Apologies for baiting that kind of response Sharkan.
If it's worth saying: I saw passion, not aggression, on Cynosure's part - which is great.
After writing that post I reviewed all the metaphors that I, and people I know, use to understand subjective parts of reality. There are many! Allot of them involve use of concepts outside our realm of logical or scientific understanding. The most famous ones that came to mind are Einstein's - which are now in the realm of scientific understanding.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cynosure
do not assume that all of us are unable to grasp concepts that are beyond the limitations of space and time
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Yet we are not beyond the limitations of space and time and thus cannot realistically grasp such concepts. We draw metaphors to understand subjective concepts allowing us to stretch our limitations on experience. These metaphors are built from pieces of our everyday experience leaving us with limitations to our comprehension of subjective concepts.
Take infinity for example. Let discuss it in terms of distances. We know what it’s like to travel long distances. In our experience no mater how far we travel there always seems to be something else on the horizon only to discover when we get there that there is something else still further. Those are the limitations of our actual “distance experience”. We can use our imagination to stretch our distance experience ten fold. Going anywhere beyond that leaves us with a very fuzzy picture. Imagining a thousand fold our distance experience would leaves us with a visual blank but the feeling of comprehension remains leaving us with more of an emotional metaphor than a conceptual one. We feel that we understand what it is to travel for infinity more than we can visualize.
This happens to me when I imagine the above scenario.
Would be wonderful if we all do an infinity thought experiment just to see if everyone is on the same page.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cynosure
Yes, raise your hand and show everyone here that your imagination and your ability to think "big" is so limited, you cannot imagine God beyond an image of a bearded guy floating in the aether.
This is the main reason why God forbade the Hebrews to make graven images of Him, so that they would not limit themselves to carnal and temporal views of Him, and so that they could reach out past the earth-bound pictures and idols created by the polytheistic religions to represent their gods.
Whatever, dude.
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I agree. A better imagination can help but adding complexity and depth to our mental image of God doesn’t guarantee insight into truth. Using metaphors to explain metaphors leads us down a slippery slope.
Lets describe a God that exists outside of our universe, and it may very well be that everything outside our universe is God, and that our universe is in fact contained (and maintained) within God as:
A (greater consciousness)(outside the realms of reality)(encompassing)(all of reality)(like an awake mind)(looking upon a dream)(permeating everything within)(being a part of it)( yet having the perspective to look from afar.)
Every bracketed term is a subjective concept. This description of God may sound more advanced and smarter than our bearded dude floating in space but does it offer any more value? What kind of value?
The "World is God's dream" metaphor feels allot more real to me but is a nightmare to test logically or scientifically. The floating dude in a void makes me laugh - I have no emotional connection to it but would much easier to introduce to a philosophical or scientific discussion.
Simple metaphors are more effective at helping us understand how the world works while complex multi-level metaphors are easier to relate to emotionally rather than conceptually. The more subjective layers a concept has the more emotional vocabulary it requires to comprehend.
Perhaps this is why faith is so addictive. We are very emotionally driven creatures. It’s only makes sense that the next step is to link emotions we experience in the real world to emotions we experience in our metaphors. Emotion provides the bond between faith and objective reality.
Oh my God…