Atheism and Impersonal God?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x9hqYkI1Aw
This is response to an earlier video regarding atheism and the possibility divinity already within the mystery of self-relation. The self-aware cosmos is the place where divinity, life eternal, makes itself explicitly known.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Spinoza
• Atheism
• Theism
• self-relation
• transcendence
• Dennett
• self-awareness
• God

[Gottlichesalitter]

The problem I see with Dennet's and your explanations of religious phenomena is that they rest far too much on monotheist, and even christian views of what 'religion' constitutes. Such concepts as a personal creator-god or life eternal have little meaning in the sphere of tribal religions (assuming, with Durkheim a.o., that the vitalist religions observed in tribal societies somehow form the earliest stage in the 'evolution' of religion - in itself debatable, but it illustrates the point).

[Professoranton]

Really?

The stoics move in between the gods, god, the fates, divine order, Providence, etc. they are beyond the categories of either monotheism or polytheism simply.

[ajr5086]

I've heard this before and I think the additional concept of a person never existing is also necessary in this frame of thought. More of a grain a salt than a counter like the teaching of emptiness in Buddhism

With that understanding, though, everything is apart of Atman's unconscious dream. If the cosmos is intelligent, than not all the parts are being used. Your heart is pumping even though your fast asleep, and even when awake one can't will the heart to stop pumping. Individuality basically

[randyhelzerman]

I'm in broad agreement, but I would point out that given our, uh, immense capacity for further progress in understanding (another way to put that would be given our almost complete ignorance) it might be premature to say that experiencing the wonder as divine or as religious is any more of a distortion or a fetishization than any other way of experiencing it.

[Gottlichesalitter]

Although i would not venture into a discussion of stoicism, as it is not my department, I do not believe your comment rules out my criticism that the concepts you use in discussing the 'origin' of religious phenomena are highly selective and of dubious value when venturing beyond the traditions from which these concepts stem.

[dewonthegrass]

You say: "When we look around, we see a world that is miraculous, it is mind-bogglingly comples..." When we look around, we see everyday, simple things that we are used to. We, human, live in our "middle world", as Richard Dawkins says (in his TED talk, I think). When we dig deeper, do science, we realize our mind can't "really keep in perspective the difference between one million year, 10,000 years and 3 billion years".

What is love? I think if one deepens onself in evolution and biology...

[dewonthegrass]

If we are part of nature - and we are - why do you say that we see everything as mysterious, miraculous... I don't. To me, everything is, as it is, because that's how things are. The sense of miraculousness, mysteriousness comes when we start going beyond the borders of our everyday experiences in our middlesized world, through science, to the hidden properties of matter, to the microscopic, or to the macroscopic which we can't see with the naked eye.

[dewonthegrass]

I have it in my favourites - the fourth before the last one.