I’ve started reading Rene Descartes and I’m intrigued by his idea of “god”.
Descartes is famous for his " I think there for I am." He doubted everything in life to such a degree that he believed the only thing he knew for sure was that when he was thinking then he existed. However, the second thing he deduced is that he knew this world he existed in, real or demonic deception, was imperfect by virtue of the fact that he can doubt it exists. So he knows he exists while thinking and has a conception of imperfections therefore perfection exists and the idea was given to him.
This perfection is god.
God is perfect in all ways. They are beyond deception because a perfect being wouldn’t need to lie, their reason alone for you needing to believe something is enough.
And to me that’s an interesting conception of god. Its a lot more sterile than the normal Christian stance that god is Love which has a emotionally textured connotation. It positions god as having feelings with which we can relate as opposed to Descartes perfection that is simply beyond our reasoning but also (conveniently) not malicious.
As an atheist, god as love makes more sense. God is the feeling of communal love that comes with a religion. People who care for each other for no reason other than because they’re in the same community has always been beautiful to me. God as mislabeled inclusion and comradely behavior males perfect sense.
What is your god or gods like?
BTW, I’m presenting that as testably-true.
It is.
ANYone can do the experiments to discover that our Continuums/Souls have memories going waaay beyond our individual-self’s lives.
There are many books, & some systematic scientific research, on reincarnation-memories.
The book “The Boy Who Knew Too Much” would probably be the most-accessible, & there is one about a psychiatrist who discovered that his patient was someone who had tangled with his previous life, & there is some massive-anthology-of-evidences-of-accurate-reincarnation-memories…
but if it is ideologically prohibited that Universe recycle souls, … then … evidence is powerless/irrelevant, right?
So, evidence simply isn’t going to convince anybody, unless some individual is honestly Empiricist…
& the experiment of using meditations/concentrations to make one’s health improve, is doable, too.
Westerners might find that Chopra & Tanzi’s ( Tanzi’s a geneticist ) book “Super-Genes” may give them permission to accept that yes, medical-science has proven that meditation can un-age people…
Maybe then it’d make more sense…
Andrew Holecek’s books are on the meditations-in-dreaming & the meditations-for-improving-one’s-surviving-of-death ( making one’s Continuum/Soul more-awake, in its journey ) & that stuff is sooo far outside what Physicalism’s ideology permits, that it’s … contempted, by Western Scientism.
Nobody’ll spend years doing the experiment, & if anybody claims that the experiment produces actual results … then they ( like me ) are just contempted as mentally-defective.
Which is fine.
As Padmasambhava said: aversion is the ONLY antidote to attachment.
Souls won’t let-go of getting-caught-in-matter until the aversion has destroyed their attachment.
That’s how everything works!
Outgrow it!
That’s the whole point of life: to experience, & to outgrow, trading mattter-life for wisdom-life.
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