Defining "God"

Defining "God" is a challenging prospect -- nearly as difficult as defining "belief". Really, "God" is a blanket nominal that has come to represent many things. To the ancient Greeks, the Gods were just one of many supernatural beings, which often took forms quite similar to humans, though with extra powers. Today, in Western Society, there is a rising trend of being "spiritual" rather than "religious".
Though I can't be for certain, what I think these people are trying to say is, "I believe in a higher, supreme power, but not as it is described by any institutional religions." There are also those who claim that God is "Love" or any number of human emotions which represent "God". Are these things truly Gods? Is there a difference between Zeus, Yahweh, Jesus, Allah, Brahman, a "higher power", or a "natural energy"? Defining myself as an atheist or antithiest, I am defining myself as the opposite of a theist, but to understand what a theist is, one must understand what a God is.
The difference, as I see it, between a character like the Christian God and a label such as "love" or "natural energies", is that the former has his/it's own will, whereas the latter does not. A God, in the institutionalized sense of the word, has desire. There is something you must do for God. There are rules you must obey or even missions you must accomplish. A "natural energy" makes no such request of it's followers. It has no will or desire, it simply is. It is the woven fabric of the universe that is beyond our power to comprehend, or at least, that is what I think these "spiritual" people are describing to me.
So really, God for anybody is the highest possible power. Institutional Gods are generally modeled after human beings, complete with all of our flaws (wrath, vengeance, and in the case of Zeus even lust). They also tend to be warped by those who evangelize in their names. More "spiritual" Gods, on the other hand, are in my opinion simply an attempt to describe powers which we don't understand. These descriptions do not even necessarily make any assumptions about supernatural powers.
God is everything, the universe, all of it. And in this case, plain old secularists have taken the institutional word and warped to simply describe one's perception of the universe, be it optimistic or pessimistic.
These "Gods", I can deal with. But "anti-institutional-traditional-dieties" is a rather long nomer, and so I think I'll just stick with "atheist".

A Monotheistic Rafting Trip

This is a highly entertaining and somewhat enlightening
article about the three leaders of Monotheism taking a rafting trip. Buddha gets a mention in there too.

Disbelief - an act of faith?

I have spoken with many people, both atheist and not, who claim that even atheism requires faith. The idea is that disbelief is simply a different set of beliefs.

But this raises the question, what can we believe? If I say that I do not believe in unicorns, and you say that you do, are we both really looking at the evidence in front of us and choosing a different belief? Am I taking it on faith that there are no unicorns, choosing to believe all of the millions of people who tell me so? No. I do not believe in unicorns because I have never seen one.

This raises even farther issues. I have never seen a giraffe, but I still believe that they exist. Is this as wild as your belief in unicorns, which you also have never seen? Either way, there seems to be some faith involved.

But my faith in this hypothetical situation is a completely different beast than the faith of somebody who believes in silver horses with big horns. I looking at the evidence presented to me (photographs of a giraffe), and choosing to believe that the camera that took the photograph acted as cameras have always acted in my experience, and that it didn't elongate the neck of a horse or something. I am taking it on faith that the animal in the photograph is made of flesh in blood, but this "leap of faith" is once again imposing my real-life experiences in the past onto my present circumstances. I am choosing the most probable explanation (giraffes exist) of the evidence in front of me (the photograph of a giraffe). A belief in unicorns requires much more faith based on the evidence.

I state giraffes do, in fact, exist. This is a decision I am making about the state of the world based on the evidence in front of me. While some may call my thought about giraffes a Belief that they exist, I would say that it is no belief, simply a conclusion about the state of the world that Any Normal Person would realize when faced with tangible evidence. Disbelief, similarly, is not a form of belief, for there is no leap of faith required.

And that's what I believe :-D

My Own Spirituality

Readers of this site may be interested in a post I've made on one of my other blogs about my own spirituality and beliefs.

Santa Claus for Adults

When I was a child, I was brought up to believe in a mythical being named Santa Claus, who inhabited the North Pole (why?) and flew around in a sleigh delivering presents to all of the children. He was always watching us. If we were well behaved we got what we wanted. If we broke the rules, we got charcoal. And even though my parents had nothing to do with it, through society I was brought up to believe in another mystical being, named God. He lived in the sky, and loved everybody who accepted his son as their personal savior. He was always watching us. If we were well behaved, we would live forever in bliss in heaven. If we broke the rules, we got eternal damnation in the fires of hell.

The parallels here are astonishing. Eventually, like all children, I lost my faith in Santa Claus. I lost faith in God at about the same age, though it seems that many faithful adults simply replaced Santa with God once they reached that critical age of "reason".

The similarities between the two do not stop there. I had no credible evidence of the existence of Santa Claus other than here-say (my parents told me he existed) and a few "miracles" (cookies magically disappearing and being replaced with gifts) but I had ample evidence pointing to other explanations of Christmas. The first clue was when fed-ex delivered a box that was almost the exact same shape and size as my new Lego set that I gleefully unwrapped a few days later on Christmas. Surely with his magical sleigh and reindeer, Santa would never need to resort to such shipping methods. Then there was the loud banging of a hammer one Christmas eve before I got my new bike. Had the elves forgotten to assemble the bike before Santa's journey? Something just didn't add up. And there is something about this "God" character that just doesn't add up either. While scientist won't be able to prove for certain evolution occured in the past without going back in time and watching it themselves, there is an overwhelming abundance of evidence saying that it did occur in the past, and we have proven that it can and does occur in the present.

But why was I different? Why did I reject not just one but both mythologies? More importantly, why do so many people hold on to one? Santa Claus is easy to let go of. You are letting go of a few presents once a year. But giving up God carries great risks. What if they are right? What if hell exists? The power of fear welded by modern organized religion encourages many to hold on to these ridiculous supernatural claims.