What Does God Mean to You?

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The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu was written in China about 500BC, it says this...

Even the finest teaching is not the Tao itself.
Even the finest name is insufficient to define it.
Without words, the Tao can be experienced,
and without a name, it can be known.

To conduct one's life according to the Tao,
is to conduct one's life without regrets;
to realize that potential within oneself
which is of benefit to all.

Though words or names are not required
to live one's life this way,
to describe it, words and names are used,
that we might better clarify
the way of which we speak,
without confusing it with other ways
in which an individual might choose to live.

Through knowledge, intellectual thought and words,
the manifestations of the Tao are known,
but without such intellectual intent
we might experience the Tao itself.

Both knowledge and experience are real,
but reality has many forms,
which seem to cause complexity.

By using the means appropriate,
we extend ourselves beyond
the barriers of such complexity,
and so experience the Tao.

I've spent my whole life analyzing the subject...but i'll just list a few quotes that i have collected.



"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes an act of rebellion" ~ H.G. Wells

"The more you know, the more you realise how much you don't know -- the less you know, the more you think you know." - David T. Freeman

The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice. ~Arthur Schopenhauer



There is, of course, no satisfactory way of arguing the merits of any one of the great world religions against the others. In all such debates the judge and the advocate are the same person, for a man judges his own religion the best simply because the standard he uses is that of his own religious upbringing.~Alan Watts-Beyond Theology


Seneca the Younger 4 b.c.- 65 a.d. said: Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived, and dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. ~John F. Kennedy


"“Demons do not exist any more than gods do, being only the products of the psychic activity of man” ~Sigmund Freud


The concept of an afterlife is inhumane and immoral.... Belief in the continuation of your "soul" or consciousness after death is wishful thinking. ...Belief in an afterlife devalues the one life that actually exists: this one.~unknown author


" “The devil is the fear you hold within The Luciferian aspect of your existence Your chains, the darkness of ignorance Are your prison” ~Patricia Cori quotes


The devil is in the details.....~unknown author


I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. ~Galileo Galilei


For those who believe,no explanation is necessary~Dostoyevsky


“Eve in the garden gives Adam a (expletive)
And no one will pardon the snake
Look who invents him and later torments him
Then makes us repent our mistakes”~Christine Anderson


""I want my lawyer, my tailor, my servants, even my wife to believe in God, because it means that I shall be cheated and robbed and cuckolded less often. ... If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." [Voltaire]


"It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head."
-- Sally Kempton


"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened."~Sir Winston Churchill

........

I liked a lot of what Thagomiser said.
To me belief in god means that the unknown is not constantly/inherently hostile territory( shadowy and murky just because for me has no definition). The unknown is god.
It is not encumbent on me to correctly and finally attribute agency and cause to every thing i am presented with in life.
That i am not responsible for the universe. And that I am not alone up here; that there's someone else even further out of it than me, someone right outside of it all.
That there's been people like me around for a very long time, some of whom got creative about how to deal with their incessant and exhausting and alienating need to find causes and agency for everything. People like me who have always had trouble imagining what other people are thinking and feeling, for whom people are just a set of zombies/"exteriors" unless they can communicate ideas. People for whom the world is like "being john malkovitch inside john malkovitch"; for whom imagining another consciousness/mind always ends up being just a replication/projection of themselves pasted onto the other.
God is an "efficient first cause", and accompanying presence in my "isolation".
To me god is like a cross between Sherlock Holmes, Robin Hood, and Merlin, but the entire universe is e-book-sized to him, like a microchip.

It is possible that god is not needed by many/most people, those who never ask questions, etc.

It is possible that the attitude " everyone needs god/religion" was "just" an empire-building/marketing concept dreamed up in the first few hundred years of christianity, with a "free gift" of "life after death and forgiveness of sins" at conversion to encourage people, and the possibility of converting many thousands more, as a powerful inducement to spread out.
Instead maybe it's just for the "weakest"/"feeblest", most freaked out, the ones with too much Fluid-intelligence compared to "Theory of mind", for example. Too little theory of mind for their huge capacity for pattern recognition. Plus something else perhaps.

Belief in god, i find, puts things in perspective. Introduces depth; close-up and further away, scale, proportion.

And god is still writing!!

Last edited by ouinon on 28 Jan 2008, 7:14 am, edited 1 time in total.

I think perhaps monotheism has reached it's apex
and needs to be dismantled.
It has always walked hand in with male dominator religion,
imperialism and monarchy etc.

I believe things work cyclically, like day-night, summer-winter
and the round Earth meaning East eventually meets West.
This leads me to "tend" towards some kind of death-rebirth cycle.

I can't believe this is the only reality or dimension
or that there aren't other more evolved intelligencies
or states of conciousness in this gooogleplex multiverse.

Perhaps various holy men, shamens, drug users and meditators
throughout history have made "contact" with other forms of conciousness
and brought universal wisdom to our reality.

Having said this I believe these peoples words are often hijacked
and used to control people through religion and dogma
by power hungry and machavelian types who miss the
essential meaning of the message.

Is there a God? I hope not for all our sakes,
especially the Judio-Christian one. *shudders*
I find it hard to reconcile Love with the lake of fire.
Such intollerance of deviant behaviour flies in the face
of evolution where the mutant gene is essential for
our survival in an ever changing universe.

There, I've had my moment

What does God mean to me?

God means...something that was made up to give people a sense of "false hope". I believe, that people believe in god have a fear of death and need something to reassure themselves that there is life "on the other side".

But i believe in one god; i don't believe in several.

In my belief there is one god. i don't think there are different ones for different groups, nor different gods for different parts of the universe. The god i believe in is sole creator of the universe that i perceive.

What the protestant church is apparently stressing now is a "personal god". This accepts that everyone's is different, but that there is still only one.
Equally i think this could mean that some people's "god" is very small, of negligible importance, or does not exist at all, without this meaning they need to be shown the error of their ways.

Does monotheism mean that everyones god is the same, or that you believe in only one god?

Apparently henotheism is the word for "the god that you know" being one, and any other's gods being largely irrelevant. Maybe god means the god that i know then. And i am henotheist!!

I can't explain God, I don't understand the question.

(Somebody had to admit it)

Nobody asked you to explain god, just say what god means to you.

The Tao is like a well:
used but never used up.
It is like the eternal void:
filled with infinite possibilities.

It is hidden but always present.
I don't know who gave birth to it.
It is older than God.

again i quote lao tzu

So what does God mean to You. - An extremely annoying fictional character that discourages you to search for the truth.

How do You see God. - Same answer as above basically.

Does God do anything for You. - He causes all the people around me to believe in his crap which affects me because I have to deal with it.

What do You what God to do for You. - Delete himself from history, which I know is impossible but damn that would be an excellent help to society.

Do You believe in more than One God. - I don't believe in any.

Do You believe in No God. - I don't believe at all.

Or is God a Lie. - Duh, how long did it take you to figure that one out?

What do You really Think. - I think the religions that believe in a god are pathetic, most of the stories in the bible weren't even written by the jews, it's all crap. We're in 2008, we don't need to believe in primitive thoughts.

Don't stop there, if you dont believe in god thats ok, but we are still here with the same questions our ancestors had, who am I , what is it to be self aware, what happens when you die, how did the universe start, am I part of something bigger?

"God" is energy, energy is a part of everything, and where nothing exists God cannot be found

To me God cannot be comprehended. But I allow myself to thing about God because I cannot accept a universe where pysical force is the highest form of activity.

12 steppers use the term "my higher power," and I like that. I call my higher power Irene because I cannot accept the Patriarchal God of the West Asian religions, because I have never known a real girl named Irene so I can imagine anything I want when I think of her (if, indeed god is a her rather than an it)., and because I know nothing about Greek mythology so the only thing I know about Irene is that she is the goddess of peace.

Mystics understand that god cannot be known through human words and human institutions. Scriptures are human words and religions are human institutions. I will read your scripture and worship in your temple because I respect that you and your people have struggled to know the truth and believe you have found it. But your truth is not necessarily my truth, so do not ask my to believe that yours is the only path or best path to truth or salvation or whatever.

God is the other side of the "cloud of unknowing" God is the virtual reality beyond the event horizon of quantum physics. God is what Rabia will see after she dies for the second time. God is Tao.

Or maybe not.

What does God mean to me?

Absolutely nothing. If such a thing exists, it is incomprehensible to us mere humans, and so any attempt to describe its appearance, goals, morals etc. are utterly futile. As soon as it can be understood, it is no longer a God. I don't begrudge anyone their belief in a specific version of God, but I can't bring myself to believe something (or disbelieve it) without sufficient evidence.

I have a question. Why is God so closely linked to the afterlife in modern religions? Aren't they totally different things? I guess there are some religions that believe in a kind of afterlife without a God, but does anyone believe in a God without believing in an afterlife?

Or an afterlife without God?

Many Buddhists believe in Nirvana (and no one knows where or what that it ) while remaining agnostic.

Just don't let someone else define your god or your path. Listen with respect to those who offer to share their god and their path (and also those who don't)

Am I responding to my own post? Not really.

After a lengthy prayer, a nun rushed into the presence of her spiritual director, Meister Eckhart, and announced: "I believe that I am God.

Meister Eckhart' reply was: "Praise be to God!"