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Showing posts with label worship. Show all posts
Showing posts with label worship. Show all posts

Friday, 4 July 2014

Can unlimited power and wisdom be limited by stubbornness?




Knowing what ethical monotheists mean by "God" is a necessary condition for asking why they say that The One exists and whether anyone is in a position to know whether they are right or wrong.

Theism - belief in the existence of a god or gods, especially belief in one god as creator of the universe, intervening in it and sustaining a personal relation to his creatures.
  • Polytheism - the belief in or worship of more than one god.
  • Monotheism - the doctrine or belief that there is only one God.
Monotheism has been an arena of high theological development with the result that many of the dimensions of this view of God have been very precisely articulated, parsed and re-parsed. There is nothing that can limit what a completely non-contingent being can do and/or know.

Ethical monotheism incorporates all the dimensions of general monotheism and adds one important further characteristic, namely, that the divine is "without moral flaw." How could the sole source of all that is be simultaneously omnipotent omniscient, without moral flaw, and interested in us and the world be the way it is -- beset by host of all too familiar "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune"?

It is generally held that no more than one being can be "all powerful, all knowing and all good" -- thus, ethical monotheists tend to believe that all other worshippers are following after "false gods," at best, or are "idolaters," at worst. Even if there an be no more than one such being, however, it is not clear to everyone that there is one at all.




Wednesday, 2 July 2014

The word "God" - used 85% of the time non-seriously



Many (but not all) religions and the people who subscribe to them, affirm the existence of one or more "gods."  The belief in the supernatural may, however, include very specific beliefs about the existence or occurrence of one or more particular supernatural beings that are in some sense, "supreme" beings (that is, not just "superior" to nature, animals or humans).

In the contexts in which it seriously occurs, "god" generally designates some force, entity, being or process that is affirmed as a proper object of human worship. To "worship" some X is to venerate it, address prayers and praise to it, be obedient to it, hold it in awe and as a target for ritual practice, and so on.

Although those who worship some X would seem, by their practice, to imply that it deserves their veneration and so on, there remains an important question to the outsider -- "Does the target of their worship actually deserve it?"  All would agree, however, that anyone who worships something that does not deserve it worships a "false" god.

The affirmation that some X or other is a proper object of worship ( and is, hence, to be called "god") has been articulated in many ways --

  • Animism - All the objects and phenomena have a soul. Worship of the ancestors , superstitions, magic 
  • Polytheism - Believes in several gods who act on the world 
  • Pantheism - Aims its worship at any and all things (either distributively or collectively), seeing them all as inhabited by spirits or beings of the sort that animism singles out. 
  • Henotheism - Belief in or worship of one deity without denying the existence of other deities. 
  • Dualism/bitheism - is the belief that two separate, complementary forces or deities exist (light/dark, wet/dry and so on). 
  • Deism - Believes in a creative God, first cause, who does not intervene in human business



If you don't believe in God, can you say, "Oh my God?"