Made by Mammals
The Anthropomorphic God (1)
By . 2009. Made by Mammals.
“The Old Testament Jehovah is definitely a sort of divine man (not a woman), who sees with eyes and hears with ears – and talks and acts in real time (God waited to see what Job would do, and then he spoke to him). Many contemporary Christians, Jews and Muslims insist that God, or Allah, being omniscient, has no need for anything like sense organs, and, being eternal, does not act in
real time. This is puzzling, since many of them continue to pray to God, to hope that God will answer their prayers tomorrow, to express gratitude to God for creating the universe, and to use such locutions as ‘what God intends us to do’ and ‘God have mercy’, acts that seem to be in flat contradiction to their insistence that their God is not at all anthropomorphic.”
Daniel Dennett
Comments (6)
yeah but could you imagine the hell it would be, if you knew all that ever happened and all that ever will happen? What a drag!
posted on October 4, 2009We humans pray to nothing more than the voice in the back of our own minds; a voice which the wise know when to ignore. I would challenge any believer to distinguish the voice of their god from the voice of their devil on any grounds other than whether that voice tells them what they want to do anyway.
If there ever was a god, he’s long dead.
posted on October 5, 2009He’s dead because we killed Him. All that is left for you NDJS is nihilism, which will inevitably just kill off itself and you’re left in a void of nothingness where not even your pointless comments mean anything.
posted on November 20, 2009I would suggest that the void if nothingness that you disdain, Neo, may actually be the foundation of the very universe in quantum terms. There really isn’t anything “here” in the sense of atomic permanence, in any case, and the neurons that you think with are probably not meant to function beyond the subjective formatta of the brain environment, while thoughts themselves are only projections in quantum non-space. Since we have so little to go on, maybe the Buddhists are right to suggest we should probably just focus on getting along first, then work out the rules slowly and to everyones’ advantage as we move ahead.
posted on December 25, 2009Well put Cydonian.
And even if life has no true ‘purpose’ in the sense that a lot of religious believe, doesn’t that make everything seem so much more meaningful and amazing? I’m perpetually in awe of what evolution has accomplished, and no religion has ever come close to describing anything half as beautiful.
posted on December 31, 2009
How can a person with a sense of dignity pray?
posted on October 3, 2009