Why Doesn't God Explain In Person?

Hey, Tuskowhat you say!I think it made more sense thousands of years ago when people were confused about dreams and visions and took them as authority. Human beings change slowly and the momentum of that earlier paradign is nowhere near exhausted yet. What seems silly to a few of us makes perfect sense, or at least makes sense to many more. That for me is hard to grasp but that is what the data says.lfen

Jar,This sounds like you are conceiving God as a human type person?
I'm very doubtful of that and even more doubtful of the value of arguments based on that. For example I work with children and though adults differ in some ways significantly from children there are strong similiarities. For example a group of boys when caught in some mischief of one sort or another will usually agree that a mischief has been done and even that there are guilty parties... the OTHER guys. The other guys either started it or told them to do it or did it, but each of the boys will solemnly swear that they didnt' do it, or they only did a little bit after the other guys started it, etc. The difference between boys and Bush and Blair and other leaders are that men have much better vocabularies and much more elaborate rationales and excuses and their actions have more extensive and deadly consequences.But what if I told my boss, or the parents of the children that are in my care that I don't intervene in their disputes or don't try to help them solve their problems in construtive ways? I'd rightly be fired. It's my job to make sure disputes don't dissolve into violence, that they begin to listen and negotiate and work to postive solutions and that they develop skills and understanding.Look at religion, look at religion in the USA, or Isreal, or Northern Ireland, and on and on. If God were a human like us, then he is seriously neglecting his responsibilities and should be fired.An alternative might be that God is not a big human being who speaks 100,000 languages even though Hebrew was his native tongue. God may not be a king, president, designer, or engineer. The concept of explanation is a human concept. I seriously doubt the source of the universe outside of it's manifestation as human beings has any notion of explanation nor that the source has made a decision to withhold anything including a explanation on any grounds. That is just too anthropomorphic for me.lfen

My thought is not that God is far above us. God is a concept that we use to relate to the vastness of creation and the mystery of consciousness. That mystery is present as you and I and the stars and bacteria, and on and on. I don't see the universe as a created thing outside of or separate from the source. My concept of God is that it is neccesarily beyond good and evil because those are concepts created by humans.I don't understand why things are as they are or I am as I am. To express this better "I" am just a concept of identity that the brain of this organism typing this has created. I am the fundamental mystery as surely as life and the universe is. I suspect that suffering is one end of the stick of feeling, the other being pleasure. Can't have one without the other. The highest value of suffering is that it can lead consciousness to contemplate it's current condition and awaken to it's real nature. The evils of this world are terrible but so are nightmares. The teachings of the Buddha and Advaita vedanta point to a reality beyond the world of duality and opposities of birth/death, pain/pleasure, good/evil.lfen

There is no each, no other, no subject, no object. The party goes on i.e. ceaseless change. Entity means self contained existing thing. But really it's not hard to see that there are no things aside from the convenience of language. The entire universe is a process of subprocesses of differing durations. No entity means no self, no other. To whom would God show his face?Think of an entity, say your self, as a whirlpool in a river. For a while the waters whirl about and the vortex they create has a brief dependent identity as a whirlpool in the river before moving on downstream. Does the river ever show itself to the whirlpool?Does God long to see his own face? Has he found a mirror? If you think so, where is that mirror?lfen

I think there is a deeper misunderstood issue here. This discrimination also results in the sense of being separated from God, All That Is. The sense of shame and the burdens that Adam and Eve felt come from that.Near Eastern religions and cultures for some reason don't seem to have accounts from individuals who awakened until perhaps the teachings of Jesus. So the focus remained on the sense of separation and of atonement by sacrifice and following rules. Atonement as At One Ment is acheived with the awakening from the illusion of being a separate being to the process of God as the source and the manifesting of the universe.Language arises from this separation. It is a human artifact. Individuals might translate their understanding into language and claim God speaks. Or translate their words in actions and claim God understands our words. But I hold the source has spoken no languages except as individual beings. Explanations are stories people make up. Being and the universe can be explained by people, but those explanations are abstractions, partial, and can never be the whole truth. We could say when a person explains that is God explaining in Person. But All That Is is much more than persons and there are no true explanations as language can't accurately model totality. So God can't explain in Person because there are no persons and no explanations.lfen

Oh, I'm interested for sure. thanks,lfen