Toti dei sunt aut non dei sunt.

Ah, i see now. Ty.

 

This is so incredibly fascinating.

I just got frustrated because my parents when they get annoyed for me saying oh god or whatever would be perfectly alright with saying oh Zeus or something.

It's hard for me to wrap my head around the idea of non proof based belief system being any more valid then another?

Also for me *and I know this is different for many people* the idea of multiple gods Makes More Sense.

Also it explains the whole If There Is One Creator Why Are They So Shitty At Helping away quite nicely, since a disorganized pantheon of childish representations of various human urged and natural occurrences doesn't sound terrifically good at running things.

Spoiler: possibly offensive

I still call myself an atheist because just NO I cant believe in God or Gods or whatever.

 

^The greeks at least fit your description of a pantheon. And then there´s also the kind of gods who are busy with seasons and weather and such, and really can´t be bothered to deal with humans much.

 

Even that makes more sense.

I don't know.

If I ever do believe in anything (unlikely, but I know an atheist who then became a nun) it will likely be a pagan sort of thing.

Or my own obsessively researched put together from scraps form of polytheistic christianity. Who the hell knows.

 

Take your time. No really, you won´t die if you don´t figure the entire world out right now. (I wish someone had told lil me that)
Also I tend to get excited about reliugion meta, so I´m more info-and-opiniondumping than anything else, and not trying to convert you.

 

My general stance on gods is that they have to conform to, at the very least, the Three Factors of Existence from Buddhism. The god can be whatever else. It can be made of gas, it can fly and shoot lasers, it can speak in tongues that explode the brains of us puny mortals. It can do all that but it MUST conform to three things. One, all things are impermanent. Two, all things lack inherent self qualities or the Atman. Three, all things lack inherent substance and are thus empty. This all boils down to gods must change over time and they must die and be subject to the same cycle of rebirth as everything else alive.

So Christian God can't logically exist within a Buddhist framework. Gaelic gods meanwhile can as they've been shown to die and to change over time.

There's other problems with gods like Abrahamic God and that is the 10 Unanswerable Questions (14 in Mahayana). Basically the gist of these questions is that we cannot possibly find the first cause. Pursuing of these questions is considered useless philosophizing. This along with other things has led to a common part of Buddhist creeds being the express disbelief in a creator god.

This ends up throwing out a lot of gods as a result or subjecting them to rules that believers in those gods don't feel are rules. Or if they are that they don't apply to their gods. Even assuming those gods do exist I don't believe that godhood necessarily makes you important. Ants, people, and gods are all living beings worthy of equal amounts of loving kindness and who must prove that they are skillful and thus deserve to be listened to.

Which then leads to the Kalama sutta. If a god can prove its worth as a teacher to me then it is worthy of veneration to me. Which sounds incredibly uppity and rude, but then I don't think they're that special. Why is a god somehow more respectable inherently than my Achaan Sokchai? Especially when gods bowed to the Buddha, who was just a human man. Nothing more. It's not birth that matters, it is skillfulness and skillfulness is earned through hard work and dedication.

The remaining question is how I actually define a "god" then. A god is a sapient being who exists in one of the heavenly realms. Thus they have powers, abilities, knowledge, or privileges above our own. So while we have to learn how to walk on water they don't necessarily need to. Gods are also far longer lived than humans. Gods also may have the ability to shape shift or may lack form entirely. They might even exist in the realm without form or perception! The downside to godhood in Buddhism is that given that you're so awesome you forget what it's like to not be awesome and blissful, thus making Enlightenment very hard. Either because you literally cannot grasp what suffering is or because you honestly just forgot that suffering existed.

 

This makes a ton of sense.
Like, more then a lot of other religions.
Who knows.

 

I think so too but then I'm Buddhist so that goes without saying. If you're curious about it I'd say start off by reading up on the Four Noble Truths. The Thanissaro Bhikkhu has a very nice study guide on them which you can find online at accesstoinsight's library. Then move to the Kalama Sutta and a commentary on that (again Thanissaro Bhikkhu has a lovely one). With that you'll get both the basic premise on which all things Buddhist rest along with the model for faith, study, and questioning in Buddhism.

Then from there dig at bits you find particularly interesting, including gods and the cosmology if you like. This is getting tangential and what not though so ending this here.

 

Honestly I'm content with my lack of belief in anything at the moment.
I just I dunno.
wanted to explain my thoughts on shit.

 

That's perfectly all right. I just wanted to share some avenues just in case you want to look into it more.

 

It strikes me that part of the difference is: the Christian God is outside of the universe. It's the biology student and we're the stuff on the petri dish. That's a fundamentally different order of being to those of most polytheistic religions I know of, in which the Gods either live IN the universe or are (parts of) the actual structure of it.

 

Yes that is definitely an important thing to consider. Though from my view if God is outside the universe then God has no bearing on it nor can he interact with it in any fashion. He might not even be able to look at it or even be able to be a thing in the first place. Which makes God profoundly unimportant.

Which all falls into the sphere of "useless philosophizing" and thus isn't a thing that needs to be talked about as far as Buddhism is concerned. Honestly the whole "FUCK ORIGIN MYTHS THEY ARE USELESS" approach Buddhism has to reality is a big part of why I'm charmed by it.

 

@Morven yep, that's one of the important things, for me. my criteria for classifying a being as a god is basically ... infinity? i mean created beings, beings with a beginning at all, are still bound at least by time. i require my deities to be without bounds.

 

Agnostic deist chiming in here.

I do personally believe there is some form of higher power. Possibly god(s), possibly not. However, I also believe that whatever that power is, it does not meddle in worldly affairs. Essentially, it created the world, set it in motion, and then let it grow organically.

The agnosticism part is that I also believe very firmly that it is impossible to actually know any of this for sure. We can make our guesses and have our beliefs, but no one KNOWS, not really.

Think of it like this. Imagine the universe as a popular series with a devoted fandom, with God (or whoever) as the sole producer. As with an actual fandom, there's canon--water is wet, grass is green, other immutable facts like that. Canon is the stuff we know for certain.

Everything else is your headcanon. And some headcanons might seem more plausible than others. There are people, as in fandom, who have headcanons that contradict canon, but other than that they are all valid to some degree.

I hope that made sense.

 

My personal headcanon is that there is an outside to the universe; that it's possible (maybe even likely) that there are intelligent beings out there, and that one or more of them may have created the universe and probably others (because I see no reason to assume there's just one). However, I don't think you can really easily affect what's inside that soap-bubble universe. It's too breakable. It's a sub-reality you have created, with its own laws and rules and consistency, and meddling with it once created is most likely going to simply break it. If these purported creator types on the outside exist, they can have little effect on us, nor us on them.

I just cannot conceive of a being so vast, so on a different scale from us, caring what the creatures do inside our universe except watch us with fascination. They could shut the world off at any moment, possibly, or break it utterly. Otherwise ... we do, they watch or not. And we have no idea what they might want with us, if anything. We may not even be the point; we may be just the fleas living on the things they are interested in. Or an intermediate stage in what they want to see if we can evolve into. Perhaps they like watching us squabble and fail? Who knows. But I'm not going to spend a lot of time wondering what such beings, if they exist, actually want from me, if anything at all.

I'm much more interested at what dwells inside the bubble of the Universe.