Dragon Winds Around the Pillar

Very good discussion going on about the nature of being and Being, and which, if any, might apply to any notion of deity. As I've said before, though probably in different words, the only honest answer to whether or not I "believe in God" is "category mismatch error." Similarly, "does God exist?" is best answered by sprinkling rice grains around on the sidewalk. "Is God real?" More likely complex. `/^ One of the reasons I tend to avoid using the term "God" for the Divine is because it just leads to confusion. People tend to think they know what "God" means, which means they haven't the foggiest idea what it means, or they'd know that they have no clue what it means. As soon as you apply any descriptive term to the Divine, you've placed a limit on it. How presumptuous of you.

There's a common bit of taiji wisdom, that somewhere between 2 and 5 years in, students generally start to think they know everything there is to know about taiji. A year or two later, they usually come to the realization that they really don't know much at all, and that there's more to it than most people can learn in a single lifetime. I never went through a long phase like that, mainly because at push hands practice, Don has always been able to make me feel like a green novice. Maybe not quite so much lately. More of a yellow novice, that might turn orange or red in another ten years. And I've meandered a bit, but taiji is only a small piece of the Divine, and it takes years and years to really start to get a glimmer of a shard of an idea of what it's really about. How much more so for that-which-is?

There's (at least) one frustrated atheist commenting at the post I linked to. As far as I can tell, his objection follows the pattern: (1) you haven't actually made any testable claims; (2) therefore, what you've said is meaningless. Right. So, non-testable claims. Celtic music sounds green and gold to me. This is, in fact, a true statement; I'm synesthetic. All music and sounds have color associations for me. But how could that statement ever be tested by an outside observer? To someone who does not experience color/sound blurring, it's meaningless. Possibly if someone strapped electrodes to my brain, they'd see stuff light up in the "color" section of the brain when music was played, and the pattern might shift depending on the type of music, but as far as I know, we can't point to a brainscan and say, "Aha! She's experiencing gold and green right now!" I'd be surprised if that ever became possible.

How about "The number 5 is brown." Not the numeral 5; the numeral can be just about any color. The number itself. 5, for me, is brown. Again, that statement will be meaningless to non-synesthetics, and most synesthetics will have a different color assignment for items. All an outside observer can use as "evidence" for these associations is self-reporting and neural scans. I find it highly amusing that Synesthesia used to be classified as a disease, probably because the first doctor to document it found it bizarre and "meaningless."

Back to the topic at hand, the "evidence" for the mystic's god is rather similar to the evidence for synesthesia. Self-reporting of very similar mental phenomenon (more overlap than most synesthetics' experiences, in fact) and neural scans of people going through "mystical experiences." Now, there's the purely materialistic response, that the brain just happens to be wired in such a way that these experiences are possible. The mystical response is that there's something out there to respond to, whether you call it "God", "that-which-is", "Tao", "the Absolute", "the Divine", "Fred," etc.

The fact that these experiences span traditions says that, if there is a "being" behind them, it must not care overly much what religious label you slap on yourself. I think of myself as a Taoist, for quite similar reasons to those given here, towards the end of the post. I ran across the Tao te Ching, and it spoke to me in a way that no text ever had. It made sense, and it felt like there was actual meaning to be had. Perhaps more importantly, I was not the only one who saw the world in this fashion.

I reject Christianity precisely because most forms of it do put limits on deity, to what it can and cannot do/will/be/allow. They put limits on what that deity is capable of while calling it "omnipotent." They claim its primary attribute is "love" yet maintain that it also created a torturous hell. They claim that certain actions on the part of humans require certain actions on the part of deity, as if it were a common merchant to barter with, or a police officer to regulate behavior. They attribute every possible good to the deity but blame every possible ill on humanity—making them, of necessity, equally powerful, in this essentially neutral world. If they would embrace these contradictions and take them to their zenalogical conclusion, there would at least be something useful there. As is, they simply try to deny that there is any paradox, or ignore any that is presented to them clearly.

The first step to knowledge is to know that you do not know. I reject any tradition that fails this basic test. Further, I reject any tradition that claims that only the mystical experiences of its own believers are valid, and the rest are some sort of sham. Finally, I reject any tradition which attributes specific properties or their negations to that-which-is. Yes, this means that I am making no testable claims about it. That is simply because there are no testable claims to be made, and that is as it should be.