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From: mangoe@umcp-cs.UUCP (Charley Wingate)
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Re: Evolving Religions
Message-ID: <157@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 12-Jun-85 13:50:18 EDT
Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.157
Posted: Wed Jun 12 13:50:18 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 14-Jun-85 05:14:48 EDT
References: <99@umcp-cs.UUCP> <449@cmu-cs-k.ARPA>
Organization: U of Maryland, Computer Science Dept., College Park, MD
Lines: 154

In article <449@cmu-cs-k.ARPA> tim@cmu-cs-k.ARPA (Tim Maroney) writes:

>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".

Well, I'll certainly assent to your description of YHWH, at least on a purely
linguistic level.  But that word "humanoid" still bothers me, since it has
generally been used to refer to human *physical* form.  I think I'll stick
with "personal", understanding that "humanoid"(tim)=="personal"(Charley).

The fact that this is anthropomorphic is, according to Judaism, a direct
result of divine purpose.  Man is God-like; thus our perception of YHWH is
precisely that of the "man-like" portion.  And many theologians through the
centuries have asserted that we should attach a "trans-" onto the front of
each of those characteristics, to indicate that the human attributes they
refer to are severely limited versions of the divine originals.

>>>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]

>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.

How can a being which "exists out of time" be sentient in the same way that
human being is?  That's the whole problem; I can very vaguely conceive of a
being existing out of time, but the images produced in my mind are clearly
defective.  I must ultimately admit that I have a very poor understanding of
what "existing out of time" means.  The heart of my argument is this, then:
that this problem exists with almost any attribute of God one cares to name.
Obviously, under such constraints a direct investigation is very difficult.

>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".

From the literature, and from my own experience, my impression is that the
mystical experience is "pre-" or "trans-conceptual";  therefore, the
conceptual framework may change the interpretation of the experience, but I
would contend that the experience itself is unchanged.

>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.

Well, I have had two very different experiences, one of which I would not
class as "mystical".  The context and content of the latter made it clear to
me that it was in fact YHWH; I recognized him.  The other, however, was not
invoked at all, and was, I think, an experience of a different order of
existence.

>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.

O.K., but all you've done is moved the evoker from an supernatural deity to
the whole order of nature.  In both cases something is posited; the question
is not "is there a deity" but "what is its nature".  I will not claim at all
that I can offer anything other than anecdotal evidence; I will contend,
however, that in view of the descriptive problem, saying that you can
therefore DENY that a deity exists is a rather subjective evaluation.

>> 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.)

Is there not order in flow?  I think the only point of disagreement is that
Judaism and Christianity claim the historical existence of Revelations, and
that these revelations are (in some unknown way) "better" representations of
the supernatural order, and that some of these revelations refer to real
concrete manifestations of the deity, rather than to such highly subjective
material as mystical experience.

Modern christian theology (and mine in particular) is much influenced by
Taoism.  What we have decided, however, is that, instead of abandoning
deities in the face of the obvious linguistic problems, we will continue in
faith, recognizing the great problems with the language and attempting to
deal with them anyway.

Charley Wingate