GOD, FROM A SECULARIST VIEWPOINT

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GOD

God is a class name, like “angel“ or “demon.” When capitalized to show what believers call “respect,” it is a title, like President, Christ, Mahatma, Buddha, Pfc. (private first class). Many mistake the word to be the sole name of the divinity of three monotheistic religions. They assume, as if they are on a first-name basis, that it is God, Bill, Jesus, Mohandras, Siddhartha, and Pfc. Luis Fantauzzi they are talking to or about. But God’s name is not God. The ancient Hebrews considered YHWH, one of the various names for the divinity, as taboo and not to be uttered. They substituted Adonai, “my Lord,” in order to avoid the ineffable, or that which should not be uttered. Elohim was the most common name for God in the Old Testament. As explained by Rolland Emerson Wolfe of Tufts College, “Elohim is a plural form which usually should be translated ‘gods’ (in contrast with individual deities such as Yahweh, Dagon, Bel, etc.) in documents written before the exile. During this period the singular form became so obsolete that, when monotheism came, elohim was retained in the plural but understood in the singular sense of ‘God.’ Usually, Hebrew writers speak of gods (elohim) and Yahweh (their god) before the exile but God (elohim) thereafter.” God’s name also appears, though rarely, as Shaddai.

Sub-standard slang expressions concerning God are numerous, with few speakers recognizing the origin of “gosh” or “golly” (euphemisms for God) and “gee” and “jeepers” (euphemisms for Jesus). Nor are they aware of the anatomic vulgarity “oddballs,” or of the colorful epithet “bloody,” an irreverent description of the dripping, crucified, and dying second person of the Trinity (as utilized by a mad and cursing Hamlet: “‘Sblood, do you think that I am easier to be played on than a pipe?”). Similarly, “zounds” is a reference to Jesus’s (His) wounds upon being crucified. Jehovah (Yahweh, Jahve) was the personal name of Israel’s god, but some hold that it is based on a mistake inasmuch as scholars believe the form Yahweh is not scripturally reliable.

R. B. Y. Scott of the United Theological College in Montreal, Canada, notes that when for the first time vowels were inserted in the Hebrew Bible in the 7th century, the vowels of the word “aDoNaY” were written with the consonants YHWH, a tetragrammaton, in order to emphasize reverence. (Tetragrammaton refers to a four letter word such as the not-to-be-uttered name of God, YHWH, which is to be spoken only with the vowels of Adonai or Elohim. It is noteworthy that most Hebrew words have only three consonants.) “The form ‘Jehovah’ is a transliteration of the resulting hybrid, and first came into use in the 14th century through the failure of Christian scholars to recognize the origin and purpose of the vocalization; it has now by usage acquired by independent standing in English,” Scott states. Non-believers ordinarily capitalize God when referring to the major divinity of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They would also make such observations as the following: • God, if the original Original, by definition would have been hermaphroditic and would not, as is the case with hermaphroditic snails, be addressed as “He.” • Typical of weak religious reasoning is the statement by Samuel S. Cohon, of the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, that “the worship of Yahweh as Israel’s covenant God and Savior, the revelation of His will to the prophets and its embodiment in the various codes that comprise the Torah, and His demand of moral conduct from His worshipers are permanent elements of Judaism, which run unbroken from the days of Sinai to the present.” • Another illogical concoction by theologians is the concept of the Trinity, a dogma accepted by all Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians and by the principal Protestant churches that, as explained by Charles W. Lowry Jr. of the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, “God is one in being (or substance), power, and majesty, but subsists eternally in three co-equal, perfect persons or hypostates, to which are appropriate respectively the individual names Father, Son or Word (Logos), and Holy Spirit.” • Paul E. Johnson, of the Boston School of Theology, points out a conflict between the various religionists: that it is sacrilegious, according to some, not to believe that the proper name for God is Allah (or Al-lah) and that “There is no God but Allah.”

GOD AND WOMEN

The idea of a woman incarnating the Holy Spirit occurred around 1270 when an Italian prophetess, Gugliemites Gugliema, was considered by her followers as that incarnation—she also was said by some to have been the prototype of the Female Pope (also the High Priestess) card in the Tarot deck. In the early 1300s, Prous Beneta, a Beguine in Provence, was similarly thought to such an incarnation. The English-born founder of the American sect of celibate utopians called Shakers, “Mother” Ann Lee, taught that God had incarnated her just as He had incarnated the man, Jesus. Another woman, Jemima Wilkinson (1752—1819), was regarded as Christ returned, which she did not deny.

GOD AND NON-BELIEVERS

Theologians generally concede that the existence of God is unverifiable and must be accepted on faith. Immanuel Kant thought he had destroyed the ontological argument for God, that God must exist because God represents the highest concept and must have existence as one attribute. Kant argued that existence has no part of the content of an idea, which concept existentialists have emphasized and which they have used as an argument to support atheism. In essence, non-believers generally avoid the word except when referring to the God theologians preach about. They recognize that a Lutheran believes in God and that a Catholic and a Jew believe, also. But, in practice, non-believers are apt to relegate the concept to a collection of terms such as the following: male gods such as Uranus, his son Cronus, and his son Zeus; or the goddesses such as Uranus’s mother and wife, Gaea (who was also mother and wife of Pontus, god of the sea); Cronus’s wife and sister Rhea (who also was mother of Zeus); and Zeus’s wife and sister, Hera. Of these, it is Cronus who fathered the great gods—Zeus, Poseidon, Demeter, Hera, Hades, and Hestia. His father, Uranus, had fathered Titans, Cyclops, and Hundred-handed Ones. But Cronus, dethroning his father, castrated him, whereupon Uranus’s blood fell onto Earth, producing the vengeful Furies. And from Uranus’s discarded flesh and the sea Aphrodite arose. What distinguishes the Hebrew’s God from a Greek god is the latter’s interest, shown in the Greek classics, in sex, marriage, pleasure, and humor. The various names, then, are descriptive terms of myths, traditional stories that involve supernatural elements and have occurred in a timeless past. “And where did the Milky Way come from?” the Greek child might ask. “When Hera was breast-feeding,” would come the answer, “Her baby bit her teat, she cried out, and as she pushed him away the milk spilled out onto the sky.” The Greek myths are of value, like the myth of Santa Claus.

For non-believers, maturity consists, in great part, in un-learning the inculcation of unscientific views taught during her or his childhood. "Believing" in Good, not God, is philosophy- rather than religion- centered.

GOD, PRAYER, IMMORTALITY, AND THE LORD (RUSSELL)

Unless taken literally. Philosophers who use the term ”God” to describe any unifying concept (for example, cosmic energy, number, mind, world soul) are sure to confuse adherents to the major religions, who oppose the use of original Original, or Goodness. Carl Sagan, for example, has stated that if by “God” one simply means the set of physical laws that are found in the universe, “then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying. It does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.” Bertrand Russell has written much on the subject, for example in What I Believe (1925):

  • God and immortality, the central dogmas of the Christian religion, find no support in science. It cannot be said that either doctrine is essential to religion, since neither is found in Buddhism. . . . I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian God may exist; so many the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.
  • On a recording, “Speaking Personally,” Russell said, “The whole attitude of the Christian toward God is based on Oriental tyrannies, monarchies. It’s the attitude one took toward the King. And it’s an attitude which a modern man should consider abject and contemptible.” In a 1950 Australian radio program, he further elaborated upon his not believing in God: “It is to the possible achievements of Man that our ultimate loyalty is due, and in that thought the brief troubles of our unquiet epoch become endurable. Much wisdom remains to be learned, and if it is only to be learned through adversity, we must endeavor to endure adversity with what fortitude we can command. But if we can acquire wisdom soon enough, adversity may not be necessary, and the future of Man may be happier than any part of his past.”

GOD and god

God is a proper noun, like Kolkata; e.g., “Some intelligent people worship God.” The plural of God is gods; e.g., “Some intelligent people worship gods”—gods is an example of a common noun, like doppelgänger. Although the common practice is to write “the God of Christianity,” the common noun for a deity is god, not God; ergo, writing “the god of Christianity” is entirely logical.

Of the gods, Woden and Jehovah and other such names are examples of proper nouns and are capitalized. If an indefinite article precedes God, it is a common noun and not capitalized:

  • • gad, a minced pronunciation of God as found in an exclamation such as “Egad!” or “Gadzooks,” which possibly is a reference to “God’s hooks,” the nails used in the alleged crucifixion of Jesus.
  • • godalmighty, as an interjection expresses surprise or dismay
  • • god-a-mercy, an expression of mercy or thanks
  • • godawful (slang), a stressing of awful in its colloquial sense
  • • god-botherer (slang), a parson; also, god-pesterer (slang), a bishop
  • • god box (slang), the remote control device for TV
  • • godcept (obsolete), gossip
  • • goddam, goddamn (slang since 1640), used to express displeasure
  • • god in the box (slang), a radio set
  • • goddery, an assemblage of gods
  • • godfather (slang), the leader of an organized crime family
  • • godfearing refers to having a reverent feeling toward God; being devout
  • • godforsaken or godforsaken refers to a forlorn or dismal area
  • • godfright (obsolete), god-fearing, devout, pious
  • • godful (obsolete), full of God, pious
  • • the godhead refers to God existing in three persons (God, Jesus, Holy Ghost)
  • • godhood refers to divinity, or the quality or state of being a god
  • • goddize, to make into a god or deify
  • • godify, to make into a god or deify
  • • godless refers to not acknowledging a god or gods
  • • godlet, a petty god or deity
  • • godlike, resembling God in some quality
  • • godliness, the quality of being godly
  • • godling is one of the lesser or minor gods; a godkin
  • • god love her (slang), Mother
  • • godly (slang) means “cool”; godly, of or pertaining to God
  • • godman, one who is both God and man, which is said of Jesus
  • • godoxious, a combination of godawful and obnoxious; repellent
  • • god rep (slang), the college chaplain
  • • god-slot (slang), a religious program on radio or television
  • • god squad, the, the forces of organized religion, especially in evangelical form; the phrase has been applied scornfully to the Salvation Army, doorstep zealots, and university Christian Unions alike
  • • God’s Acre is capitalized if it refers to a specific churchyard’s area
  • • god’s balls (slang), usually shortened to oddballs
  • • godsbodikins, an irreverent reference to the deity’s body
  • • godsend is something desirable that has come unexpectedly
  • • godship, used jocularly to refer to a god’s position or personality, as in “your godship”
  • • godspeed, as in “I wish you godspeed,” refers to success or good fortune. The reference is to speden, to prosper, and sped, Old English for success.

GOD AND THE PHILOSOPHERS

See a definitive article by Paul Edwards, “God and the Philosophers,” in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy.

“GOD BLESS YOU”

See entry for superstition.

GOD (HIMSELF)

  • God, after emerging from primal chaos, created the cosmos and the life which would populate it. Then after a period of time He realized that His creation was terribly flawed. Worse, He found that He no longer could control what He had created. If corrections of the flaws were to be realized, those correction would of necessity have to come from the created, not the creator. “Amid all that rotation of boulders in the void, I saw the small, derisory grain in the cosmic forest as the shelter of my only possible hope. Earth! . . . Earth was the flower of hope to which the cosmos had given birth,” He lamented. Whereupon, He wrote a God’s-eye history of what He saw. And it came to pass that He encountered Moses, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Gautama (the one Eastern intruder among all the other Westerners), Jesus, Augustine, Isidore of Seville, Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Columbus, Galileo, Shakespeare, Caravaggio, Mozart, Rousseau, Hölderlin, Melville, Freud, and Einstein. And He called his history The Life of God (As Told By Himself). . . . Or so the Italian novelist and Rutgers University professor of literature Franco Ferrucci imagined in a 1996 work.
  • Jack Miles, who wrote God: A Biography, observed that “Though mentioning neither Hegel nor Darwin, Mr. Ferrucci, in effect, fuses their visions but writes his own ending. For him, the ascending arrow is now in descent. Earth, in all its majesty, is beyond repair. God will miss it—’It won’t be easy to abandon such beauty’—but He can do nothing about it.” The work, he concludes, is a charming expression of Ferrucci’s “boundless hopes for, and poignant disappointment in, his own human kind. {The New York Times Book Review, 14 July 1996}

GOD, ACCORDING TO JOHN DEWEY

See entry for pragmatism.]

GOD, DEFINED

And God said unto them, “And who do you say I am?

And they replied, “You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being, the ontological foundation of the context of our very selfhood revealed.”

And God said unto them, “What?”

{Quoted on the Web}

GOD, GOODNESS AND MERCY OF

Anyone who is teary-eyed about the goodness and mercy of God, said a Manhattan Unitarian Universalist, should work for a while in a hospital on a children’s ward.

GOD, MESSAGES FROM

From time to time, individuals allegedly receive word from God, and the media cover the story.

For example, in Huddersfield, England, Shaista Javed, a 14-year-old Muslim, sliced a tomato in half and found a “miracle message” from God written inside. On one side of the tomato she read, “There is only one God.” On the other, “Muhammed is the messenger.” To the Daily Mail, she revealed the revelation, adding, “God made me buy that tomato."

The Reuters news agency reported that a local storeowner said demand for tomatoes had soared.

GOD, NATURE OF

Rather than attribute cause and effect to a supernatural or supreme deity, secularists focus on the nature of man and the nature of the universe.

GOD, ON TELEVISION

Norman Lloyd, the director of “Steambath,” a PBS Hollywood Television Theatre, portrayed God as a Puerto Rican locker-room attendant.

GOD, PHALLUS OF

See entry for John Allegro.

GOD, QUIPS ABOUT

• Not even God is wise enough. —Nigerian proverb
• Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man. —Thomas Paine
• God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable.
They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority,
soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters.
—H. L. Mencken
• If God created us in his image we have more than reciprocated. —Voltaire
• Beware of the man whose God is in the skies. —George Bernard Shaw
• God, that dumping ground of our dreams. —Jean Rostand
• God is all-powerful, and God is all-loving—and the world is what it
is! :How :are you going to explain that? —Lord Salisbury
• For me, the single word “God” suggests everything that is slippery, shady,
squalid, foul, and grotesque. —André Breton
• God is the Celebrity-Author of the World’s Best-Seller. We have made God
into the biggest celebrity of all, to contain our own emptiness. —Daniel Boorstin
• I do not believe in God. I believe in cashmere. —Fran Lebowitz
• The impotence of God is infinite. —Anatole France
• Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know he is.
—Jean Anouilh
• God: the Old One. —Albert Einstein
• Whom the mad would destroy, first they make gods. —Bernard Levin
• Some people think God is a Christian. Some people think God is a Moslem.
Or a Jew. Or a Catholic. Or a Baptist. If you think about it, they can’t all be
right. —Dan Barker
• Some people say it is not nice to question God. They think that believing
the myth is more important than finding out what is really true. —Dan Barker
• We can explain phenomenon without any need to refer to gods or God.
—Paul Edwards

(See the entry for Great Mother Goddess. Also, see Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 3. )

{CE; EH; ER; JMRH; RE}

God, Ubiquitous Perpetuity (20th Century)

According to the New Haven Register (15 February 1996), a San Rafael, California, man by the name of God was jailed on the latest of eighteen indecent exposure convictions.

Mr. God had changed his name years ago (from Enrique Silberg) so that his “flashed” victims could receive “some type of awareness of God.”

Pundits noted that upon his death, the former Mr. Silberg would be memorialized with the headline, “GOD DIES.”

GOD, WRATH OF

Judith Hayes, writing in Freethought Today (April 1995), provided a partial list of wrathful killing by God, as purported by the Old Testament:

• The entire population of the earth at the time of Noah, except for eight survivors (Genesis 7:23)
• Everyone in Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19: 24, 25)
• Amalek and his people (Exodus 17:8-16)
• 3,000 Israelites (Exodus 32: 27,28)
• 14,700 Jews (Numbers 16:44-49)
• The people of Og: “So they smote him, and his sons, and all his people, until there was none left him alive: and they possessed his land.” (Numbers 21: 33-35)
• 24,000 people (Numbers 25: 4-9)
• All Midianite males (Numbers 31: 6-12)
• The Ammonites (Deuteronomy 2: 19-21)
• The Horims (Deuteronomy 2:22)
• The Amorites: “. . . utterly destroyed the men and the women and the little ones.” (Deuteronomy 2:33-35)
• The Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites: “ . . . thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them.” (Deuteronomy 7:1-5)
• Everyone in Jericho but one family (Joshua 6:20, 21)
• 12,000 people of Ai (Joshua 8:19-29)
• All the people of Makkedah, Libnah, Gezer, Eglon, Hebron (Joshua 8 and 10)
• All the inhabitants of the land of Goshen: “ . . . until they had destroyed them, neither left they any to breathe.” (Joshua 11:14)
• The inhabitants of Hormah, Gaza, Askelon, Ekron (Judges 1:17-19)
• 10,000 Moabites, 10,000 Perizzites and Canaanites, 600 Philistines, 120,000 Midianites, 1,000 Philistines, 25,100 Benjaminites, and all the hosts of Sisera (Judges 1, 3, 4, 8, 15, and 20)
• 50,070 people of Bethshemesh (1 Samuel 6:19)
• All the Amalekites: “Slay man and woman, infant and suckling. . . . “ (1 Samuel 15: 3, 7)
• 200 Philistines, to obtain their foreskins, in order to buy a bridge (1 Samuel 18:27)
• 22,000 Syrians, 70,000 people, 40,000 Syrians, and the Ammonites of Rabbah, tortured to death by the great King David (2 Samuel 8, 10, 12, 14)
• Every man in Edom (1 Kings 11:15)
• All the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18:40)
• 100,000 Syrians (1 Kings 20: 28, 29)
• Moabite captains, and “fifties” (2 Kings, 1:9-14)
• 42 children and 185,000 Assyrians (2 Kings 2 and 19)
• 500,000 men of Israel, 20,000 Edomites, and 120,000 Judeans (2 Chronicles 13, 25, 28)
• 75,000 people (Esther 9: 15,16)

WHAT'S GOD GOT THAT GOOD DOESN'T?

Secularists can respond, "Nothing, except God is an unscientific concept and carries with it the resultant negativity. Classical philosophy, on the other hand, can utilize naturalism to explain Good in positive terms as is found in aesthetics, epistemology, ethics, logic, and metaphysics."

{WAS}

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