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Why do monsoons knock down trees? God shouldn't be thought of like a very powerful human.

theamk 6y ago
Monsoons knock down the trees because they have no choice. Lacking any intelligence, they have to follow warm air and pressure differentials. Is this how you see your god?
- Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
  Understanding god is hard unless you use your emotional intelligence instead of logical intelligence, because that's what the concept of god is used for. To guide humans in their emotional life, not in their logical pursuits. In your example, if that happened to you (monsoon knocked down trees, your houses and a couple of your children) - then you would for sure have an emotional reaction, and those emotional reactions would absolutely not see monsoons as "pressure differentials with no choice". (Well unless you block all your emotions, which many people do of course.). You would need to figure out an emotional reaction to that situation. That might be anger/grief unto the monsoon (as an extension of god), or if you processed it and grew spiritually from it, you might see it as god (through monsoons) trying to teach you something, and then everything there in between. However, you would still not in any of those cases see monsoon as pressure differentials. At the very least your emotional intelligence wouldn't. (Then there is a question of whether you listen to it or try to block everything and live like a robot, which some people opt to do, but that only works for a while.) But until life makes you actually interact with those situations, then it's easy to ignore the emotional reality and see the world (or any part of it like a monsoon) as dead mechanical force with no consciousness.
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    > Understanding god is hard unless you use your emotional intelligence instead of logical intelligence, because that's what the concept of god is used for. To guide humans in their emotional life, not in their logical pursuits. IME the Christian god serves more as a means to an end for controlling and/or dilluted rulers. Being an abusive, often absent, manipulative, and bigoted father that god is unlikely to help anyone emotionally.
  - Miraste 6y ago
    I don't see why being upset that a monsoon ruined your life requires magical thinking.
    - chongli 6y ago
      I think the point is that religious people may be quicker to move through grief to acceptance in disaster situations such as monsoons. I don’t know if there’s any evidence of this but it’s an interesting hypothesis to test.
- danharaj 6y ago
  They don't follow warm air and pressure differentials, they are warm air and pressure differentials. A monsoon knocks down trees because a monsoon knocks down trees. Whatever God is, if it is to be God, it must be utterly transcendent and unconditioned on circumstance, unlike any natural phenomena. Treating God like a human being, or really any being or phenomenon can only be a flawed metaphor. God is nothing. God is not the Supreme Being because God isn't a being. To exist is to be conditioned, so God does not exist. These aren't wild, heterodox statements except to our current modern strains of fundamentalist religious thought which try to pin down God as a phenomenon we can observe and study. They are statements that have been made by theologians of all sorts of traditions including the Abrahamic ones throughout history.
  - earthboundkid 6y ago
    At the Passover seder, one topic my relative get hung up on many years is "Why did God 'harden Pharaoh's heart'?" My take on this question is that regardless of "why" this is an objective historical phenomenon—look at the USA today, clearly the hearts of Trump supporters (and the Resistance) have been hardened. Any account of God has to take the observed world as a datum, and the data say that before destruction, the leaders of a nation are stricken with hardness of heart. Similarly, God suffers monsoons to blow and so forth and so on. That's the data. Today we are again we see that God destroys Towers of Babel. So it goes.

Monsoons knock down the trees because they have no choice. Lacking any intelligence, they have to follow warm air and pressure differentials. Is this how you see your god?

Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
Understanding god is hard unless you use your emotional intelligence instead of logical intelligence, because that's what the concept of god is used for. To guide humans in their emotional life, not in their logical pursuits. In your example, if that happened to you (monsoon knocked down trees, your houses and a couple of your children) - then you would for sure have an emotional reaction, and those emotional reactions would absolutely not see monsoons as "pressure differentials with no choice". (Well unless you block all your emotions, which many people do of course.). You would need to figure out an emotional reaction to that situation. That might be anger/grief unto the monsoon (as an extension of god), or if you processed it and grew spiritually from it, you might see it as god (through monsoons) trying to teach you something, and then everything there in between. However, you would still not in any of those cases see monsoon as pressure differentials. At the very least your emotional intelligence wouldn't. (Then there is a question of whether you listen to it or try to block everything and live like a robot, which some people opt to do, but that only works for a while.) But until life makes you actually interact with those situations, then it's easy to ignore the emotional reality and see the world (or any part of it like a monsoon) as dead mechanical force with no consciousness.
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  > Understanding god is hard unless you use your emotional intelligence instead of logical intelligence, because that's what the concept of god is used for. To guide humans in their emotional life, not in their logical pursuits. IME the Christian god serves more as a means to an end for controlling and/or dilluted rulers. Being an abusive, often absent, manipulative, and bigoted father that god is unlikely to help anyone emotionally.
- Miraste 6y ago
  I don't see why being upset that a monsoon ruined your life requires magical thinking.
  - chongli 6y ago
    I think the point is that religious people may be quicker to move through grief to acceptance in disaster situations such as monsoons. I don’t know if there’s any evidence of this but it’s an interesting hypothesis to test.
danharaj 6y ago
They don't follow warm air and pressure differentials, they are warm air and pressure differentials. A monsoon knocks down trees because a monsoon knocks down trees. Whatever God is, if it is to be God, it must be utterly transcendent and unconditioned on circumstance, unlike any natural phenomena. Treating God like a human being, or really any being or phenomenon can only be a flawed metaphor. God is nothing. God is not the Supreme Being because God isn't a being. To exist is to be conditioned, so God does not exist. These aren't wild, heterodox statements except to our current modern strains of fundamentalist religious thought which try to pin down God as a phenomenon we can observe and study. They are statements that have been made by theologians of all sorts of traditions including the Abrahamic ones throughout history.
- earthboundkid 6y ago
  At the Passover seder, one topic my relative get hung up on many years is "Why did God 'harden Pharaoh's heart'?" My take on this question is that regardless of "why" this is an objective historical phenomenon—look at the USA today, clearly the hearts of Trump supporters (and the Resistance) have been hardened. Any account of God has to take the observed world as a datum, and the data say that before destruction, the leaders of a nation are stricken with hardness of heart. Similarly, God suffers monsoons to blow and so forth and so on. That's the data. Today we are again we see that God destroys Towers of Babel. So it goes.