Spiritual concepts

God

The word God is a HOMONYM – in other words a word having the same spelling or pronunciation but many different meanings and origins.

In some cases it has been used to refer to the spiritual world at large, in other cases it has been used to supply a ‘Father’ figure, for those who need such things – ‘God will sort it out’. The word is used to personify a whole series of either Natural or perfectly preventable disasters that have happened to someone. ‘Why did God do this to me’. If there is any definition, it appears to revolve around the rather immature notion that we need something to blame ‘a wrathful God’ when something goes wrong, or something to thank when things go right ‘Thank you God’. In the best cases the term personifies a concept to thank for the wonderful world we live in.

In the Ukrainian language, the word "bo(h)" stands for "God", and, simultaneously, it also stands for "because". An ellipsis is placed after the word "bo" when people can find no evident and simple answer why this or that event has taken place. With time, the word "bo" was hypostasized – in other words, the abstract concept was treated as a concrete reality and it acquired independent existence as a cause of inexplicable events. It is the Ukrainian equivalent of ‘Allah wills it’.

"The child died unexpectedly -- it is Bo(h) (Eng. God) who took it.";
"A fierce drought has perished this year's crops -- it is Bo(h) (Eng. God) who has punished us"
"A thunderbolt has struck a man -- it is Bo(h) (Eng. God) who has punished him for his sins", and so on.
In effect, Bo(h) (Eng. God) was considered as an Ultimate Cause of actual events which had no other explanations. Then, “people's fantasy led to represent Bo(h) into anthropomorphic forms like an Old Man with a grey beard.”

The interesting thing about this definition is that it mixes type and occurrence, system with execution of the system. Analogously, there may be a set of software programs related to various diseases – in software terms a package. But the actual running of that package happens billions of times here on earth in the physical to different people and with different outcomes. Thus the definition is close to defining God as the systems of the universe, but it fails at the last hurdle, by not making the difference between the master package [God] and all the copies of the package implemented on us as analogously little computers.

The Lord’s prayer, which Jesus uses, starts ‘Our Father’ but the Father here uses symbolism that was well known at the time, and has nothing to do with the meaning now attributed to the term.

The spiritual world exists, see Inner speech for proof. The Intelligence hierarchy exists. The Ultimate Intelligence exists. But as Spinoza plus a host of other philosophers proved years ago – many years ago – the Creation was not created for us, we are a tiny part of it, and as far as the Ultimate Intelligence is concerned a parasite is as important as a person.

So where did other ideas of ‘God’ come from?

The majority of people who believe in God, do so because of the Bible and early Judaism. Christianity, Islamic beliefs and Judaic beliefs all centre round the idea of a single ‘God’ because their founders were, essentially, Jewish.

The older religions other than Judaism had a complex but more accurate understanding of the spiritual world, largely due to the Mystery religions. But as is so often the case, the mass of people was not involved in the Mysteries and their understanding was so simplified it was causing real problems. Instead of figurative sacrifice, there were literal sacrifices, instead of symbolic castration there was literal castration, instead of symbolic circumcision there was literal circumcision [and still is, unbelievably]. And there were also conflicts – as there are today – caused by the ‘My God is better than your God’ problem.

There is only one spiritual world, there is only one Ultimate Intelligence, there is actually only one Intelligence hierarchy, although the number of synonyms is extraordinary. Something had to be done, so Moses, who was an Adept of the Mysteries in Egypt said ‘There is only one God’ and so there was – for a time, because Allah appears to have crept in since, as well as the Catholic God versus the Protestant God, but this demonstrates the problem all too well.
Moses wanted to stop the conflict, one of the blessed – a peacemaker.

Once there was only one God, the theologians took over and decided they were going to create a concept closer to what they wanted to achieve – hence this had a political and power based motive. Now read on

On the Kabbalah and its symbolism – Gershom Scholem [Professor of Jewish Mysticism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem]

In opposition to the pantheistic unity of God, cosmos, and man in myth, in opposition to the nature myths of the Near-Eastern religions, Judaism aimed at [sic] a radical separation of the three realms; and, above all, the gulf between the Creator and His creature was regarded as fundamentally unbridgeable. Jewish worship implied a renunciation, indeed a polemical rejection, of the images and symbols in which the mythical world finds its expression.

Judaism strove to open up a region, that of monotheistic revelation, from which mythology would be excluded. Those vestiges of myth that were presented here and there were shorn of their original symbolic power and taken in a purely metaphorical sense. Here there is no need to expatiate on a matter that has been amply discussed by students of Biblical literature, theologians, and anthropologists. In any case, the tendency of the classical Jewish tradition to liquidate myth as a central spiritual power is not diminished by such quasi-mythical vestiges transformed into metaphors.

This tendency was very much accentuated by the rationalistic thinking of medieval Rabbinical Judaism; its unbroken development from Saadya to Maimonides gave rise to a problem closely related to the subject that will concern us here. The philosophers and theologians were concerned first and foremost with the purity of the concept of God and determined to divest it [sic] of all mythical and anthropomorphic elements. But this determination to defend the transcendent God against all admixture with myth, to reinterpret the recklessly anthropomorphic statements of the Biblical text and the popular forms of religious expression in terms of a purified theology, tended to empty the concept of God. For once the fear of sullying God's sublimity with earthly images becomes a paramount concern, less and less can be said of God.

The price of God's purity is the loss of His living reality. For the living God can never be subsumed under a pure concept. That makes Him a living God in the mind of a believer is precisely what involves Him in some part of the human world, what makes it possible for man to see Him face to face in a great religious symbol.

Reformulated in rational terms, all this vanishes.

so the concept of God is invented, but the Ultimate Intelligence and all the concepts on this site are not, so follow the links to find out more.

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