Oh My God?: "God", a Word for Children?
For the next few weeks, HuffPost will be hosting an array of respondents -- including spiritual leaders, world leaders, personalities and celebrities -- who are asked to fill in the blank to the statement: God is...
The series will lead up to and accompany the November 13 opening of the upcoming documentary Oh My God?
God is a word for children.
For the few who grow up, it is deep, private and wordless, and has nothing to do with the schoolyard chatter of conflicting religions. Yet, paradoxically, it is the very young and the very old who know this best.
It is quite possible to practice the 'awareness of the presence of God'. Those who do come to realize that religions too belong largely to words and concepts, where God is not to be found.
Anyone who tells you they know WHO god IS are to be mistrusted.
Remember it's early in history, it's only 2009, and we're all still primitive little savages, oblivious to the effulgence of our own existence.
It is revealing that 'God' is also the most extensively used expletive in the multiple languages of our world. It springs unbidden from our deepest hearts, when we're not 'thinking'.
Thought is the enemy of 'the awareness of the presence of god.'
Knowing is different from thinking, or hoping or having 'faith' in. It's been remarked that 'Belief, surely, in the absence of certainty, is close to lunacy'. The world is full of lunatics.
Not enough of us have practiced, or even considered, the 'a.o.t.p.o.g' to have an opinion on the matter. Those who have know the futility, the pointlessness -- indeed the catastrophic dangers -- of declaring an opinion on the matter. There are religious sects in Asia that maintain it is a blasphemy to even mention the word, because to do so is to confine its meaning such that one obviously hasn't a clue as to what it means. In the Knowledge of the Presence of God there is power beyond words... so why not just shut up and get on with it for God's sake.
Read the previous response, from the film's director Peter Rodger.
Lawrence Blair, Ph.D. is an author, explorer and filmmaker. Brought up in the UK and Mexico, he has been a resident of and expert on Indonesia for the past 35 years. He is currently featured in the documentary Oh My God?.
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One thing you can be sure of. Whenever someone starts saying "God does this" or "God wants that," they don't know what they're talking about.
God is Reality. God is Nature. God is Truth. God is the laws of physics. God is you and me. God is the sum of the perfectly balanced constants (Avogrado's, Faraday's, Planck's, gravitational constant, etc) that allow reality to exist.
I believe we are all connected. So Tallulah, call me a believer ;)
See Tallulah Morehead's Profile
God is black. God is blue. God is up. God is down. God is mountains. God is satiric novels by Patrick Dennis. God is my cat. God is the paperback edition of CATCH-22. God is Hi-Def DVDs.God is everything but the final season of ROSEANNE.
When you self-define "God" as anything you please, all you've proved is your own disconnectedness to any sort of logic or intellectual rigor. I believe you are not connected to me.
The problem with deciding that "God" means any word you decide it does is, when words mean whatever you privately decide they do, then language ceases to have meaning.
I believe God is Monty Python's Flying Circus.
But thanks. I was getting so bored with nothing but intelligent comments.
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Gee, all atheist comment postings, including mine. If some believer doesn't post, how will we ever get a good argument going?
God is not real. Your life is just a delicate and transient ballet of interacting quantum states, which will inevitably end. And when you die, you die and that's it: the mind is itself a pattern of electrical impulses contained in the brain, and moderated by a staggeringly complex array of chemicals. Mind without body is absurd: a light does not "go to heaven" once you turn off the switch; it is simply off.
God is a word for children.
"God, Dog...Dog, God...."
All that ever was or will be is here now.
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"All that ever was or will be is here now."
Not true. They haven't shot the last episode of LOST yet, and the doggie I had growing up has been gone a long time now.
There is no God.
God is: one or more entities created by man in his own image as a result of arrogance, ignorance and fear.
The earliest evidence of religion (Hindu) dates from about 5000 years ago. If we use a 24 hour clock to represent the 2.5 million year existence of the homo genus, language and recorded history took place about 6 minutes ago, and religion developed about 3 minutes ago. It is somewhat unlikely that any significant human population existed anywhere in the world other than Africa until about an hour ago.
What is known about our ancestry, and that of every other living thing, is that there was one entity that was revered (honored profoundly and respectfully) by all- to do otherwise meant extinction. We call it (her) nature, and I have written several books extolling her virtues.
It is our outrageous arrogance and ignorance that presumes we are somehow special in the grander scheme of things. I believe nature has a very different view of our place among living things, and it is certainly not at the top. Actually, there is no top.
The beauty of revering nature is that she provides the same guidance to all living things, and we don't need self-appointed paid intermediaries. We do not have to suspend reality or have an unrealistic belief system. We just have to look out the window at the plants, animals, and soil, and there she is in all her beauty.
Roy Mankovitz, Director
http://www.MontecitoWellness.com
Ah, apophatic theology, the ultimate god of the gaps.
Worried believer: "Every time I make a claim they refute it!"
Savvy theologian: "Then stop making claims."
Relieved theologian: "Brilliant!"
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"Thought is the enemy of 'the awareness of the presence of god.' "
This is a fact. "Faith" is the traditional alternative to thinking. Let's put it another way: "All thinking men are atheists." - Ernest Hemingway.
"God" is indeed a word for children. One of the great problems of humanity is that adults don't leave it in the nursery, where it belongs, but instead brainwash it into their children's minds, and use it as a justification for flying planes into skyscrapers.
Do use it as an expletive. Just don't use it as meaning something important or real.
Tooth fairy, Santa Claus, God, Zeus, Easter Bunny....
So when did you conclude they were all fairy tales?
Oh 'God'. Nothing puts a better marking of ignorance and superstition on a person as their affinity for "god". Is there any single term in the history of human beings that has done so much damage? None.
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