Reply #48: second reply

[kwassa]

IMM
"Indeed from my interactions with theists on this board, I have not found anything which is an objective commonality of attributes."

I'm not sure what the word "objective" means in this context.

"If you are looking for commonalities, it comes down to anything good comes from god, and anything bad is the result of our own flaws."

I disagree. I believe that we all believe, as theists, in God, though what form or formlessness God consists of might be quite contested. I, for example, have no belief in God as a Supreme Being, or a being at all.

One basic commonality is that God is infinitely greater than our ability to know him, a theme that runs in many religious stories. God is complete knowledge and all-encompassing. That includes good and bad, yin and yang. Prayer is, in essence, the act of receptivity, of turning towards God in order to receive his knowledge, if that is possible. That act of receptivity is informative. I think this is pretty universal. Most religions have some form of the Golden Rule. Jesus said to love God above all others, and to love your neighbor as yourself. That's Christianity, to me. Sin is the act of falling away from God, and hurts not God, who holds us in love, but only ourselves.

"Perhaps I was careless to choose fabricate, because I did not mean to offend (any more than theists normally get offended by materialist views.) My dictionary says "to construct from diverse and usually standardized parts." How is that different from what you said? You can say people "arrive at" rather than "fabricate" their own personal views of god, but what does that mean? Is arrive at different from construct?"

The reason this would be offensive is because we don't see it as fabrication, because we don't see it as construction at all, but rather divination of that which is already there. Fabrication implies that we are the source of ourselves, when we see that source as outside of us, and our feeble attempts are to find out what that external source is really like.