What Defines a God?
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Lol, that made me smile. Thank goodness I've moved out of home and have freedom. Freedom!Teiraa said:
the Greek gods only had a sertain amount of power, and they were all jerks- kind of like old testiment god. I guess having a kid mellowed him out.Inverse Skies said:
"Kill a man, one is a murderer; kill a million, a conqueror; kill them all, a God."
--Jean Rostand (1894-1977)
--Jean Rostand (1894-1977)
A being with supreme "power" not necessarily supernatural stuff but being worshiped by all none would challenge you. Most Dictators wanted to be viewed as gods so that none will rise against him. They want people to think that he is supreme none can challenge him.
screw religion- mythology for the win. that's all it really is. we now know that science is, for the most part true, and can actuallt prove all general questions at this point. no need to rely on a god when you have knowledge.Inverse Skies said:
Whilst I'm a firm believer in the Big Bang theory most of those 'general questions' are still unanswerable. For example, we know about dark matter because it makes up to 90 something % of the universes mass, but we can't measure it in any way. Also the time before the Big Bang is also speculative etc. Science can't answer it all, prehaps it might some day but now we're still limited in what we know of the universe around us.bowserboy26578 said:
Anselm, some old english bishop, defined God as a being, about which it can be said taht no greater being can be imagined. I'll go with that.
Thought it doesn't translate well to the polytheistic religions(I choose, for simplicity, to count christianity as a monotheistic religion here)
Thought it doesn't translate well to the polytheistic religions(I choose, for simplicity, to count christianity as a monotheistic religion here)
The answer to this question depends entirely on whether you mean a god or God. The use of the capital letter threw me a little.
A god is harder to define than God, because God seems to be whatever the masses want him to be and a god is whatever it is regardless.
I used to like the belief adopted by Neil Gaiman, amongst others, in his novels. A god exists because people believe in them. When people stop believing in them, they grow old and die. In his novel, American Gods, an ex-convict by the name of Shadow is employed by Odin to rouse the aging old gods into a final battle with the new gods, such as the god of computers, credit cards, etc.
To me, God is an ideal. He exists in the imaginations of his believers and helps many people to live a moral life and cope with suffering.
A god is harder to define than God, because God seems to be whatever the masses want him to be and a god is whatever it is regardless.
I used to like the belief adopted by Neil Gaiman, amongst others, in his novels. A god exists because people believe in them. When people stop believing in them, they grow old and die. In his novel, American Gods, an ex-convict by the name of Shadow is employed by Odin to rouse the aging old gods into a final battle with the new gods, such as the god of computers, credit cards, etc.
To me, God is an ideal. He exists in the imaginations of his believers and helps many people to live a moral life and cope with suffering.
How come nobody believes in the steady state theory anymore? Just out of interest Inverse, do you believe in the random-universe Big Bang or the Oscillating universe Big Bang? And do you think that there are other universes in other locations in spacetime that came about as a result of quantum chaos?Inverse Skies said:
The Oscillating universe Big Bang. I seem the recall somewhere that recent measurements of the speed of light had proven it had slowed down. By a miniscule amount but it had still slowed down from the original E=mc^2 formulae developed by Einstein.cuddly_tomato said:
This simple fact seems to point towards an Oscillating universe as the speed of expansion of the universe is gradually slowing down, and if that happens then logically it must eventually reach a point where it stops... then reverses, eventually casuing everything to collapse in on itself into the singularity of the big bang, upon which the cycle repeats.
Whilst this theory seems to fit very neatly and seems plauisible to humans because of its cycle nature, the only thing which seems to unravel it is the second law of thermodynamics, the one which states that the 'entropy of the universe is constantly increasing'. This means the universe is constantly becoming more random and disordered, a fact which seems to negate the idea of it slowing down or shrinking. For this I can't provide an explanation, but I still beleive in the oscillating universe theory (simply because it seems to fit so well).
Yes I do beleive in other universes, although I don't beleive we would be able to exist in them. I can't remember the name of the law now (and that makes it hard to google it)
but there is a constant which exists for this universe which helps to hold atomic nuclei together, and even slight deviations in it would cause carbon nuclei to be blown apart but their protons own electrostatic repulsion (hence if their laws were different...) There's also so many bizarre things about this universe, such as anti-protons which explode if they come into contact with normal protons, dark matter, the fact that using quantum mechanics you can nearly prove the whole universe is just a hologram, quantum mechanics can demonstate the ability of two objects to exist in two differing locations at once I fail to see why ours would be the only universe in existance. Proving such an idea... I'll leave that up to theoretical psychists.
The Japanese, so I have read, used to have a belief that if a human is particularly honourable to his nation and his ancestors, or somehow improving Japan's lot in a demi-god like way, or even something uniquely human that the Kami couldn't do themselves, that human became a Kami themselves. I think that's the reason why lots of Japanese people see Osamu Tezuka as the God/Kami of Manga, because of how he resisted the norms of Japanese wartime society, becoming a pacifist, and using his art to improve the human condition.
A belief the Egyptians had was that Osiris weighed the hearts of every human being against the Feather of Truth when they died, which would then either damn them to their hearts being devoured or give them an afterlife to be enjoyed forever. I was given a copy of The Book of the Dead by my friend who went to the British Museum gift shop, and although some of the stuff in there is like an acid trip or something Alan Moore would put in a grimoire, you could imagine that back in Egypt's prime, this would have been very spiritually empowering to a people who lived by their faith in ancient times.
And I'm a Christian saying that. I prefer William Blake's poetry over the sermons we get at school chapel, at least there is a real sense of awe when you read Blake's visions of God rather than the bland "Believe it, please, we're begging you" sort of thing the school chaplain has to condescend to us in order to win converts.
A belief the Egyptians had was that Osiris weighed the hearts of every human being against the Feather of Truth when they died, which would then either damn them to their hearts being devoured or give them an afterlife to be enjoyed forever. I was given a copy of The Book of the Dead by my friend who went to the British Museum gift shop, and although some of the stuff in there is like an acid trip or something Alan Moore would put in a grimoire, you could imagine that back in Egypt's prime, this would have been very spiritually empowering to a people who lived by their faith in ancient times.
And I'm a Christian saying that. I prefer William Blake's poetry over the sermons we get at school chapel, at least there is a real sense of awe when you read Blake's visions of God rather than the bland "Believe it, please, we're begging you" sort of thing the school chaplain has to condescend to us in order to win converts.