Re: If god exists, what created god?

Hooked on Phoenix (venugop@phoenix.cs.uga.edu)
3 Sep 1995 18:04:01 GMT

In article <427b54$bbc@newsbf02.news.aol.com>, ARKYJAY <arkyjay@aol.com> wrote:
>This is a tired stupid thread.
You are right; it is like the six blind men who tried to
describe the elephant.

If god is omniscent, why create the
>universe, whose outcome is already known to its creator.
It is as untested a theory as the Big Bang, Steady State, or Expanding
Universe theories.
Is God a sadist who enjoys watching the suffering of
>others? Since he knows who will be damned and who will be saved, why not
>just cut to the chase, and create some in heaven and some in hell to begin
>with.
No, "god" is not a sadist, neither a masochist or anything else.
We are responsible for our actions and inactions. When we do not
have sufficient control over our fate or future, we attribute it to
the unknown, who is called "god."
Heaven and hell are creations of our own febrile minds.
Any word that alluded to these or referred to such states, were
misinterpreted as real. Borges talks about this in his story
"The Aleph." Any word denoting godhead is mistaken as a description
of god itself.

>god has suspended his omniscence and omnipotence, or never possessed those
>qualities-perhaps it was God that exploded in the Big Bang and is trying
>to restore itself to wholeness through the wonder of its constituent
>parts-in which case we ARE god.

Yes, we are God. There is the mnaqib that goes:
Thu khudha tho nahi, par khudha ki kasam,
Thu hai khudha ka nishan, Khwaja Hindenwali.
(you are not the Lord, but I swear on the Lord;
you are a representation of the Lord, O Khwaja -saint of India)

Then there is also another line:
Surrat theri shahe ummang, Allah ka hi tasveer hai.

The wonderful thing about this is, Allah is never given an
anthromorphic, or zoomorphic form. Allah is just given attributes.
So the Hamds- when they praise the Lord; assign known human values
and qualities to the Lord (the algebraic or abstract depiction
of a perfect being). Then paradoxically we efface ourselves by
being the semantic opposite of those qualities, which we desire to
possess. While at the same time we are in the awareness that the
Lord per se does not exist, we are not pure or perfect, have
some degrees of perfection and purity within us.
When one contemplates this sufficiently long enough, and using
tautology to question one's existence, rather than nihilism -
which is often mistaken for nirvana, I do suppose one can realize
godhood, or the futility of trying to achieve the same.

On a practical plane; the Middle Path or Buddhism is the most
advocable
regards
gopa

-- 

  Gopakumar Venugopalan

  "..to be a rock and not to roll."    Long Live rock and roll.

 "I shall not be a member of any club that accepts me"-Groucho Marx