If God is dead, does mankind become God?

Well, I don't know about Eisenhower but here you are speaking nonsense.I'll give you a bit of nonsense:"God is dog spelled backwards."That at least makes a little sense!lfen

Sense or nonsense is not a property of "What Is in Itself." Sense is a property of language. It is a meta judgement on the formation of syntactical statements in the language, and independent of the truth or falsity of the statement. "B+A+-shaving left handed=not my big toe" is nonsense in math. 2+2=5 makes sense in math. It's false, but it's not nonsense, whereas it's hard to say if the following lines are true or false, but they are nonsense, delightful though they be:Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.You are confusing levels of abstraction. True, falsity, sense, nonsense are properties of abstractions that refer to nameless What Is in Itself. That is you appear to be decieving yourself in the Zen sense. You seem to want to point at the moon but then confuse your finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself.lfen

You are not distinguishing the map from the territory, the thing referred to from the reference. You have conflated them and that leaves everything a muddle.When you wrote: It appears to me that you have assigned a definition to the word "God" of "reality" and then assigned the word "truth" to the same definition.Look around and pick up something, let's say it's a small object we would all agree is a "rock". Is that rock true or false?lfen

This seems like a clear statement of a definition of "God".Earlier in this thread you had this fantasy about me in which it appears you are projecting on to me your projection of your definition of God. This is your definition that God is your world view and I'm not sure how you manage to not see the narcissism of that.lfen

A rock is.A proposition in a language such as "There is a rock in my hand" or "rocks are hard" are abstract statements that can be evaluated as true or false.Rob, you are the one who has consistently played language games in bad faith in order to manipulate people's emotions. You are now refusing to clarify and choosing to keep things muddled, conflated, and confused. Why is that? I will say that you require oxygen to live. That if you are deprived of oxygen in most environments, setting aside for the time being the possiblity of being cryonic suspended which doesn't yet seem viable, for a length of time of 10 or more minutes you will most likely die.
Am I invoking omniscience of my own in making such an induction?How do I defeat myself?lfen

I don't know. We have virtually no evidence of what he said or even if he existed.
http://home.ca.inter.net/oblio/home.htmIt is possible that a teacher had awakened and was trying to explain awakening but was killed before he could finish his teaching. In Ramana Maharshi we have a modern awakened teacher whose teaching was recorded over decades. The teacher that in English is called Jesus could have been trying to explain that one had to look to the source of the self, the "I am" to find what he called the Kingdom of Heaven within."I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except by me." Means literally that was one has to follow the sense of the "I am" to the source and that is the way to the source. He wasn't refering to a specific biological organism. Christian dogma is a misunderstanding of this and a creation of a theology that protects the ego's sense of itself as a discrete being.lfen

Ringo,When Rob can't deal with an argument he comes up with these vague accusations in which he protrays himself as the well intended victim of something or the other and then dances away from the argument with platitudes and unsupported assertions that have been refuted here many times.Well, it could be worse. At least he doesn't dismiss arguments on the grounds that he already won the debate with irrefutable evidence in his OP.lfen

Yeah, I don't know if it's the same ball or not. I'll cede the points as I don't really know and I don't want to research it. He sure got snippy with us though.I don't object to a bhakti path of developement. It's the exclusiveness and literalness that I object to. It's fine with me if people worship an external God. It's part of the process. But the sectularization (did I just make that word up?:eek of western religion has resulted in the kinds of stuff we are seeing in the mideast right now and I would like to see people begin to give that up.What I am beginning to understand is that literalists conflate the map with the territory. What I still don't understand is why pointing that out to them makes them so insecure and defensive. It's like they have some great ontological anxiety and only by insisting that words are reality can they feel secure. Maybe they really do suspect that the ego is a fabrication and impermanent but they are flooded with anxiety and threatened by that?lfen

Just be fair and include examples of you, Phat, Iano, Rob and other fundamentalists claiming your opponents are spiritually blind, or are blinded by God and can't see or understand the Bible's contradictions because they lack spiritual vision, or because they are ego dominated, and etc.Psychological modeling of human behaviour is significant when trying to understand humans. My model uses identifiable terms. How do you define spirit that it can be blind?lfen

You are being too hard on yourself, Rob! Denial, or ignorance is the source of the ego's illusion of it's existence so it is the source of suffering but from the human perspective it is a major psychological survival mechanism. You wouldn't be believing all the non sense you cherish if if weren't for your great capacity for denial. You are playing a shell game with words here. It turns out for you God is reality. This is a tautology. So, your statement is also the equivalent of:Reality means a lot of things to a lot of people. whatever that is, that is their reality.Or God means a lot of things to a lot of people. whatever that is, that is their God.John Lennon sang, "God is concept by which people meansure their pain." Is that what you are getting at?lfen

I said I wasn't going to reread this thread but now I am.Whoever first came up with this and all those including yourself who repeat it as true are wrong. God was created in one or more human images especially Jesus. Then after coming up with the notion of God, it came up with the notion that God created man in God's image.It might be possible to go beyond this. A few Taoist, Buddhist, Hindus, and even Christians have but most keep falling back into a human model of divinity as an autocratic designer.lfen

Rob, here you are defining reality as another term for god. god means reality and reality means god. Two words that mean the same thing.Since you define them as synonymous please give me a definition that isn't circular for god/reality. I personally am fine with the concept that god is another word for reality, but that being the case you need some other words to clarify what you mean.I have asserted and you have simply denied that you confuse the abstractions of reality by the symbolic use of words with the "reality" of the phenomena that the words refer to. They are not identical. Do you need me to demonstrate the the word water can't function the way the fluid that you drink functions? This issue is one that you have not directly addressed but went totally non sequential into just preaching something about the teachings attributed to Jesus.It seems to me you have a difficult theory of language to defend that words somehow are reality. I understand that argument and see the truth of it but it leaves one with relative truths and that seems to be a contradiction in your position.Do you really want to think seriously about these issues? or do you want to create occassion to preach the "gospel" and reguritate the rhetorics that have been shown to be useful sales techniques for your religion?lfenEdited by lfen, : rewrote the third paragraph as I realized it was very unclear

I'm saying words are inadequate to discribe or model god, yes. Words are a useful tool for many tasks including talking about issues raised by religion and spirituality, but the answers lie beyond words.I specifically am saying that the fundamentalist's attempt to claim that a literal interpretation of the Bible is true leads to falsifications of several orders. I am claiming that literalism is at it's inception a flawed approach to the the truth of What Is and leads to the contradictions and non sense that we read on this list. These misunderstandings are based among other things on errors of improper semantics.lfen