DiscussMormonism.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bvr839oRK0

It would be nice if I could lure Dan McClellan back for a bit of participation here. The link is to a presentation he makes about approach to the Bible. He makes several straightforeward observations, the Bible is not univocal, we create meaning through interpretations of words some body chose to represent a meaning they had in mind. There is plenty of room for variation. Words do not have a precise steady meaning but build with experience upon a prototype. Good point, too much theology starts with and abstract definition of God. I know Dan rejects that as a Biblical view and instead sees variety and development in peoples understanding of the word.

I find myself puzzling over what the prototype for God would be. What I am aware of about the world is a lot of variety. Divine council? is that not just one of many possible images and stories?

I suspect the gods, if they exist, are self-aware 'somethings' with more totality to themselves and are orders of magnitude beyond ourselves to the point of unrelatability. A gods prototype will inevitably involve a mirror if a human is involved.

That said, if I had my druthers, I hope we're the gods in the sense that there's a baseline civilization, whatever that means for something totally alien to my mind, and we choose to enter into simulations for whatever reasons that make sense to us, or a higher being that's part of us to whatever degree.

At the end of the day we're mortal and we're going to die. Whatever it takes for the individual to make peace with that I'm all for, as long as it doesn't involve being forced into play acting in their dilemma. I would hope, if there is a god, that would be their preference, too.

Doctor CamNC4Me wrote: ↑

Mon Aug 21, 2023 12:22 am

I suspect the gods, if they exist, are self-aware 'somethings' with more totality to themselves and are orders of magnitude beyond ourselves to the point of unrelatability. A gods prototype will inevitably involve a mirror if a human is involved.

That said, if I had my druthers, I hope we're the gods in the sense that there's a baseline civilization, whatever that means for something totally alien to my mind, and we choose to enter into simulations for whatever reasons that make sense to us, or a higher being that's part of us to whatever degree.

At the end of the day we're mortal and we're going to die. Whatever it takes for the individual to make peace with that I'm all for, as long as it doesn't involve being forced into play acting in their dilemma. I would hope, if there is a god, that would be their preference, too.

You can take acid tonight and meet the machine elves behind it all.

drumdude wrote: ↑

Mon Aug 21, 2023 2:50 am

Doctor CamNC4Me wrote: ↑

Mon Aug 21, 2023 12:22 am

I suspect the gods, if they exist, are self-aware 'somethings' with more totality to themselves and are orders of magnitude beyond ourselves to the point of unrelatability. A gods prototype will inevitably involve a mirror if a human is involved.

That said, if I had my druthers, I hope we're the gods in the sense that there's a baseline civilization, whatever that means for something totally alien to my mind, and we choose to enter into simulations for whatever reasons that make sense to us, or a higher being that's part of us to whatever degree.

At the end of the day we're mortal and we're going to die. Whatever it takes for the individual to make peace with that I'm all for, as long as it doesn't involve being forced into play acting in their dilemma. I would hope, if there is a god, that would be their preference, too.

You can take acid tonight and meet the machine elves behind it all.

I've taken, on two different occasions, an 'heroic dose' of shrooms. On the first occasion I saw dimly, as if a veil had been lifted, a being of some sort who didn't seem pleased I saw them. Other than that it was a lot of typical psychedelic stuff. I also dosed acid around six times as a teen. Acid was wild, while shrooms were, in my opinion, an organic experience (obviously).

After having dabbled in psychedelics I'm convinced that there's really a lot going on in reality we're not privy to due to our anatomical limitations, which is fine. Whatevs. But I do think we sense a lot of that stuff latently, like a sort of harmonic. Perhaps it's the god gene, but I kind of lean toward the idea that our brains are just picking up vibrations from other spectrums. It's kind of like, again, a harmonic spike from a signal that may be too high to tune into on an outdated piece of equipment, but you get that harmonic ever so softly and sometimes drugs, or one's wiring, allows you to sense more reality than what you can normally sense.

Going back to the 'god prototype', I'd guess a 'god' would be able to exist in all of reality in the same sense we exist in our narrow slice of it. That, in of itself, would be such a huge gap between our brain and a god's brain that relatability either way would be an impossibility.

huckelberry wrote: ↑

Sun Aug 20, 2023 11:53 pm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bvr839oRK0

It would be nice if I could lure Dan McClellan back for a bit of participation here. The link is to a presentation he makes about approach to the Bible. He makes several straightforeward observations, the Bible is not univocal, we create meaning through interpretations of words some body chose to represent a meaning they had in mind. There is plenty of room for variation. Words do not have a precise steady meaning but build with experience upon a prototype. Good point, too much theology starts with and abstract definition of God. I know Dan rejects that as a Biblical view and instead sees variety and development in peoples understanding of the word.

I find myself puzzling over what the prototype for God would be. What I am aware of about the world is a lot of variety. Divine council? is that not just one of many possible images and stories?

It seems quite evident that the Bible is not univocal. I hear the Bible touted as "the word of God." Or is it really the words of the various human authors? Supposing for the sake of argument that there is a God, of the sorts portrayed in the various books of the Bible, why do different human authors portray God in such varying ways and scenarios?

Consider for a moment how much Joseph Smith's alleged theophany morphed over 7 tellings. One single human author is not clear on what he allegedly experienced with God. It evolved over 7 different recounts. The Mormon exposition of God changed so much after Smith was murdered that the SLC corporation's leadership even de-canonized (without a membership vote) the Lectures on Faith.

If I want to learn about God (assuming for argument's sake there is such a being), what standard or guideline would I deploy to sort through the various human authors to find the real God?

huckelberry wrote: ↑

Sun Aug 20, 2023 11:53 pm

I find myself puzzling over what the prototype for God would be.

My guess is the first prototypes involved safe weather and bountiful harvests. Only much later in God-development would you find things like the Tapir-headed God of Alternative Translations.

If Elon Musk owned three media platforms he could combine them into Triple X.

sock puppet wrote: ↑

Mon Aug 21, 2023 3:06 pm

If I want to learn about God (assuming for argument's sake there is such a being), what standard or guideline would I deploy to sort through the various human authors to find the real God?

Apart from relying on hearsay from human authors, the only option I know is to look at the natural world, to try to infer things about its creator, assuming it has one. This still relies on human thought and perception, but at least for some things we can get enough reproducible experimental data that humans probably aren't stupid or clumsy enough to have screwed all of it up completely.

What does the natural world reveal about its (hypothetical) creator?

J.B.S. Haldane wrote:If there is a Creator, he must have an inordinate fondness for beetles.

In fact God seems to like cold vacuum even more than beetles. We can't be sure about God's opportunity costs, though. Maybe God isn't prioritising beetles or vacuum over human-like life forms, but merely allowing a lot of vacuum and beetles as harmless side effects. What I think we can say is that God must have an enormous tolerance for things that seem pointless to humans. Seeing each sparrow fall was evidently an understatement, because God is apparently happy to watch atoms drift through intergalactic space for billions of years.

My optimistic interpretation is that God is an undemanding audience, delighted by drifting atoms the way parents are thrilled with their babies' gurgles and twitches. It can't actually make sense to suppose that a transcendent being like God could have no interest in us primitive humans. If God had high standards most of the universe would never be there. The limit of infinite mind does not mean being bored with everything, but being fascinated by everything, because you have infinite attention to spare. At least this would explain the apparently trivia-heavy universe that we see.

Although most of the universe seems awfully simple, however, it has rare pockets of enormous complexity. Conceivably the scriptures were culture-appropriate metaphors for their Bronze Age day, but fundamentally they have it all wrong. God would never make a man out of dust the way we make pots from clay. God's idea of the cool way to make human beings is evidently to start with a couple of dozen quantum fields and run through a dozen billion years of hydrogen and gravitational collapse and fusion ignition and planet formation with hot iron dynamo cores for magnetic fields and nucleic acids and mitochondrial symbiotes and and and dot dot dot up to us.

God really seems to love mechanisms. The medieval religious philosophers may conceivably have had culture-appropriate metaphors, too, but they were radically wrong. Nothing real is just defined by its properties, which it has by definition. Everything is made of smaller and simpler things; every event is a process and every thing is a place. What I take from this pattern is that we are naïve to suppose that it ends with our minds, as the ultimate emergent phenomenon. On the contrary, we ourselves are probably also small working parts in something larger than we are.

We're supposed to be organelles.

Doctor CamNC4Me wrote: ↑

Mon Aug 21, 2023 12:22 am

I suspect the gods, if they exist, are self-aware 'somethings' with more totality to themselves and are orders of magnitude beyond ourselves to the point of unrelatability. A gods prototype will inevitably involve a mirror if a human is involved.

That said, if I had my druthers, I hope we're the gods in the sense that there's a baseline civilization, whatever that means for something totally alien to my mind, and we choose to enter into simulations for whatever reasons that make sense to us, or a higher being that's part of us to whatever degree.

At the end of the day we're mortal and we're going to die. Whatever it takes for the individual to make peace with that I'm all for, as long as it doesn't involve being forced into play acting in their dilemma. I would hope, if there is a god, that would be their preference, too.

Doc, I was not expecting this angle on the question but considering you do have a possible point.Experience with mushrooms in all likelihood extend back deep in time.

For some reason your comment made me wonder if deep in time human wondering about death germinated the idea of supernatural, ghosts and then possibly power spirits for help or hinderance.

Physics Guy wrote: ↑

Mon Aug 21, 2023 7:59 pm

Apart from relying on hearsay from human authors, the only option I know is to look at the natural world, to try to infer things about its creator, assuming it has one. ....

What does the natural world reveal about its (hypothetical) creator?

J.B.S. Haldane wrote:If there is a Creator, he must have an inordinate fondness for beetles.

In fact God seems to like cold vacuum even more than beetles. We can't be sure about God's opportunity costs, though. Maybe God isn't prioritising beetles or vacuum over human-like life forms, but merely allowing a lot of vacuum and beetles as harmless side effects. ....

Although most of the universe seems awfully simple, however, it has rare pockets of enormous complexity. Conceivably the scriptures were culture-appropriate metaphors for their Bronze Age day, but fundamentally they have it all wrong. God would never make a man out of dust the way we make pots from clay. God's idea of the cool way to make human beings is evidently to start with a couple of dozen quantum fields and run through a dozen billion years of hydrogen and gravitational collapse and fusion ignition and planet formation with hot iron dynamo cores for magnetic fields and nucleic acids and mitochondrial symbiotes and and and dot dot dot up to us.

God really seems to love mechanisms. The medieval religious philosophers may conceivably have had culture-appropriate metaphors, too, but they were radically wrong. Nothing real is just defined by its properties, which it has by definition. Everything is made of smaller and simpler things; every event is a process and every thing is a place. What I take from this pattern is that we are naïve to suppose that it ends with our minds, as the ultimate emergent phenomenon. On the contrary, we ourselves are probably also small working parts in something larger than we are.

We're supposed to be organelles.

Physics Guy, thanks for contributing some interesting thoughts. I think even though many religious people may be slow to admit it I think our learning in science guides our interpretation of scripture imagery. It should be a guide even if people sometimes resist because the order in the natural world is our closest glimpse to Gods thought.

My opening post was thinking about the subject of how Israel went from a polytheist view as in the divine council to monotheism. Dan takes the view that there was polytheism largely untill Babylonian captivity or later. It is a view like Mark Smith's book "The Origins of Biblical Monotheism"' In the link Dan specifies an interest in word meaning starting with prototypical examples and building with usage and examples. I wondered if considering prototype would clarify why or how this transition would happen.

I think people even if considered far back in time having limited understanding of the world would still have had a basic scientific interest, how it is that stuff happens, how do things work,
//
ps, I have always found the Beetles comment amusing but for me it points to the breadth of God while somebody else might hear it as grumpily dismissive of god.

Yeah, Haldane's remark generally reads as a slap-down of natural theology, but I take it as you do, huckelberry. God probably is more like an entomologist than like the Sunday School grandpa. Entomologists do really like beetles. God might really like us, in a similar way. That wouldn't be a bad thing.