So can we say that the 'idea of God' and all the paradoxes that postulating his existance creates make no sense? The thing that strikes me about all this is the extreme effort in the form of convoluted gymnastics that it seems must be resorted to to sort of patch up all the leaks in the hypothesis.
<<Moonbeam: I believe that the people accusing your of being disingenous would not do so if you would candidly report on your worldview or religious system. Maetryx>>
OK since you asked:
I'll try to be brief but comprehensive enough to qualify as candid and I'll just report my beliefs in the form of factual statements without all the IMHO even though you will know they are just opinions and even though many here already know them.
I am inclined to the belief that the way people think of God is incorrect. The universe just is. It was not created by anybody or anything. We are animals that evolved by chance to a very high degree of complexity. The degree of complexity is so great that we are self aware, we have the feeling and the certainty that we exist. We are an animal and we have an animal nature we call human nature.
Our human nature is a blessing and a curse. We inherit from our animal, maybe mammalian side, or mammalian brain a genetic socialism, a love, joy, and exuberence in being alive with others of our kind. We are playful, curious, empathetic and caring by nature. But we are animals with survival instincts, pain receptors and endocrinal triggered fight and flight type reactions too. We can know pleasure and pain. This was the strategy evolution happened upon to insure gene survival.
But co-emergent with our increasing complex socialism, our culture, was communication, language, the ability to abstract, to turn over in our minds ideas for which there is no correspondence in reality. We began to think, and to think in language, to lable and divide, to abstract, to idiolize. We invented knowledge.
Prior to that, all our reactions were immediate and directly as a result of the content of our senses. See a tiger up a tree or protect the young. Everything was instantaneous. Without thought we had no fear, no separation from the immediate. There was only the now. Every feeling we felt manifested in our actions. There was no neuroticism, no evil.
But with language came thought division and time. We began to put words to perfection. That which caused pain was bad, that which brings pleasure is good. We invented duality and applied it to ourselves. We invented rules, laws, verbal coersion and propaganda. We invented lies. We invented putdowns. We learned to hate the sinner and not just the sin. We transmitted to our young the feeling that they were only worthy conditionally and told them they didn't measure up. We learned to kill love, to destroy our natural impulses and to adopt a false personage, a phoney self who measures up. We learned to hate who we really are because being who we are brought torture and punishment. We became diseased, divided against ourselves. We learned to hate ourselves, to hate the pain that being real brought over and over. Because, before we developed our egos, our adult armor against memory and pain, we were capable of feeling pain to the maximum that pain can be felt, we recoiled from that pain to the maximum extent possible.
So we are asleep and can no longer feal; we don't remember what it is to be real. We are controled by the false self, the one we created, had to create to survive the pain. We conform, we obey, we are sheep, we are anything that will keep us from the pain.
We know something is wrong. Look at all the threads on depression. But we can never look where the answer is because it would be to look right into maximum pain. So we are upside down to reality living in a wrong world, a false consciousness, a false self.
Throughout the ages there have been a few who have found their way back to the real self. Imagine their surprise. Occassionally they must also have met others of their kind. In a room full of sleeping people those who are awake will recognize each other. They would have formed schools, systems for teaching and preserving words and techinques for retrieving the self. I don't think Christ was the son of God, but the product of such a school. Owing to the nice way he was treated, the most dangerous activity a person can undertake is probably to awaken the sleeper with all his hate for pain, such schools are private and intentionally invisible.
In our culture a tradition of monotheism evolved but in other places the Knowledge was transmitted in different terms. Two things are at work. We interpret according to our expectations. Transendental experiences which are beyond the reach of words get interpreted in known terms, and when speaking to others one couches ones insights in terms that are already in currency.
So there is a Truth, the reconnecting to the real self, and the terms used to convey the possibility vary from culture to culture and time to time.
With the advent of modern psychotherapy and the intentional analysis of repressed feelings, the true self, the realization that everything that has been happening in the spiritual world is just the recovery of the real self, usually via a bridge that transcends and does not descend into the original pain of separation, has been discovered to lie at the core of our being. The reliving of childhood trauma via psychoanalysis has lead to the discovery that everybody feels like he is the worst in the world, doesn't know it, and doesn't want to know it. This condition is a result of put downs, the believing of verbal lies as to your true nature. By refeeling, reliving the events, personally it is possible to actually internally see and completely realize that they were nothing but lies. So there is this wonderful news. There is nothing wrong with you except that you believe there is.
Jesus willingly died to tell you you are forgiven but there was never any guilt except that you believed there was and turned against your true self.
So our job, if you will, is not to believe in God, or obey laws or rules. Our true self will do that naturally. Our job is to free ourselves from self hate. Because of our hate we destroy everything including all the good that was intended for us by so many who have labored down through time to heal us. We turn the doors to our salvation into weapons with which to kill each other. We use religion for war. We make of our religions a joke so that millions of seakers become discouraged and go elsewhere.
The struggle to save one religion, here Christianity, should be an attempt to save all religions. They are all the same, the attempt to recover what we can be. God is nothing more or less than the projection of our inner potential onto a Logos or Ideal. God is the product of human consciousness, but he is real. He is the tree nourished and made living because of the leaves.
The deeper ones self realization goes, the more like God one becomes.
It would seem, then that if you do not know your self, you do not know God.
Well that's more or less what I think. Naturally there are multiple implications I leave untouched.