Praying to God one must ensure that he reveals as little as possible.
For instance, personal identity can be a burden and prevent any further acquaintance with the Creator.
If you enter a candy shop, buy stuff, and pay with cash nobody needs to know your whereabouts. But if you pay with credit cards then a major personal identity is needed.
Privacy is like money, it’s the power to selectively expose yourself to the world.
God dwells in darkness.
Psalms 18:11. He made darkness his secret place; his pavilion round about him [were] dark waters [and] thick clouds of the skies.
1 Kings 8:12. Then spake Solomon, The LORD said that he would dwell in the thick darkness.
2 Samuel 22:10. He bowed the heavens also, and came down; and darkness [was] under his feet.
2 Samuel 22:12. And he made darkness pavilions round about him, dark waters, [and] thick clouds of the skies.
You light a switch in a room and darkness disappears.
So be careful, if you are, God cannot be. And if you’re not, then God is.
Errata Corrige.
The first phrase was intended to be: “Praying to God, we must ensure that we reveal as little as possible. “
I feel that the way it has been stated in the post is much ambiguous in the “light” of what said later about God.
But what is a text about? We will never know, says philosopher Richard Rorty: “it is wrong to think that there is something that a text is about, something that will be revealed by the rigorous application of a method.“
The believer betrays the words he thinks he is interpreting. And assuming that the only decision lies with the interpreter himself is called “magical idealism.”
The same way Jacob’s nocturnal wrestling with an angel who refuses to reveal his own name even after being defeated is the encounter with the magical divine.
When captured by Polyphemus, Homer’s Odysseus says he is “ΟΥΤΙΣ”, “nobody”, and does not reveal his name. But not (as usually thought) to prevent Polyphemus from being able to successfully call for help when Odysseus enacts his escape plan. The knowledge of a true name allows anyone to magically affect another person.
In fact, after Odysseus successfully escaped he reveals his true name and suffers from Poseidon’s revenge: a tremendous storm sends his ship to the bottom of the sea.
God who refuses to be named, probably has much more to do with magical thinking than to metaphysics.
Now.
We came to know that I have a different interpretation of the second part of the text, and you have proposed one, tho at least three interpretations wrestle in your mind.
But to understand the post all this is not quite relevant.
You have only to admit that God dwells in darkness. Not explain why it is so, or even if he is hiding, somehow.
The main point is that, given some attributes of God, being Him the Creator of the Universe, being All-Knowing, being All-Powerful, the first part of the text plays with the idea that -given these qualities – you can’t hide from Him. Hence the question of privacy.
What is privacy all about? It’s the ability to selectively expose yourself to the world.
The comparison of the two texts generates meaning on the assumptions given. The reader has to turn on the lights.
But -of course- there’s no scandal browsing around.
Robert said
For me it means we don’t really know much about God, even whether or not she exists.
Well I was being just a tad facetious. In this sort of discussion a sense of humor is always advantageous.
I would submit we know a great deal about the gods that people have actually believed in – Yahweh, Zeus, Shiva and the like. It is only the abstract “god” of the philosophers who dwells in darkness. And I would say it is because such a concept is incoherent. I think it is well nigh meaningless to talk about “god” outside the specific traditions of belief. Those traditions of belief are themselves the very definitions of what we can mean by “god”.
So when I say I don’t believe in “god” it is the gods of the traditions to which I refer. The “god” of the philosophers does not admit of being believed in or of not being believed in.
Stephen said
God is the name we give for the set which consists of all sets that contain no members.
Well, the set that contains no members in the Naive Set Theory is the “empty set” or ∅, so the set (God) which consists of all sets would be S={{∅},{∅}, {∅}…} and this is non-sense since this would be a multiset or mset and fall more with the n-tuple theory then classic set theory.
The empty set can be understood very well in the von Neumann universe where there is one set Vξ for each ordinal number ξ.
ξ may be defined by recursion starting from V0, or the empty set.
So at the very core, there could be one and only one ∅ set, because it represents the number 0.
But let’s go back on the record. You’re stating that S={∅}, in other words, the P(A) = S contains the empty set. Well, given any set M, the P(M) or the set of its parts always contains the empty set.
So your statement is non-sequitur since every set X has a P(X) that contains ∅. And since there is only one set S ={∅} that contains the empty set, God would be G ={S} but would not be the paradox (yours) desired.
Good janmaru, you figured it out. “God” is a non-sequitur. (Yahweh and Zeus are simply silly.)
Robert how did we determine that the “Unknowable God” is unknowable? The Unknowable God seems to be a rationalization by those who cannot demonstrate any real reason to think God exists but can’t let loose of the concept.
We should approach the infinite with open hands. Why drag along all this baggage? It’s that stinky ole “god of the gaps”. Except now we’ve found a gap, the “unknowable”, that can’t ever be examined. It’s entirely possible we will reach a point in our exploring beyond which our minds may not be equipped to penetrate. So be it. Let’s accept it and not project our fantasies onto it.
Steefen
God is not private. God is public.
God is not dark. God is light.
= = =
Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross
Steefen
Maybe Thomas Merton wrote the preface of the edition I read in the 1980s.
God (the Sun) still holds me when the Earth must turn away from God as it revolves on its axis.
God (the Sun) is behind the clouds.
God (the Sun) creates life and preserves life.
= = =
God (the Sun) created Day and Night on Earth because the Earth rotates on its axis because of the Sun’s creation.
Explanation:
The Sun formed from the bulge at the center of this disk, and the planets formed further out. They inherited their rotation from the overall movement of the Solar System itself.
Over the course of a few hundred million years, all of the material in the Solar System gathered together into planets, asteroids, moons and comets. Then the powerful radiation and solar winds from the young Sun cleared out everything that was left over.
Without any unbalanced forces acting on them, the inertia of the Sun and the planets have kept them spinning for billions of years.
And they’ll continue to do so until they collide with some object, billions or even trillions of years in the future.
The Earth spins because it formed in the accretion disk of a cloud of hydrogen that collapsed down from mutual gravity and needed to conserve its angular momentum. It continues to spin because of inertia.
= = =
God is not about the creation of the universe. Mind your own business. God is about “putting a roof over your head” [the Earth’s atmosphere], it is not about other solar systems. Other solar systems are different Creator/Preserver Gods.
Entities from other solar systems may be good for us or bad for us. Think about us. Do we even think about inter-solar system diplomacy? Are we good for entities in other solar systems? We have not even adopted an inter-solar system planet in need of our care. We are not holy enough internally to shine out care to entities in other solar systems.
= = =
Anyway, God (the Sun) gives us Day, Night, and Photosynthesis.
Just stick with Deus Sol Invictus.
Robert said
These questions are probably above my pay grade. Come to think of it, nobody pays me anything at all to talk about God. A god of the gaps doesn’t bother me too much as long as we are not shirking our responsibility to fill in as many of the gaps as we can. Those who seriously entertain the concept of an unknowable God have already given up on the concept of God altogether. Likewise fantasies of such. Any god whose existence can be proven or denied isn’t God anyway.
But whose pay grade would it be? Theologians? They don’t study god; they study what people have said about god. Mystics? They’re like drug trippers writing down an account of the trip after the fact. God is the subject on which everyone is an expert – or no one. The unknowable god, the god that can be neither affirmed or denied, is a signifier without a referent.
Only God knows if he exists or not.
Robert do you know the Hindu Rigveda?
Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born and whence comes this creation?
The Gods are later than this world’s production. Who knows then whence it first came into being?
He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it,
Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not.
Perhaps god doesn’t know if he exists or not.
I can’t be bothered with pretending to know more than I do.
I’m not pretending to know more than I do. Just wondering if there’s anything to be known here at all.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert