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Biblical Genesis; is it fact or myth?
Jesus always spoke in parables (Matthew 13:10,11,34,35). He also claimed he only does as the father does (John 5:19). None of the stories told by Jesus were literally true. Yet they convey lessons that Jesus felt were important. Could the same be true for Genesis?
According to Genesis, God created the heavens and the earth. Yet there isn’t a single fact on HOW God created anything, nor is there a single fact about who or what God is. What I do find is a warning about the power of deception, and many parallels between Genesis and Eastern philosophy.
Eastern philosophy deals with the power of mind over matter. The quality and result of our actions is totally dependent on the quality of our thoughts. If our thoughts are not in harmony with the power that drives creation, our actions will be confounded. So the key is to understand what drives creation.
The power that drives creation is what the ancients referred to as God. To understand what GOD means, we have to understand WHAT DID create the heavens and the earth.
The church gave us its interpretation of God, but it is all based on a personification. A personification does not define nor describe God. If you can’t see beyond the personification, you aren’t seeing anything but fantasy. That is a serious problem.
Everything that we have created requires that we understand the creative process. The creative process involves the structure of matter, which can be traced all the way back to quantum fields, and the creative forces of nature, which can also be traced all the way back to quantum fields. The power that created the heavens and the earth includes both the structure of matter, and the forces that manipulate that structure. That is where we have to start if we want to understand what God is. Presently, science is closer to the truth than the church. But science doesn’t deal with spirituality. There has to be a balance between the two.
Closing Statement from Roy Bourque
There are three different viewpoints;
1. Genesis is myth, and therefore nonsense.
2. Genesis is fact, and therefore supports the idea of a young earth.
3. Genesis is myth, but contains many deep lessons if you care to search them out. I am of this group.
Joseph Campbell made many connections between myths of various cultures and showed their relevance in understanding the mysteries of life. Although they weren't literally true, they had value as food for thought. Jesus said man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. To me, this is a direct association referring to food for thought. The fundamentalist says "the bible says that God has a mouth". The freethinker says the universe speaks through those who were able to understand.
Ancient cultures had two levels of thought; The exoteric was meant for the general masses (just accepting the literal word). Esoteric was the deep wisdom, reserved for the elite. The Jews have an esoteric teaching called the Kabalah. This goes far beyond the literal word.
Moses was raised in the house of Egypt and married the daughter of a Midian priest (part of Mesopotamia). These facts come from the bible. I was led to look into Egyptian and Mesopotamian myths and found many similarities to the Judeo-Christian tradition, yet these myths predate the bible. Genesis itself was written in the age of myth.
I see myth as a mystery that makes you think. The fundamentalist is persuaded by word alone. But word alone has many conflicts. The order of events in Genesis chapter one is different than Genesis chapter two. Genesis 22:1 says God did tempt Abraham. Yet James 1:13 contradicts this. There are many more. These discrepancies cannot be ignored if one is to take the word of God seriously. Why is there a discrepancy? What is it trying to tell you? You have to think about it, you can't just take it for face value. Myth demands that you use your brain to think and not just memorize.
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J Ale
You are all over the place.
We understand God by understanding the structure of matter and quantum fields? Really???
God is defined as that of which there can be no greater. If something can be more...then it cant be called God, whatever God is. That;s the definition of a God (with a capital G) How does matter, which is in potency, somehow connect to knowing what God is?
If personification is not a path to God, matter is? I mean, just on the surface, a person ís much greater than a purely material process. For one thing, a person can move on his own volition and, most importantly, can think. But, we know God by knowing matter?
Roy Bourque 20+
I had an experience at the age of nine while meditating on God. What I saw could easily be explained by quantum physics. They weren't teaching quantum physics in the third grade. It would be eleven years before I would learn about quantum physics. It was only then that I was able to relate to what I had seen.
Quantum fields are the source from which all things come and back to which they go. They are everywhere. They are invisible. They are what is doing the creating. There is nothing that we know to exist that can't be explained in terms of quantum fields. They have all the qualities attributed to God. Is there a connection? In order to answer that question, you have to know what quantum fields are and what they are capable of. We are just starting to understand.
J Ale
That aside, given the quantum world is material, by logical necessity it cannot explain God who is beyond potency (potential) but is pure Act. If God were not pure Act we could not refer to God as God, for their would be someone greater than that one who we were saying is God. And that one would then be God and would be pure Act with no potency.
There is potency in the quantum realm. for what can be possibly can possibly not be at a particular time. This cannot be said of "God".
Roy Bourque 20+
You make a good point. I can only go as far as quantum fields in my understanding. They have all the same qualities that are attributed to God, thus I saw them as one and the same. This was in response to a childhood spiritual experience I had while meditating on God.
The quantum world is material, but quantum fields are not. The electron is a point source of negative electrical energy. When you put it together with a proton, it creates a sphere. In the absence of a proton, there is no structure. And then again, the sphere itself is not physical. It is only when enough of them are gathered together that a physical structure becomes apparent. It is only in the combined output of many fields interacting that the physical world becomes manifest.
J Ale
I wonder if you understand what I mean by material? Material would be that which has mass. A negative charge has mass. An empty space has no mass but may potentially be filled with mass. Thus it is in the same order of existence, i.e. a material existence, and follows phsycial laws. the lack of a structure does not negate a physical order, it is just a matter of lack at that point.
As an aside, even quantal components themselves may be reduced to subatomic particles, which evidences the material nature of particles. An electron may be reduced to smaller particles.
There is a book you would might enjoy which deals with all of this as well as Metaphysics. It is called "The Modeling of Nature"by William Wallace.
As to the spiritual experience you had, it does not violence to the idea of God to say that He is known by his effects. However, the effect can never be greater than the cause.
To stretch this further, God as that which nothing greater can be said must of logical necessity be One and Simple (meaning simple as opposed to an admixture or complexity), Infininte, Good (by logical definition as all that exists comes from God and from nowhere else and is thus "good") and Being itself. (i.e. God cannot have existence but must actually be existence in himself) Thus God's Act is the same as His existence. This is all in line with the idea that God cannot have potency in any way. Not even the potential for potency. He must be pure Act. Also, he is the Unmoved Mover.
If your approach were to be maintained, then, necessarily speaking, there would be no God.
Roy Bourque 20+
Religion created an image of God that is apart from reality. That is why we try to find God apart from reality. And by the same token, anything that can be explained is no longer attributed to God because it now has an explanation within reality itself. By this reasoning, if we can explain everything, then there is no need of God.
Ancient cultures saw things very differently than we do. To them, everything that happened was a result of God, God being the deeper recesses of reality that they could not understand. They personified God, but they (the elite) knew that such personification was an imaginary character developed to represent the deeper recesses of reality. If you wanted to know God, you had to see beyond the personification into the laws of nature itself.
It was the Catholic church that separated God from reality so that science would not infringe upon its doctrine. Since then, religion has fallen apart because it is now based on false ideas. And it is because of these false ideas that people take Genesis as literal, seeing God as a character, rather than the forces of nature personified. The forces of nature and the structure of matter alone is all we need to understand how the universe works. But that is what the ancients referred to when they used the term God. They saw things very differently that we do. You have to see things as they did in order to understand what they tried to tell us.
Gross Ryder
John Moonstroller 20+