Unanswered questions (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, April 01, 2009, 09:27 (5476 days ago) @ George Jelliss

George: "If someone defines God as being Nature or the Universe, and does not assign this God personal properties [...] this would be an acceptable definition." - First of all, thank you for answering my questions so clearly. I'm sure you will have realized yourself that this response comes very close to David Turell's panentheism, and it confirms my feeling that there's a great deal of common ground between all of us. Categories can be unnecessarily divisive. Atheist, agnostic, theist, panentheist...we separate ourselves with these titles, but the fact is that we all acknowledge there is some sort of incomprehensible force at work. - Of course the nature of that force is where the ...isms diverge, and this ties in with my question whether all religions are facets of the same universal truth, or elaborate fictions etc. You have replied that religions are all different. That's certainly true, but by facets I meant different angles, and my question relates to what religions have in common: most have at their centre the incomprehensible force which we all acknowledge and which somehow brought us into existence. You could call that force Yahweh, God, Allah, Brahma, Tao, Nature, Energy....The details vary enormously, but the essence is the same, so maybe the "or" in my question was wrong. Religions could all be facets of one universal truth, but at the same time could also be elaborate fictions to explain the inexplicable. After all, we often use images in order to capture the essence of something. - I also asked if we were cells in a superorganism, and both you and David have said no, though you think we might evolve that way "especially if some religion like Islam takes hold". The superorganism I had in mind was the universe, or Nature. There seem to be so many interconnections on the macrocosmic as well as the microcosmic level that it's an image I'm reluctant to dismiss.


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