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I feel like this comment and comments by western atheists make me think that the west has this idea of judeo-christian god that they just bring into any convers

I feel like this comment and comments by western atheists make me think that the west has this idea of judeo-christian god that they just bring into any conversation without thinking deeply. For ramanujan god is more like an emotion.

FieryTransition 2y ago
I'll never figured out whether Einstein thought that the god as described by Spinoza is a real thing? Since there's so many misattributed quotes of him which frames him as talking about the judeo-Christian god as most people know by modern standards. Also, there have been other early religions like Gnosticism in the west, which also falls into this category. Point is, even western religion has way more nuances.
- shagie 2y ago
  I would suggest that the answer to that is "yes" in that the Spinozan God is... for lack of a better word the Universe. (Kaizō in 1923 https://books.google.com/books?id=vLm4oojTPnkC&pg=PA262#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=vLm4oojTPnkC&pg=PA262#v=on... ) > Scientific research can reduce superstition by encouraging people to think and view things in terms of cause and effect. Certain it is that a conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the rationality and intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a higher order. > This firm belief, a belief bound up with a deep feeling, in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God. In common parlance this may be described as "pantheistic" (Spinoza). https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3800/3800-h/3800-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3800/3800-h/3800-h.htm (Ethics was one of the hardest reads I had back in modern philosophy class) And while it is a gross simplification of Ethics, from news://rec.humor.funny ( https://everything2.com/title/Existence+of+the+System+Administrator https://everything2.com/title/Existence+of+the+System+Admini... ) 1. The System Administrator is defined as the most perfect user possible. 2. The property of necessary existence means that anything which possesses it must necessarily exist. 3. If existence is better than non-existence (see the ontological proof), then necessary existence is better still. 4. Any perfect user must possess the property of necessary existence. 5. Therefore the System Administrator must necessarily exist. However: 6. Being perfect, the System Administrator cannot make mistakes, delete the wrong account, trash the root directory, mess up a tape load, etc. 7. Being perfect, the System Administrator can not be capable of goal-directed action, because such action would imply that the network is somehow less than perfect in its current state. 8. Therefore, the System Administrator is really more of a force of nature within the system. 9. Arguably, then the System Administrator *is* the system itself. Counter-argument: 1. None, since the System Administrator has been defined to the point where it is a totally useless concept, there's no point in arguing. At least this resolves one of the major issues: the Spinozist argument proves that *if* the System Administrator does exist, it cannot be intelligent. --- The God of Spinoza and Einstein is the magnificence of the universe as it reveals itself to us. The universe is real as is its majesty.
  - TomK32 2y ago
    Re 6. Listing so many mistakes the System Administrator surely never does is Blasphemy!
monktastic1 2y ago
I was with you right up until the word "emotion." Although "Hinduism" is vast and covers quite a few disparate beliefs and philosophies, none of them (to my knowledge) even approximately equate God with an emotion. Even bliss (ananda) is only one aspect. I don't claim to know the particular religion of his village and/or lineage, but I understand his God to be something closer to the Consciousness that (supposedly) gives rise to all of reality.
- fuzztester 2y ago
  >Although "Hinduism" is vast and covers quite a few disparate beliefs and philosophies, none of them (to my knowledge) even approximately equate God with an emotion. Bhakti does. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhakti https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhakti >covers quite a few Tons. >Hinduism There is no such thing. The term is a Western invention, by complacent sneering so-called scholars about India.
  - monktastic1 2y ago
    You are confusing using emotion to reach God with emotion being God. And of course there is "such a thing." You even described what it refers to, a definition which is sufficient for the purposes of this thread.
    - fuzztester 2y ago
      There you go with your weasel words again. Hey academic philosopher, God is everything, and there is nothing else, so God can be emotion and emotion can be God :) :) :) Don't you know about Brahman? There is nothing else ;) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahman https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahman QED.
- fuzztester 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - monktastic1 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
hprotagonist 2y ago
> For ramanujan god is more like an emotion. for most jewish, christian, and muslim mystics and some theologians, as well. the 'new atheist' conception of what "all christians" think about when they think about god is, well, not very representative.
- sumeruchat 2y ago
  True. I was just commenting on the lack of depth in some modern discussions in the west
  - mangamadaiyan 2y ago
    The lack of depth in modern discourse is not limited by geography, I'd think.
rdtsc 2y ago
> I feel like this comment and comments by western atheists make me think that the west has this idea of judeo-christian god that they just bring into any conversation without thinking deeply. For ramanujan god is more like an emotion. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan#Personality_and_spiritual_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan#Personalit... > While asleep, I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood, as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing. That doesn't seem like an emotion at all. It's a very visual, concrete image. It's closer to the "western atheists" view of god that just an abstract feeling of some sort you were describing, wouldn't you agree?
- sumeruchat 2y ago
  Its a bit of a psychedelic experience. If someone was on LSD and seeing stuff i would compare it an emotional experience. Of course it goes deeper but just explaining the reasoning behind the word emotion
- subsubzero 2y ago
  I had a similar experience while in college, although not as dramatic! While studying CS I was working on problems every night late into the night. I came a across a issue I could not figure out, and went to sleep frustrated. That night I had a dream where a very specific solution was told to me(a voice with text) and it was in a way I had never thought of. I tried it out the next day when I woke up and it worked. It always freaked me out as I don't know how that solution was given to me, my assumption is maybe the subconscious is more powerful than we thought in terms of reasoning.
  - dpig_ 2y ago
    In the early stages of learning something totally new (a new language, etc) I will be completely confounded by something, only to wake up and find that I fully understand it. It's a spooky feeling because it really doesn't seem like you had the prerequisites for that understanding before you slept (although of course you must have).
devnull3 2y ago
Atheism is an accepted school of thought in Hinduism [1] Indian philosophy is diverse and vast. See the comparison of these philosophies [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charvaka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charvaka [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_philosophy#Comparison_of_Indian_philosophies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_philosophy#Comparison_o...
- sumeruchat 2y ago
  Sure is. Doesnt invalidate my argument that western atheism lacks depth
  - keiferski 2y ago
    “Western atheism” doesn’t lack depth, it’s more that the people actively arguing with others that call themselves atheists tend to lack knowledge of their own position. Dawkins, Hitchens, etc. are notoriously uninformed on the topic of religion.
    - canadianfella 2y ago
      [dead]
    - skruger 2y ago
      [reference needed]
      - keiferski 2y ago
        https://old.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/search?q=dawkins&restrict_sr=on https://old.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/search?q=dawkins&rest... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Atheism#Criticisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Atheism#Criticisms No one in the philosophy world takes the works of the New Atheists seriously. They are pop-culture writers, not serious philosophers (other than Daniel Dennett.) If you want a serious thinker's thoughts on atheism, you are better off picking up a book by Nietzsche, Charles Taylor, David Bentley Hart, the Oxford Handbook of Atheism, or any other number of thinkers, or browsing the articles here: https://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py?query=atheism https://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py?query=atheism
spaceman_2020 2y ago
Yeah, Hinduism has enough room for non-believers too. I’m not religious at all, so when someone asks me if I’m keeping a fast for such and such occasion, or celebrating some festival, I simply tell them that I don’t believe in these things and I’m usually left alone. Although this aspect of Hinduism seems to be changing and becoming a bit more hardline
- DiggyJohnson 2y ago
  Why would you have to believe in these things as "real" to still keep a fast? Why would you not answer a simple "no" instead of the answer you give?

FieryTransition 2y ago

I'll never figured out whether Einstein thought that the god as described by Spinoza is a real thing? Since there's so many misattributed quotes of him which frames him as talking about the judeo-Christian god as most people know by modern standards. Also, there have been other early religions like Gnosticism in the west, which also falls into this category. Point is, even western religion has way more nuances.

shagie 2y ago
I would suggest that the answer to that is "yes" in that the Spinozan God is... for lack of a better word the Universe. (Kaizō in 1923 https://books.google.com/books?id=vLm4oojTPnkC&pg=PA262#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=vLm4oojTPnkC&pg=PA262#v=on... ) > Scientific research can reduce superstition by encouraging people to think and view things in terms of cause and effect. Certain it is that a conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the rationality and intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a higher order. > This firm belief, a belief bound up with a deep feeling, in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God. In common parlance this may be described as "pantheistic" (Spinoza). https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3800/3800-h/3800-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3800/3800-h/3800-h.htm (Ethics was one of the hardest reads I had back in modern philosophy class) And while it is a gross simplification of Ethics, from news://rec.humor.funny ( https://everything2.com/title/Existence+of+the+System+Administrator https://everything2.com/title/Existence+of+the+System+Admini... ) 1. The System Administrator is defined as the most perfect user possible. 2. The property of necessary existence means that anything which possesses it must necessarily exist. 3. If existence is better than non-existence (see the ontological proof), then necessary existence is better still. 4. Any perfect user must possess the property of necessary existence. 5. Therefore the System Administrator must necessarily exist. However: 6. Being perfect, the System Administrator cannot make mistakes, delete the wrong account, trash the root directory, mess up a tape load, etc. 7. Being perfect, the System Administrator can not be capable of goal-directed action, because such action would imply that the network is somehow less than perfect in its current state. 8. Therefore, the System Administrator is really more of a force of nature within the system. 9. Arguably, then the System Administrator *is* the system itself. Counter-argument: 1. None, since the System Administrator has been defined to the point where it is a totally useless concept, there's no point in arguing. At least this resolves one of the major issues: the Spinozist argument proves that *if* the System Administrator does exist, it cannot be intelligent. --- The God of Spinoza and Einstein is the magnificence of the universe as it reveals itself to us. The universe is real as is its majesty.
- TomK32 2y ago
  Re 6. Listing so many mistakes the System Administrator surely never does is Blasphemy!

monktastic1 2y ago

I was with you right up until the word "emotion." Although "Hinduism" is vast and covers quite a few disparate beliefs and philosophies, none of them (to my knowledge) even approximately equate God with an emotion. Even bliss (ananda) is only one aspect. I don't claim to know the particular religion of his village and/or lineage, but I understand his God to be something closer to the Consciousness that (supposedly) gives rise to all of reality.

fuzztester 2y ago
>Although "Hinduism" is vast and covers quite a few disparate beliefs and philosophies, none of them (to my knowledge) even approximately equate God with an emotion. Bhakti does. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhakti https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhakti >covers quite a few Tons. >Hinduism There is no such thing. The term is a Western invention, by complacent sneering so-called scholars about India.
- monktastic1 2y ago
  You are confusing using emotion to reach God with emotion being God. And of course there is "such a thing." You even described what it refers to, a definition which is sufficient for the purposes of this thread.
  - fuzztester 2y ago
    There you go with your weasel words again. Hey academic philosopher, God is everything, and there is nothing else, so God can be emotion and emotion can be God :) :) :) Don't you know about Brahman? There is nothing else ;) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahman https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahman QED.
fuzztester 2y ago
[flagged]
- monktastic1 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

hprotagonist 2y ago

> For ramanujan god is more like an emotion. for most jewish, christian, and muslim mystics and some theologians, as well. the 'new atheist' conception of what "all christians" think about when they think about god is, well, not very representative.

sumeruchat 2y ago
True. I was just commenting on the lack of depth in some modern discussions in the west
- mangamadaiyan 2y ago
  The lack of depth in modern discourse is not limited by geography, I'd think.

rdtsc 2y ago

> I feel like this comment and comments by western atheists make me think that the west has this idea of judeo-christian god that they just bring into any conversation without thinking deeply. For ramanujan god is more like an emotion. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan#Personality_and_spiritual_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan#Personalit... > While asleep, I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood, as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing. That doesn't seem like an emotion at all. It's a very visual, concrete image. It's closer to the "western atheists" view of god that just an abstract feeling of some sort you were describing, wouldn't you agree?

sumeruchat 2y ago
Its a bit of a psychedelic experience. If someone was on LSD and seeing stuff i would compare it an emotional experience. Of course it goes deeper but just explaining the reasoning behind the word emotion
subsubzero 2y ago
I had a similar experience while in college, although not as dramatic! While studying CS I was working on problems every night late into the night. I came a across a issue I could not figure out, and went to sleep frustrated. That night I had a dream where a very specific solution was told to me(a voice with text) and it was in a way I had never thought of. I tried it out the next day when I woke up and it worked. It always freaked me out as I don't know how that solution was given to me, my assumption is maybe the subconscious is more powerful than we thought in terms of reasoning.
- dpig_ 2y ago
  In the early stages of learning something totally new (a new language, etc) I will be completely confounded by something, only to wake up and find that I fully understand it. It's a spooky feeling because it really doesn't seem like you had the prerequisites for that understanding before you slept (although of course you must have).

devnull3 2y ago

Atheism is an accepted school of thought in Hinduism [1] Indian philosophy is diverse and vast. See the comparison of these philosophies [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charvaka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charvaka [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_philosophy#Comparison_of_Indian_philosophies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_philosophy#Comparison_o...

sumeruchat 2y ago
Sure is. Doesnt invalidate my argument that western atheism lacks depth
- keiferski 2y ago
  “Western atheism” doesn’t lack depth, it’s more that the people actively arguing with others that call themselves atheists tend to lack knowledge of their own position. Dawkins, Hitchens, etc. are notoriously uninformed on the topic of religion.
  - canadianfella 2y ago
    [dead]
  - skruger 2y ago
    [reference needed]
    - keiferski 2y ago
      https://old.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/search?q=dawkins&restrict_sr=on https://old.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/search?q=dawkins&rest... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Atheism#Criticisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Atheism#Criticisms No one in the philosophy world takes the works of the New Atheists seriously. They are pop-culture writers, not serious philosophers (other than Daniel Dennett.) If you want a serious thinker's thoughts on atheism, you are better off picking up a book by Nietzsche, Charles Taylor, David Bentley Hart, the Oxford Handbook of Atheism, or any other number of thinkers, or browsing the articles here: https://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py?query=atheism https://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py?query=atheism

spaceman_2020 2y ago

Yeah, Hinduism has enough room for non-believers too. I’m not religious at all, so when someone asks me if I’m keeping a fast for such and such occasion, or celebrating some festival, I simply tell them that I don’t believe in these things and I’m usually left alone. Although this aspect of Hinduism seems to be changing and becoming a bit more hardline

DiggyJohnson 2y ago
Why would you have to believe in these things as "real" to still keep a fast? Why would you not answer a simple "no" instead of the answer you give?