Do you believe in God?

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I accidently reported one of your posts while trying to quote it... I am sorry!! !

But yeah... what I meant to type as a comment was that what you said is BS and you are putting words in my mouth. I think the conversation between you and I is basically over. We are ships passing in the night. Our definitions disagree more often than they align. Basically its come down to us saying "No... you are wrong... No... you are wrong." I will continue to post sources that represent my side... but I will not continue to engage in this back and forth. If you want to declare yourself the winner at this point... you can go ahead. This is exactly what happens when I discuss these issues with that same cousin I keep referring to. That is why I have not discussed religion with him in a few years. I finally learned that I hate to argue... and all I have to do is let him continue to maintain blissfully superficial understanding of science, theology, and philosophy. The way I see it is the atheist is equivalent to someone who does not appreciate Shakespeare because they do not understand the metaphor. All you can do is smile, love them, and hope they can grow to appreciate the significance of it later.

Why do you all assume the question refers to the Judeo-Christian God?

In truth, I only skimmed that video, so forgive my initial impressions. I think we are close to finding common ground.

On Alan Watts on Jesus:
Except for Alan's excusing of biblical miracles, there's nothing about what he's saying that I object to. I was eluding to just this thing earlier. The term cosmic consciousness can be applied to what I experienced, I'm just using different terminology. And yes I interpreted it without any religious baggage because that was my nature previously. Jesus didn't know about any religion other than a few in his area, so he interpreted a possibly similar experience in terms of Judaism, and God. So does this excuse Christianity (or other monotheistic religions)? I think not. Christianity is what people who didn't have this experience created out of vague reports and miracles which they mistakenly took literally. They are essentially Jews with slightly different myths. It's not a religion created by it's alleged founder (unlike Buddhism). I object to religion not because it's a path to transcendence, but because it's an obstacle to it (among other things). As Alan says, the gospel is an emasculated gospel. They miss the point, the same way you guys are missing the point about my atheism. I'm not ignoring transcendent experiences, I doing everything I can to remove obstacles that prevent it, and one of those things is the conception of the supernatural, and the conception of God as something other.

I recommend Alan's commentary on how eastern thought differs profoundly from western thought. The idea that God is a creator is anathema to it's essential oneness. There is no difference between the creator and the creation. In the east, nature isn't seen as something assembled as if out of parts, from a plan, that could only be conceived by something infinitely intelligent, rather things grow out of their own nature, without a plan, without a centralized intelligent structure. Western religions are, in Alan's words, "celestial monarchies". This is the God I reject. If you agree with this interpretation, you cannot consider yourself a theist. You may either consider yourself an atheist, or God. I prefer the former, since the latter is too likely to be misinterpreted.

I'm glad to see that belief in the divine is not as rare here as in my home country of Sweden. The vast majority of people here are atheists and typically assume you're stupid if you believe in God. Ironically, these common people have lots of unfounded beliefs themselves and typically don't believe in science (in spite of saying "I believe in SCIENCE"). More often than not I end up teaching them something about both science and theology.

No I do not believe in the celestial monarchy either... My conception of God is much closer to Brahman than the Abrahamic God.

And I feel like we could definitely achieve common ground. This is just the type of situation where the point of view gun could change the world. As I tried to articulate way early in this thread, in my world view and conceptual understanding, the difference between God existing and not existing is a very subtle point. The varying interpretations of Spinoza's Ethics illustrates this point. The way he defines God you can substitute God and Nature interchangeably and it makes sense both ways. It just depends on which "angle" you approach it from in your contextual framework. This is also evident from the common misunderstanding of Alan himself as being an atheist or pantheist... because the true meaning of what he is saying is very subtle. To fully grasp his message one needs to have a highly developed contextual framework to understand the esoteric jargon.

In short, God isnt "out there"... God is "in here"