Flushing out the "gods."
Submitted by magilum on June 20, 2007 - 2:00am.
I'm growing more resistant to the deist/pantheist position. It always comes down to a handful of tiresome dead ends that beg the question. The "god of the gaps" keeps moving further off into the distance, scientific understanding nipping at its heels. As it always has, and will continue to until such nonsense is ruled out by our understanding of reality, or people come to their senses. Or maybe "everything" is "god": the insufferable redefinition of words, where a universe with "god" can't be distinguished from one without. The needless pantheist inference of a divine somethingoranother that did something for some reason, and one is and the same with all existence. What a trifling, superfluous concept.
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don't throw the baby out with bath water though
Just be careful of how you go about expressing it if I may advise. I think deism and pantheism is a path toward atheism on their step up away from theism/christianity. It was for me. While the biblical and mid-east beliefs I had fallen away from, the general belief in a god was a lot tougher making deism a temporary stop for me and I've heard others echo that as well.
No Way!!! Haha, don't
No Way!!!
Haha, don't need a picture.
It's an opinion of definition
I agree that it's hard to handle the deist/pantheist position, though I think it is good to see how the definition of "God" is rather different in many peoples perception. For instance in the 1985 Gifford Lectures of Carl Sagan, which have recently been released as a book called The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, he approaches this very idea in the God Hypothesis chapter (it seems everyone must have this chapter in their book). He states rhetorically; what is Buddhist enlightenment but a quest for reaching nothingness, and isn't that atheism? Within the same realm of definition, the Roman church prosecuted the Christians under the belief that they were atheists, which is true for the christian view of the Roman Gods, But as Dawkins consistently remarks "some of us just go one God further." For the prospect of attacking Western theism we have to understand that the word 'God' is over saturated, for don't we as atheists understand and feel a connection to the vastness of the universe, or the 'God of Einstein?'
It seems that it's hard to find the right word when subjective experience determines a definition. all definitions are, really, are ways of trying to relate subjective experiences. If we say love we both think of the times we've had or lost it in our lives, yet we subconsciously agree that it's the same concept. Communication can be such a bitch. But, for what its worth, I feel you on your frustration. Someday I hope we can all be post theists and sit back and laugh about all the time we've had to spend trying to convince people that, like the easter bunny, there is no big eye in the sky.