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What is the nature of God?
- Thread starter Orbit
- Start date
K.Venugopal
Immobile Wanderer
According to me God ought to mean the totality of all existence as well of the essence of all existence. I would simply say that God is nothing other than Life - which enlivens all existence and is the source of all existence. There is nothing other than life.
chinu
chinu
If you want to see the nature of "God", Its already all around you can see because "God" itself is its nature.
But if you want to know the Individual-Nature of God. Than "God" doesn't have any nature because "God" is alone in his world. He doesn't has any companion to reflect upon his nature
Robert.Evans
You will be assimilated; it is His Will.
The One is simple, it becomes complex.
The One complex, is God. God then is evolving consciousness. That is all that you see.
It is fractal and holographic. It replicates what it is. It looks into the face of themselves. It is binary from a singularity. It is an enigma. It is all things. It is what we know and what we don't know. It is both the right and the left. It is all and is the All. It is whole and it is One. It is nothing. It is you. It is benign. It is life and it is death. It throws out its own Self and gives liberty to it. Its Self expresses its own individuality that it receives from the One.
The Self has freewill coming from the One. It is all things we see. It is all in error. What is pure is far from us, yet also close. If you try to see it, it will leave. If you move from it, it will remain. It holds no part of you, yet you hold it. It gives you life and breath, and will take both from you, for you don't exist. Your expression is one of many realities within your own higher ideal of consciousness, as God sees fit to give.
It is wonderful, expression, life. It is all things. It is a book being read, and we write it. We write it from words already written, but we still are free to write as we see fit. We neither copy nor emulate. But we become what we are. It is fractal. It is the Self. It is invisible, undetectable, but resides within us. It is the purity that we cannot see, but we muddy with our own thoughts.
We try to perceive it, and through the lord, we do in part, and shall in full.
Forgive the repetition. I've posted the following more than once:
if (God), then
if (God), then
for all X
God != X
Which does not work
There must be at least one X equal to God, if God. Unless there are really no X equal to God, but that would entail that there is no God, against the premise.
So, maybe we should write
If (God), then
for all X
If (God != X)
If (God != X)
God != X
Which is tautological.
Which is tautological.
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What do you know about apophatic theology?Which does not work
There must be at least one X equal to God, if God. Unless there are really no X equal to God, but that would entail that there is no God, against the premise.
Nothing.
But I know something about logic. Your little deduction is simply logically false. Independently of theologies. For obvious reasons. Sorry.
Ciao
- viole
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Thanks.
Probably not going to happen in this, an open forum.
There's another sub-forum, called "Same Faith Debates", where you can specify which religion, or otherwise, you want the debate to be between, and Rule 10 (the DIR rule) would apply.
As a polytheist, I believe in many Gods.
Their natures, as well as exactly what they are, vary depending on the type of Wight they are. Therefore, I've generally come to the conclusion that a "God", i.e., a Deity, is something that has gone through a process I call "deification." That is to say, of the Viewer and the Viewed, the Viewer is the one making the God out of the Viewed. In that sense, there are no Gods without the ability to deify things, and because of the very real process of deification, Gods in that sense exist, but subjectively. (That is, in a similar vein as political boundaries: they have subjective existence, because without us conceiving of and marking them, they don't exist.)
The Gods don't always get along, for sure. Specific Gods are enemies of each other, and no matter what we do, some God or another is angered or pleased by our actions. (Take the Olympians Athena and Aphrodite, for example. I simply cannot imagine the Virgin Goddess of War and Wisdom getting along in any way with the Goddess of Sex and Beauty. ...and I don't believe for a second that Athena is the type to take part in a beauty contest as Homer depicted.)
But if there is one near-constant nature shared by the Gods, it's that their natures are not definite.
There is a story from Vaishnava-Hindu theology about the God Krishna that illustrates that. While he was King of Dwarka, he had 1000 wives. So, he split himself into 1000 Krishnas, one for each of those wives. Now, because each individual human is different, each of those 1000 women would have had varying personalities and preferences. Therefore, to please each one, each individual Krishna would also be unique among all the others, in appearance and persona.
It is thus with all the Gods. The same God can appear in very different ways to different people and Tribes. My King, Woden, can be a right royal prick, who is prone to lying, starting wars, and making fools of the reasoned. But He's also the same Allfather whom to many Asatruar is a wise and loving, if decidedly melancholy, father figure, watching out for us.
If you don't mind, I'm going to substitute gods/spirits for God, because in proper case like that the word is typically understood to mean the one-god of the classical monotheisms.
In the broad sense, gods are that which a person or culture deems worthy of worship; worship is understood as paying respects to something, and it is often an expression of a person's values or is wrapped up in ritual and story. I accept any and all understanding of gods as valid and real, even if they are theologically incompatible with my own approach to the gods.
With respect to what I deem as worthy of worship, there is nothing that I find to be unworthy of worship. One of the few things that ties all the god-concepts of the world's religions together is the idea that gods are fundamentally greater than us. I can think of nothing that fits that better than all of reality, or what I sometimes refer to as the Weave. I call it the Weave to emphasize the interconnectedness and interdependency of all of reality. If but one thread in the Weave faded into nothingness, the entirety of the Weave would unravel. As such, I regard everything as sacred and worthy of worship without exception. Although the Weave is a whole, I sense and perceive the world around me as composed of individual things with relationships. I am a pantheist, and I am a polytheist.
It is not practically possible to actively worship everything, so when it comes to deciding which gods I actually honor, it really comes down to values. From there, the nature of those gods is determined by what they are, though my human understanding of any aspect of reality is inevitably limited. As an example, Storm Spirit has always been a force I pay respects to. If I want to understand the nature of Storm, I get to know it through all paths of knowledge at my disposal. I will experience Storm first hand and revel in its marvelous wind and rain, lightning and thunder. I contemplate the meaning and essence of Storm in a darkened room by candle light and incense. I read the mythos and folklore our ancestors told about Storm from culture worldwide. I study the sciences that have uncovered some of Storm's mysteries, as the sciences are the study of the gods through rigorous methodology.
Knowing the gods is like knowing a person. Each one has to be approached individually. And just like knowing a person, you will never know the whole essence and nature of what they are. The spirit of them is fundamentally indescribable; their nature speaks for itself. It is up to us to explore it and get to know it as we can.
God is pure consciousness sat-chit-ananda (being-awareness-bliss). Our consciousness at its core is God. The universe is a divine drama/play where God separates Himself from Himself into finite forms and returns Himself to Himself.