You can still have all sorts of claims, you can have a creator who has power, you can have faith.
It just needs to make sense within the context of confirmable reality.
And I can’t disagree more in terms of the desirability of a theology that takes a more nuanced consideration of reality.
Quite the opposite in fact.
Why should someone choose a deity that smites with absolute judgement and demands subservience rather than a deity embracing relativism to the point that self-determination may be the entire point of existence? Why have a deity judge their creation at all rather than embrace its self-determined differences?
It reminds me of Solomon’s litmus test to tell a true parent from a false parent.
The false parent only cared about being recognized as the parent and didn’t care if the child died or was harmed to achieve that.
The true parent cared most about the child living as their complete and unadulterated selves even if that meant not being known to the child at all.
Why should we desire a theology that offers a deity fitting the false parent archetype in that scenario? Because a book with clear signs of rewriting by each dynasty passing it through says so?
And why shouldn’t those desiring a divine parent instead be inspired by a universe with non-intuitive rules bending over backwards to embody relativism on scales from supernova to stardust instead take inspiration from confirmable reality to conjure up faith in a parent more aptly fitting the true parent in Solomon’s story, where who they are is loved and accepted whether they know anything of that parent or not because there is no absolute expectations? And where relative truths are embraced rather than rejected in favor of the truths forced upon you by a parasitic priestly class?
So basically you have invented a god that knew that childhood cancer would be a thing but let’s it happen because he thinks helping is worse than that.
I don’t know about you but I am a parent and wouldn’t sit there while my kid is dying for fear that I would corrupt their natural self.
Well, now we’re stepping into more specific considerations.
For a number of reasons, I think the notion of an always existing deity to be less compelling than an eventually developing deity like put forward by the Orphics.
When we look at our own universe, random existence through a process of self-organizing complexity gave rise to intelligence and even the creation of our own rudimentary universes.
Does that process end with us? Should we assume it to be exclusive to us?
And if there were to be a process like that taking place after us, would a creator recreating earlier humans be inherently unethical?
As an example - let’s say someone in the far future wanted to bring back humanity after it went extinct, and did so by creating a universe wherein after death those recreated humans could continue on in their own relative paradise (a configuration the originals might not have even had).
Would it be more ethical in that scenario to recreate only the rich, healthy, and privileged humans to live a life of happiness and then a life of relative paradise thereafter too? Or would it be more fair to recreate humanity as accurately as possible, cancer and all, so that even the humans dealt a crappy hand in life would be represented in its perpetuity and be entitled to the rewards now possible with their recreation by an intelligent entity?
Would you, as a parent, only want your luckiest child to be entitled to the possibility of their own relative paradise, or would you want the less fortunate children to also be entitled to that too?
You can still have all sorts of claims, you can have a creator who has power, you can have faith.
It just needs to make sense within the context of confirmable reality.
And I can’t disagree more in terms of the desirability of a theology that takes a more nuanced consideration of reality.
Quite the opposite in fact.
Why should someone choose a deity that smites with absolute judgement and demands subservience rather than a deity embracing relativism to the point that self-determination may be the entire point of existence? Why have a deity judge their creation at all rather than embrace its self-determined differences?
It reminds me of Solomon’s litmus test to tell a true parent from a false parent.
The false parent only cared about being recognized as the parent and didn’t care if the child died or was harmed to achieve that.
The true parent cared most about the child living as their complete and unadulterated selves even if that meant not being known to the child at all.
Why should we desire a theology that offers a deity fitting the false parent archetype in that scenario? Because a book with clear signs of rewriting by each dynasty passing it through says so?
And why shouldn’t those desiring a divine parent instead be inspired by a universe with non-intuitive rules bending over backwards to embody relativism on scales from supernova to stardust instead take inspiration from confirmable reality to conjure up faith in a parent more aptly fitting the true parent in Solomon’s story, where who they are is loved and accepted whether they know anything of that parent or not because there is no absolute expectations? And where relative truths are embraced rather than rejected in favor of the truths forced upon you by a parasitic priestly class?
So basically you have invented a god that knew that childhood cancer would be a thing but let’s it happen because he thinks helping is worse than that.
I don’t know about you but I am a parent and wouldn’t sit there while my kid is dying for fear that I would corrupt their natural self.
The only excuse for God is it doesn’t exist.
Well, now we’re stepping into more specific considerations.
For a number of reasons, I think the notion of an always existing deity to be less compelling than an eventually developing deity like put forward by the Orphics.
When we look at our own universe, random existence through a process of self-organizing complexity gave rise to intelligence and even the creation of our own rudimentary universes.
Does that process end with us? Should we assume it to be exclusive to us?
And if there were to be a process like that taking place after us, would a creator recreating earlier humans be inherently unethical?
As an example - let’s say someone in the far future wanted to bring back humanity after it went extinct, and did so by creating a universe wherein after death those recreated humans could continue on in their own relative paradise (a configuration the originals might not have even had).
Would it be more ethical in that scenario to recreate only the rich, healthy, and privileged humans to live a life of happiness and then a life of relative paradise thereafter too? Or would it be more fair to recreate humanity as accurately as possible, cancer and all, so that even the humans dealt a crappy hand in life would be represented in its perpetuity and be entitled to the rewards now possible with their recreation by an intelligent entity?
Would you, as a parent, only want your luckiest child to be entitled to the possibility of their own relative paradise, or would you want the less fortunate children to also be entitled to that too?