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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: How greater reality changes God
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
I didn't want to derail the 'On the possibility of belief in God' which this is possibly tangential to.
From my self indulgence in Hell:
"... what an ijit I'm being about discovering that God is a tad bigger than I thought, as if that dilutes Him homeopathically across the infinite eternal cosmos which He immanently pervades and transcendently encompasses.
He was more real to me when the universe felt like a one off half way through eternity. And that it was empty but for us because of the foolishness of Fermi's paradox. So there was only one Incarnation and an angelic realm is more allowable.
I found I need a local, tribal, small, personal God, mysterious beyond THE finite universe.
How silly. How childish.
Fermi's paradox is resolved by the limits of technology, materials science, physics, economics. The materials necessary for a space elevator cannot be synthesized. The galaxy crawls with life and the distances are utterly insurmountable for physical communication, just theoretically feasible for detection. By spectroscopy.
Each of the practically infinite number of sapient species in our bubble must have had an Incarnation.
Which makes God ... complex. Especially as the Son.
There are infinite practically infinitely inhabited universes.
There always have been.
If there are angels and demons they must be local. To our world. To each world. Of the infinite worlds. The accounts of them are of very localized creatures that are not eternal. They don't do parallel processing, any of the omnis by far. But they are 4D.
Why should I give them the time of day? Jesus did. Big time. After His resurrection in Mark."
Also, as the God narrative is necessarily changed by our ever more accurate physical perspective, particularly with regard to the Incarnation and secondarily with regard to the angelic-demonic, that acts as a metaphor indeed a parallel to progressive revelation beyond 'revelation', beyond the text to the trajectory that includes extension of marriage beyond heterosexuality.
The biggest single corollary in all of this, as included above, is that the Incarnation cannot be unique. Therefore one of an increasing infinity.
Can a conservative God survive any of this?
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Love wins
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Eutychus
From the edge
# 3081
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Posted
You need to read Perelandra by CS Lewis*:
quote:
...if he were not the ransom, Another would be. Yet nothing was ever repeated. Not a second crucifixion: perhaps - who knows - not even a second Incarnation... some act of even more appalling love, some glory of yet deeper humility. For he had seen already how the pattern grows... the small external evil which Satan had done in Malacandra was only as a line: the deeper evil he had done in Earth was as a square: if Venus fell, her evil would be a cube - her Redemption beyond conceiving
*it ought also to appeal to sufferers of Stendhal syndrome.
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Let's remember that we are to build the Kingdom of God, not drive people away - pastor Frank Pomeroy
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quetzalcoatl
Shipmate
# 16740
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Posted
I've met a few people, who I'm not sure if they are mystics or nutters (or both), who said that all of it is happening all of the time. Thus the virgin birth is happening now and now and now ... And the Son is being born and killed and reborn now and now and now ...
I don't know if this has any headway in Christianity proper. That doesn't interest me.
I alternately find it fascinating and repellent. I suppose it draws me back.
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I can't talk to you today; I talked to two people yesterday.
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Ohhhhhhhhh. Read 'That Hideous Strength' oooooh 44 years ago. Mr. Bultitude is my favourite bear. Jack said it all over 27 years before that, 71 years ago! Wow, I get there in the end. I mean my cosmology just caught up from the 70s. I know he presaged postmodern Christianity before the term existed too. What a guy. What a mystic nutter eh q? That's got to be a first. I've repelled you! Who'd uh thought YOU could be repelled by ... logic?!
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Love wins
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no prophet's flag is set so...
Proceed to see sea
# 15560
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
I've met a few people, who I'm not sure if they are mystics or nutters (or both), who said that all of it is happening all of the time. Thus the virgin birth is happening now and now and now ... And the Son is being born and killed and reborn now and now and now ...
I don't know if this has any headway in Christianity proper. That doesn't interest me.
I alternately find it fascinating and repellent. I suppose it draws me back.
If I understand you right, you're talking of falling into eternity and it falling into you, which compresses everything into a singularity, the unity of the beginning and of the end before it expands creating and destroying reality. We can only talk word-salad about such things or at least that's all I can do. Word don't have the ability.
Imagine that the spirit of God is within you and all humans and all the 'people' where ever they might be in the universe/multiverse and that we all thus share in the "Appalling Love". The ancient and new chord and cord of existence and death tying it all together. (Who needs drugs eh?)
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Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.
\_(ツ)_/
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Aye, nice. Reality eh? There have always been people who had a beginning. And in God they still exist. So great a cloud of witnesses indeed. The created supernatural beings in the evolving Bible stories included, as one infinitesimal subset, one dot in an infinite array of Cantor dust. A local Bible for, of local people including the man Jesus and angels and demons, validated by Him.
Reality is ineffably strange. Eternal, infinite, created, thought, peopled reality. In God.
So we're all happy with that changing God in Christ, changing the Incarnation to the meta-Incarnation of God the Son in an infinite number of created entities who transcend, ascend and yet remain in some sense local? God the Son must encompass an infinite number of such formerly more localized new people?
The closet start to a metaphor of which appears to be the many worlds hypothesis of quantum mechanics, which I've always thought of as absurd as it appears to propagate universes with every quantum choice. All possibilities happen. But utterly validated quantum theory does say that all quantum paths are real ... Nah, it's still absurd, because origins and destinations do happen, regardless of all paths taken. Still, still a metaphor to mull on.
So we're all happy with heaven and hell and angels and demons being integral with the hard sayings of Jesus and being transcended by the trajectory since?
The antidote to all of this is the one Barth took: Jesus loves me this I know, 'cos the Bible tells me so, I suppose.
Go thy way, Daniel.
Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth? (Eternity ago in the eternally inflating scalar field.)
Any more please?!
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Love wins
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quetzalcoatl
Shipmate
# 16740
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Posted
Yum yum. Hard core stuff.
I found that the present moment annihilates me. But of course, I come back. So life and death in the blink of an eye.
And then really, it doesn't matter, whether I experience this or not, or go to the supermarket and buy a nice fish pie.
What's that phrase in Buddhism? The conditioned and the unconditioned exist side by side, or in each other's pockets.
But time to let go of all that. There is nowhere to get to, relief.
I hope your health is better, Martin.
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I can't talk to you today; I talked to two people yesterday.
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Aye, live in the moment q. As per the beautiful David Steindl-Rast on Ted. Don't worry, you will sneer at his every claim ... and then agree with him.
The more I consider His heavens the was less reason I have to believe in God, for less read values !>0. But I still have Him thanks to Jesus.
I was invited in to a Salafist mosque on the way home from hospital and was blown away by it, the invitation, the respect, the beautiful simple liturgy in the beautiful building. The Spirit is truly poured out on all flesh.
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Love wins
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quetzalcoatl
Shipmate
# 16740
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Posted
Yes, Sufi song and dance can be mind-blowing. If I was younger, I would probably end up joining a Sufi group, but too old and knackered now. And also no longer seeking, as I think somebody said earlier on the thread. What am I seeking? Only the refraction of the reflection in a mirror that I thought that I saw one day.
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I can't talk to you today; I talked to two people yesterday.
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Erratum, that bloody 'was'!
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Love wins
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rolyn
Shipmate
# 16840
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Posted
I like some of the things said here.
Seem to remember something about that elderly Taize leader, (French I think), who was knifed by a member of his own congregation, being in to preaching the Ressurection as a spiritual experience happening daily, with each dawn as it were.
My son is heavily into Power of Now meditation, reckons it does the world of good. Well, most of the time. Others I know have done transcendental meditation with similar results.
I get some sense in lot of this, and yes it is good, and yes the God thing will sometimes do it. Admittedly, always easier with a glass of the red stuff. Then on goes the TV and, invertibly, any feeling of Greater Reality seems to become sucked down by the ever burgeoning weight of mediocrity .
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Change is the only certainty of existence
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
I laughed out loud rolyn. Yeah. Watching the news. Syria. Carolina. That poor girl in Goa 8 years ago. All utter chaos. Nothing linear about any of it. All the evidence, the phone cam footage, the police cameras when it all comes out, who's flying the planes, a 15 year old girl full of drugs alone on a beach. Utter chaos. My poor wife was outraged that that was all I would invoke: That some poor crazy black guy probably had a gun and that explains how a community is angry at white cops how?
Mediocrity are us. I realised this week, after 62 years, that my hypnopompic struggle is OK. That when I wake up I'm looking for a story. Good luck with that.
At Triangle tonight the only thing that worked was being kind, mild, tolerant, acceptant with helplessly crazy people. The women are ALWAYS the worst. The trouble is the craziest are on my side of the counter. And that's not sexist, it's about power. Which is.
And people STILL expect explanations. 'Why did that happen?'. My standard answer is 'The weather.'. And when it's windy AND there's a full moon, you bet.
A guy threw food down the street I just gave him. So I went and got him more. He loved me.
And the new 'rule' is that all drunks must eat out on the street. I just hope to ... hope that 80 people turn up rat arsed next Friday.
God is STILL great and God is STILL good, thanks be to Himself in Jesus. Another thing I was able to say to one of the interns as to why something worked out: everyone, EVERYONE, wants to be loved. Respect when they don't deserve it, and they KNOW that, is love, and they know that.
Aye, Côtes du Rhône.
[ 23. September 2016, 23:41: Message edited by: Martin60 ]
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Love wins
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rolyn
Shipmate
# 16840
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Posted
Good post Martin, respect for your efforts in the actual reality that surrounds many. I, OTOH wander around the garden looking at clouds and occasionally pretend on Eden. Even though Eden might as well be at the other end of the Cosmos when mediocrity gapes it's great black hole.
<As a footnote to what you say above re. drunks. I've been thinking this more an more of late, I mean why, for the love of fuck's sake, don't the royal They just outlaw alcohol and legitimize Pot?>
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Change is the only certainty of existence
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
My quantitative 1% efforts rolyn. My tithe of a tithe. I spend easily 10% finding Eden.
I'm wrestling with the fact that I should be doing more than 1% But it demands ... commitment. Visiting the sick, the imprisoned. To do an hour a week of either (both!) would require much more of me. What a terrible admission of mediocrity.
<They banned alcohol in Iran. All the alcoholics died quicker one way or the other. Maybe an acceptable price to reduce the murder rate, the violence, health and social-economic cost.>
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Love wins
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cliffdweller
Shipmate
# 13338
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Posted
I've come to expect, if not always appreciate, Martin's posting style. Sometimes there's just nothing I can hang on to. And sometimes it's off topic.
This last post-- which I take overall to be an expression of pain and regret at the immensity of suffering in the world-- yes. And yes, sometimes it is so great that that is all you can do. Cry out, why? Come, Lord Jesus, come. Set all things right.
And yet... there are things in that post that are just Not OK. I'm not sure if they're worth a tangent or another thread to untangle, given the context of simply crying out against the injustice of the world. But precisely because the context is the injustice of the world, I cannot just let them pass by:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
... That some poor crazy black guy probably had a gun and that explains how a community is angry at white cops how?
...The women are ALWAYS the worst.
...And that's not sexist, it's about power. Which is.
Probably some more that I couldn't parse out.
And yet... there is:
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
... I realised this week, after 62 years, that my hypnopompic struggle is OK. That when I wake up I'm looking for a story. Good luck with that.
At Triangle tonight the only thing that worked was being kind, mild, tolerant, acceptant with helplessly crazy people.
...The trouble is the craziest are on my side of the counter...
And people STILL expect explanations. 'Why did that happen?'...
God is STILL great and God is STILL good, thanks be to Himself in Jesus. Another thing I was able to say to one of the interns as to why something worked out: everyone, EVERYONE, wants to be loved. Respect when they don't deserve it, and they KNOW that, is love, and they know that.
So.... yes.
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"Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid." -Frederick Buechner
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
cliffdweller. It's about power. ALL power is ... wrong. Broken. Power is another term for inequality, no? Tea-time!
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Love wins
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cliffdweller
Shipmate
# 13338
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
cliffdweller. It's about power. ALL power is ... wrong. Broken. Power is another term for inequality, no? Tea-time!
Yes, absolutely. And yet-- the posts I was highlighting seemed IMHO to be coming alongside the wrong side (i.e. the powerful side) rather than the marginalized. But I may be misreading, as I often do with less-than-linear posts/ more lyrical postings.
Pass the scones, please.
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"Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid." -Frederick Buechner
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
As Jesus proved, the side of power is weak. Power only has power. Power is weakness. And there is a false dichotomy between power and weakness, they both share utter chaos, although power has the force, the greater violence to put superficial order on repressed chaos.
On Friday night a heartbreakingly beautiful young woman heroin addict 'kicked off' as we say. Her completely wasted but affable male partner had wandered off leaving her with all their baggage. They're regulars. They know we have goodwill, offer an hour of sanctuary. I've expelled one of her male consorts before now for line crossing aggression. She threw tea (as had the guy mentioned previously, but at her, in the full dining room) and stuff about the lobby, shouted and cursed, banged the door in to the toilet. We didn't react apart from offer to look after their baggage, but she needed stuff in it. Another guy was an attentive moth to her flame. They ended up sitting outside, I orbited remotely, she asked politely for a cup of tea, the guy came in and we gave them more food and tea to take away. She was humble and grateful for the lightness of touch.
Most of the church volunteers blame demons. I think they get a bad press.
At least she was expressing her emotions, which IS good. A female strength. My anecdotal observation is that 80% of the time the 20% of women cause the visible emotional temperature to rise, which is nearly always bad. Even when it's high spirits and banter. Everyone agrees. Men get always get leery when women get animated. The worst violence in six years was caused by a woman being insulted from ten meters away and invoking her partner. And her heroin addict mother. Whom I had to protect from herself as she in turn went for another guy for insulting her (she looked great in every way last week I told her, which she did compared to the previous week, yeah she said, she'd just 'self medicated', we laughed). Followed closely in nastiness by another poor woman with an expressed death wish provoking her huge partner with her prostitution.
That's all about inequality, all about want, need, poverty railing against useless immediate brute power.
Nobody has ever SHOWN a knife. Even in mass violence. Nobody has a gun. A guy once spoke to me about stabbing, six years ago. Not threatening anyone. But a taboo. I was distracted to my left. I looked back and he was unconscious on the ground. I was impressed. I asked the chaps I correctly inferred responsible if they wouldn't mind leaving and they most politely and apologetically did.
When the cops come, as they did two weeks ago by chance just after two girls went for each other, something I've seen repeatedly and never with two guys, they were as always very laid back. Everything calmed down. One of the mouthy girls left with her pack. We should have suspended the other for the evening, but it was very busy.
Mental health, drugs, drink. Yes.
No cars, no guns. When that happens it's bad here too.
I turned on to a main street a couple of weeks ago and it was crawling with cops. Tooled up, road blocking, cool, phlegmatic British cops in a busy, working class, immigrant neighbourhood. Tazers, side-arms. All holstered. There'd been a stabbing on a bus. Hence the escalation of power. Two immigrant lads apologized to me, the token WASP, saying it wasn't that kind of neighbourhood! I heartfeltedly agreed.
Nobody overreacted. Especially the cops who set the tone. Because they had brought guns to a knife party.
I much prefer old world freedom. From, not to. Freedom from guns mainly.
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Twilight
Puddleglum's sister
# 2832
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Martin60:
Most of the church volunteers blame demons. I think they get a bad press.
Why blame demons when we have Big Pharm. The companies who, twenty years ago, told the doctors OxyContin wasn't very addictive, and now we have
this.
My West Virginia is number one in overdoes deaths.
So many young women dying and leaving children behind.Like this.
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
For good reason I'm sure it doesn't have a high profile in the UK, neither does crystal meth. Now mamba! Everybody's wasted on mamba. A nice Somali guy on it managed to beat himself up with the pavement from sitting in a chair we provide outside last week.
Helpless chaos.
Talking of which, Big Pharma is part of the powerlessness of power. The evil we create just by being unenlightenedly organized. Which is part of my Izzard segue back to the OP. I can just about manage transfinite, pre-eternal, immanent, helplessly present God sustaining all of this treacle flow evolving chaos at every scale, at every stage, to infinity (and beyond!); God may not author confusion but Satan doesn't write it either. No one does. And all is confusion. The order is entirely down to us.
I'd forgotten what my motto became 12 years ago: Dominus illuminatio mea. The Lord is my light. I'd always ignorantly translated it 'Lord enlighten me'. But as John Clees would say that would come from 'Dominus illumina me'.
Lord enlighten our ordering of chaos.
I must cling on to Jesus as the bridge between otherwise unnecessary, transfinite, pre-eternal God and reality, as truly offering the only hope of better chaos beyond this, so that I don't descend in to more eating, drinking and being merry (motorbiking and mountaineering) to meaningless oblivion: Unfortunately I need a reason to aspire to be marginally decent.
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Love wins
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Sorry, this isn't just a bounce.
How does God scale? To infinity? From the Planck length? Planck tick?
I suspect lightly. Zenly.
So how does He encompass an infinity of ... us.
See what I mean?
Boy is He big.
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Love wins
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
I know I'm turning in to a lobotomized Kierkegaard, arguing with himself in the newspapers, but at least it's under one name, one persona ... at a time ...
I find myself reconciling the impossible, unnecessary God, who explains nothing looking out the window; nothing does apart from the remorseless logic of Alan Guth which establishes the eternity of stuff whether God is or isn't, therefore making Him unnecessary; with the immanent God I invoke.
Infinitely immanent.
And immanently infinite?
Doesn't feel right does it?
And what about the scales? As I walked across the park yesterday to a line of trees its suddenly scaled when the trees occupied a third of my field of view above the third of the grass down to my feet and below the third of the one third clouded blue sky.
From dirt to heaven.
I can live with God sustaining the practically infinitesimal to infinity, just Omming away. I can live with Him Omming outside the ever growing infinite universe ... I can live with Him being locally transcendentally immanent in Christ, our Jesus, Earth's Jesus.
It's the necessary growing infinity of other world's Jesuses.
If I don't write it down, I can't tell myself the story!
Does this resonate with anyone? It did with C.S. Lewis obviously. What did he do about it?
K.I.S.S?
[ 13. October 2016, 09:12: Message edited by: Martin60 ]
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Love wins
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Doone
Shipmate
# 18470
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Posted
To be honest, Martin, whenever I try to think about this, it 'does my 'ead in', but what you've written does resonate with me.
When thinking about the complexity, vastness and infiniteness out there, I lose the God who knows and loves me intimately. But, Jesus ... and I love the thought of other Jesus' in the universe.
But I also often think it's all crap ![[Tear]](graemlins/tear.gif)
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
I knew it couldn't just be me Doone, I think it's all of us even if it's just an intrusive thought we healthily ignore. Me and thee ent healthy obviously!
I feel it's all absurd too, and then I stare at Jesus. And He's here. Zenning away with each of the growing seven billion of us. And every sparrow. With the Father. And the Spirit. How local are they?
I've explored it here before, years ago. In the 33 year incarnation a human sized curtain in to a human sized room gradually drew back over an infinite window on God the Son. The curtained room is orthogonal to the window and ... the metaphor changes as I write it. A human sized room, pinhead sized at first, grows on the infinite window as large as a human mind can grow, all the while suffused by the light through the frosted window, like no other human before or since.
In the resurrection of this person, the window cleared, slid back and the room expanded to encompass the world, humanity's realm.
As EACH incarnation must do.
What happens to EACH of the infinite transcendent incarnations?
'ead done in.
Never mind. OURS is real. OURS is ours. Because? For me it's the woman caught in adultery. Makes Jesus real. Along with everything else but that towers above.
He's enough.
I still can't see how our Jesus can be the same as Ophiuchus - alpha Ophiuchi-Rasalhague c's.
But I can 'see' (HA!) how they all exist as chromatophores or infinitely superpositioned states on the yet infiniter God the Son.
That's enough staring in to the pit for today.
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Love wins
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Annuvafing.
Either stuff is self caused or is caused by a self caused God.
Which is infinitely less likely. As the atheist ads on the bus minimally, conservatively said.
But for Jesus.
I'm glad of Him.
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Love wins
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GeorgeNZ
Apprentice
# 18672
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Posted
Martin Martin, my brother by a different mother but maybe we share a Father in a way we don't really understand. After all the only things we really know about him is through the letters the words that our Brother has shared with us . . . . words from the Word.
Martin maybe this thread is all about why we must invite Jesus in? He who is the Way the Truth and the Life, the door through which all must pass into Dads place . . . yet still we must invite Him in first. For to step out and through before He was beside us, with us, in us, would see us step into the void that is not a void that is God. Yet God is not 'is' as we are 'is', that is the conundrum that we cannot imagine. Surely everything that is . . . . is, yet somehow God is not, God is bigger than is, He is outside is, all that is is contained within Him. Step out into that void with being anchored to Jesus is to be lost forever.
Ha even when you are lost you are somewhere, you just dont know where that somewhere is, yet being lost in God is nowhere and everywhere, no time and everytime. We are lost yet found yet still we seek to know, ignoring the fact that to know is irrelevant, all that really matters is to be known, by Him
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
I like that.
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Love wins
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Doone
Shipmate
# 18470
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Posted
Oh, and just to say, for me, God is easy to ignore, for all the reasons above (the hugeness, complexity, etc). But Jesus isn't. Or his teachings on love and servanthood. Which is very annoying and disturbing a lot of the time. Most of the time I would prefer to just live in a bubble of ignorance.
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Felafool
Shipmate
# 270
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Posted
Really enjoying reading and thinking through this thread, but my head and heart have exploded. I can almost hear the colours, even though I don't understand the words.
No, that's wrong, I know most of the words, but they fail to convey their presumed meaning when applied to the mystery that is God Almighty, full of grace and truth, whose very voice is the sound of cascading waterfalls.
I'll keep reading and hope those bits of my soul that are left continue to find a home in the place where Jesus is.
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I don't care if the glass is half full or half empty - I ordered a cheeseburger.
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
You're His home. I'm His home. We're His home.
Let's live together. Set up house.
All of [Him in] us.
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Doone
Shipmate
# 18470
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Posted
Went to a coffee morning my church runs every week, mainly, though not exclusively, for the elderly to chat, play scrabble, etc. Took a friend who's in a dark place. She was enfolded in love, fellowship, laughter, acceptance - God felt very close, involved, loving. She wants to carry on coming and asked if she could come to church with me on Sunday. Love and acceptance - Jesus.
[ 01. November 2016, 13:10: Message edited by: Doone ]
Posts: 2208 | From: UK | Registered: Sep 2015
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
THAT'S local. Personal. Intimate. Immanent. Incarnational.
My latest comment here last night, threw me this morning, I woke to it amongst other anxieties.
The truth of it.
Yours is the perfect counter.
[ 05. November 2016, 11:10: Message edited by: Martin60 ]
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Mulling on this, triggered just now by asking God how it works when I speak to Him, looking out of my 50's net curtained bay window at the vast pale blue, contrailed sky over the semis opposite and the towering limes to the right, how He gives me ear and the rest of the seven billion of us on this mote in infinite motes from eternity that He's thinking that shows no affect of Him doing so, that apparently exists seamlessly perfectly sufficiently without being thought. I feel Him listening, seeing. Signal ... or noise? And not. Not being at all. Noise ... or signal?
The answer came as it came a couple of weeks ago now: For God is Spirit. That is some stuff!
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
I'm sorry to bounce, but it's that or repeat the thread from new.
Up above I said that God is self caused. He isn't is He? He is and that's that. He doesn't exist. Nothing exists Him, is'es Him. He is not constrained by cause. He is cause, He is existence. He. God. That's a statement, noun, (transitive) verb.
Sooooooo. Ineffable, dimensionless, including timeless as He ... (no is!), can there be an eternal foam of universes up to this point in the eternal to date one way time of the multiverse? The substrate that makes universes? Because that's simpler than there being one backwardly finite universe. OR can there be (meta- not trans-finite and eternal, above those lines) God thinking just this universe and whatever else He does meta-eternally above, below, beyond it?
Answers on a rhetorical postcard please.
Can 'infinite', 'eternal' God do finite? Do beginnings? BeginninG?
[ 22. September 2017, 09:30: Message edited by: Martin60 ]
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Golden Key
Shipmate
# 1468
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Posted
Martin--
Your most recent post reminded me of this:
quote:
“God is over all things
under all things,
outside all,
within, but not enclosed,
without, but not excluded,
above, but not raised up,
below, but not depressed,
wholly above, presiding,
wholly without, embracing,
wholly within, filling.”
– Hildevert of Lavardin
I *think* there's supposed to be an "inside all" in the first part, and "wholly beneath, sustaining [or supporting?]" towards the end.
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Blessed Gator, pray for us!
--"Oh bat bladders, do you have to bring common sense into this?" (Dragon, "Jane & the Dragon")
--"Oh, Peace Train, save this country!" (Yusuf/Cat Stevens, "Peace Train")
Posts: 18601 | From: Chilling out in an undisclosed, sincere pumpkin patch. | Registered: Oct 2001
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Excellent GK. It frames my question beautifully. But the question remains. In unchanging, impassible God, was there a beginning?
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Golden Key
Shipmate
# 1468
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Posted
Martin--
Well, I don't know that God is either of those things. Actually, in People Of The Book traditions, "impassible" is about the *last* thing God is.
Beginnings, though: ISTM that there may not be an answer that we can understand. Has the universe always existed? Is it steady-state? If God created it, then did God have a beginning? Where did She come from? If She's not the First Cause, then Who or What is?
Or does everything and everyone...simply exist?
Have you read the Tao Teh Ching? Particularly the glorious one with black and white photos. IIRC the translator may be Jane English.
BTW, the "rhetorical postcard" you mentioned:
Does it communicate only with itself? Is it mailed to itself? Does that require a stamp? And is it a solipsist?
![[Biased]](wink.gif)
[ 22. September 2017, 11:15: Message edited by: Golden Key ]
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Blessed Gator, pray for us!
--"Oh bat bladders, do you have to bring common sense into this?" (Dragon, "Jane & the Dragon")
--"Oh, Peace Train, save this country!" (Yusuf/Cat Stevens, "Peace Train")
Posts: 18601 | From: Chilling out in an undisclosed, sincere pumpkin patch. | Registered: Oct 2001
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Golden Key:
Martin--
Well, I don't know that God is either of those things. Actually, in People Of The Book traditions, "impassible" is about the *last* thing God is.
That's just anthropomorphism. How does God feel about what He omnipathically passively feels? And that 'how' covers 'what' AND does He feel every evanescent little infinitesimally local thing we blades of grass feel and WHAT He feels about it throughout Himself? I suspect not. And much more besides. (Infinite? From eternity?) creation changes constantly at the Planck level up and God is thinking all that, passively, but it changes Him not.
quote:
Beginnings, though: ISTM that there may not be an answer that we can understand. Has the universe always existed? Is it steady-state? If God created it, then did God have a beginning? Where did She come from? If She's not the First Cause, then Who or What is?
Hawking may say beginning, shmeginning, due to causality getting quantally fuzzy but the universe isn't as it was. It certainly isn't steady-state. A far more common sense physicist is Alan Guth.
And God is without beginning by definition.
quote:
Or does everything and everyone...simply exist?
God doesn't. If there 'were' no God then oddly rational infinite universes possibly amongst infinite others would in a non-entropic uncaused field. Unless null 'necessitates' not null.
quote:
Have you read the Tao Teh Ching? Particularly the glorious one with black and white photos. IIRC the translator may be Jane English.
No. I like the coffee table version of A Brief History Of Time. So I might as it's got pictures.
quote:
BTW, the "rhetorical postcard" you mentioned:
Does it communicate only with itself? Is it mailed to itself? Does that require a stamp? And is it a solipsist?
Hah, your last para answers this fool according to his folly!
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Aravis
Shipmate
# 13824
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Posted
One crucifixion is recorded - only -
How many be
Is not affirmed of Mathematics -
Or History
(Emily Dickinson)
This is about a quarter of the poem. I'm not good at posting links but it should be easy to google.
Posts: 689 | From: S Wales | Registered: Jun 2008
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MaryLouise
Shipmate
# 18697
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Posted
Wonderful, complex poem, a favourite of mine.
From the original fascicle in the Emily Dickinson Archive here
Another link for the entire poem here
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“As regards plots I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots.”
-- Ivy Compton-Burnett
Posts: 646 | From: Cape Town | Registered: Nov 2016
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Beautiful. And wrong. It is affirmed by mathematics. That there have been infinite. Unless meta-infinite changeless God did a beginning. True for us of course.
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Golden Key
Shipmate
# 1468
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Posted
Martin--
Perhaps a simpler approach?
quote:
Sing God a simple song:
Lauda, Laudē
Make it up as you go along:
Lauda, Laudē
Sing like you like to sing.
God loves all simple things,
For God is the simplest of all,
For God is the simplest of all.
That's part of "A Simple Song", from Leonard Bernstein's "Mass" (Hymnary).
A very good audio here (YouTube). Many other renditions online, some with video.
"Mass" is a theatrical performance about faith, loss, and surviving, and follows the outline of the RC mass. It's really, really good.
FWIW.
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Blessed Gator, pray for us!
--"Oh bat bladders, do you have to bring common sense into this?" (Dragon, "Jane & the Dragon")
--"Oh, Peace Train, save this country!" (Yusuf/Cat Stevens, "Peace Train")
Posts: 18601 | From: Chilling out in an undisclosed, sincere pumpkin patch. | Registered: Oct 2001
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Yes I need this. Simplicity. I used to sing the same choruses over and over again in the car when commuting during an acute phase of life. Trying to push back the intrusions amongst other things (Just yesterday I got a drowning man movie of all the usual intrusions and felt nothing. That was new and good.) Yet I must explore the corollaries of existence here too. I do simply relate to God, with thanks at the beginning and end of the day, the Lord's prayer at the beginning. The occasional intense one way, mindful, raw conversation in the shower. Other brief expressions. I find it easy to tell Him that rationally I don't believe in Him except for the Kalam cosmological argument but that I yet obviously believe, because of His Son Jesus and faith by His Spirit. I miss Him. The sky is vast and remote and complex and full of helpless goodwill as I write this. There is respite.
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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leo
Shipmate
# 1458
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Golden Key:
Martin--
Perhaps a simpler approach?
quote:
Sing God a simple song:
Lauda, Laudē
Make it up as you go along:
Lauda, Laudē
Sing like you like to sing.
God loves all simple things,
For God is the simplest of all,
For God is the simplest of all.
That's part of "A Simple Song", from Leonard Bernstein's "Mass" (Hymnary).
A very good audio here (YouTube). Many other renditions online, some with video.
"Mass" is a theatrical performance about faith, loss, and surviving, and follows the outline of the RC mass. It's really, really good.
FWIW.
I second that - one of the most thoughtful pieces about faith to come out of the 20th Century -and by a bisexual Jew too.
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My Jewish-positive lectionary blog is at http://recognisingjewishrootsinthelectionary.wordpress.com/
My reviews at http://layreadersbookreviews.wordpress.com
Posts: 23198 | From: Bristol | Registered: Oct 2001
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Nick Tamen
Ship's Wayfaring Fool
# 15164
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Golden Key:
"Mass" is a theatrical performance about faith, loss, and surviving, and follows the outline of the RC mass. It's really, really good.
It is wonderful work. It was written for the opening of John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
quote:
Originally posted by leo:
I second that - one of the most thoughtful pieces about faith to come out of the 20th Century -and by a bisexual Jew too.
Bernstein wrote most of it, but Stephen Schwartz ("Godspell," "Pippen" and "Wicked") wrote some of the text and lyrics. Paul Simon also wrote a small bit of it.
Both Schwartz and Simon are, of course, also Jewish.
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The first thing God says to Moses is, "Take off your shoes." We are on holy ground. Hard to believe, but the truest thing I know. — Anne Lamott
Posts: 2833 | From: On heaven-crammed earth | Registered: Sep 2009
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by leo:
quote:
Originally posted by Golden Key:
Martin--
Perhaps a simpler approach?
quote:
Sing God a simple song:
Lauda, Laudē
Make it up as you go along:
Lauda, Laudē
Sing like you like to sing.
God loves all simple things,
For God is the simplest of all,
For God is the simplest of all.
That's part of "A Simple Song", from Leonard Bernstein's "Mass" (Hymnary).
A very good audio here (YouTube). Many other renditions online, some with video.
"Mass" is a theatrical performance about faith, loss, and surviving, and follows the outline of the RC mass. It's really, really good.
FWIW.
I second that - one of the most thoughtful pieces about faith to come out of the 20th Century -and by a bisexual Jew too.
Su-perb.
I've sung 'in tongues' - glossolalia I made up - under duress, it helped.
Wow. Blew me a way to start and more so over three minutes in. Beautiful.
I just must forgive, understand, zen, rationalize, deconstruct those who say this is God meeting them. As it's infinitely forgivable, understandable.
This isn't Him, but He joins us in it, He yearns with our yearning. And it is Him as we are Him returning to Himself.
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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simontoad
Ship's Amphibian
# 18096
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Posted
I am reading this thread, but only understanding parts of it. My lack of understanding primarily derives from the tendency of my eyes to move faster than my comprehension. It's annoying.
I don't have room in my head to think about the nature of God. I think about comedy, trying to remember jokes that made me laugh, or trying to make up jokes or stories that I find funny. I think about things to say to other people that they might find funny, rather like Mr Collins in Pride & Prejudice.
I think about things that I have done wrong in the past quite often, and I try to remember not to use those things to castigate myself. I think about my behavior, and I try to judge whether I need to tell my wife or my psych about it, to reality test myself.
When I'm at work, I think about work and try to make the people around me laugh, and try to read their mood so that I can understand them better (I work with mostly non-verbal people of varying capacity).
I think about God and I pray, especially if I am frightened that I might do something self-destructive. Essentially, my private prayer life involves pleas for courage and/or endurance. Sometimes there are prayers of thanks.
I don't have to worry about God's existence or nature because of the personally salvific character of my conversion experience. This is a gift of huge importance. It leaves me free to concentrate on my own mental health and my contribution to the community and the Kingdom.
Martin, I enjoy your writing a great deal, especially how you weave your personal experiences into your systematic speculation. I just don't care, at present, how God has engaged with other sentient species or what God's relationship to time might be. Nevertheless, I always find reading you worthwhile, and I am glad I read this thread tonight.
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Human
Posts: 1571 | From: Romsey, Vic, AU | Registered: May 2014
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
simontoad. You're just too damn nice. Like my wife. Always taking responsibility for how bad I make her feel; that it's her fault. The reason for your partial understanding is my considerable incomprehensibility. And I'm sure I've been a brutal git to you in the past.
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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simontoad
Ship's Amphibian
# 18096
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Posted
It's not that at all. It's more that I read the thread from start to finish and my concentration is not what it was when I was 20.
You have not been a git towards me. I however, deliberately sought to get up the nose of both Mr Cheesy and yourself some months ago. The visible consequences of my attempt were avoided when a natural peacemaker intervened.
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Human
Posts: 1571 | From: Romsey, Vic, AU | Registered: May 2014
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