Kindest Regards, Tao!
Thank you for your thoughtful response!
Ok, let me try to put it another way.
Imagine a faculty of Gods, since you used the department head analogy i'l run with it. Somewhere there is a faculty head and under him are all the department heads. Our universe is in the hands of one of those department heads. We, being in terms of net mass contributed to the universe are tiny, insignificant and ultimately, I believe, unimportant.
I didn't raise the issue, but I did agree with the concept, so OK. I think the matter of spirit is being overlooked. Now I must delve into greater specificity, using Christian terms because I am not familiar enough with other concepts, even though this is an exercise in speculation.
I see it a bit more like military ranks. Perhaps G-d is a general, a commander in chief...but I suppose there might be room for even higher officers, although from our perspective we aren't very likely to run into them for it to matter to us grunts. In between G-d and us are the commanding ranks, angels if you will, that do have some interaction in and among us, and who perhaps report to the higher ups.
There is also consideration of "the way," the Tao, the universal flow, the natural laws. Sin is not necessarily sin because a human believes it to be wrong, although I will grant that a lot of what is construed as sin probably is a failing of proper social intercourse. But there are also sins that circumvent (or try to) the universal laws.
The department head maybe on some level aware of our existence but most likely as a concept and certainly not our every individual foible. The human body is host to millions of living multiplying and dying bacteria at any given moment in time. Are we aware of each and every one? We know they are there, but we dont know them by name and we certainly dont judge them. Maybe these ickle bacteriums too theorise about us!! Likewise Mr Dept. Head of Gods'r'us dont know us.
Do the bacterium have "guardian angels" that report to our minds? I see significant difference. On a "universal law" level though, those bacterium will go about doing what they are "designed" to do. I cannot see to the level of bacterium to find out what would happen if a single bacterium were to buck the trend and try to conduct its affairs contrary to the universal law. I suspect free will is an important distinction between us humans and bacterium.
The "good" laws/regulations found in any Holy Book are basic common sense for social stability. They are far too 'human' to be anything else.
In general terms I agree, regarding cultural specificity and application. But why such encompassing similarity across time and culture? Why have all cultures sought the same answers to essentially the same questions? If G-d were naught, or solely an invention of someone's mind to mollify their tribal masses, why is religion not a unique undertaking, or at least a limited undertaking amongst the various tribes and cultures of humans?
This is always a sticking point I have yet to receive answer for from anybody.
Let me attempt to phrase another way. Let's suppose for a moment you are correct. "The 'good' laws/regulations found in any Holy Book are basic common sense for social stability," ONLY. So, one should think that an evolutionarily forward thinking human, likely of some influence over "his" tribe, figured out and realized that if he created one called G-d and placed all-encompassing authority in Him, then wrote a set of rules to keep his subordinates in line, AND somehow convinced the whole tribe it was true...then that might explain religion in one tribe / culture of people. Even allowing for cultural interaction over time, war and commerce, trading of wives, etc., it still wouldn't fully account for the encompassing search for spiritual truth found even in prehistoric times among hunter-gatherers. Let alone the persistent pervasive search ongoing in modern cultures! If this G-d were a fabrication, ONLY, at some point I would think it would become evident. Yet, there are far too many mysteries, far too many esoteric branches of the major faiths, far too many miracles and other evidences, to allow a full dismissal as simply human invention.
The need for God that individuals have is multi-faceted but to believe Mr Dept. Head is going to judge you on whether of not you eat pork, swear, wear a hijab or anything else is just fanciful and very obviously stems from human leaders claiming divine sanction for the laws they made. So on that basis I stand by my belief that Mr. Dept. Head is no more knowable than Mr. Faculty Head or his boss, or his boss..... In some ways it is a grandiose arrogance to assume we understand God. Another all too familiar human trait.
Ah, but as arrogant as I can be at times, I have not ever on this site claimed or assumed I understand G-d. What is the title of this thread? I am speculating, like everybody else does. Only here, I am doing so openly, allowing for alternate views and expanding on my own view. Of course, we are now back at the vengefully exaggerated superhuman sitting with a gavel in hand waiting to pounce...decidedly not what I suggest at all. Perhaps it is the universal law itself that will bear witness and be our judge...I don't know or understand the mechanics of how it works. Certainly no more so than anybody else, of any religious stripe, if they are truly honest. We hold to what we believe, and hope and trust it works out in the end.
I think most of us try, pretty hard but not to the point of sainthood, to be decent human beings towards others, to the land, to nature and to spirit. I don't really think sainthood is a prerequisite to enter the hereafter, being decent with an honest heart and attitude is sufficient. These things, as I intuit them, are in tune with the Tao and pointed to go with the flow. These things are "judged rightly" by the universal law. IMHO, anyway.
This is why I keep coming back in so many of my posts to my assertion that the Nature of God cannot be found in a Holy Book.
Of course not, the full nature of G-d is too vast for any human mind to wrap around.
They are the work of men any of which was less educated than the average modern 12 year old and had no concept of what we have learned from science in the past 200 years. I dont deny many of the writers had great wisdom, but they lacked what we now know.
I am not in a position to deny your assertion. I do see what I feel to be a huge flaw. In trading the religious dogma of scientific prominence over religion, one effectively negates those millenia of wisdom alluded to.
Science is about how, religion is about why.
Think back for a moment to when your first child was born...Science tells us that a child develops from an egg and a sperm, gestates for 9 months or so, and *POP*, out comes an infant human. But I'll wager that was not the thoughts going through your mind at the time. I would bet you were filled with overwhelming awe and wonder, unfathomable joy, and profound love for both the child and his mother. Why?
As much as I have seen some allude to science understanding the soul of humans and thereby try to lay claim to that realm, science is not equipped as a discipline to do so. Science in the purest (and purist) sense was never intended to do so.
I believe the reason that so many of us 'feel' God is real is because in the most literal sense we are a part of God. Not part of His creation, as a separate article, but because Creation is itself the Nature of God. Just as the bacterium inside us live out countless generations without contact with anything, and beyond contact with anything else so we live within God and are incapable of ever seeing the totality. We can infer by our own existence that god exists, but like the bacterium God cant know us and we cant know God. The best we can do is realise our laws are human laws and respect them for that and to observe the beauty of creation and wonder at its profundity.
That is certainly a possibility. We won't know until the time comes, and even then maybe not.
