Scuse me, but the Torah is Jewish, much older than xtianity.

All I can do is say thank you: you've made my day. You are a generous individual!!

If you cannot recognize that god murdered A & E by neglect by insuring they would not eat of the tree of life, then you are not reading the story right. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

Look at what you wrote to me: If..., then... That leaves me with no response. And when someone tells me I'm not reading correctly, it conjures up images of 1984 type fascism, as if there is only one right way to read. That's totalitarian thinking in a nutshell. It shuts everyone else down. Homey don't play that game.

The term translated as loincloths is used elsewhere to mean protective garments worn in battle. — Fooloso4

I don't think you'd use fig leaves in battle.

Although the term 'ethics' is anachronistic — Fooloso4

I'd say that the Torah is the start of ethics.

If you cannot recognize that god murdered A & E by neglect by insuring they would not eat of the tree of life, then you are not reading the story right. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

Now that's almost fascist in its authoritarianism. You are beginning to scare me.

I see. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

I don't think you do.

When a deep truth is known so intensely
That all of its clothing falls away,
Then one has learned the beauty of truth, for
The reality of meaning is beauty. — PoeticUniverse

Yes, and this is a blinding and pure moment, fleeting like a dream. Understanding that one is living a moment of truth is a marvellous experience--whether the truth is painful or ecstatic--because to recognize a felt truth is liberating. Liberating from ambiguity, from repression, from the unconscious. Those moments breathe me: I don't breathe them, and it's one of those full, complete breaths that opens one up completely.

I have a painting by Felix Nussbaum right across from my desk; this is it. One of the most breathtakingly beautiful paintings I've ever seen.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%27Self-portrait%27_by_Felix_Nussbaum.jpg

Wow!!!!!!!!

‘Life was much too easy in Paradise,
And lacked therefore of any real meaning,
For without the lows there can be no highs—
All that remains is a dull flat feeling!

Just like Barbie and Ken. We can't know ecstasy and joy and love without knowing depression, fear and frustration. Amen.

Do you know about kanneh bosm in the Old Testament? Cannabis!! Humans' very best friend in the flora kingdom.

Humans are defined as rational animals. — TheMadFool

But how much of the time are they irrationally driven by emotions both conscious and repressed? I think the rational capacity of our species is over-rated. In fact, I'd define rational more along the lines of ability to survive and guarantee the survival of one's species, and we're not doing well at all in that capacity.

That takes quite the prick of a god, especially when his warning was followed by his murdering A & R by neglect and his hiding away what would have kept A & E alive. The tree of life. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

I think you are trying to read Genesis like a contemporary whodunit novel. The way I read it: A&E are banished from the garden and forced to go out and experience all the joys and pains of human life. It's kind of condensed down to farming and childbearing, but God gives them the entire gamut of human experience in the expectation that they will learn how to do it right.

God never planned to keep them like a Barbie and Ken in the garden: they wouldn't have been human if they hadn't responded to God's command with the NO of the two-year-old who is acquiring both the physical coordination and the mental calculations to make her/his own decision: "NO: I'ma do things my way. I must be fully human and make my own mistakes--not a doll, an automaton."

I believe that God had to let go completely when humans were created: God understood that it was creating a species incapable of being controlled or limited by instinct. God's still waiting for us to get it right, and repair the world, tikkun olam...

What an amazing poem; who wrote it?

Gen 3; 22 And the LORD God said: 'Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil;

If you know of good and evil, that would mean you have attained moral thinking and know of the ethical actions that should be taken. Right? — Gnostic Christian Bishop

What I meant was the A&E's immediate reaction. The snake promises one thing, but after she passes it to Adam and they ate: "Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they perceived that they were naked; and they sewed together fig leaves and made themselves loincloths" (JPS Jewish Study Bible Gen 3:7).

Then they hide from God. That's where it starts getting ethical, in my reading. When they lie to God about hiding from him is when it gets ethical.

However, prior to feeling ashamed and hiding from God, I'm fascinated by their first recognition of their private parts and the need to cover them. That part isn't ethical to me, and this is my midrash, my commentary: It's the birth of the problem of sexuality in patriarchal Judaism. The natural is seen as unnatural to A&E, so they invent clothing to cover up their private parts. I would call this a form of implicit guilt about/terror of sexual desire. This is an on-going issue shoring up the patriarchal and frequently repressive version of things all the way through the Tanakh and the rabbinic writings up until the 20th century.

Regards back atchya s

Then we are all made of God-stuff, as the atman in the Brahman.

Or, without God's Mind, we are all made of the base existence.

All that 'is' already is, complete. — PoeticUniverse

I assumed that Everything was God; I thought we came to that conclusion--at least, I had.

What is base about existence? If God is existence, then... I suppose "base" is as good an adjective as any--except, is existence the foundation, or has existence, er, existed for eternity?

I think language inevitably does us a disservice with these issues.

I read it many years ago, too. Good existential kind of reading, as I recall. But I'm a lot older now and I believe my attitudes and feelings have changed a lot. In some ways it becomes an attractive proposition in terms of how bad it gets on this planet...

if we ever come to the conclusion that there is a being or consciousness that created existence, — Tzeentch

Can the being or consciousness itself be part of the creation, in no way extraneous to it?

eternal First and Fundamental Being, with a creative Mind, — PoeticUniverse

What if the Mind isn't a part, but the totality of the First and Fundamental Being?

I thought consensus, or something close, was the idea too. I called it what I called it because that's what I was looking for, if it was/is there to be found? — Pattern-chaser

So does this restrict the kinds of propositions about God that one can put forth? I thought I was getting close to consensus with at least some folks, while others were never seeking consensus.

Hmmm, based on the thread title, I thought "consensus" was the whole point of this thread. — ZhouBoTong

Did you really think there would be consensus about this topic? If I'm limited to express what I think will fulfill the expectations of the readers, then my writing will be subject to all the wrong influences. I must express my understanding of God and see how it connects--or not--to others' ideas.

We didn't arrive at 'infinite' though, at least not yet. — PoeticUniverse

I thought we did arrive at Infinite. I don't think infinity is all the same; I think there's probably infinite variation.

You're just too irritable, probably bilious. You have a lot of anger, and maybe you're really angry at women. You probably hate feminism; it probably makes you really angry.

But I don't really believe that you're angry about these things; there's something else, underneath, that governs your anger and cruelty. You could have asked me a question at any time, and I would have been glad to clarify. But if I'm correct and you hate women--or you just hate me specifically--, then there's absolutely nothing that I can say.

All I want to do here is dialogue with people, have my ways of thinking transformed and influenced by the brilliant thoughts of others. This isn't graduate school anymore; this isn't a job where people treat you like shit; this isn't the family in which you were perhaps treated like shit. So it's all you know: how to hate and try to get others to hate you.

I refuse to hate you; as a matter of fact, you no longer have my pity. You have my compassion and you even still have my desire to dialogue with you.

One final thing that needs clarification, because I can see that you are correct and some of what I posted wasn't clear at all: I think I've sketched my current feelings and perceptions of what God could be, and I agree with what Poetic Universe has written as well.

What I didn't explain is that part about what goes on with humans, which isn't about God, but about human behavior and psychology. When people express a lot of anger and hostility, it's like an addiction, and it gets worse and they need more and more anger and hostility. One of the many biblical stories like it is the Israelites making the calf of gold as soon as Moses trundled up the mountain. There are all of these things that can take me away from love, which I really like to practice with others, and they are all false idols which, in the past, have alienated me from myself, from authentic relationships with other people and from Everything (i.e., God).

When I've been mean to others, it's like a loss of soul, a process of dehumanization and a concurrent ability to dehumanize others. Then I'm a bit demonic. On one end of the spectrum, you get psychopaths like Dahmer, and towards the other end, you get, for example, professors and parents who take pleasure in demeaning and belittling the people over whom they have power. I've been teaching college students since the end of the 70s, and while I've lost my temper and my patience many times, I was never one of those professors who took pleasure from putting down grads or undergrads. I've always been appalled by that type of bullying.

This is my definition of human evil (in a nutshell, I could expand, but not here): the desire to inflict harm and suffering on others; the derivation of pleasure or a sense of satisfaction from such behavior. I could go on, but this is long enough. Talk to me, S.

Let us praise the creative potential of the Eternal, if that still does something for us, or at least be awed. — PoeticUniverse

Compounding the above, what is eternal has no input, making its outputs to be random, as we note in Quantum Mechanics, but which we can still presume as everything possible happening from it, this granting creatorship and the resultant transitions by laws that get formed at higher and higher levels. — PoeticUniverse

I will drink and vape to that. Essentially, infinitely and eternally, God is quantum mechanics and so much more.

I can't take you seriously at all. You are playing bating games. Pattern Chaser asked for

a description of God — Pattern-chaser

; I was responding to this request and I avoided using the terms he objects to in the initial post. You've disagreed with my thinking and dismissed it--which is your right. But you remind me of the kind of professors I observed in grad school who seemed to enjoy inflicting humilliation on graduate students.

I have nothing to prove to you, and I don't care what you think of my ideas. That doesn't hurt me, but it makes me sad to see you behave in a hostile way. So you should stop or I will report you.

Very well, if you intend to battle it out with the sandbag, go ahead. — Shamshir

Sandbag? Are you the sandbag? I won't battle anything out with anyone.

It doesn't matter to me if you disagree; I feel sorry for you that you have the need to be nasty about it. You can try to insult, but it may be that you can't understand a discourse so different from your own. You don't even want to. That is sad to me.

Why are you so aggravated over this? — Shamshir

I'm not aggravated--not in the least.

There are other and better ways to perform what you wish to do. — Shamshir

Here I must say that you are wrong, and that I know what my best course of reading consists of. I'm not asking for advice; I'm merely expressing my view on things. You can't appropriate my view.

The reason he, and others before him tend to put it at the front - is because of its active role in conception. It's transmutation versus substance, or in simpler terms - player vs piece. — Shamshir

I don't buy that for a minute as a justification, as if the sperm were any more active than the egg. Your statement comes from inside the philosophy that I'm trying to stand outside of. The sperm is futile without the egg; the egg is empty without the sperm.

Why study Luria? If I don't study Luria and other kabbalists, how will I be able to add my voice, present my argument, create a non-sexist, non-gendered Jewish mysticism??? If I can't take the heat, I'd better stay out of the kitchen; but I can take the heat, so I'm in the fray.

It's good to consider that the notion of father, does not directly imply the semblance of an earthly father; though it's easy to see how that could be manuevered as a political design. — Shamshir

Which I believe it always has been. It's the essence of patriarchy. I've been studying a little about Isaac Luria's kabbalistic system and its sexism broke my heart. He couldn't have subordinated female to male any more thoroughly. This is why I'm working on a genderless understanding of God, except that metaphorically, I see the cosmos as a womb. Luria saw semen as the most sacred fluid in the cosmos, but I ask, what good is semen without an egg? The egg and the womb are nowhere to be seen in his mysticism. I'm moving beyond that. Perhaps all God is is Mother Nature on the cosmic level...

I don't see how ideas like those listed above can possibly lead to any type of consensus. — ZhouBoTong

I don't seek consensus--especially not about God. I explain my terms as best I can and will be glad to expand and clarify.

We can also devolve if low-life's have more children than better people, but, of course, what happens pretty much has to — PoeticUniverse

I think that's what we've been doing for thousands of years--perhaps throughout our existence as a species--which, as we know, is a lil drop in the bucket of time as regards life on this planet. So sometimes I imagine this micro-second of our existence as homo sapiens in the broader context of all the golden star dust exploding out of the big bang which we were a part of, molecularly speaking. And of course, our molecules were around for all the previous big bangs; I mean, we've always been around in some form or another;

I've read essays on topics like the history of childhood which make it so painfully clear what a primitive and savage species we are. We still haven't figured out how to raise our offspring. I conclude that most if not all human beings are emotionally damaged, and I often wonder if the majority is more like Hitler and the nazis, or less like them and more like their victims. Alice Miller, the German psychologist, wrote a book detailing the parental behavior which was the norm in Germany prior to Nazism's rise, and she basically says the Germans had been reared for generations to be completely seduced and enthralled by a character like Hitler. They were ripe for fascism. People are incredibly cruel to children because they were treated cruelly and abused, and it seems like a perpetual inheritance for our species so far.

I think the species will most-likely self-destruct before it comes to a place of self-understanding and control over and sublimation of aggressive behavior into truly constructive behavior.

Quantum entanglement far apart in space shows that connections are more primary than distance. — PoeticUniverse

That is so cool; I read that and I got really happy.

It would imply that one couldn't discern intervention from no intervention as they would be functionally the same. — Shamshir

That's the idea, and thus we can eliminate the anthropomorphic and somewhat parental notion that God causes this and that to happen--like maybe global warming is simply God's latest version of the Flood because humanity has become so irritating and noxious again.

As I've stated somewhere above, I eliminate completely the image of God in the patriarchal, gendered image. It seems sophomoric, naive, to me.

Beginnings and Ends are out, concerning the Everything. — PoeticUniverse

I agree: the eternal respiration of the cosmos (God's breath): in (contraction, tsimtsum), out (expansion, big bang, matter moving away). I was imagining one day a while back after reading about black holes, that at some point, God's inhalation or contraction draws everything into a single black hole that would then expand, exhale in a big bang. Everything (God) breathes.

It might be boring, but examples of workable descriptions are the ones that we're most familiar with, such as a creator of the universe, or a being which is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good. — S

I'm expressing my thoughts and my continuously-transforming understanding. If it makes you uncomfortable or you disapprove, it's fine with me. I'm not seeking your approval of how I think and question. But I have no intention of limiting myself to what you may be familiar with. If you don't want to consider things from a different perspective--if I bore you--you know the drill...

'God', then, seems to not intervene, or can't. — PoeticUniverse

If God is existence of everything, did God create the laws of existence? I would say the laws are part of everything's existence. Why would/how could God intervene? It all is God.

Has everything existed forever? Has the cosmos contained matter forever? Are there realms in infinity that don't operate according to the laws of physics we use to describe the known-by-us cosmos? It would seem anthropomorphic to assume that infinity continuously operates according to the laws that govern our little space (which includes what we can observe, which is what? up to 13 billion plus light years away? What lies 13 billion light years beyond that? God skips rocks across all of this, and let's imagine that the rock skips 8 times; what is there? And this is like a very small pond. I mean, we're talking infinity... So this little neighborhood's been expanding over that time period; what's been going on elsewhere? What's everything up to? Is there _____ beyond God's infinity of everything?

but also why it can never be still and continually has to transform and transition through the states which are probably stitched together via something like the laws of nature. — PoeticUniverse

There is no stasis; there is transition. However, we humans can devolve if we don't keep learning deeply.

Isaac Luria wrote that God contracted to create a space for matter. I find the concept fascinating, but it's underpinned by the opposition of Godhead to matter. And this just leads to more patriarchal oppositions which only serve to separate, subordinate and render everything Incomplete, instead of the Completeness of Everything. This insistence on gendering God is a definite sign of an utter lack of understanding. Luria's story is the story of humankind--not of the cosmos. I like to think of the cosmos as a giant womb, forever birthing and re-birthing big bangs....

And perhaps this is close to the core of the problem for humans, this insistence on patriarchal hierarchies, as opposed to understanding how homologous and congruent things (like male and female) really are, all connected and interdependent as everything in the cosmos is, nothing really subordinate to anything else; merely cooperative.

I'm thinking that there's a lot of patriarchal hierarchization in this forum... Dominance mode, not dialogic mode... Let me add that women can be patriarchal and men can be non-patriarchal. My favorite French Psychoanalytic Feminist Philosopher Luce Irigaray wrote that women's language must disrupt and confound until men are able to tune into a different frequency and understand.

I don't want to start a new topic; but, can someone lay out the reasoning behind claiming that death is not an event in one's life? — Wallows

I think dying is the event, and when it's over...

Sarcasm over the internet can be difficult to detect but I'm glad it was a joke. — Judaka

It wasn't sarcasm: it was irony. I enjoy poking fun at myself, but I try not to be mean to myself.

Sounds like you have too much of a conscience. — S

I think it's just right for me.

This I would classify as the worst kind of response to the question. — S

But did you like it?