Re: OT: God's loaded dice (was Re: semi-OT: Re: "defense of wilderness" (wasRe: lexicon))

In a message dated 2003:06:09 09:33:35 AM, Nik Taylor
(yonjuuni@EARTHLINK.NET) writes:

>J Y S Czhang wrote:
>>     Hmmm, God as Cosmic Con-Artist and Ultimate Trickster! ROTFLMAO...
>
>The Old Faith of the Kassii included the belief that when one dies,
>their soul plays a game of chance with the Goddess of Death to determine
>what they'll be in their next life.  However, she's not the most honest
>deity.  :-)
    Nice touch to a conculture/conlang...

    In the American education system's social studies classes, we are only
taught about democracy, socialism, fascism and communism - glossing over or even
disregarding tribalism, capitalistic libertarianism, anarchism, etc. ...and
when most people in America think of types of religious worldviews they only
think of/in terms of monotheism, agnosticism, atheism and paganism/polytheism.
    There is much more variety in the world... & being the hyperintellectual
monkeybrainies that I am, that's the way I like... uh huh, uh huh :)

    With this in mind, I repost these somewhat brief notes I have compiled.
Fodder for both conlang lexico-LOGOS-semantics and conCULTure cult-ivating ;)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
~> the Godhead * of each of our own understandings
* “godhead” = the God-Reality

NOTE: throughout this section, you may replace the words “religion” &
“religious” with the less loaded words “spirituality” & “spiritual.”

    Carl Gustav Jung wrote, "Nobody can know what the ultimate things are. We
must, therefore, take them as we experience them. And if such experience
helps to make your life healthier, more beautiful, more complete and more
satisfactory to yourself and to those you love, you may safely say: 'This was the
grace of God.'"

    Jung also wrote," If you should find in yourself...an ineradicable
tendency to believe in God or immortality, do not allow yourself to be disturbed by
the blather of so-called 'free-thinkers'; but if you find in yourself an
equally resistant tendency to deny all religious ideas, do not hesitate to deny
them and see how that suits you."

    "...divine chaos ...rumors of chaos have been known to enhance the mature
religious vision.... for the godhead manifests no more of its reality than
the limited grammar of each person's imagination and conceptual system can
handle. A second advantage is suggested by William James in _Varieties of Religious
Experience_. James affirms the possibilty of many gods, mostly because he
takes seriously his multiverse theory of personal monads, each one of us
experiencing a unique religious revelation. An orderly monistic and monotheistic
system, he fears, might succumb to a craving for logical coherence, and trim away
some of the mystery, rich indeterminancy, and tragic ambiguity in a complete
numinous experience. For some temperaments, the ambivalent gentleness and
savagery of fate can be imagined effectively in a godhead split into personified
attributes, sometimes at war, sometimes in shifting alliance." ~ Vernon Ruland,
Eight Sacred Horizons: The Religious Imagination East and West

    In another words, the Godhead as Multiple Personality ;)
________________________________

>>> JUST A FEW OF THE INFINITE WAYS -Commonly Known & Otherwise - OF
CONCEPTUALIZING THE GODHEAD (or God-Reality):

NOTE: some of the following concepts have much overlapping, i.e. it is
possible to be a monotheistic dualist, a pluralistic therianthropotheistic animist
or a non-dualistic henotheistic polytheistic panentheist...

atheism - belief & arguement that there is no god or gods

agnosticism - skepticism to whether god or gods exist or not, that such
metaphysical speculations, ideas & concepts are neither provable or unprovable

deism - belief in a "God" who initiated Creation and set its
mechanistic/scientific laws in place, allowing Creation to pursue its own course or evolution
(hence the metaphor of "God" being a "Watchmaker Supreme" and Creation a
"Clockwork Cosmos")

physitheism/transcendentalism - belief in "God" based on the arguement for
God's existence based purely on determinate and/or aesthetic experience of the
natural world, esp'ly of its order, purposiveness and beauty

monotheism/monolatry - belief & worship of one & only one "God" - "a
personal, loving, good God" - usually male - who freely created all that exists out of
nothing & who continues to preserve & control it; doctrines/dogmas related to
those belief systems (i.e. Judaism, Christianity and Islam)

anthropotheism/anthropomorphism/anthropolatry - belief conceiving "God" or
gods in human imagery and/or terms, attributing human qualities to the Godhead -
"Man created God in His Own Image."
    From the ancient Egyptian Stela 797, inscribed during the reign of
Pharaoh Sabakos (about 8th c. BCE), repeating a much older text from about the year
2850 BCE: "Every divine word came into existence by the thought of the heart
and the commandment of the tongue. When the eyes see, the ears hear, and the
nose breathes, they report to the heart. It is the heart that brings forth every
issue, and the tongue that repeats the thought of the heart. Thus were
fashioned all the gods, from Atum [the first Egyptian deity] on."
    Alexander Eliot writes, "Thus one of the most ancient paragraphs in the
present possession of mankind likens the Creator of all things to the creative
heart of man himself.”

polytheism - belief & worship of many gods & goddesses... the gods came out
of the primal Chaos/Void, and from the gods came the essences of all things -
some gods giving essences to some things, others to different things --- good &
evil, war & peace, mart & knowledge, etc.. Humans contain the essences of all
the gods. Hence there is war amongst the gods even as there is war
with/in/amongst humans ... "All men have need of the gods." ~ Homer [One approach to
polytheism in modern psychological/spiritual terms is to see the gods as
archetypes, character trait ideals, aspects of the Godhead we seek to imitate or be
possessed by, etc.]

kathenotheism - belief & worship of one god after another in succession,
treated - for the moment - as the only god or avatar of the Godhead

henotheism - belief & adoption of a particular god, while allowing that other
gods exist - usually within a polytheistic belief system (i.e. some major
popular forms of Hinduism)

animism/animotheism/zootheism - the belief that all appearances - esp'ly
living/sentient appearances - are animated by spirits (usually animal-like) OR
made vital by a supernatural power, an "Anima" (Latin for "Spirit")
    "If oxen, lions and horses had hands with which to make images, they
would fashion gods after their own shapes and give them bodies like their own." ~
Xenophanes

therianthropotheism - belief & worship of gods represented in combined human
and animal forms (i.e. Ancient Egyptian religion)

--- Panentheists and pantheists share the view that the universe and every
natural thing in it is pervaded by divinity:

pantheism (from _pan_ "all" + theism)- Pantheists believe that the universe
itself is divine. They do not believe in personal or creator gods; they believe
that the Godhead exists in everything - that that the godhead & the world are
essentially identical; the divine is "world-inclusive," totally immanent (*)

    ^  * immanence - the presence and/or actions of god/gods in the world,
usually with a distinction between the presence and the actions. At one extreme,
the total transcendence of the Godhead has no relation to Creation. At the
other extreme, Creation is a mode of Godhead's self-manifestation, and thus is
the 'body' of the Godhead. Most theistic religions allow varying degrees of
immanence between these extremes.

- another crucial difference of all these different “godhead-views”:

    DUALISM/PLURALISM - the conjunction of two (usually opposing) entities or
principles.  [a.] (philosophy) belief & theory that in any domain of reality
there are two independent underlying principles, e.g. mind & matter, form &
content, etc.  [b.] (theology, usually monotheistic) the belief & theory that
unchanging forces of good and evil are - more or less - equally balanced in the
universe.
    But change and flux are facts of life throughout the divine cosmos. So
are the risks on earth of human destructiveness, disease, accident, collision
with meteorites and so on. It is true that these attributes of the universe and
nature are not compatible with pre-conceived ideas about God as an unchanging,
perfect, loving being. But pantheism does not believe in such a God, and
accepts the universe as it is - wonderful, mysterious, creative, exuberant,
joyful, and yet also at times chaotic and destructive. Evil and pain exist for
theists too, and they are extremely difficult to reconcile with the idea of an
omnipotent, yet loving God. Christian apologetics have still not come up with any
satisfactory explanation of why God should have created them.
    NON-DUALISM/MONISM - belief & theory that everything in existence, in the
Cosmos, is a holistic unity & that perceptions or ideas of difference &
division are “illusionary.” (Concepts of “good” & “evil” are situational & less
clear-cut than in dualistic systems of belief: “One man’s meat is another’s
poison.”... “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”)

panentheism (pan-en-theos means "all-in-God" - that is, the universe is
contained within God or the Godhead) -
    belief in all gods & all gods being merely finite aspects of the infinite
Godhead (thus all statements & views of the Godhead are - in a sense - both
true AND false, that the multi-personal-itied, multi-versal Godhead is many
things to many people); belief that the Godhead exists in everything AND
transcends everything, that the Godhead is both totally immanent AND totally
transcendent - both world-inclusive AND world-transcending.
    The Godhead is "dipolar" - encompassing such contraries as absoluteness &
relativity, one & many, being & non-being, necessity & contingency, eternity
& temporality, destruction & creation, positive & negative, male & female,
divine & profane, impersonal & personal, etc. ad infinitum googolplexplex plus
plus ... the Godhead is perfect being, not unchanging, but capable of being
excelled by nothing other than the GodheadSelf: change, not permanence, is the
fundamental nature of both the Godhead and reality. In another words, both
changeless and changing perfection.

    “Panentheists believe in a Godhead that is present in everything but also
extends beyond the universe. In other words, the Godhead is greater than the
universe. Unlike pantheism, however, it does not say that the universe is
identical to God; it maintains that there is more to God than just the universe.
Panentheism says that all is in God, somewhat as if God were the ocean and we
were fish. If one considers what is in God's body to be part of God, then we
can say that God is all there is and then some. The universe is God's body, but
God's awareness or personality is greater than the sum of all the parts of the
universe. All the parts have some degree of freedom in co-creating with
God.... [To put it simply, both God and the cosmos are interdependent “entities”
of creativity.]
    “... Panentheism gives all that one could want: an all-encompassing,
growing, perfect God, everywhere present and containing everywhere within himself;
and the reality of oneself and others, freely deciding within God, responding
to God's overtures in the process of co-creation. Theism denies that the
world (including us) shares in God's being. Panentheism recognizes that everything
shares God's being (or becoming) but that God's being operates from
innumerable relatively freely-choosing centers or perspectives of existence. God and
the world, which is God's body, are interdependent. To be is to be free, to be
choosing, and to be enjoying (slightly or greatly, positively or negatively)
the process of selecting from among competing influences. To be doing this is to
be alive. To be doing it with the complexity of performing these tasks
self-consciously, rationally, purposefully is to be doing it as a person. To have
perfect awareness of all this, perfect memory, love, and preservation of it, and
to be giving perfect guidance to the others who are involved in the process
is to be the only perfect person, God.”

~§~

LILA <from Sanskrit> = "Divine Play"  - the 'joyous exercise of spontaneity
involved in the art of creation' (Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan)
...the play of creation, destruction, and re-creation, the folding and
unfolding of the cosmos...both the delight and enjoyment of this moment, and the
play of [the] God[head].

WHIM = 1a. a sudden fancy; a caprice. b. capriciousness.
 2. a kind of windlass for raising ore or water from a mine. [17th century:
origin unknown]

WHIMSY (plural forms: WHIMSIES, WHIMSEYS) = 1. a whim; a capricious notion or
fancy. 2. capricious or quaint humour. [related to WHIM-WHAM] Italian
capriccio, French boutade

WHIM-WHAM  = a toy or plaything




---
Hanuman Zhang (aka "Z")
WOG (Wiley Oriental Gentleman ;)
Avatar of Sun WuKong, a.k.a _Ma-Lau_ ("Monkey")
a.k.a. "TricksterGod of the Glorious Anti-Imperialist Chinese Boxers";
¡¡¡  TricksterShapeShifterIncarnate  !!!  >^..^<           ';'           ;P~~~

<=  thee prIs ov X.iztenz iz aetern'l warfaer 'N' kreativ playf'llnizz...  =>

    =>  om hung hanumatay rudratmakai hung phat  <=
    mantra to Hanuman the Hindu Monkey TricksterGod

>Finally a religious statement I can agree with:
>
>the Zoroastrian teaching that it is a sin for a person to be boring.
"Life is all a great joke, but only the brave ever get the point."
                                    - Kenneth Rexroth

googolgigglabyte
goegolgiechelbijt  - of - met een vette megagrijns
GoogolGekicherByte
googolrisibyte ===> el byte de la  risita de googol
googolrisadinhabyte ===>  o byte de risadinha de googol
googolspassoctet
guugoIllolbijt
gugolhihibajt
gugolngisibayt
okukolkikikol
egúgelegigalibaith
kiletstroknolyadgigabaiti
cimacimakekehapi
baitakhakhweifayatrauni
ufi'auayinisuguguluarkhar
pokatra oemadroabhethetre
inarevuta yhiyhayhake nawyo
AnekoMeppathmoTtilvatelmDiggulgyttahat
va'i utne tuktukt'ishushukuko`g tuk  go`go`o`gwgaga
ggsngngsbd [gugulaNexebidi]