Is the belief in GOD just a psychological crutch for the weak ?

[melanie]

“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” Woody Allen.

[mkirkpatrick]

“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” Woody Allen.

Thanks Melanie for the thread starter,I believe in the power of GOOD,hope that does not make me weak.


regards michael.

[Graybeard]

“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads.

No .... It has always been like this. Its our own overweening arrogance that leads us to believe that we are at a unique point in the history of mankind.

One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction.

Crap !! There are many many paths ... this is way too simplistic.

Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” Woody Allen.

Praying won't help. In fact, it is shortsightedness such as prayer that allows us to dump our responsibilities with a psychological washing and wringing of the hands.. and why only a crutch for the weak ?

greg

[austintorn@aol.com]

Atheism Triumphant: The First Disproof of God

Believers in God may derive comfort from their belief, for which there is no proof, but they tend to preach it as truth and fact, which innocents may fall for, and so to prevent this as much as we can, I am providing here the first disproof of God.

The first cause of Totality cannot be complex, such as a mind, for complexities are composites, and so they must have parts that are more basic than the whole, having come before it. In reality, too, we see that complexities come later on, from simplicities and intermediate aggregations, and so it is in the future that we should look for higher evolved beings, although these still will not be gods. It seems that the believers have looked in the complete wrong direction, trying to place a complexity—an ultimate one, even, beneath and below, where we find but the simpler and simpler.

They simply thought that life required larger Life behind it, but then just stopped there, throwing the template out the window, not then requiring an even larger life, etc., basing this scheme on the family structure of old, in which the father was strict. Well, the window is closed, and would be broken, except that stained-glass windows are expensive to replace, and so so some believers will just carry on, out of habit, but some who view this disproof may, as well as some nuns, get out of the habit completely.

And, no, He wasn’t always there, fully formed, for all eternity, for the same problem of complexity arises: one cannot have the whole before the parts, for systems must have them.

And, no, He’s not made of special spirit material or of immaterial material, but if one still wishes to say that, then He still cannot be, for no matter what a system is made of, it would still be a complexity. Turn around, look to the other direction—to the future for some smart alien, who still is not God, to do some terra-forming on planets.

And get a new template, for the old one merely begs the question, resulting in a very much larger problem than one began with.

[melanie]

Thanks Melanie for the thread starter,I believe in the power of GOOD,hope that does not make me weak.


regards michael.

To believe in a God that doesn't exist except in the human imagination is a sign of weakness.

To believe in the power of Good is to be strong, and that's what leads us on for the Good.

[melanie]

No .... It has always been like this. Its our own overweening arrogance that leads us to believe that we are at a unique point in the history of mankind.

Yes, I agree, its always been like this, nothing changes but change itself.We are forever linked to our ancestral roots, it couldn't be any other way, different, but same, maybe wearing a different disguise, while underneath, nothing has changed.

Crap !! There are many many paths ... this is way too simplistic.

There are indeed many paths, as there are human opinions, and we all know where these paths lead.

Praying won't help. In fact, it is shortsightedness such as prayer that allows us to dump our responsibilities with a psychological washing and wringing of the hands.. and why only a crutch for the weak ?

greg

Nothing can help us, certainly not prayer, prayer is for the weak. The strong stay calm and carry on.

[melanie]

And, no, He’s not made of special spirit material or of immaterial material, but if one still wishes to say that, then He still cannot be, for no matter what a system is made of, it would still be a complexity.

It is the mind itself, the mind that isn't really there, the one that believes it is there. But its all a clever trick the mind plays on itself, an illusion believing in an illusion at best.

[Mikal]

A belief in God is encultured in by those attracted to the qualities existent in the powers and forces of religion—religion has had an historical evolution necessary to the differentiation of the autonomous human self.


In the whole of religious development across history, God has always been the ultimate ground of a living matrix of embodied meaning and value and as the religious impulse expanded and developed, God took on more principles and qualities being the existence of a transcendent reality representing a triadic relationship between (God) a deep intrinsic place and state where (Self) can redeem mortal nature and differentiate itself from the outer (World)—it’s a complex process which achieves human autonomy and is paid for by human alienation—the former precious, the latter painful. To be aware of it is to recognize the movement of the world going from the primal, to the cosmic to the (divine) universal.


Religion is an institutional system which carries the religious impulse—God is a pure force, at once abstract and metaphysical yet layering everything from the Universal cosmos, to the exterior world, to the interior world of the self with a tension and interplay where all is ensouled or permeated with meaning, presence, spirit, where all communicates and is filled with purpose. It’s a unification of the whole in ways that are both tangible and invisible comprising language, symbol, the myth and the spiritual.


It’s the Mystique of Participation—as far as you are equally willing to immerse yourself to the farthest reaches of the objective and into the farthest reaches of the subjective where the objective contains the essence of your spiritual existence and the subjective contains the essence of my spiritual existence. We can fail to attain intimacy at either end and find ourselves in the consequence of losing out on transformative presence which permeates me with an intrinsic meaning of you/situation/place, thing—this loss of potential for participation is what brought about our present psychological century.


Religion comports a belief in God—life as a unified whole from Universe, to Cosmos to existential life in the world comports a participation in God. I don’t believe a belief in God is a psychological crutch for the weak—I feel it is the impulse to be guided by some unseen force to be right in the world, to do good in the world. Most historical studies of the religious dimension of life have shown this to be essential to psychological health and wholeness. Attaching to the comport of belief could simply be a blindness to the structures of pregiven meaning existing as layered in all things.


In 2007, Richard Tarnas authored the book, ‘Cosmos And Psyche.’ In that book he stated: my additions are marked by (….)


“As the world loses its structures of pregiven meaning, the conditions of human existence—both outer and inner—become increasingly open to change and development ever more subject to human influence, innovation and control. The disenchanted cosmos impoverishes the collective psyche in the most global way, vitiating its spiritual and moral imagination—‘vitiate’ not only in the sense of dimmish and impair but also in the sense of deform and debase. In such a context everything can be appropriated—in disenchantment nothing is sacred. The (beauty and depth of) ancient trees and forests can then be seen as nothing but potential lumber, mountains nothing but mineral deposits (to be secured at all expense even the expenditure of life itself), sea shores and deserts can be seen as nothing more than oil reserves, (serene) lakes and rivers nothing more than engineering tools, animals as harvestable commodities (for science and study,) indigenous tribes of obstructing relics of an outmoded past, children’s minds as marketing targets. At the all-important cosmological level, the spiritual dimension of the empirical universe has been entirely negated, and with it any public affirmable encompassing ground for moral wisdom and restraint. The soul of the world has been extinguished—whether in politics, business or the media myopically obsessed with narrow goals and narrow identities—the powerful blind themselves to the larger suffering and crisis of the global community.”—pg. 32-Chapter: The Cosmological Situation Today

In reference to these words being scripted in 2007—are we there yet? Have we reached this moment of the powerful being blinded?


Kind regards Mikal

[austintorn@aol.com]

Why Anything?


The human condition is such
That it often just prematurely halts at a word,
Such as ‘God’, for the believers,
Or ‘matter’ or ‘forever’, for anyone.

The Cosmos or its basis, meaning All,
Not just our locality or universe,
Must be eternal, or it wouldn’t be every-when,
As well as infinite, or it wouldn’t be everywhere,
And so the prime and causeless mover
Must have these attributes,
Requiring nothing else but itself.

Nor can the ultimate basis be a complex composite,
For these are not fundamental, but come later.
(‘God’ is out, too.)
The basis must be the simplest elemental state.

As for matter, it has many particulars,
Such as its total amount and its individual properties
Of spin, charge, form, size, mass, location,
Matter vs. antimatter state, and other specifics,
Or limitations, such as
That there are only two stable matter particles,
The electron/positron and the proton/antiproton,
And only one stable energy particle, the photon.
(Neutrons decay.)

We cannot just stop at the word ‘matter’
And just say that it is what what was around forever,
For one simply cannot have an eternal something
Already made and defined in all of its particulars
Without it ever having been made and defined
In the first place that never was.
Impossible.

So, where does this leave us?
We are fine, for there is/was literally nothing
To make the original stuff of, anyway,
And there is no way around this fact;
So, ‘nothing’ must be the answer,
It also being the simplest state,
One that is necessarily perfectly unstable,
For it cannot be at all or stay as such.

So, the vacuum fluctuates,
Making the vacuum only a ‘vacuum’.
Movement is natural, not stillness.

Existence is a positive/negative distribution
Of nonexistence.
‘Nothing’ is the only candidate for the prime mover.

Welcome to zero-sum physics;
(And ‘nothing’ is exactly the opposite of ‘God’.)

Look about; there are particles
Of opposite polarity of charge
And matter/antimatter states;
The weak force opposes the strong force;
The positive kinetic energy of stuff is canceled
By the negative potential energy of gravity, etc.,
For an equation of a zero balance
Had to replace the cause and effect
That could not have gone on forever beneath.

It is the opposite polarity of charge
That nullifies all of existence in the overview,
But not in actuality, for nothing cannot be.

Zero-sum physics perhaps started here:

Einstein as a near traffic fatality…

George Gamow told in his book, ‘My World Line’,
How he was conversing with Albert Einstein
While walking through Princeton in the 1940s.
Gamow casually mentioned that one of his colleagues
[Pascual Jordan] had pointed out to him that according
To Einstein’s equations a star could be created
Out of nothing at all, because [at point zero]
Its negative gravitational energy [mass defect]
Precisely cancels out [is equal to]
Its positive mass energy [rest mass].

“Einstein stopped in his tracks,” says Gamow,
“And, since we were crossing a street,
Several cars had to stop to avoid running us down”.

Now that we know of this zero-balance requirement,
We might use it as a reason
For the necessity of conservation laws.

What about the word ‘eternal’ or ‘forever’?
We need go on to the implications,
For forever systems are their own precursors.
No first matter making light;
No first light making matter.
No first anything.

How? Opposite pair production, perhaps,
Or that infinity times zero = one;
Take your pick.

Boundless space, overall electric neutrality,
And conservation of charge, momentum, and energy
Leads inexorably to nothingness, really.

The zero-equation is the reason
The universe is the way it is,
The reason why the universe
Must be the way it is,
And the reason why it is.

It is the perfect zero-sum equation.

Zero and infinity, the smallest and the largest,
Both lead to nonexistence,
And so our finite existence cannot be there,
But must be at its midpoint.

Zero and infinity lead to many
Of the same problems in algebra and cosmology.
They are the same thing: nonexistence.

The deathly spiral of paradox ever follows
The carving of wishes into the stone hollows
Of dogma forever blocked from the allowables.

The believing dance grinds to the elemental
Of that Being who can never be fundamental.

All such tales of original stuff made of love
End where there’s nothing to make it of.

[melanie]

Religion comports a belief in God—life as a unified whole from Universe, to Cosmos to existential life in the world comports a participation in God. I don’t believe a belief in God is a psychological crutch for the weak—I feel it is the impulse to be guided by some unseen force to be right in the world, to do good in the world. Most historical studies of the religious dimension of life have shown this to be essential to psychological health and wholeness.

Religion does not comport a belief in God, Human imagination does, and that's exactly where the belief will stay, where ever that may be ?

Locating a belief would be like trying to locate a rainbow. Go into a rainbow and you'll find there is nothing there, same with God, and beliefs.