The nature of God

[Kscott]

Well this is the natural progression of thought from my previous thread, so here we go.

Ever since mankind has been around, there has been some form of god concept. The earliest religions were shamanistic and probably very akin to modern shaman religions. Spirit worship, but usually consisting of an ultimate spirit, God as we would call him.

Somewhere down the line this concept became more humanistic. People started making the spirits humans. Look at Greek, Roman, Norse, Celtic mythology etc. The Gods are merely humans with exceptional powers, not unlimited powers. Ultimately somehow the eternal blue sky as known in Mongolian shamanism, became just merely a leader of a host of gods, not the ultimate.

This to me is a sad perversion of an ancient tradition. The gods were no longer formless, they were given form, and this form was of man. Man forged god into his image.

I could be mistaken, but it seems probably that early semantic peoples were shamanistic. I mean the Bedouins were when they first started praising Allah. This semantic God skipped the polytheistic stage in Isreal, with probable influence from the Zoarastrains. Therefore the shamanistic God kept his universal qualities, yet he took more human form. When most people today envision the Judo-Christian God they image a very Zeus like figure. This is surely not how the ancient Hebrews saw him, but it does seem he is portrayed humanly, if indeed we were made in his image.

This progression all seems natural. Shamanistic with a universal spirit type creature like our mongolian eternal blue sky, to a polytheistic with human like gods, to a monotheism, though the step to monotheism only occurred in a few instances.

Many think this process is different in the east, but its not really. The Chinese philosophies avoid the question of God altogether. The one real exception is Hinduism and the religions that followed it. In Hinduism they kept the shamanistic qualities yet also moved to a form of polytheism. But the utlimate god remained ultimate, and very far from being humanish.

So what does this mean for us? Well ultimately I think there is a visible trend to make God humanly. Hell, Jesus was 100% human(and 100% God). The question is why would God be so? We are merely only one aspect of his great creation, yet we have a terrible habit of putting ourselves first. We were not made to be part of the universe, the universe was made to serve us. Frankly I find this view disturbing and its prevalent in many post shamanistic religions.

So is God really like us or is he more universal. An all encompassing faceless spirit. Even people in the same religion might have trouble agreeing. I for one say we return to the more pure shamanistic ways and see God as man first saw him. Not how millenniums of thought changed him.

*much has been simplified for the need to keep pace.

[Sétanta]

Well I believe that God created Humanity in his own, chosen image. Being God, an omnipotent being, he can take any form he wishes, or no form at all (thats what we call the Holy Spirit). So when He created humanity, he obviously looked in the metaphorical mirror and made us what he looked like at the time. Jesus coming to Earth solidified the belief that God made us in his own image. Although, being God he doesn't really have a physical body except for when he choses to take one.

CS Lewis had and interesting theory on the nature of God. He felt that God had a body, just one not constrained by physics as we know it, so it was more like light. He wielded the Holy Spirit as his medium across the universe, and when Jesus came to earth took Human form.

[Publius]

By that logic God made the spider monkey, the walrus, baboons, well, you get the picture ...

So, the way I see it, we have three options:

A) When God created all of these things he made them in his own image at that given time, hence we could state that God has looked like a baboon without (hypothetically speaking) insulting him.

B) Humanity is too endeared with our own image and likes to think that just as we once thought the earth was the center of the universe, now God modelled us on himself (or conversely himself on us).

C) I'm completely wrong and will be spending some quality time down under. And no, I don't mean the Outback.

[Amorphos]

I think the druids were much like the Hindu's but their god wasn't even a formless deity it was simply the centre [later known as the divine centre], the core of mind self and existence.

The Egyptians started putting gods together as the book of the dead progresses, ultimately leading to Akhenaten's monotheism, from which i feel the Hebrew god was born out of.

Perhaps though as i think you infer, perhaps we went wrong in doing that – trying to change everything. We could leave everything alone and see things as they are, then you just have an undefined spirit from whence all things are manifest, god, gods, man etc.

lately i am trying to conceive of something beyond all that, which is somehow within all things but is not a god at all, not even a mind nor intellect, but can become these things and to which they all belong.

[felicissimus]

First if he is alive being,why should he not have connection to human thought in generations like the prophets and saints claimed they have connection ?
Second,the Christian religion is not humanistic in the way the greek mythology for ex. is.Here you have The Holy Trinity-and this is actually God,and Christ-son of God and God himself.Now there is enermous difference betw.the Trinity and Christ,which was disputed for centuries.The Trinity is the nonmaterial,nonconceivable,not aquireable by thought Divinity,which has no form,no place and cannot be either found anywhere or seen or ACHIEVED by any means.In the same time it is everywhere being allmighty(omnipotens) and does -creates everything,the world and men and even influences Christ.In other words it is the Supernatural existance,alive ,reasonable and before everything,which is ABOVE everything (not in place-term ).
The Holy Trinity is not divided into 3 but is one.Yet it has characteristic features allowing to speak of Father,Son and H.Spirit which can be distinguished by their energy and actions,not by nature.The nature,the essence, is one for the whole Divinity.The Father has the features of a thinking Reason,the Son-of a Creator and Worker through whom everything is done,and the H.Spirit-of a Means and Power by which everything is done.All They act always together in the same time and never oppose but always in accordance.Which Father wants,the Son does by the Holy Spirit.Also much maybe said about that,but this's enough now.
Christ is the Son,second face of the Holy Trinity,who came on earth to commit the human salvation.To do this he was embodied in a human corp.In Christ's personality there exist the Son and the concrete personality of the son of the carpenter.But also because the H.Trinity cannot be torn in pieces,in some sence exists the whole Divinity.Accepting human nature to exist along the Divinity(but they never merged,remained separate) is not contradictory of smth. because the Divinity can do anything(omnipotens) and it never destroys but makes things better.
That is how you have Christ-God and man,in One Holy Unity where the human nature is preserved and added to the Divinity,and the Divine one remains separate.But they are in some ultra existant and super beneficial status.
I don't see much allusion to pre-christian religions.
p.s.You can read more in "A Summary of the Orthodox Faith" by st.John of Damascus (8th century canonised )

[Cluny the Scourge]

The universe seems to me to bear all the incompetent marks of having been designed-by-committee, so I suspect God is actually a group of about eight or nine people sitting around a table who all secretly hate each other and want to be chairman because he gets to hand out the agenda sheets.

[Sadreddine]

"God" is an impossible concept to fully aprehend, yet we can deduce God´s role in existence by looking into Creation. Only by digging into Creation we can see the wonders of existence such as the myriad of factors that permit the Universe to mantain itself in cycles without collapsing in a moment.

The material dimension and the interactions between all the elements that conform it is built over a language: mathematics. Now, this language is the basis for physics, which sustain the Law that permits the Universe as a whole to exist. Man can understand certain basic concepts about physics using the language of mathematics, since humanity as race has been gifted with a superior grade of intelligence over other creatures. But how does this Law exist? What is that "misterious force" that originated the Big Bang? Is there a principle of eternity? Is there a First Cause that originates everything?

We know by scientific evidence that the Universe expanded and is now contracting. Creation, destruction, and new creation. It is up to you to believe there is an entity, impossible to classify or to understand by humans, which is the Sustainer of the Laws that give form to the Universe represents the Eternal. Nothing would be then eternal but God if explained as such a force.

After man passed the stage of inventing gods to explain their surroundings, the natural evolution of human thought developed into a different form of worship. Praying for the Sun, a Sacred Tree or a divinized animal could be meaningful by those pimitive cultures (theologically speaking for they were considerable advanced in a way that planted the tree of human knowledge), but human thought had deveoped a step forward: it´s just irrational to worship human emotions or events in form of deities (war, love, darkness, wisdom...) or to worship planets or stars like the sun or the moon. Those are elements of Creation, mere effects of a myriad of causes in constant relations between them and, in many cases, products of human abstract reasonings of things that were important to them, or were afraid of.

Such a concept of God, far from being humanized but considering God such an abstract concept a human could never fully aprehend, made me abandon atheism (after being a disillusioned catholic christian, religion in which I never truly believed for rational reasons).

[Jan Taihwo]

From my birth I learned that God Is everything, the air we breath, food we eat. Mankind needs something "higher" to guide it through life. It becomes much easier when you have something that looks like you, somthing that you recognize and can relate to.

*As a sidenote: I'm not sure if I believe in "god", I'm only stating what I have learned through my life.