• Haafiz Mohammad Beigh
    3
    Hi
    I would like to talk about the concept of God or I would define god.
    How can we properly define something? The answer is simple yet complex. To define something we will use the Jainsh method. According to the Janish method if we want to define something then we need to know what it is and also know what it is not for example if we want to define a table we can define it by what it is, made of wood, has four legs etc but we can also say that a table is not a tree, it's not me. So to properly define anything we need to define what is it and what it is not at the same time that's why Jain people have a concept of kawaliya which means to know yourself, by knowing yourself you know what you are and what you are not which implies that you know everything just to know yourself properly.
    Now I am going to define god using this idea of defining anything.
    We get two possibilities when we try to define god. These possibilities are:
    1. God is finite, ie we can define it as what it is and what it is not.
    2. God is infinite, ie it is everything. We can define it as what it is but can't define what it is not because it is everything.
    We will call these 2 possibilities as case 1 and case 2
    Case 1
    God is finite, which means when we will try to define it, we will see that it will make god a mere object. If god is our creator, then he has authority over us but the problem is he is not a human being. So it means he is free from human desires, so why does he want to be praised? Why does he become angry with us, and why has he created hell for the people who disobey him? In fact, why does he want us to obey him? These questions prove that this definition of God looks human-made because this definition has human qualities. It just means this definition was made to make our society stable. if this concept of God does not exist whole of humanity would end in great chaos.
    Case 2
    Now, the case is god is everything; therefore, I, you, a dog, everything is a part of God, which means that our every attribute is God's attribute. I have lust, greed, pride, etc, which means god also possesses these attributes, which means that god should be the first one to go to hell. ( we are taking God as just, so he should do justice in this case because the problem of justice is too complex for me). It means that the idea of hell does not exist but most religions believe in the idea of hell.
    So when we try to define god using this idea of definition we find that in both cases we find that the concept of God does not match with our classic idea of God. It gives rise to 3 more possibilities which are
    1. The way we define has an error.
    2. The idea of God we know till now is wrong.
    3. The idea of God and the way we define it are both wrong.
    Thanks for reading my views and hope that you will improve this by engaging in a positive discussion
    Note: {We took the idea of a just god as a fact. The question arises about whether god exists or not and is just or unjust }
  • schopenhauer1
    10.9k
    Case 1
    God is finite, which means when we will try to define it, we will see that it will make god a mere object. If god is our creator, then he has authority over us but the problem is he is not a human being. So it means he is free from human desires, so why does he want to be praised? Why does he become angry with us, and why has he created hell for the people who disobey him? In fact, why does he want us to obey him? These questions prove that this definition of God looks human-made because this definition has human qualities. It just means this definition was made to make our society stable. if this concept of God does not exist whole of humanity would end in great chaos.
    Haafiz Mohammad Beigh

    Bingo!

    When it comes to these things, I tend to think anthropological and historical. The God you bring up, seems to be the one from the Abrahamic variety- the one started in the Bible. Well, how did this God come about historically? If you look at the history. There were variations of a henotheism amongst the tribes of Israel, and Judah. Israel was destroyed by Assyria in 722 BCE and many of the inhabitants fled to the south to Judah. The scribes, priests, and "prophets" there incorporated stories and spun the history to be completely monotheistic stretching back to even before the Iron Age to a mythological Bronze Age (the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, etc.).

    So when the elite Jews of Judah were captured to Babylonia in 586 BCE, their leadership coalesced the stories into what became the Torah and main prophets from Joshua down through ones like Isaiah and Jeremiah. The Leadership that coalesced these stories, had a vision for a very strict form of "ethical monotheism" whereby all aspects of life were accounted for by both the priestly class (the Koheins and Levites), and the laypeople (the Judhites/Israelites ). So this was okay for a while under the Persian period when they prospered under Cyrus the Great and all in the 400s BCE. But then the Greeks came around in 333 BCE under Alexander the Great who took control of Judea. Judeans became Hellenized to some extent, and Greek ways of life and philosophy entered their own religious system. Now, it wasn't enough to have ethical monotheism, but justifications. Why should one follow these rules set out by the elite during the Babylonian and Persian periods (that mythologically are supposed to go back to the distant past to Moses)? Are there rewards, punishments, an afterlife? Who should rightly lead, priests or layman scholars? How come the God in the Torah and Prophets seems to have human-like attributes if he is a transcendent God? Why does he look so human? Etc. etc. Then all sorts of answers and schools of thought started to form creating various subsects of Judaism, and theological discourse on the nature of the Godhead. We cannot discount the Hellenistic/Greek influence of Plato. That is to say, the notion of a soul, and of emanations leading to a perfect unity. And thus Jewish mystical traditions were born whereby the old ethical monotheism was combined with mystical Platonic aspects whereby the notion of a transcendent God above the fray can be justified with the one presented in the Bible that seemed to have human-like qualities. And thus all the questions you ask..

    But notice it's really just a history of ideas and responding to these ideas, not necessarily actual metaphysics. It can lead to interesting metaphysics, but if you take the angle of religious tradition, you have already skewed it to be in this tradition which is again, just history playing itself out in this particular culture at this particular time in history.
  • 180 Proof
    15.4k
    Welcome to TPF.

    Afaik, "god exists" only in one's mind "defined" subjectively; thus, there are as many "gods" as there are (ever were) egos. Otherwise, "god" is merely an empty name¹.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empty_name [1]

    ... if you take the angle of religious tradition, you have already skewed it to be in this tradition which is again, just history playing itself out in this particular culture at this particular time in history.schopenhauer1
    :up: :up:
  • wonderer1
    2.2k


    Nice history lesson!
  • Haafiz Mohammad Beigh
    3

    god exists" only in one's mind "defined" subjectively;
    @180 Proof
    The god as we know him is subjective and an empty name. But if we really want to know what god is and whether it is, our human capabilities come to hinder our way. It's like we have just 5 senses. Some animals have 2 or 3, so are these 5 senses complete? Humans defining god is like a blind man defining colours. He doesn't know what the sense of seeing something yet he is trying to define it, like in the case of humans we trying to do same trying to define god without sensing it. If we talk about the definition of God today they are just some simple answers to our complex questions. We should call this the curse of knowing that we don't know
  • Leontiskos
    3.1k
    1. God is finite, ie we can define it as what it is and what it is not.
    2. God is infinite, ie it is everything. We can define it as what it is but can't define what it is not because it is everything.
    Haafiz Mohammad Beigh

    Classically we say that the infinite God can be known by way of analogy, eminence, and negation. Or as Aquinas says, "but we know God from creatures as their principle, and also by way of excellence and remotion":

    Since according to the Philosopher (Peri Herm. i), words are signs of ideas, and ideas the similitude of things, it is evident that words relate to the meaning of things signified through the medium of the intellectual conception. It follows therefore that we can give a name to anything in as far as we can understand it. Now it was shown above [...] that in this life we cannot see the essence of God; but we know God from creatures as their principle, and also by way of excellence and remotion. In this way therefore He can be named by us from creatures, yet not so that the name which signifies Him expresses the divine essence in itself. Thus the name "man" expresses the essence of man in himself, since it signifies the definition of man by manifesting his essence; for the idea expressed by the name is the definition.Aquinas, ST Ia.13.1 - Can God be named by us?
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