Please outline your beliefs

[Hare_Geist]

Originally Posted by ---Beany---

What are your beliefs regarding what God is?

I think that the many ideas labelled god are very easy to delineate. But if I want to treat god as more than just a sound-pattern linked by numerous people to numerous concepts, then things become very difficult. For it seems that I cannot define it by the similarities between the concepts conventionally labelled god within cultures and subcultures, since they are so diverse: for example, some say that god created everything, while others say that it did not create anything, but that it is everything. So perhaps the solution, then, is to move away from the internal definitions and toward the external functions. God would then quite quickly appear to many as an active presence that delimits the possible. But here I worry about interpretation problems, as indicated here.

For the reasons expressed, I am hesitant about using the term atheist for myself. Certainly, I do not believe in the Abrahamic deity or Brahman, but to call myself an atheist, when it now comes with so many connotations, and when I may reject god as anything specific but a sound-pattern, I find problematic. To prevent confusion, rather than tell people I am an atheist, I would much rather ask them what they mean when they use the word god, unless it is blatantly obvious, and then evaluate them individually.

Originally Posted by ---Beany---

What are your beliefs regarding who Jesus was and his relation to god and us?

Bracketing questions of Jesus’ historical existence and divinity, I want to draw attention to what I find to be an interesting similarity between Jesus and Epicurus, Christianity and Hellenistic philosophy. The latter was born out of the effects political upheaval, centralized government and despotism had on the mind of the subject: because it had lost all political power, all control over external circumstances, and was being swirled around within a chaos, it turned its search for self-fulfilment inward and came to define happiness as absence of pain. This ultimate goal, happiness, was to be achieved through resignation of life and acquiescence: for the stoics and epicureans, everything passes and everything is fated, so one must live simple and unattached, accepting all that comes, while the sceptics said nothing can be known, and so we might as well give up the strain caused by the search for truth and be tranquil.

Similarly, Christianity taught obedience to the state, acquiescence and ascetic resignation from life for spiritual (inner) fulfilment. But whereas Epicureanism denied an afterlife, and stoicism did not promise personal immortality, Christianity promised an eternity in heaven; I believe this is one reason why Christianity replaced stoicism as the state religion of Rome. Certainly, stoicism, like all the other Hellenistic philosophies, was not, for the most part, just a philosophy: they were also cults. This is another point of similarity: both Christians and Epicureans lived in communes, and just as Christians believed Jesus to be the son of God, the Epicureans believed Epicurus was divine.

So to answer your question, I believe Christianity was born out of the same poverty as Hellenistic philosophy, and therefore that Jesus, whether real or fictional, was a nihilist. On a side note, I believe this ties in well with Marx’s theory of religion as the consequence of a politically alienated man. In fact, I believe that it essentially comes to the same conclusion, at least within the case of Christianity.

Originally Posted by ---Beany---

relation to god and us?
What are your beliefs regarding other religeons?

My opinions on them are probably trivial.