Dear Squeers,

"in our system"

I was, perhaps wrongly, under the impression that I am talking with a person, an individual, not with a system. You also failed to disclose who is this "our" (or "us") group which you spoke for. As I'm probably not included in that mysterious group of yours or adhere to its particular system, all that is left for me to do is to accept your claims at face value: As you claim that "our group believes such-and-such; our system tells such-and-such" - then I also agree with you that so does your group believe and so does your system tell.

One thing I forgot to mention in my last post, is that one of God's best gifts, is death. Without that gift we could have been wandering endlessly in this world, getting ever deeper entangled in materialism and ever more anxious about either obtaining more things or retaining what we already have. That could be closely described as "hell", but fortunately, God's mercy does not allow this to happen. Fortunately, all matter eventually comes to an end, the human-experience eventually comes to an end, societies eventually come to an end, humanity eventually comes to an end, nothing of what we ever did will last forever, so none of that is truly worth being stuck in the mud for.

Fortunately also, Death, as the last line of defense, ensures that no material security be possible. Had it been, then poor souls would have remained stuck forever, stagnant in their illusion of existence rather than pursuing religion to re-unite with God.

I suppose that your system considers death as an anachronism too": Good luck and Memento Mori!

Yuyutsu,

I'm open to all sorts of notions about our situation here in earthly materiality - even to the notion that it may be that we are not humans that have occasional spiritual experiences, but spirits that have occasional human experiences.
I'm curious though as to why all the bother. If, as you say, God is so merciful as to allow us the gift of death to escape our wanderings through materiality, why then does he put us here in the first place?

And, stuck as we are for the time being in material reality, why is it necessary to clamour towards religion when, as you say, Death reunites us with the whole?

Dear Poirot,

Good questions indeed!

We are in this world not because God placed us here, but because we wanted to, we desired this experience. I am aware that this answer is incomplete because you could still in a sense "blame" God for it, as in essence we are not separate from Him! Nevertheless, so long as you are unconscious of your unity with God, you can experience your subjective desire to be in the world as solidly yours (and if you were conscious of your unity with God, then you wouldn't think that you are a human in this world to begin with).

According to some teachings, which I take seriously though I have no direct evidence/memory of, death does not solve anything because the seeds of desire for the world are still there to re-germinate. It is only by burning those seeds, so to speak, by overcoming our attachment to the world while we are in it, that we no longer need to come here again.

Another reason to seek to unite with God while the body is still alive is that from this state it is possible to teach and help others achieve the same, thus cease their suffering. Had I been in this state, I could have answered your questions more authoritatively, fully and accurately.

Yuyutsu:

<"in our system"

I was, perhaps wrongly, under the impression that I am talking with a person, an individual, not with a system. You also failed to disclose who is this "our" (or "us") group...>

despite politically conservative and religious protestations which insist on the category of the "individual", the "person", the "self", the "soul", these are all highly dubious designations and there is no hard evidence such entities exist. A much more plausible explanation is that these are social constructs, "interpellated" representations, earnest affectations, conjured credulously into discrete being when we are first called to the stage.
Such is not an item of faith for me, but a compelling view that contends with the politically conservative and religiously naive and flattering view that the individual is somehow self-sufficient and independent of the group mentality. As much as it affronts our "beliefs" and precious sense of self, that we are cultural constructs is only logical, and there are many unholy texts you ought to read before you dismiss the idea--that is if enlightenment is the goal rather, than continued self-deception. Even the Buddha warned that sense of self was the last and highest hurdle.

However, when I say "in our system", I don't only allude to our acculturated "thought" and "collective" beliefs, but in fact mainly to our material conditions within the "hive" (I deliberately use these "pejorative" terms because despite conservative dogma they accurately depict the native conditions conservatives affect to despise. Ah, the delicious ironies of life!). Just as the individual has little or no integrity in himself, so materially too the illusion of independence, to enjoy "God's gifts", is nothing more than a cultural conceit, bestowed on the hapless individual who may revel in his consummate spiritual/material self-affirmation.
"Our system" is thus the one that created you and me in mind and body, and continues to sustain us in high station at the expense of others. You may rationalise this as "God's gifts", as you've been acculturated by "the system" to do, if you like, but to the extent that I demur, I'm an individual!

Dear Yuyutsu,
Sincerely, I thought you were either a (westernized) Buddhist or apologist of (some classical form of) Buddhism. Silly me, but in a sense I am glad because it made me try to formulate my understanding of Buddhism as limited as it is.

Now I know better, and in particular I would endorse almost every word you wrote in your polemic with Squeers. We are certainly much closer in our positions on these matters than I originally thought (never mind our different tastes concerning the word “nauseating”).

>>I do reject as ridiculous … where God … eats ambrosia and drinks nectar.<<
This is rather obvious, as if Sagan (or anybody) wrote that he was rejecting the notion of the Cosmos being a plate supported by four or eight elephants (from Indian mythology). I do not see how this is relevant to the question whether everything that exists - and if you believe in God, including Him - is reducible to the material i.e. can be investigated by science. The fact that some people or societies could understand only naive, mythological models of reality - be it God or Cosmos - has no bearing on the existence or not of those.

Please note that in fact I never claimed God was PART of that “extra”, i.e. completely outside the material realm, only that He was not REDUCIBLE to what science can investigate and seek evidence for. (ctd)

(ctd)
>> I LOVE God and my love of Him is most central to my life.<<
I appreciate this, however it would make sense also if God was just a delusion as Dawkins and his apostles claim. So here as well, I have to add that I do not believe God is REDUCIBLE to the mental, but neither is he completely outside the mental. (Compare with a mathematician's feeling that he/she both CREATES mathematics in his/her head and DISCOVERS mathematical truths outside his/her head at the same time.)

My own formulation, repeated on this OLO many times, is that the biblical “God created man to His image” and Feuerbach’s “man created God to his image” (or something like that) are just two sides of the same coin. Not unlike “being corpuscular” and “being wavelike” are, according to QM, two descriptions of the same part of physical reality, though to common sense the two properties seem to contradict each other.

In this sense I prefer to speak about mythological, biblical, metaphysical etc MODELS of God: they can be primitive, naive, like your example above, or metaphysical (our atheist friends like to call them "mental gymnastics"); formally in agreement or disagreement with the teaching of this or that religion; acceptable or not to this or that individual with positive or negative experience with this or that organised religion, etc.

The relations among existing models of “spirtitual” reality (that Includes the notion of God) is much more varied, complicated and controversial, and culture-determined than the relations among different models (theories) of some particular feature of physical reality.