost. God is just a Force depending on what you want him to be.
He could be a dog, human, cat, a tall giant with a grey beard, father of jesus, jesus, you know anything. But everyone's heaven is connected so you can visit their plain.

You basically said exactly how I feel.

Throughout my experiences in my life, I think we all have a little bit of God in us. When I say "God", I mean a power that is within us that allows us to reach our farthest goals, a part of us that enables us to do the unthinkable. By all of us having that part of "God" in us, we are all connected. Its kind of hard to explain, I hope you guys understood what I was trying to get across lol

When I grew up I had to fuse religion and science somehow. I believe there is more than we can measure out there. The best proof is that we discover so many new things even today that we didnt believe in before. For me, god is a kind of power that existed from the big bang on. maybe it is intelligent, maybe just a force, I can´t tell that really...

God is 42

A scapegoat onto which a society collectively projects their fears and desires and the responsibilities they don't want to shoulder themselves.

Nothing I can describe used human concepts and words.

Gods are psychological entities with characteristics and power that are partially determined by the way we think about them. But saying they are psychological doesn't mean they're pretend, they're also intelligent and conscious, in a different way than we are.

Although there's an element of free will in the way our thoughts create and interpret God, its not arbitrary. To the extent that we think about God in a way that is inconsistent with who we are and how our minds work, for instance, then that thought is delusional and doesn't work.

Presumably there is some more subtle intelligence that these myrid interrelated gods are derived from. It expresses itself in those ways, but can also express itself in other ways as who we are changes. That intelligence seems to me to have a will in some sense, though its not the personal will such as may sometimes be attributed to God. The various lesser gods have wills too, which are related to that subtler God and to our wills. I think its not completely right to say that we create the gods, its also true that they create us.

We have some choice in what gods we worship, and in what we mean by worship. To some extent everyone has to work that out for themselves, there's no one way that's right for everyone. In one way or another, everyone worships gods, and the way that they worship is a part of what determines what those gods are. A lot of people seem to want to kiss God's ass, to gain favor and get away with stuff. That isn't my way.

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.

This word 'god' seems to me like asghojasdrhoah or pdbddbnjdohaasbndafo. It's nonsense - literally. You can no sense it. It doesn't exist. Only thing you can do is believe it. And a man can believe in anything, so I believe in the word asorgasgoargnawrg more than the word god.

One morning long ago a caveman woke up, stepped out of his cave, sretched, basked in the sunshine, and became self aware. This very first onset of sentience was followed by two breathless observations:

"Shit! I exist!"

"Shit! I'm going to die someday!"

But all of the caveman's wiring to date insisted and confirmed that he must not die. In order to reconcile the fact of his eventual death with his instinctual need to stay alive, the caveman decided that he must somehow survive death, that there must be an existence beyond death.

So he told his cave-family and cave-friends about all this, and, since they had not yet become self-aware, they weren't buying his tale. Frustrated, the caveman decided he needed to make his story more interesting, and from his descriptions were born god, the soul, and, by default, the shaman.

Creatures used in mythology, shown as ones of great power. Can be evil or good, sometimes worshipped. For some reason people worship far more the evil ones though.

So yeah, a normal tale to me. I quite like the Cthulhu mythos actually.

Originally Posted by Sageous

One morning long ago a caveman woke up....

This isn't relevant to the spirit of your post, but I feel like pointing out that the Old Testament Hebrew religion has a strong tribal God but no concept of an afterlife. Maybe the afterlife ideas were introduced later through interaction with Greeks, etc. when they were a part of the Roman Empire.

More later.

^^ Not so much no afterlife, if I remember correctly, but more a permanent barrier to the afterlife, thanks to original sin. This barrier will only be lifted upon the arrival of the messiah.

Regardless, the Hebrew religion arrived long after that hairy fellow realized he existed; even if you are correct, the rationale for their decisions to omit an afterlife would have had nothing to do with the origins of man's sudden sentient need for something more... indeed, they (the Hebrews) likely needed to explain why they could not have an afterlife (hence original sin, perhaps?).

An ocean of ones and zeros that is searching for the optimal way to order itself.

"A God is a being who recognizes good without evil as a point of reference"

Originally Posted by Sageous

^^ Not so much no afterlife, if I remember correctly, but more a permanent barrier to the afterlife, thanks to original sin. This barrier will only be lifted upon the arrival of the messiah.

Regardless, the Hebrew religion arrived long after that hairy fellow realized he existed; even if you are correct, the rationale for their decisions to omit an afterlife would have had nothing to do with the origins of man's sudden sentient need for something more... indeed, they (the Hebrews) likely needed to explain why they could not have an afterlife (hence original sin, perhaps?).

The Adam and Eve story attributes mortality to sin, but this concerns the span and health of a human life, not an invisible 'afterlife' that occurs after physical death. There's no concept of an afterlife, denied or otherwise, anywhere in the old testament. In Ecclesiastes, which is philosophically the most modern of the Old Testament books, the spirit returns to God at death. Then the idea of a physical resurrection appears in the New Testament, but there is no idea of a spiritual 'heaven' afterlife. This seems to have been invented later, and became a standard part of Christian theology, possibly because St. Paul's more concrete Zombie Awakening version of salvation doesn't sit as easily with the modern mind. But the idea of a spiritual afterlife is not in the Bible.

^^ Okay then.

As usual your wealth of knowledge outweighs my feeble memory. Indeed, that you know that there is no mention of an afterlife anywhere in the Old Testament is downright humbling. Clearly I've misunderstood or perhaps inadvertently retro-interpreted Judaism; touche.

... still, and as we both already noted, this has nothing to do with the caveman's invention of god, or this thread.

Who or what is God to you?

Daddy!

Originally Posted by Sageous

that you know that there is no mention of an afterlife anywhere in the Old Testament is downright humbling.

I find it remarkable that Christians generally know so little about the Bible in some regards, considering that its not really that long, and many of them believe it to be the Word of God and study it weekly. It seems everyone reads it with a theological filter already in place.

^^ Nice.

Yeah, we Christians are generally just a bunch of pig-headed, blinder-wearing idiots, I suppose. Thanks for the clarification.

For what it's worth, I haven't paid much attention to anything theological for well over thirty years; perhaps when I was familiar with the Old Testament, my post would have been different -- not that it could have though, given those pesky theological filters.

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

I find it remarkable that Christians generally know so little about the Bible in some regards, considering that its not really that long, and many of them believe it to be the Word of God and study it weekly. It seems everyone reads it with a theological filter already in place.

Just to clear things up, American Christianity isn't true christianity at all(Not sure if you were referring to america at all lol, just saying in case you were). Americans have changed so much of it and made it to fit them. Doesn't work like that though, so I see where you are coming from. There are very few True Christians in America today, very few who follow the original religion. Today we have so many denominations, Its rather sad. Many christians study the Bible everyday, it acts as a refresher considering the book is 1500 pages long in some formats. Anyone that follows their own religion will indeed make it a big deal in their life , if they are true to that religion that is.