God is the Universe, God is Nature (attack on pantheism)
Offline I named the post because I wanted you to know ahead of time, this is an attack on those who would redefine God as nature or the Universe.
This post was written by someone else and for all I know she was serious, and I see an equal amount of reason to question her as we would someone who defines God as the Universe or as nature etc...
Here it goes....
So, I made this pasta sauce the other night that was PERFECT.
It was just the right combination of spices and meat and vegetables and cheese...I cooked it in just the right pot, at just the right temperature, for just the perfect amount of time.
I ate it for 3 days...on pasta, bread, polenta.
It was SO good that I have no words to describe it.
I had an experience while eating it that was an out-of-body sense of connecting with my divine purpose. I felt like I had transcended mere "eating" into something more powerful.
I felt like I suddenly understood everything and loved everyone...I knew that "I" was one with everything, that the separation between me and the pasta sauce was just a pathetic ideological human construct...I knew that I was simultaneously both incredibly unique & important and a mere dot in infite spacetime.
I know that the elements of this pasta sauce existed at the start of the world and will exist long after I've materially disintegrated to join it for all eternity.
I've decided to call this pasta sauce "god"
So, am I still an atheist?
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God has revealed himself to me (in the same way he did to Saul of Tarsus) so you will just have to have faith in this revelation.
The answer is that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a triune god: the noodle, the sauce and the holy parmesian cheese.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. - Seneca
LOL, sounds like she's been touched by "His Noodly Appendage".
I think she was being facetious. At least I hope she was.
I have heard this argument before, as you pointed out, but with nature replacing pasta sauce.
I think that writing off human emotions(as powerful as they feel to us) as some divine outer force holding us all together and offering holy glimpses into our own existence is pretty crappy. Way to trivialize feelings, pantheists!
She's definately not an atheist if she honestly believes all that, that's for sure!
Sounds like she was joking - I know nobody seriously believes in the FSM.
Mattschizzle,
If you die before you find the FSM you will suffer for all eternity in the heat of the kitchen. Forever being tormented by having the eat burnt toast. Don't you think it's best to believe just in case? You have nothing to lose if I'm wrong and everything to gain if I'm right.
The end is near. The FSM has revealed to me some signs to watch for:
1. People will eat their food in their cars.
2. Some people will eat meatfree sauce.
3. Some people will eat their meals without a piece of garlic bread.
4. Paper napkins will replace cloth napkins.
5. The Holy Parmesian Cheese will be used on dishes other than spaghetti.
6. Some people will eat with their mouths full.
7. Meatballs will fall from the sky but people will think they are shooting stars.
8. Children will disobey their parents and leave the table before they are excused.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. - Seneca
LOL!!
Makes more sense than the Christian ideas anyway...
I have a feeling my doomsday list had an influence on this list being posted. (although i do find it quite amusing).
The Future of the World and the United States can be summed up in one verse:
Quran 61:9
{ He it is Who has sent His Messenger (Muhammad SAW) with guidance and the religion of truth (Islâmic Monotheism) to make it victorious over all (other) religio
Of course I believe she was kidding, however people who call the Universe God are being sincere, and their argument is not much different.
The point is that we have a word for Universe, and that word is Universe. We have a word for sauce, and that word is sauce. If we define God as amazing marvelous and awesome things because we think they kick ass, you'll have all sorts of different types of gods out there that have nothing to do with god. For example, Donovan McNabb is god. Or Jake (www.afterfaith.com) is god. But what's the point? It's just muddying the waters, and if it's not dishonesty, it certainly comes close.
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You forgot about the over sized portions and eating with out The Prayer.
Hallalua, a new revelation!
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. - Seneca
I've always thought that pantheism and atheism were indistinguishable once you get past the semantics.
Pantheists state that the universe is all there is and call it 'God."
Atheists (the naturalist ones, anyway) say that the universe is all there is and call it 'universe.'
This "God" of the pantheists does not appear to have any implications that would challenge philosophical naturalism (to distinguish it from nudists).
I agree with Sapient; calling the universe God is ridiculous since we already have a name for 'universe.' Calling pasta sauce 'God" is also absurd.
Penentheism, on the other hand, is indistinuishable from theism, and the pantheism/panentheism debate is essentially the same as the debate between naturalism and supernaturalism.
I'll fight for a person's right to speak so long as that person will, in return, fight to allow me to challenge their opinions and ridicule them as the content of their ideas merit.
I believe. He molested me with his noodly appendages when I was a little boy. Oh wait, that was my priest...
The Enlightenment wounded the beast, but the killing blow has yet to land...
DIE BLASPHEMER!!!!!
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. - Seneca
Hi everyone, I dug up this pantheism straw man from 2006; it's intended facetiously, I know and, in that, pretty funny I agree but I wanted to make a serious reply too.
My reply is no less rhetorical than the OP, but it's not something that people think about every day either. To describe pantheism using pasta sauce you need to go further than to name the elements of the delicious noodle topping, you would need to define them.
Lets start with a vegetable, the tomato, the fine rich red perfect tomato that formed the base of the sauce. What was this vegetable before it was blanched peeled and crushed in a base of salt? It was the glorious, hardwon, crowning achievement of a small green tree. This tree is (or was) alive, and through it's life its energy and resources were spent producing a lovely red tomato. Whether this was a conscious process is not the point, the point is that it was the dynamic process of a working body, work was done to produce the tomato and a small proportion of the available energy in the local universe was transferred by living and dynamic physical organisms from random sources unusable by humans into a neat red delicious packet, highly useful to us.
None of this has to have imported meaning, it has meaning all of it's own. When a factory worker wraps you a chocolate bar a small proportion of your purchasing dollar finds it's way to that person and they recieve a token of your gratitude for their effort. When another person expends their own energy in order to benefit you, there is no question of the value of that benefit in your life. Yet, here we have the same principle, a tomato, the product of many organisms working to benefit man, and albeit jokingly, this generosity of spirit is taken for granted entirely. The tomato was cut from its tree, the tree, which ploughed it's very life essence into producing plump ripe fruit makes another.
This doesn't need to be skewed anthropomorphic to be simply meaningful, however, if we want some anthropomorphic overtones there is a conscious being graciously giving an element to the pasta sauce. The cow.
Consider the animal, it's life was probably lived solely and exclusively to provide you food or milk, have it's children taken and slaughtered at it's feet for rennet, and die before old age on a white floor with no grass to comfort it such is the society which we live in. But then even if it was not a slaughter house animal, suppose it was a traditional farm bred beast, having lived a reasonably pleasant life on some hill with flowers and companions. Its life becomes yours, literally, when you eat the pasta sauce. The energy which its body stored away for frolicking in flowers, is now yours. No less effort was expended by this animal to provide humans an energy source than by the butcher who cut it up.
The pasta sauce, perfect or not, is never fully paid for, and nor do the truly benevolent working bodies of the universe ask for payment for the pasta sauce. Eating pasta sauce is more than eating, it is recieving benevolence from real feeling living beings which were sacrificed to our ends.
this benevolent providence is a part of reality in which pantheists and panentheists see a reflection of their deity but anyone can see it simply in the light of the individual living organisms and know that something valuable to some other lifeform has been given to them for their pasta sauce, one can even see it purely in the sense of the uitility of the various ogarnisms, once alive but now pasta sauce, and still the physical fact that literal work is done to your benefit is undeniable.
Pasta pantheists. LOL.
Theist badge qualifier : Gnostic/Philosophical Panentheist
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This is not necessarily so. The Panentheist deity is within all parts of nature, this is to say that no matter how small you break the universe down into it's individual parts, one part is wholly God.
THis god is also distinct from the physical universe, by default such a notion is traditionally labelled supernatural and so by contemporary atheists summarily disavowed, however very early philosophical panentheism such as that of Heraclitus (5th CE) defines the supreme being and souls natural realm quite clearly as underlying nature itself, not outside of it. The distinctness of the panentheistic God of Heraclitus is in its properties respective to the visible world, not its abstract location respective to the natural world.
When comparing debates I would say the debate between naturalism and certain philosophical panentheism is analogous to the debate between physical monism and neutral monism.
Theist badge qualifier : Gnostic/Philosophical Panentheist
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Sounds roughly similar to my experiences with the Divine Smoothie.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Oh, man. That was a good one.
Safe within the arms of sanity, you are verily atheist. You can call the pasta "Jerry" if you want; it's still pasta. I can prove to you that pasta exists. Pasta can be measured, weighed, and cooked to perfection.
Your atheist stance might be shaken if you decided to invent an imaginary type of food that nobody had ever experienced before, and you claimed it to be the divine perfect origin of the universe. That would probably keep you from being an atheist.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
I must disagree with you on this issue. Renaming the pasta "god" and renaming the pasta "Jerry" are quite different, because of the connotations and the perception required to deify something. The object itself isn't changed, but the treatment of it is. In the same sense that George W. Bush didn't change when America decided to start calling him "President," but how he affected America changed. The title of "President" alters the perceptions of those minds who have placed it upon him. Likewise, attributing a "god" status to anything, even an inanimate object, alters the way that object is perceived by the mind.
Sounds like a form of Buddhism
It's still something that exists. George Bush exists, pasta exists, the "object" exists. Now, if you're talking about people who can worship their dog (or pasta) as a deity with all seriousness and devotion, then you're talking about someone who is insane. Hands down insane.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
So in order to be a theist, you feel that a person must believe in something that by definition does not exist?
I'm not sure how you can justify deciding that something that explicitly exists is less worthy of deification than something that explicitly doesn't. Would you care to explain?
No. In order to be a theist, you must believe in something that is superhuman.
"Less worthy" doesn't describe my argument. If you believe your dog, or pasta, or George Bush, for example, are eternal and responsible for the creation of the universe (following the gist of the original post) then your beliefs diverge greatly from observable reality.
"Deification" of either real or imaginary entities is absurd. One is not more absurd than the other.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
I'm not sure what "superhuman" is supposed to mean.
Forgive me for the criticism, but that shows a rather Christian bias. Not all gods, after all, are eternal, or responsible for the creation of the universe. I didn't read anything in the original post that suggested that the god referred to had such qualities.
Perhaps you are correct.
Let's say "supernatural". With "superhuman" I was assigning an additional aspect of dominion.
Criticism is welcome, and in this case, absolutely correct. The "creation" bit was a misread on my part. I'll restate: if you believe your pasta has magical powers, you're probably removed from reality.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
Fair enough.
If your pasta has magical powers, then wouldn't that qualify it as being "supernatural"?
Since from my point of view, nothing supernatural has ever been demonstrated, if the pasta has scientifically observable magical powers, then the observable powers have left the supernatural and entered the natural.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
Which brings us back to my previous contention:
By your own definition, nothing "supernatural" can be known or observed to exist, otherwise it would cease to be "supernatural." Would you care to explain how my interpretation of this would be incorrect?
I think we've reached a really thin hair to slice: it was my contention that should the powers of the deified object be observed in a rigorous, reliable way (e.g. by the scientific method) they would enter the realm of the observed natural, whether the object of deification existed or did not.
If you mean that I accuse an object that has such powers of not existing, that's going too far, since the powers of the alleged magical pasta (or Its Holiness the Smoothie) are the only supernatural claim.
Now don't get me wrong - there could exist a pasta that is simply the "tip of the iceberg", so to speak, of an entire parallel universe of wonderful powers outside the scope of our natural world. But I have no reason to believe that such a thing exists without evidence.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
I agree with ShaunPhilly , quote "I've always thought that pantheism and atheism were indistinguishable once you get past the semantics." ////
Pantheism is a clever helpful way to steal the god word from the god of abe followers to help dismantle abe religion. Why should we atheists let them religion theists own the "god" word.... and the many other words like faith, saved, sin, divine, holy, and even jesus etc etc etc .... ???
I think we "spiritually saved divine holy caring" atheist "doctors" need to think harder at how to "save" the abe fans. Take their words and make them ours, why not ?!? Destroy all god separation concepts.
Hey Sapient , my mentor, please better explain your quote, (or anyone else),
"If we define God as amazing marvelous and awesome things because we think they kick ass, you'll have all sorts of different types of gods out there that have nothing to do with god." ---------
Geezz, I want the GOD word re-defined for the kids kids, to make mockery of the old Abe theist god of separation.
Good god / Bad god; do we tell the kids "god is bad or good", ... for a short answer best to say both, but we really have to dig in here and keep the awe alive (science) ..... I like the pantheists buddha jesus message that all is simply ONE.
Language sucks, therefore we suck, "god" sucks, and so I worship evolution , hey but that is GOD ! , but damn god is slow on our watch .... Well at least I AM GOD as you, it's all we are .... so sorry, so glad, ....
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