Faith and Writing | |||||||||||||||||
In my opinion, God is an author like myself. In a story I imagine, a dream I have, or a hallucination I perceive, the characters only exist in my mind. Until I put them to paper, they do not exist anywhere else. And if I am ever destroyed, they cease to exist. In the same way, we exist in the imagination of a writer God. He has written Existence to tell a story, and I as a character have a limited viewpoint of that story. He tells the story to me in a limited third-person omniscient narration; I see the things he's writing me thinking about, but I don't find out about what's going on in other people's heads without dialogue. Does this mean he is controling my every move? Yes and no. As a writer, the characters you imagine sometimes come to life and seem to have a life of their own (and yes, I'll be frank-- dissociative hallucinogens [LSD, PCP, Ketamine, DXM] can help this process... though they carry serious psychological risks you should research before ever *thinking* of using them). They have a life and an imagination and they can create entire universes in their own imaginations in which they are god-like creatures. But let's be realistic, it's got to stop somewhere, right? Somebody has to have made somebody else, right? Logically speaking? Not necessarily. Mystics repeatedly discuss the idea of the "Mysteries of Faith," and these mysteries do not mean Blind faith... they just mean there are questions to which we have no answers. People make up stories and make up answers to their questions because we need to feel like we have some control over our existence. In the existence we create through our perceptions, we have total control-- whether to love, to hate, to create, to destroy. But we do not control the larger world in which we live. God controls that world. Or a being who has God-like powers and has imagined us. But if that being is not God in his own right, then there has to be a God controling him, and so on, and so forth... What is one of God's names? The Alpha and the Omega. The Beginning and the End. In this infinite loop of creations and imaginations, God is that one being who DOES see all of our works and lives, no matter how many iterations "down the rabit hole" we go (to co-opt a useful Alice in Wonderland / The Matrix reference). We'll never truly understand anything beyond the level of imagination that we create, and we'll never truly experience anything (at least in life) beyond the imagination in which we dwell. But faith tells us that a Prime Mover has created it all. Faith serves where intellect and reason cannot. At the bounderies of our imagination, intellect, reason, wisdom, sanity-- they all fail us. Faith is the only indestructable thing we have.
Mystakaphoros, Mar 04 2005
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Since we each create the universe anew as we mature through the integration of our sense input, all components of this integration must be carefully considered for validity. Some people find the peculiar construction of an all powerful being most satisfactory inspite of many contradictions in that assumption. Some of us totally reject that assumption and some of us retain a rather large doubt as to whether this assumption is useful or necessary. The quality of such an assumption is such that its validity is probably unprovable therefore it is necessary to maintain the acceptance of this construction without proof. This uncritical acceptance is what is called faith and some people derive great comfort from this assumption of a basically friendly universe. I have found the universe essentially unconcerned as to my existence and the existence of my species or to the existence of all life. I could be wrong.
Where is the idea ? IMHO, this doesn't belong here.
I agree with you that faith serves were the intellect can not, but faith is not indestructable. Faith is indestructable only if you will it indestructable. The rest of your writing I agree with. I have always found it interesting that history is spelled HIS Story. And I also believe that someday we will be allowed to read/see/perhaps experience the chapters of the story that we can not now see.
p.s. I also agree that it doesnt belong in this section.
Any general view of the way reality is constructed is an idea and worthy of consideration as the source of other ideas. My personal view is that faith is an extension of primitive speculations as to the way things are and is based mostly on wishful thinking and amusing folk tales and cultural habits.
If reality was based on linguistic constructions physics would be responsive to grammar and considering the wildly illogical quality of English this most puzzling world would be even more mysterious. If "history" works as a confirmation of God, then God is subservient to English speaking people and is in desperate difficulties with speakers of other languages.
This is an idea.