I'm stuck on that one. The answer "love" isn't a serious answer because you can't love without an object (unless it's self love).
Why would a transcendent God do anything?
by gubberningbody 24 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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poppers
Because he can. Being transcendent, nothing can touch harm, or offend "God". This world (and even the "invisible spiritual" realms) are all within the world of form, but since God is transcendental he is not confined to the world of form; his true essence is formless, and the world of form is only an expression of that formlessness. In other words, God is found in all things but isn't limited nor affected by any of it, and so the world of forms unfolds continually within the formlessness of God. This has been called "God's sport", or lila - the play of consciousness. All of what you see is "God at play".
What is disconcerting is when people believe that they are separate for God, that they are who they think they are. The way out of that is to discover what you really are beyond all ideas of "self" - discover the formlessness that lies beneath every idea you have, including every idea of "self".
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choosing life
Poppers, that makes sense except that God's sport or play seems to be insensitive to the suffering encountered by innocent people. Why would his play include such things?
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Narkissos
Another good question, I mean the kind of question that no answer can match.
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poppers
that makes sense except that God's sport or play seems to be insensitive to the suffering encountered by innocent people. Why would his play include such things?
Yes, it doesn't make sense to "us", those individuals who see themselves as separate from God. That is dualism - there is "me" and everything else, including ideas of what "God" is. This dualism is where religion and belief systems about God have a powerful influence because they place emphasis on separation, requiring you to believe in separation, requiring you to believe that "you" are separate from everything else, especially "God". This is what keeps you trapped in the world of form, and what creates the notion of suffering and lack.
What is left unexamined in most cases is this notion of the "me" that thinks itself is separate from "other". Is the "me" real or is it only a concept that is identified with? Find out what you are prior to any concept, and in finding that you will discover that what "you" are is not separate from anything else. This is the discovery that "all that is" is just a manifestation of form out of formlessness, and that creates an illusion of separateness. But that illusion falls apart in the discovery of what you actually are. Then the world of form is seen for the "play" that it is. "You", as you believe yourself to be, are nothing more than a set of ideas held in the mind.
For suffering to end, that must be seen directly. To see it directly begin by looking for the "me". Can you find anything of "you" other than ideas of you? Can you be an idea, a flickering thought form that comes, changes, and goes, or is there a sense that there is something stable and present in all situations? Find the nature of what is constant and never changes - that must be what you are. Then see if that is separate from anything else.
Then the question of "why would his play include such things" becomes clear: God is playing all the roles and all the props and is behind all the situations. Each "individual" is God disguised, and to make the game interesting for himself, the individual "forgets" his true nature. And part of the game is "waking up" to reality while "others" remain mesmerized by the world of form and forgetful of the formless God within. Part of the game/play is discovering and experiencing what it is like to believe in and live a life that seems separate.
Were it not for the "bad" stuff the game would be less entertaining and interesting. But with it there comes the possibility of God re-dis-covering himself in every possible situation. That is the sport God plays with himself, and because he literally is everything, he necessarily must create an illusion that seems very convincing to "all" who are participating. Without the illusion there would be no joy at rediscovering himself within the world of form. In other words, God uses the world of form in all its permutations and possibilities as a way to experience himself. The entire universe, both subtle and gross, is the "mirror" that God uses to "see" himself. Without "form" there is nothing to see and nothing to experience, but with it everything imaginable is possible. So in the end, there is nothing that can harm or change God since he is doing everything, and is being everything. This is what nondualism is about, the realization that all is "one", and that you ARE that one thing. Not the illusory "you" that thinks it's separate, but the core reality of what you are that is one with everything.
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Satanus
Choosing life
The word god no doubt evokes the standard god of the western christian world for you. Try the concept of AWARENESS, instead. Put the word awareness where the term god is being used in this thread. Does that remove some of the standard god concepts?
I am a bit dualist in my view. I don't see the material universe as one of the better emenations of the source/awareness/god. Personally, the planetary suffering disturbs me, also. Yet, it is a natural continuation of the violence w which this universe was born and devloped. The solar system was by the same violent way. Life on this planet, the same. Perhaps, there are planets out there somewhere, where life entails less suffering. But, we are here, so we deal w it.
S
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BurnTheShips
The answer "love" isn't a serious answer because you can't love without an object
If you believe in the Christian Trinity, then you believe that the transcendant God lives in a relationship of the highest love, beyond imagination, within Himself, before the world came to be. The knower, the known, and the love.
One of the supreme confidences God has made to His human friends, a divine secret that only God could know, is the story of the impenetrable activity inside the Godhead, the story of the family life of God. He has, in His lover's eagerness to be known, told us of the mystery of the Trinity; the mystery of three divine Persons in one divine nature, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, who are yet, by their unity of nature, one God. The intense life of divinity itself is told to our trusting hearts: the Father, who is God eternally knowing, eternally generating; the Son, who is God eternally known, the Word eternally generated; the Holy Ghost, who is God eternally loved, the breath of love proceeding eternally from the perfect Knower and the perfectly Known. These are three Persons, distinct from one another, but completely identical in their divine nature. This is a lover's surrender of secrets. It is not a truth told to stagger our minds and so to impress us, though certainly the truth is much too big for more than our most timid caress. The secret has been revealed to further and deepen our happiness, a contribution of love to the happiness of us who are so loved.
Even to our dull eyes, there is a tremendous kindness, a gentle protection of our love in this divine confidence. In our stumbling human fashion, we might so easily have seen God as utterly alone . . . aloof from everything for lack of equals, cold for a lack of goodness worthy of His great heart; and, seeing Him thus, we might have given Him pity instead of admiration, adoration and love. In our human experience activity and change are so intertwined that we might easily think of the unchangeable God as condemned to a life of idleness, completely inactive, stagnant, with nothing to do and all eternity to face; and so have our own hearts go dead within us in a sorrow that would be close to revulsion. Because we have direct experience only with human persons, we might easily make the mistake of conceiving of God as an impersonal being, some kind of a huge blob of goodness, spectral, ghostly, without eyes or heart; and thus have rendered ourselves incapable of so intimately personal a relationship as love.
In the trust that love so eagerly gives to a lover's words, and so helplessly since there is no other way of knowing what must be known, we know now that there is no loneliness in God, no lack of equals, no lack of loveableness worthy of infinite love. Rather, the joy, the truth, the beauty, the love of that divine life has spilled over in its abundance to make a world and to quench the thirst given to men for the life that is proper to God. He has told us that truth's bright beauty is never veiled and the allure of goodness never dimmed; in other words, that the activity of mind and heart that can shrink the hours to minutes in our clumsy world of time, flames through all eternity with infinite intenseness. In that divine life, on the word of God, Love is so personal as to be a Person, Wisdom and its Generator so far superior to anything we can conceive as to be Persons. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are divine Persons; the revelation of their eternal life is the divine answer to the absurdity of an impersonal God, the divine invitation to a love so penetrating as to be victorious possession and unconditional capitulation.
God is most anxious that we know these divine secrets; He tells them plainly though they be beyond our mind's power to understand. Depending with a lover's trust on His word, the very knowing of the existence of the Trinity will do so much for our love of God, so much for our living, so much for the honor and respect we will give to men who are to share that divine living now and for eternity.BTS
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Chalam
Hi,
tran scend ent adjective
beyond or above the range of normal or merely physical human experience
Because He became a man.
Philippians 2:5-7 (New International Version)
5 Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
6 Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
7 but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.All the best,
Stephen
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BurnTheShips
Yet, it is a natural continuation of the violence w which this universe was born and devloped. The solar system was by the same violent way.
What is violence? By this apparent definition, any energetic process acting in inanimate matter would be violence.
BTS
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gubberningbody
Narkissos, for me this is THE question. (and one that is invariably papered over by people who always miss the point of the question by making all manner of unwarranted assumptions)
I've heard...
"Because God has no free will. He had no choice." (reminds me of the answer a physicist gave as to why there was something instead of nothing..."Because nothing is unstable.")
The answer then creates a bizarre cascade (we cannot have free will either then) ultimately eliminating the existence of sin and evil as being simply a wrong way of looking at events, but this snakes back around to the usage of the term 'wrong' because lacking free will, it makes no sense to refer to wrong or right.
I've also heard...
"Because God wants to experience death and the only way he can do this is vicariously."
I understand that some jewish sages suggested that creation was so that God could exist and experience the world that he created (which makes no sense)
I suspect that any question that asks "Why" in this case where there can be no eternal "Because's" (no existence of actual infinities, only potential infinities) will be faced with a definitionally irrational reply. No rational answer can be given because a rational answer is a finite series. At the end we're faced with a God whose action of creation seems to be one that can never be understood in any logical sense, nor would I image that it would be possible to speak of it. I think it would just have to be experienced. I often thought that reconnecting with the transcendent in this way would be the only way possible to "experience an answer". Once that answer was experienced, I would imagine that the answers to all other questions would seem superfluous.
The question of course for me at that time would be... "Is what I'm experiencing real and true, or just an illusion?"