On the other hand, the point you’ve been trying to make has much more value. Obviously, we can go into more detail about the concept of god that you are interested and how we can recognize it in various facets of our lives.

Thanks–it’s nice of you to say so. But I think that unless the absolutely PERFECT opportunity to discuss it here at MSP comes up, I’ll save discussions like that for my own blog, so that the comments don’t become clogged with stuff that isn’t really interesting to a lot of the people here.

In any event, Happy Holidays.

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We had some great snow here last week — the kids and I made some snowmen and the whole family had a fun snowball fight. Unfortunately, it all melted (at least downtown, probably not up in the mountains). It hasn’t been unseasonably warm, but just a little too warm for snow.

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It was because I was trying to make a slightly different point. Yes, of course I recognize that the fact that people use the term in a narrower sense doesn’t change the fact that there’s another concept covered by the term that is more complicated, but that first fact does lead to an impurity of language no matter if we use the first definition or the second definition. To recognize this (as you do, because you do recognize the loathsome connotations around the one conception of god) and still go boldly forward with the second use, even if that second use is disparate and sound as we have agreed, is asking for trouble. And to me, I see clear evidence of this: the way this very discussion unfortunately went.

In the end, this point I’ve been trying to make is really silly and inconsequential. I shouldn’t have pressed it for so many posts, because in the end, there’s nowhere to go from it.

On the other hand, the point you’ve been trying to make has much more value. Obviously, we can go into more detail about the concept of god that you are interested and how we can recognize it in various facets of our lives. It is a creative discussion, rather than a destructive one. I don’t know about the others here, but I’d much rather have creative discussions than negative and destructive ones.

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But my remark about atheists and agnostics wasn’t meant to be taken as a statement of MSP’s policy. It was merely an attempt to wrap this up on a light note by acknowledging that any minority viewpoint in any debate may have an uphill battle on a 24-hour-a-day site that’s read from multiple time zones worldwide.

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What happens when you throw a mystic-friendly agnostic into a swarm of hard-core atheists?

If it is indeed the case that, as I seem to be discovering, this forum is mainly for and by “hard-core atheists,” you might, in the interest of fairness in advertising, include a reference to that on the policy page. I just checked, and there’s nothing to suggest such a thing–merely a statement about skepticism, and I consider myself a skeptic.

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No freakin’ duh, Andrew. I already knew all that. I mentioned it frequently in my original comments. I wrote, way up in #10:

You might say that this is again a cop-out because it rejects the idea of god dominant in the world today…. And a lot of the time I avoid using the term “god” to talk about this…something that interests me, precisely because “god” is such a loaded, loathsome term. But the fact remains that “god” has been used throughout the centuries as a term for this great mystery. The fact that a lot of people use the term as narrowly as possible doesn’t change the fact that there’s this OTHER concept covered by the term that is more complicated, more thoughtful, and beyond our comprehension and description.

I don’t know why you felt obligated to repeat that information back to me as if I didn’t know it, but oh well. I hope we’ve both learned something from this, if not about “god,” at least about communication. Because neither of us did it very well.

I know that where I really got hung up was when you asked,

is language so flexible? Can we go back to a previous usage of “god” and other god-language that would accommodate Holly’s idea

A way of paraphrasing that question is, “Is this phenomenon that has happened really possible?”

I offered you reasons why it was possible, and when you questioned them, I offered more. When you still had problems, I offered reasons why, cognitively, you could accept the fact that this phenomenon had indeed happened.

I should have just said, “The fact that this potentially difficult-to-understand-and-accommodate linguistic phenomenon has happened is evidence that it is possible; otherwise it–and multiple similar linguistic phenomena throughout human history–would not have happened,” and not wasted my time or yours with the other stuff.

re: Chanson 70:

If you bring up the existence of your type of God on this thread that started as ProfXM’s discussion with his SiL about the existence of her type of God, naturally people are going to assume you’re saying that the two questions are related, and it will cause confusion if they’re not.

They are related if one is interested in the larger question of what “god” means to certain rare, more careful, thoughtful believers, instead of merely to those believers with a very traditional view of an anthropomorphic god. If one is merely interested in disproving the existence of anthropomorphic gods who interact with humans in fairly conventional albeit supernatural ways, then I can see that the concept I brought up is of no interest whatsoever.

Unfortunately, I assumed that in a discussion instigated by someone who teaches sociology of religion, about all the reasons why people reject belief in a volitional, active deity, there might be room for introducing information about another concept of the divine–one that renders the SiL’s original assignment not only masochistic on the part of the instructor who gave it, but irrelevant. Behold my faux pas. Mea culpa.

re #71: cell phone analogies. Yeah, I worked out a very detailed analogy where the conversation about cell phones included a discussion of the nature of phone-ness, so I asked people to look at the old 1960s wall-mounted dial phone left in my basement by the previous owner and everyone freaked out and started saying, “That’s not a cell phone! It doesn’t have a key pad! Or a menu! It’s not portable! Why would you even keep it in your basement?” While I keep saying, “I never said it was a cell phone, it’s a phone, and I keep it so I don’t have to run upstairs to answer the phone if it rings while I’m doing laundry” and Andrew asks, “Is language flexible enough for ‘phone’ to mean both a cell phone and that old thing in Holly’s basement?” but it’s not worth posting, only paraphrasing.

I will also add that I would never hold a phone or pager in my hand and say, as Andrew depicts in his analogy, that their existence or nonexistence are difficult to prove, since if I’m holding them, that to me offers very strong evidence that they do indeed exist.

What happens when you throw a mystic-friendly agnostic into a swarm of hard-core atheists?

Well, I will say I feel a little like someone who stumbled into a religious discussion and realized too late that it was not a discussion but a testimony meeting–although one on how great it is NOT to believe in god instead of one about how great it is to BELIEVE in god.

This is why I said above that I think the problem is really one of orthodoxy. I do try to follow the rules once I understand them, and if a certain atheistic orthodoxy is the requirement here, I’ll adhere to it whenever I come back.

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Suppose the title of the post had been “Sure, I’ll tell you why cell phones don’t grow on trees…” and in it ProfXM had written a detailed discussion of organic chemistry and had explained where the components of a typical cell phone come from. Then suppose Holly comes along and says “I don’t like your definition of cell phone, and by my definition of cell phone, maybe they do grow on trees.” Then we discover that Holly is talking about an obscure dialect on an island (in the English Channel) where they use the word “cell phone” as their word for “banana.” And we find that it really is a legitimate usage of the word that makes sense to everyone on that island, and it turns out there’s a fascinating story of how this usage came about, based on the islanders’ traditional greeting of holding a banana to their ears in the same way that we might hold an ordinary cell phone. I’d say that — even though this alternate usage may be interesting — it’s not clear that it’s relevant to the point ProfXM was originally making.

Also, this discussion answers another interesting question: What happens when you throw a mystic-friendly agnostic into a swarm of hard-core atheists? I’ve never seen a theological discussion quite like this one. I hope there are no hard feelings all around and that this won’t drive people away from MSP.

Oh, yeah, and Merry Christmas, Good Yule!!

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If you bring up the existence of your type of God on this thread that started as ProfXM’s discussion with his SiL about the existence of her type of God, naturally people are going to assume you’re saying that the two questions are related, and it will cause confusion if they’re not. This leads us to waste a lot of time and energy distracted by semantic questions that have nothing to do with the energy force you find interesting and want to discuss.

I think Jonathan Blake’s comment above was insightful:

I share this interest in the mystery of the world. It awes me. I often experience wonder at the beauty, strangeness, vastness, tragedy, irony, and briefness of life, of being. Where you and I seem to part company, Holly, is that I avoid calling this God because it is such a loaded word.

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This does not belittle the significant schools of theology that do. And that is not what I or anyone else is trying to do. We are not saying that there are no significant schools of theology that discuss god in a vague, weird metaphorical way as you have. But it does point out that you will face an uphill battle to fight against the theological connotations that people already have toward god.

We’re not saying you made up this usage. What we are saying is that, whether it makes sense to you or not, whether it’s goofy or stupid of all of us to be so absorbed on this petty point, the vast majority of people that use the term “god” have colored with with particular connotations that cannot easily be escaped, and these connotations are not going to go away, despite your interest in another significant tradition.

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