A need to 'project' a 'Religious' (For Spirituality is 'Fashion' - ever since the shame of nakedness in the Garden full of fig leaves and snakes) exploitation to control the minds of others.

Jasin wrote on Apr 7^th, 2024 at 10:54am:


This is one of the lamest 'arguments against Christianity in particular and religion generally.

Christians were persecuted severely for 400 years by the Romans, for centuries by assorted other Christians and by Muslims, for decades by various communists.  Do you think all those thousands died for mind-controlling the Romans, Christians, Mohammedans, Stalinists and Maoists?

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All very stupid and blinkered and parochial. Pinched, narrow minded, dogmatic. Ignorant.

They didn't 'die', they died. And not for a book. 

Face it. This 'Universe as a Consciousness' is just Religious nutters creeping in to exploit the Science of the Cosmos and exploit it for some new bullcrap 'story' and New Edition religion. That's all it is.
Why? Because its human nature to make money out of gimmicks even like this.  Roll Eyes
Humans have projected their consciousness onto nature and other things in the past and they'll keep doing it into the future.

The best that the universe can be known by, is via analogy...

So, paint, write, sing, compose narratives and music, found religions, wax lyrical about the meaning of it all until the end of time - it's the best we have to feed our imagination of what it all might be - but never succumb to the notion that you've landed on the Island of Truth.

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So all speculation and conjecture and dialogue about the nature of the universe and our place in it should cease forthwith because people have been wondering about all before?

Write no new books, paint no new pictures, compose no new music, recite no more poetry, dance no more - it has been all done before, sometimes even for money, so stop and desist everyone.

CERTAINLY, for Goff, the argument for the existence of the traditional God fails fundamentally given “evil and suffering. It’s difficult to reconcile with a loving God – the Omnigod that’s all-knowing, all-powerful and perfectly good”.

Perhaps we should think of creation not as an act of “god” but as “something much more generic, as some kind of goal-directedness”.

Opting for “goal-directedness” avoids the far-fetched concept of a traditional god, Goff feels, but explains the seemingly designed nature of the universe.

Equally, the fine-tuning of the universe, directed towards the “existence of life”, undermines the atheistic notion that the cosmos is “meaningless and purposeless”.

Goff adds: “Traditional atheism struggles to explain fine-tuning. Evil and suffering is the issue that the traditional God-hypothesis struggles to explain.

“Why would a loving God create the northern short-tailed shrew which paralyses its prey and eats it alive over days? That makes no sense. Why would ‘God’ choose to create us through such tortuous long-winded processes like natural selection?”

To Goff, the theory of Cosmopsychism deals with the problems inherent in both the traditional belief in god and atheism.

Modern intellectual thought is stuck, Goff feels. It hasn’t synthesised the facts of fine-tuning into a wider theory of what that these “Goldilocks” numbers mean for creation. He thinks we’re like people in the 16th century when proof emerged that the Earth wasn’t the centre of the universe. Like our ancestors, we find the new reality hard to compute.

Although Cosmopsychism is Goff’s favoured hypothesis to explain the deficiencies in both religion and atheism, he has explored other ideas.

One concept would be “to just tweak the definition of God”. Given the universe in which we live, “God” can’t be either good or bad. Maybe, Goff suggests, God is simply a designer who is “amoral, or has limited abilities”. He adds: “Maybe She’s made the best universe She can and is like ‘sorry, I know this is messy with all the evolution stuff, but it’s the best I could do. It was this or nothing’.”