Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site cmu-cs-k.ARPA Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!unc!mcnc!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!rochester!cmu-cs-pt!cmu-cs-k!tim From: tim@cmu-cs-k.ARPA (Tim Maroney) Newsgroups: net.religion Subject: Re: Evolving Religions Message-ID: <449@cmu-cs-k.ARPA> Date: Tue, 11-Jun-85 18:51:19 EDT Article-I.D.: cmu-cs-k.449 Posted: Tue Jun 11 18:51:19 1985 Date-Received: Thu, 13-Jun-85 02:39:13 EDT References: <238@ihnet.UUCP> <446@cmu-cs-k.ARPA>, <99@umcp-cs.UUCP> Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, Networking Lines: 119 Scorecards! Getcha scorecards here! Can't tell the correspondents without a scorecard! Seriously, this is a response to a message from Charley Wingate, which responded to a message from me, which responded to a message from someone who hasn't been around long enough for me to remember his name. (People's names are probably the weakest part of my memory.) That was a response to a message from me that responded to a message of his. > >> Is there any evidence for a deity(s), as described in any religion? > > >If you mean the incorporeal humanoid most monotheists believe in, no. > >People do report contact with the being, but their accounts are > >contradictory and can be explained as delusions of some sort. (I tend to > >think that many dogmatists do have genuine mystical experiences, but find > >them so upsetting to their normal perspective that they immediately slap > >them into some readily comprehensible, literalistic model afterwards.) Nor > >is there any reason to believe that there is any being, who is real in the > >same sense we are, who is Zeus or Indra or Aphrodite or Kali. [Tim] > > Humanoid? Only in a sense so weak that christians and jews almost always > choose "personal" instead. [Charley] I suppose this is a subjective judgment. The Judeo-Christian-Islamic god seems so anthropomorphic to me that I feel justified in my statement. "He" (rarely "it", n.b.) has purposes, intelligence, personality; his actions are often described in terms of emotions; he is assumed able to communicate in human language; he is assumed capable of meaningful manifestation in human form; and so on. That's what I meant by "humanoid". > >On the other hand, if you consider deities simply symbols, as I do, then > >obviously they do exist; just go down to the library and you'll see a whole > >mess of 'em. This puts the discussion on another level: are they useful > >symbols? My empirical evidence (my own experiences in my "lab") show that a > >properly performed invocation, that is, an attempt to harmonize oneself with > >the nature of the deity, is effective in producing states of consciousness > >that cannot apparently be reached by other means. I consider this > >exploration of the potentials of my consciousness valuable, since it has > >become clear to me that most people confuse a single state of consciousness > >with "reality", failing to understand the observer-created nature of the > >universe. If someone else does not consider such work to be valuable, I > >have no argument with them, provided they do not seek to prevent me from > >following my own path. [Tim] > > The problem with this argument, Tim, is it is the traditional monotheistic > argument wrapped around Pantheism. Language about deities, as almost every > religion has ever conceived of them, has to be purely symbolic and > metaphoric in nature. Even the word "exist" takes on a symbolic meaning, > since it is claimed of deities that they exist in a different framework than > we do. As I understand it, Tim seems to be saying that, outside of being > mental constructs, deities do not exist at all. [Charley] It's not really intended as an argument, but as a simple statement of my position, without any attempt to convince anyone else of its absolute validity. I was answering the question of whether there is any evidence for the existence of any deity as conceived by any religion. My answer was, sure, look at the position that they are symbols. Your last sentence is tricky, since from one perspective nothing exists except "mental constructs"; from another, only the Tao exists. The question at hand is whether we should consider deities sentient in the same sense we consider humans sentient. That's the sort of judgment for which I usually require some sort of intellectually acceptable proof; for instance, if you were going to claim thast you have a friend named Tawny Shleppenschleppen who can type at 1000 words a minute, I would be skeptical, and I'd ask for some more evidence than your claims that you frequently speak with her. The point about "exist" taking on a different meaning is a good one. Even things which "do not exist" such as fur-lined bathtubs can be considered "real" in that they are a particular point within the Absolute. The same can be said for deities conceived in a literal sense. (In "Software", Rudy Rucker has extended the idea to include the afterlife in a very clever and pleasing sense.) Deities can be conceived of as symbols, as emergent properties of sentience resulting from large-scale organization of systems such as the Universe, or as "unrealities" in the sense of the preceding paragraph, as you will. The ideas are not equivalent, and will lead to different mystical experiences, but all stem from the idea of "deity". > I find Tim's evidence equally as problematic as he finds mine. Moreover, > his evidence (as it is presented) fails to disprove the reality of the > beings he seeks to invoke, in the sense that the language of the deities may > be symbolic of supernatural order. I guess you'tre referring to your claims that your personal mystical experiences of "Jesus" demonstrate the reality of that deity as a real person. Right? I'm not making any such strong claims from my experiences; I just say that well-performed invocations lead to certain unusual experiences of an apparently unique nature. As for the second sentence, true, but it is impossible to perform this sort of disproof short of finding a logical contradiction in the idea of their existence, and I haven't. The default position is to say they are unreal, because they are not obviously real, and to ask anyone who believes in them to provide evidence that they do exist. Basic burden of proof, you know the rule: the burden of proof is on the side I disagree with. Seriously, any claiming of personal reality for these beings is a strong positive assertion, placing the burden on the person making the assertion. > In general, I find that the strongest conclusion I can draw from the > mystical experience is that there is some supernatural order which shows > some unification of the natural order. The problem with trying to go beyond > that is that the language appears to be stretched to the limit just to get > that far, making it very hard to generalize across the mystics. [Charley] Well, I consider mystical experience to show that any attempts to formulate reality in such a literal and intellectual sense are fruitless. The flowing reality of the Universe is beyond all such attempts to represent it in a static sequence of symbols. Intellect is a useful tool for dealing with subsets of the Universe, but will never capture its totality. (In case it wasn't obvious, Taoism is my second favorite religion, after Thelema.) As usual, I have focused on disagreements rather than agreements, so I haven't commented on all of Charley's message. -=- Tim Maroney, Carnegie-Mellon University, Networking ARPA: Tim.Maroney@CMU-CS-K uucp: seismo!cmu-cs-k!tim CompuServe: 74176,1360 audio: shout "Hey, Tim!"