"God is a Human Construct" Hmm.

jeremy Mor Fr Raphael Appleby, the wise old Benedictine monk who instructed me in the Faith 18 years ago, once said that every act of kindness, however insignificant (such as dipping one's headlights at night) is a manifestation of God.

greenpeaceRdale@ jeremy Mor • That´s a fine assertion, and needs to be contextualized in relation to Jesus Christ´s life, mission, message, and legacy that honored, or need to honor, his Jewish tradition, from Abraham to Moses´ Commandments, all with respect to God. Without that specification, the laws of nature and Physics are no less expressions of God, in their range of qualities that we perceive as evolved human beings, as terrible or grand as they can be. Those physical laws, however, have only been articulated in modern fullness by Jesus´ legacy that uniquely prepared imperfect and limited human Christians to take ancient Greek and eclectic resources. As part of their University-based culture, those human Christians have much still to learn about spiritual practice from other traditions with their importance in the globalized, US-UN community of nations. Ancient Buddha and Yogic Pantanjali, and modern Gandhi are excellent examples.

• Justafoolag@ jeremy Mor • IOW, god can only be expressed through man and nature. No need for any supernatural god. Right? All gods are human constructs. No? Regards DL •

− greenpeaceRdale@ Justafoolag Ah, and around we go. "God can only be expressed through man and nature." Well, that´s a basic foundational formulation that is ripe with additional component relational factors. "Only" begs its own analysis. We, or some number of us humans who so engage actively and adequately, experience God and identify God in, and in relationship to, nature and the physical Universe. As such, it might be said more accurately, that "God is expressed...." Human beings and nature, are evolutionary developments in the cosmological evolution and lawful regularities of the physical Universe. Sure. With imperfect Christian monastics as part of the Sociology and Anthropology of the History of secularized Christian Western Civilization, and the key foundation of modern University-based scholarship. In that context, thus, we can identify our culture´s foundational recognition of God thru Jesus, an emergent phenomenon that began with God thru Abraham and Moses´ Commandments, having separated from and sustained, certain Mesopotamian precursor conditions. More broadly, variations on relating to God through shamanic spiritual experience and practice, that began at least with Paleolithic evidence.

"No need for any supernatural god." Here, you use the term "need" that has at least dual usage, both psychological and metaphysical-cosmological. Moreover, you make an rhetorical question as assertion without justifying it, taking it as self-evident. Key historical sociological events, the divisive violent conflict of ancient Greece, the destructive conquest of divided Greece by the Romans, and the spread, rise, and persistence of Christianity very much demonstrate the necessity of a supernatural God in achieving the modern globalized US-UN community of nations, and recognizing the dangerous imperfections that remain to be reformed.

"All gods are human constructs." Another unexamined assertion, and a prevalent one. Consider first the exceptional insights of Empirical Philosophy, the basis of scientific philosophy and its famous method. Empiricism means specifying identifiable, recognizable referents based on observable real world phenomena. Science emerged as Galileo advanced Archimedean thought and practice after Aquinas synthesized Aristotle and Christianity and organized the foundations of modern academic thought. Also at that time in the 1200s, the Church prohibited allowing ancient Greek limiting assumptions to restrict the study of God´s Creation, because of the assumption of Abrahamic-Mosaic-Jesus´ God the Creator´s omnipotence. Thus, Galileo´s study of falling objects identified uniform motion in relation to the Earth that, with DesCartes et al´s math, allowed Newton to associate a falling apple, Kepler et al´s astronomy, and thinking about the moon and "action at a distance" to conceive the concept of "gravitas" (gravity) in scientific philosophy. All a human construct, based on empirical observations in a cultural network.

The ancient Greeks had diverse assumptions about the Universe and reality, whether Democritus´ atoms, Plato´s Ideal One, Aristotle´s First Cause but diverse metabases. The ancient Greek religions asserted a panoply, so that diverse concepts co-existed: origins in Chaos, water as universal substance in Orphic religion for Thales, the eternal Universe, an Unmoved Mover, or the polytheistic gods subordinated to necessary laws. Christians had Jesus´ prophetic tradition of religious experience in which God had been asserted as Moses´ recounting "I am that I am," back to Abraham and related traditions thru to Genesis as transcendent Creator. Gods as "human constructs" relate to religious experiences in cultural contexts and environments. Thus, "human constructs" have identifiable dimensions. Even modern "psychiatric constructs" of psychotic mental conditions have made labels of conditions that have underlying causal conditions and contexts. "A Beautiful Mind"´s mathematician scholar guy at Princeton didn´t see dragons, but Cold War conspiracy. What was his psychoanalysis? I don´t recall his name at the moment, oh it´s John Nash, I recall now. I´d like to research the psychoanalysis bit, if available. Over time, Nash was able to get a grasp of his identity and the nature of knowledge domain perspectives, as I remember it. Meanwhile, Wilhelm Reich had a schizophrenic with a harsh religious doctrinal mother. He helped with breathing exercises and his non-Freudian psychoanalysis.

Individual psychotic breaks are deviations at basic psychological levels in modern rationalistic society that quickly surpassed Freud´s own reductionism in Jung´s insights and constructive formulations, like James earlier, Reich, Adler, Assagioli, and others (many secular Jewish, interestingly). Jos Campbell i.d.´d medical doctors assessing schizophrenics as shamanic phenomena, and a more recent doctor J Polimeni MD laid out the hypothesis extensively. Anthropology´s efforts were more exotic and less accessible, as with Black Elk´s interviewer, Marg. Meade, G Bateson, C Casteneda, and Michael Harner.

As such, Abraham´s first religious experiences were in Mesopotamia, and led him to leave as a covenant was formed in a coherent and persistent series of events. He wasn´t stuck in Mesopotamia where Ishtar, Marduk, or whoever´s priests might have denounced him, nor did he just whither away as a forgotten desert nomad. A simple comparative historical thought exercise establishes that Babylonian culture at large died out, with some relation to Alexander the Great´s and Islam´s conquests. For one thing, kings like Hammurabi and their Cosmology situated them and affected their empirical experience, as Stan Jaki has analyzed. So, "human constructs" is an oversimplified term that has limited use when it used without both empiricism and epistemological rigor. Thinking that it disproves God is presumptuous, unexamined, and a reductionist knowledge-domain fallacy. Historian YN Harari has committed that error egregiously, but gets away with it by keeping his focus on History and Sociology. Prayer and meditation are two basic tools of the spiritual-religious method, along with study and reflection in Religious Studies, Comparative Religion, and the Philosophy of Religion.