Also, to answer your question,

"Care to explain how, under monotheism, anything could be meaningfully differentiated, if they all have the one god in common? "

It's because, under monotheism, I am not God. So God and I are two, and He is other than I. The belief that all is god is pan[en]theism, not monotheism. Admittedly, your conceptual toolkit seems to have gotten too small recently to distinguish. Which leads me back to....

have you spent my $800,000 well?

@ghug: I'm high on Christ lol

@semck:

Is your point that 800,000 is more than one? I say again that the small is not to be discounted against the large, since the large is composed of the small, and since the divisions within the large are external inventions of the human mind. It's interesting you use money. Can you actually show me 800,000 dollars? You can show me papers, computer screens, gold bars. But where are the dollars?

How can you call God other than you if you are created by God, and if all raw material of creation also comes from God? Within the universe, a creation concept of creator and creation being separate makes sense, because the universe contains them both.

You rightly call god the first cause of everything. God is the answer to why something exists rather than nothing. God created himself, and everything else. The unifying element is God. To separate creation from God is to deny the superlativeness of God, and is to serve more than one God.

Either there is the All in All, or there are 800,000 different gods to serve. You can't serve two masters even if you insist you only serve one. The world is of God. If it isn't, where did it come from?

I also add that just because you call what I believe pantheism and say this is different from monotheism isn't very meaningful. Words are just words, as others have I seriously, but rightly, pointed out. Whose is it to decide one word has a different meaning from another? Sure, to you, monotheism is different from pantheism, but this why you are particularly Christian, and not simply a believer. So much of Christianity is actually right on target; it's a wonder so many Christians don't even realize why.

What purpose does differentiating God from the Universe serve? The universe just means all of whatever exists. If there is an anthropomorphic god and also a created world, both together form the Universe.

I seem to recall a very wise and venerated man saying "I and my Father are one" and "the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand."

Who was that, anyway?

aesthetics, evolution & "energy"

All I have to say to that is, if y'all think I'm vague, you haven't stuck around long enough to see Dharmaton post :P

Thucy,

My point is that if there is only one number, then you cannot, in particular, distinguish 800,000 from 1 (or, in this case, from 0).

"How can you call God other than you if you are created by God, and if all raw material of creation also comes from God?"

Because all the raw material is also separate from God. There is obviously no conceptual difficulty with a creator being distinct from what He creates.

You are correct, of course, that this is all a matter of definition, but you, not I, are the one playing word games. You tried to make a point by harking to my monotheism, but now you are insisting on the right to redefine monotheism. Redefine it if you wish, but obviously it is no longer true that I am a monotheist if you redefine it to mean what is conventially called pantheism, so your point is just as empty as the rest of your silly words.

Alright, no more words games then: I'll be blunt. I'm talking about where the insight originally came from that there is only one omnipresent, yet invisible god who is always with us, and you are talking about the Nicene Creed. I am talking about worshiping the Most High, or to stick with math terms, the set of all sets which does contain itself, the universe, that which contains everything. Meanwhile you are saying God does not contain his creation, and say that this is not conceptually difficult. I say it is not just difficult but impossible to put limits on the Limitless as you are attempting to do. How can you be a monotheist, who believe God is unified, is everywhere and above everything, and then proceed to try to put him in a box separate from everything else that exists?

There is no difference between cause and effect.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqXmBy1_qOQ

As to the numbers: if you are talking about actual reality, and not the inventions of the mind, there is no number but one. You count ten apples. I count one group of ten apples.

"As to the numbers: if you are talking about actual reality, and not the inventions of the mind, there is no number but one. You count ten apples. I count one group of ten apples."

So? That doesn't mean there is no number but one. That just means we're counting different things. People who try to make deep-sounding "Woah, man" paradoxical statements usually rely on conceptual unclarity like this if they are so foolish as to try to actually reason for the truth of their aphorisms.

There are ten apples, and there is one group of ten apples. But there is more than one apple. If we stick to counting a particular type of thing and not equivocating, then we need more than just one number.

"As to the numbers: if you are talking about actual reality, and not the inventions of the mind, there is no number but one. You count ten apples. I count one group of ten apples."

http://i.imgur.com/6jkyNQg.gif

Haha good one, yes, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds. Crazy old Thucy been eating too much acid. What if I told you these ideas I'm writing are older than Jesus, independently conceived in at least four civilizations, if not five, and that LSD was invented in the last century?

You would be telling me nothing I didn't know; but it still wouldn't explain your bizarre behavior, whereas hallucinogens do very nicely.

If you really want to argue that there is only one number, then say it without changing objects halfway through. Is there only one silver dollar? If I give you one silver dollar, will you agree with me that I gave you 800,000 silver dollars?

Abge, I'd love to engage with you on this as well. I think what I am saying is accessible either from the side of supernaturalism or from hard-nosed materialism. A mathematician more than anyone should know, I think, that numbers are invented symbols, and that no actual counting takes place outside the mind, evidenced by the fact that any number has an infinite number of fractions between it and the next number. This is Zeno... It's not exactly groundbreaking stuff. Zeno was a pantheist by the way.

Thucy, I would be happy to talk to you about this, but I'm afraid we'd have to start from a more fundamental basis, because I honestly don't understand what you're trying to say.

You're so caught up in abstraction and particulars that I have a hard time straightforwardly engaging your question. Yes I can count and know that two dollars buys twice as much candy as one. But what I am telling you is that taking a step back, two and one look a little closer together from the perspective of 100. Still more from the perspective of one million. From the perspective of infinity, there is no difference between them.

It's not very complicated actually, semck is just a legalist, so he plunges down rabbit holes with abandon. What I am saying is that everything is connected, nothing can be completely extricated from the other things it is connected to, and, considering this, you begin to see that what everything has in common is the universe, and the significant thing about the universe is that it exists, which, from an abstract or neutral point of view does not go without saying, making it a kind of miracle, if you will leave the baggage of that word behind.

It's as basic as that, but, when you think about what this actually entails, it becomes eye-opening, but that's the skeleton of it. Like I said, not new stuff, not original with me. The reason I myself have started talking about it is I myself stopped dismissing it as shallow statement of the obvious and started to think about it in a concrete applied way, and realized it is the most life-affirming belief there is - literally.

Particulars demand explanation, Thucy. A philosophy that ignores them or denies their existence is not much of a philosophy at all. From any true perspective, however far away, two is twice as much as one. From the perspective of 100, 2% is twice 1%.

Now yes, if you want to put everything into one set, that is something you can do, and then you'll have one set. So if I have 8 silver dollars, then I have one set of all my silver dollars, its cardinality is eight, and I have eight silver dollars. See how easy this is when you're conceptually clear about things? Of course, it doesn't lend itself very well to "Woah, bro" aphorisms, but it has the distinct advantage of coherence.

"What I am saying is that everything is connected, nothing can be completely extricated from the other things it is connected to,"

Sure, with this I will completely agree.

"considering this, you begin to see that what everything has in common is the universe"

OK, I would argue that things have varying degree of commonness, but w/e

"and the significant thing about the universe is that it exists, which, from an abstract or neutral point of view does not go without saying, making it a kind of miracle, if you will leave the baggage of that word behind."

That depends on a lot of things. If you believe in Many Worlds, then it's really not all that impressive.

See, Thucy, your message just now to abge was written straightforwardly, propositionally, and coherently. Don't dismiss as "legalism" attempts to hold you to such standards. Your attempts to be the Buddha earlier in the thread were just noticeably deficient.

Actually, you ignore the universal and are left only with particulars, that is the peak of incoherence. It's just chaos - random objects with no relation to other in random quantities and positions and times, and the of why or how any of it exists goes unanswered. Nothing could be more incoherent than that. It is coherent the way a half-remembered dream is coherent. That's not "woah dude," that's basic. Also, an affirmation of the universal is not an ignorance of the particulars, it redeems them and affirms them too, part of a larger whole.

abge, I think the point might be that you would apply Thucy's argument above to the many worlds, then, not just to the one. He is essentially asking, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" (Correct me if I'm wrong, Thucy).

No, Thucy, I certainly don't ignore the universal. That is the mistake of materialism. Any sound philosophy must account for both. I have no idea what makes you think I ignore the universal, actually.

Nothing I said earlier in the thread is incompatible with what I said just now. Your constant badgering and attempts at character assassination aren't particularly impressive.

To be slightly tongue in cheek, what is far more impressive is that a brother of mine can be so single mindedly committed to creatively defending uncreative traditional thinking.

@abge

You say things vary in their degree of commonness, I agree in a particular sense, in the pragmatic sense. Gunshots in Syria have less in common with my lifespan in that visceral way than do those in New Orleans.

But this is only a narrow view. This is the view that still sees objects as separate from each other. Take the moon for an object. It's nice and full out my window. You might argue the earth and sun effect it more than say Sirius and an alien planet do. Certainly there is an everyday sense in saying that.

But, only if you implicitly accept that the moon is actually a distinct object at all. Is it? How do we define it? Already this question admits that its identity as an object comes from human definitions rather than a physical reality, but let's proceed with the question. It is the satellite of earth, that mass of rock out there. But if you go to it's surface with a powerful microscope, you may see atoms bunched together against space. Look a little further in and you will see that there is a lot of empty space between the atoms. So, a random piece of space dust floating one foot from the surface - is this part of the moon? One mile? One picometer? And how about time? When did the moon become the moon? At what moment when it ripped from earth's mass in ancient history did it become a separate object? When will it stop being the moon?

"The moon" is just a human label of convenience. We should not pretend "the moon" and that blue-white glow out my window are the same thing.

So if the moon has no distinct as an object, neither does any object. All suffer from that same problem. Except one. The Object. The one that contains all the others. This is the answer to the Many Worlds question. The real "universe" is the sum of all those worlds, all those "observable universes", all those simulations within simulations, or whatever metaphysics you believe in. This Totality contains all of that. And of course such a thing exists. The second anything exists, it exists. You might simply call it Existence, but we have already seen the failings of names.

But anyway, knowing this, we are left with some important lessons. Such as: selfishness is a delusion. Property is a delusion. Negativity is delusion (existence is positive, not negative). Suffering is delusion (perhaps your stomach hurts, but that same phenomenon is a boom to your stomach bacteria).

And on and on. The more specific I get, the further off the mark I am though. The core of it is the important thing - if no objects can be distinguished, degree disappears, distance disappears, magnitude disappears. "The last shall be first, and the first shall be last."

"To be slightly tongue in cheek, what is far more impressive is that a brother of mine can be so single mindedly committed to creatively defending uncreative traditional thinking."

Which is it? Are ideas to be respected because they're old? Or should they be discarded because they're old?

How about neither? How about we just discuss ideas, and stop worrying constantly about whether we're being too "traditional," or sufficiently "ancient"?

As for character assassination -- I assume that's a reference to my halucinogen remark. Sorry if it was unclear in its jokiness. If you say you don't use halucionogens, I certainly believe you, as I think you to be a very honest person; however great would be their explanatory power for your behavior.

And yes, fundamentally this centers on the question, perhaps the greatest question: why is there something rather than nothing? The question is more important than the answer - what matters is that Something does exist. It is. What to call it, this thing that is and contains everything. Dare I call it The Being? The Holy Spirit? Nature? The Way? Again, the word for it is not very important, what matters - literally - is It.