More on God

[andrewducker]

Nice quote I've just stolen from here, where the author is inspired by the Onion AV story about God to translate Brecht:

Someone asked Mr K. whether there was a God. Mr K. said: "I advise you to reflect whether your behaviour would change depending on the answer to this question. In case it wouldn't change we can drop the question. If it would change I can help you in that way that I say that you have decided already: You need a God."

I short, people invent the God's they need. They feel that there must be something, and so they assume there is. I think I'll pass.

Comments

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

Reality being subjective has nothing to do with knowing or not knowing or appreciating or not appreciating other people's world views. Your subjective reality includes your internal model of the world and your internal model of other people's internal models of how they perceive the world. It is all mediated by your senses and experiences and interactions with the world, which are subjective, and form your taxonomy and functional definitions of everything around you.
The way you react to a call of "car" or someone pushing you out of the road is based on how you view those experiences affecting you and your knowledge of the world around you, how can this not be subjective?

Yes, the majority of people would be able to understand the situation in a reasonably similar (subjectively speaking, because there is no objective similar) way. They would be able to understand the concept of broken bones and car wrecks, in some way based on experiences of their own. So that if you said "car wreck" they'd all remember a car wreck they were in or saw on TV or read about in the paper. All mediated by their perceptions, all subject to their experiences.
The same occurs with any taxonomy of day to day situations. Breaking down the world affecting us. Just because you can track the movement of the underlying world, which is the basis of your viewpoint, doesn't mean that car is somehow not a subjective term nor your mental image of a car nor your touching of a car nor any other interaction with it.
That the car might interact with you and break your leg is based in the underlying objective reality of energy states and energy state transitions, but everything above this level, everything we use for day to day behaviour by breaking the world down into pigeon holes we can deal with, is subjective.

[andrewducker]

I never said it wasn't subjective. All of our experiences definitely are.

but originally you said that because you believe there is a god then there _is_ a god. If you'd said because you believe there is a god then there might as well be a god then i'd have agreed with you.

Re:

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

And tell me the functional difference between one subset of the universe's energy being in a given form and being called God and another subset of the universe's energy being in a given form and being called God.

The first being some omnipotent force, the second being a collection of neurons in someone's head.
People define a lot of things as being God. The feeling that there's someone up there that loves them, the feeling they get when they see a beautiful day or a sky full of stars and wonder at the enormity of existence. How is this feeling any less God that an actual white bearded entity raining down thunderbolts (and/or love).

If you believe in a thing and project attributes onto it, then all you have done is taxonomise that thing into a pigeon hole. As this is what we do when we deal with experiences of cars and accidents how is it any different?

[andrewducker]

"And tell me the functional difference between one subset of the universe's energy being in a given form and being called God and another subset of the universe's energy being in a given form and being called God."

Because if I call something a flower and you call it an anti-tank missile, when I say i love smelling flowers, there's confusion.

These people aren't claiming that there is a God in their heads, they're claiming that there is an outside force who affects the universe. They aren't after a semantic quibble, they're claiming a force which moves throughout the universe causing effects.

If they want to say "I get a funny feeling when I think of flowers, and I call that feeling God" then fine, but they are actually claiming that there is an external God who causes funny feelings in them, which is not the same thing.

It's the difference between me saying that "Metallica is pleasure." and "Metallica makes me feel good." One is a fairly objective fact, one is a statement that other people can (and do) argue about constantly.