How big is your god?

One of the 54 so-called "wrathful deities", Karma Heruka, in union with his consort, Karma Krodeshvari, painted by Shawu Tsering and photographed by Jill Morley Smith, in The Tibetan Book of The Dead, Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition (2005)

Humans like to fight. We enjoy a good war, brawl, mêlée, fracas, dispute, argument, disagreement. And one of the things we most like to fight or argue about is the thing we label as "god".

Mainly, we fight about the nature/attributes of god: has a thousand arms, is found in the sea, is found in the air, is found in a burning bush, throws thunderbolts, was crucified, is male, is female, is genderless, carries a large hammer, enjoys drinking blood, has a long white beard, is wrathful and jealous, likes a good flood, etc.

The attributes of deity are many and various, if not infinite. Some people say that all attributes are manifest in deity, and therein lies an opportunity. If everyone agreed that all attributes are the attributes of deity, then we would have no basis for disagreement about the nature of deity. (And by the way, having all attributes is equivalent to having no attributes.)

persons unknown

Jo is writing a story about a person writing a story about a person whose name is not known.

The plot is based on the proposition that if the person fails to discover the name of the person whose name is not known, then the person whose name is not known kills the person who fails to discover the name.

One day the person who doesn’t know the name meets the person whose name is not known.

"What’s my name?" asks the person whose name is not known.

"I don’t know," replies the person who doesn't know the name.

"It’s Jo, fool!" ze says, killing the person who has failed to discover the name.

"Ah yes," ze says, before ze dies, "but now the end of the story is written, Jo, and it is you who are no more!"

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the zillion names of god

There are no disagreements, there is only confusion about labels. There are no arguments about meaning, there is only a failure to understand the difference between the signified and the signifier. This confusion is especially relevant and important in relation to so-called disagreements about god or gods, and the nature and meaning thereof.

Both the pantheistic position and the panentheistic position are unassailable, logically, because they are constructed on the bedrock of axiomatic definition, and the truth of any axiom is as agreed in advance of its application. (Although if Godel is right then all positions are unassailable from within but may be assailable from without).

Older men and long white beards

Do you believe in God?" is a stupid question. It invites confusion between the name of the thing, the thing itself, and the qualities/attributes of the thing (the sign, the signified and the signifier, if you want to get technical).

For the ancient Greeks, Poseidon (left) was the god of the sea. For the ancient Romans, Neptune (below) was the god of the sea. Generally speaking, Greeks and Romans accepted Neptune and Poseidon to be different names for the same god. The same qualities were attributed to Neptune as to Poseidon (e.g. both were believed to be the god of horses as well as of the sea, and both were believed to wield tridents.