Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.
Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!
There is no conflating Brahman with the cosmos.....Brahman is the cosmos....say for instance I use the concept of Gaia to represent the planet earth in the context of discussing the physical makeup....are you saying I am conflating Gaia with earth?
I acknowledge your acceptance of the right for a pantheist to use the Brahman to represent the cosmos.. I assure you that I am not playing word games....it is just those believers of a beginning to the universe are trying every trick in the book to mangle proper logic and reason to avoid accepting that universal existence could not be anything other than eternal... If you disagree....then please debate me without resorting to obfuscation by objecting to my religious position....I am not making any appeal to higher authority in this debate.....it is about logic, reason, and science....
Sure it does...that is why I try so very hard to phrase my posts in a way meant to get a simple yes no response so that the debate will reach an unambiguous conclusion...but alas...those believers in a new universe avoid such exchanges and go round in circles avoiding my questions.. If I am not mistaken, you are sitting on the fence regarding whether the universe had a beginning or is eternal...so here is a request to you to see where you think I am going wrong with the logic....consider my post # 201 and explain if and where you find it circular....in logical and clear language?
Ok..I present the response from Legion to my statement that "there was never a beginning because existence is eternal" that started our exchange....his post #178...." What caused it to be eternal? You said "because existence is eternal", so what is the "cause" behind this "because"? Try answering your own little language games for once."
There was no edge..nothing can't exist in the first place...if you think otherwise..show me the actual proof...
It is not a moving of the goalposts...it is just that you as an atheist have a problem with concepts that have arisen from religious traditions which I use frequently....this being a religious forum and all....
I think you're putting the horse before the cart. Firstly, there are multiple ways to model reality depending on which perspective one is looking at it from. The models are simply crafted ways to try to create a framework for analysis and discussion points. The same person could model the same thing any number of different ways and all of them be equally valid and true from each other perspectives held. It doesn't necessarily have to do with prior beliefs and assumptions, but simply searching to create a language to talk about their thoughts and observations.
Because they are all symbolic. They are all linguistic signs to translate experiences, be they thoughts, ideas, observations, etc, into mental objects. They are not the raw data itself. They are not the thing itself. We've placed a boundary around them and defined it as that boundary. Giving the word "tree" to an object and pointing it does not mean that "tree" is actually what we call it and subsequently believe it to be. It's simply a word we assign to that particular perspective given to the thing. It is of course not invalid to do this as it has usefulness to be sure, but we start to lose sight of the reality of "tree" as we now quickly glance at it and begin to relate to it as that word-sign. But what we are doing is we take this raw experience and then instantly wrap a linguist boundary around it, and then related to it in those terms. We have subsequently concretized reality within the boundaries of these terms. We take what is inherently metaphors, and make them facts.
In no way, shape, or form is what I am talking about a "syncretic" approach. I am not taking the symbol of a DNA molecule and putting it on the altar of a deity and calling it Brahma or Vishnu.
Now, that's syncretism! What I am doing is stepping above ALL the ways we model and talk about the experience of Reality and understanding that science and religion are both doing the exact same thing using different symbol sets and models of reality, experienced from different perspectives.
From your link, "In simple English, when you portray a person, place, thing, or an action as being something else, even though it is not actually that “something else,” you are speaking metaphorically."
I could go much more into expanding the basis for saying this and pointing out the truth of it.
So, a tree is just a tree. End of story? There is no other way to understand it but as fact?
Of course there are other ways to understand tree.
I am arguing that everything is metaphor when you understand that language is not the thing itself. We only learn to relate to them concretely as if they are. This is the same thing as what Campbell is saying above, except on a species-wide level.
Again, I'd be cautious about calling what we call things "facts". That is my point in all of this. Yes, it's good to have conventions, common ground of understanding, but the problem arises when we don't recognize that these are simply conventions, languages, and not "facts". They are conventions. Don't mistake the metaphors, don't mistake the models for the "facts" of reality. It is more than possible to make use of these in practical ways, and we should. But when we mistake the language for the thing itself, we have placed a boundary around it and our language will actually inhibit a prevent any other way of legitimately understanding it beyond those.