Which allows for several inconsistencies, tales to have been modified over the course of the years, details to have been rewritten a hundred times... which makes it nothing more than a book of tales. Whether they are written by one person or several doesn't change anything (other than explaining the stark contrasts in tone over the pages, from a vengeful god which murders thousands with a flick to a loving one).
I still don't see how your personal opinion of the Bible holds any bearing on my arguments. Can we drop this part of the discussion now?
Let's go to the wikipedia article and look at the first line:
It's perfectly correct and fine if you want to use the Integral Theory to explain what god is for you, and I didn't really want to go in there because it's a perfectly fine definition. The thing is, the definition in itself is the same as if we started discussing "what are the aliens for you", to talk we must first assume they exist. If you don't, well, that whole talk about defining god is little more than hypothesizing. And since everybody is free to do so, well, I didn't really go there. I just went for the parts where you claimed you can prove god exists.
There are theorems and equations explaining the mechanism of gravity. Does that make gravity an abstraction, a mere theory? No, it does not.
Yes, there is a such thing as Integral Theory. Yes, it does account for quadrants and levels. This does not make quadrants and levels theoretical.
People used to believe in magic, in gods creating thunder, because they didn't know how it happened. People believed in gods from the moment they were aware of their own death and afraid of disappearing as a way to find comfort.
Sure, that's what God was to many people in times past, and this type of relationship with God is still meaningful to many people today.
But as I clearly illustrated in my
first post, there are also rational and post-rational ways of relating to God.
To say that because some people consider God as a magical superbeing, and to further say that such ideas are foolish, is an opinion, albeit an opinion with some merit. To go on to assert that anyone who has any type of relationship with something Transcendent is a fool? That's simply reducing all non-rational knowledge to pre-rational knowledge.
Notice how you are moving from "a defined God" to "Spirit", the concept of something magical and intangible that affects the world, which is something much blurrier.
I am using Spirit, God, and Mystery as synonyms, and have been doing so
this entire time.
And last, people believe many things. That doesn't mean they are necessarily true, or even real.
In some ways, it does, in fact. This ties into your next question, so I'll describe how it does so below.
I would like you to explain which views are those and how they are "deeper". And whether they are anything more than stories, philosphies. My mom is a new-ager who firmly believed "the mind of the universe" was going to change in the Mayan calendar change and become "more open", and I don't really think she has a deeper understanding of the universe despite following a new philosophy.
In regards to the personal experience you just related, you may find this quotation both informative and amusing. It's from Wilber's book 'A Brief History of Everything.'
"Q: ... So there is an overall continuity to evolution, from physiosphere to biosphere to noosphere.
KW: Which makes sense, doesn't it? And as evolution moves into the noosphere, then - based on the work of numerous researchers, such as Jean Gebser, Pitrim Sorokin, Robert Bellah, Jürgen Habermas, Michael Foucalt, Peter Berger, to name a few - we can outline the predominant "worldviews" of the various epochs of human development. These stages, these worldviews, may be summarized as archaic, magic, mythic, rational, and existential...
The general point is fairly simple: different stages of consciousness growth present a different view of the world. The world looks different - is different - at each stage. As new cognitive capacities unfold and evolve, the Kosmos looks at itself with different eyes, and it sees quite different things...
Q: So these are different ways to look at the world?
KW: Yes, but we have to be very careful here. This might seem to be splitting hairs, but it really is very important: it's not that there is a single, pregiven world, and we simply look at it differently. Rather, it is that as the Kosmos comes to know itself more fully, different worlds emerge.
It's like an acorn growing to an oak. An oak isn't a different picture of the same in unchanging world present in the acorn. The oak has components in its own being that are new and quite different from anything found in the acorn. The oak has leaves, branches, roots, and so on, none of which are present in the acorn's actual "worldview" or "worldspace." Different worldviews create different worlds, enact different worlds, they aren't just the same world seen differently.
Q: I understand the distinction, but it does seem a bit of hairsplitting. Why exactly is this distinction important?
KW: It's crucially important, because in many ways it's the great watershed separating the modern and postmodern approaches to knowledge...
You've heard of the "new paradigm" approaches to knowledge?
Q: Well, only that everybody seems to want the new paradigm. Or a new paradigm, anyway.
KW: Yes, well the
old paradigm that everybody
doesn't want is the Enlightenment paradigm, which is also called the representation paradigm...
This is the idea that you have the self or the subject, on the one hand, and the empirical or sensory world, on the other, and all valid knowledge consists of making
maps of the single and simple "pregiven" world. And if the map is accurate, if it correctly represents, or corresponds with, the empirical world, then that is "truth"...
Q: But what's wrong with the representation paradigm? I mean, we do it all the time.
KW: It's not that it's wrong. It's just narrow and very limited... There are many ways to summarize the limitations of the representation paradigm, the idea that knowledge basically consists of making maps of the world. But the simplest way to state the problem with maps is:
they leave out the mapmaker. What was being utterly ignored was the fact that the mapmaker might itself bring something to the picture!...
Beginning with Kant, and running through Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Heidegger, Foucalt, Derrida - all of the great "postmodern" theorists - in all of them we find a powerful attack on the mapping paradigm, because it fails to take into account the self that is making the maps in the first place.
The self did not just parachute to earth. It has its own characteristics, its own structures, its own development, its own
history - and all of those will influence and govern what it will see, and what it
can see, in that supposedly "single" world just lying around. The parachutist is up to its neck in contexts and backgrounds that determine just what it can see in the first place!"
And how does this represent more depth? The postmodern existential/pluralistic worldview is deeper than the modern rational worldview because the former "transcends and includes" the latter. Pluralism incorporates rationalism while bringing its own new and emergent truth that allows us to get a broader picture of reality.
Also you go back to the argumentum ad populum: the fact that those new ways rely on god-ish beings doesn't mean they are necessarily right.
Hold on: you have just asserted that because something can account for God, within its scope, that God's existence is necessary for its validity. That assertion is clearly false. The post-rational worldviews do not
rely on God. They simply are not at odds with Spirit and Mystery in the way that the rational worldview is.
My point is that rational thinking is almost exclusively materialistic. Pluralist thinking is sometimes materialistic, but often is not. Integral thinking, from what little of it has come into being, is entirely non-materialistic. It's certainly too early to draw a definite conclusion, but it's beginning to look like materialism is something to be outgrown as humanity evolves.
And it's not argumentum ad populum, either. Following the basic process if evolution, pluralistic transcends and includes rational, and integral, in turn, transcends and includes pluralistic. It's not just that "some believe it, so it's true." It's that deeper truths continue to emerge in this ever-evolving world. And as they do so, they show us the limitations of the previous truths.
It's the same process through which slavery was abolished in all industrialized nations. The techno-economic base at the time of the Enlightenment supported a worldview that all people were equal, regardless of what beliefs they held. Now we are at the point in history where reason, and its materialistic mapmaking, are being dethroned.
We now have an informational techno-economic base, which supports a worldview that re-affirms not only the importance of interior subjective spaces, but essentially re-establishes their existence, since modernity's basic position is that the only things that are really real are those with "simple location," the things you can point your finger at. Rationality would have us believe that since you can't put your finger on emotions or values or shared meaning, that all of these are simply minor considerations, unnecessary for describing the world.
Thereby, science has not only told us that it alone will solve the world's problems, it has basically tried to decide what is a problem in the first place. Well, that was fun for a while, but evolution moves on.
Oh, and there isn't much of a "scientific worldview", other than the fact that science tries to explain stuff that happens through experiments, evidence and earhtly logic, without relying on "magic" from a being from a higher plane of existence we can't see or touch, or even know whether it exists at all.
You just described the rational worldview and denied its existence in the same sentence.
What does this mean? I have looked around and never, ever in my life I have seen a god doing magic or miracles about me. I have never seen anybody turning water into wine. I have seen perfectly good explanations for basically any question I have ever had that do not require a magical being intervening. Why shouldn't I assume that there is a very good chance it isn't raining at all?
I'm not sure why we're reverting to the definition of Spirit as a "magical superhero in the sky." I've made it clear that this is not the only understanding of what Mystery is, and it's not the God I've been talking about.
Philosophy (metaphysics) goes like this: premise/assumption -> reasoning -> conclusion -> verification/refutation.
Post-metaphysical ontology goes like this:
Injunction -> observation -> conclusion -> verification/refutation.
Philosophy goes like this:
All organic life is composed of smaller wholes. Therefore plants have "cells" that make up their apparently solid surfaces. And we would then debate the merits of the argument as presented.
Post-metaphysics goes like this:
One looks at plant skin through a microscope. One sees little "cells" that compose the apparently solid surface. Therefore, a plant's surface is composed of cells. Others then look through the microscope, and report what they see.
If that's not clear enough, you're going to need to be more forthcoming about what it is you're not getting.
Well, yes, the four quadrants exist as a way to define god if you start from "god exists". If you don't, they do not define anything. That's a philosophy for me (and for Wikipedia it seems).
I mean, you could modify those areas to define how society works, without the need for a god. It's just a chewed gum somebody stuck on a worldview to take advantage of the fact that we can relate to that to make an argument for god, despite the fact no god is necessary for that worldview.
Everything that arises can be related to from any of the four basic perspectives that the quadrants represent. They are not being used to validate God's existence. What they are being used to illustrate is that
when someone experiences God, they do so from one of these fundamental perspectives.
the experience of God
the experience
And there you go. That's what I wanted to say. The experience those people are living is real. That's all we can know for sure. Because, you know, there is no need for an actual god to exist for that person to feel "the experience" of god. You only need to make that person believe hard enough so it becomes real for them. It's that simple. The fact that a person who has interiorized the existence of god feels something special when doing an action intimately related to that god they believe in only proves the fact that humans can feel X under Y conditions, not that a God does exist.
I can make a person feel a terrible fear if I manage to convince them that there is a murderer on the room next door. That doesn't make the murderer real, but their feelings are.
When fear is experienced, that fear is real. When love is experienced, that love is real. When God is experienced, that God is...... not real??
THE ILLOGICALITY HURTS MY BRAIN
Your argument
almost makes sense if you restrict your definition of God to a magical superhero again (which I have shown to be only one of at least twenty-eight fundamentally different ways of experiencing God). And yet it still falls short, because if someone is hearing God's voice in prayer, and we've verified that the brain-state correlates with the alleged mind-state, then God is real in that person's direct and immediate awareness; God exists in that worldspace, which is just as real as any other worldspace. And only someone with the same worldview who entered that same prayer-state could verify or refute that a magic superhero God was speaking.
The magic superhero is not fake or imaginary just because it does not arise in your experience. All you can actually say is that it doesn't exist in your worldspace, which is also a real worldspace. If you entered the same prayer-state as the other two, you might also hear God's voice. But he would be saying very different things to you, not at all fitting for a magic superhero, and he might even actually be a she! S/He'd likely be telling you to use your own careful discernment to solve your problems, or to make sure your information comes from a trustworthy source.
"Science is necessarily methodologically materialist. Science wishes to describe and explain nature. Diversion into the "supernatural" begins to describe and explain matters that are not natural and obfuscate the natural.
Methodological materialism is a defining characteristic of science in the same way that "methodological woodism" is a defining characteristic of carpentry. Science seeks to construct natural explanations for natural phenomena in the same way that carpentry seeks to construct objects out of wood. In operating in this manner neither discipline denies the existence of supernatural forces or sheet plastics, their usefulness or validity. The use of either supernatural forces or sheet plastics is simply distinguished as belonging to separate disciplines. "
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Materialism
Last month, the videogame Professor Layton VS Ace Attorney was released in Europe. I won't spoil anything, but one of the most annoying things in the trials is that, since magic exists in the universe where the game plays, Phoenix has a ridiculously tougher time proving anything in court. "That piece of evidence was left in the wrong place, my client clearly couldn't have put it there!". In the real-world games, the prosecutor would say "Oh crap" loudly. In this magical world, though, they'd simply say "well she used
magic!", and suddenly your argument isn't worth a penny.
Science is materialistic from the second it doesn't rely on "gods" using magic to explain reality. If we used "magic", in fact, we would be stuck praying to the saints for rain instead of using chemical products to induce it, because we wouldn't be fully sure about whether it does work or is nonsense. After all, it's ridiculously easy to move the goalposts when you are talking about "magic", something we cannot truly comprehend or replicate. Both views are respectable, but you can't expect the side that has decided to stick with nature to accept magic. That would mean turning science into a completely different discipline altogether.
We do not have to revert to magic to acknowledge God/Spirit/Mystery, as I clearly illustrated in my first post. So all of that is irrelevant.
As to materialism, it is simply a fashion. The general idea is that inner experiences are not repeatable or verifiable, but inner experiences are not just ignored, they are
reduced to mere byproducts of their exterior correlates. Which is totally unnecessary, for one, and for another, inner experiences are both verifiable and repeatable, which is what the study I presented in my first post demonstrates.
Scientific inquiry comes with the rational worldview. The reductionism is sold separately.
Oh, and all your arguments are based on nothing more than an assumption that God does (or can, or perhaps should) exist. What does it make you think your assumption is more valid? (And I love the subtle ideas you are hinting at with the "should not", as if we "knew" god existed but were trying to actively deny it for who knows what nefarious reasons. Nice one, that).
Actually, I have heard it argued more than once that all religion, and by implication all experiences of God, are something to be eliminated. And this assertion invariably comes from those that are comparing the best of modernity with the worst of religious tradition, and using that unbalanced comparison to conclude that all religion is bad for humanity. Hence my terminology.
Regardless, you have said many times that my arguments are based on assumptions, or philosophy - metaphysics by any other name. You can say it many more times, and it will still be false.
What I have argued is that
when people experience God, they do so from four basic perspectives. And they will interpret that experience according to what their worldview allows them to see.
Notice that you can replace "God" with "anything": when people experience anything, they do so from four basic perspectives. And they will interpret that experience according to what their worldview allows them to see.
This is not an assumption. It's an observation.
