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Occam’s Turtles All the Way

Theists like to go:

1. We were created

2. Therefore there must be a creator

3. Therefore that creator must be external

And the standard non-theist/pantheist/atheist/polytheist answer is, of course, “who created that creator? And the creator of that creator?”

For most of the typical origins they ascribe to the creator (“He transcends existence” is the most common, “He has always existed”, “He precedes Time itself”, “He just spontaneously formed” etc etc), that same explanation can usually just as easily be ascribed to the naturalistic origin story.

Ultimately it becomes a matter of semantics.

Theists define “creation” as the subset of what exists and what’s there that excludes the theistic God and the entire realm of that God, labeling that excluded part as “transcendent”.

I’m not onboard with that definition. By cosmos I wanna refer to the whole shebang, not just a subset.

Theism, to my mind, diminishes God so much. Shrinks the idea down from something that encompasses all to this tiny li’l superhero flying around.

What’s appealing to me about the Christian story (beyond the themes that it culturally appropriated from Isaiah) is the opposite of theism. It’s the age old Atman-is-Brahman story illustrated by how this Lord, the highest, this omnipotent guy who’s all fire & brimstone & floods & locusts & “love me or die” like a twisted mom keeping a gun next to the cradle, one day he decides to “ehn, I’ll give it a whirl, how hard can it be, I’ve made the world good to live in, after all. I’ll step down there and show ‘em what’s what” and he incarnates and becomes a dude and he gets bullied and tortured and killed and in the final breath all his divinity bleeds out from him (“Ἠλί, Ἠλί, λιμὰ σαβαχθανί”) and you know, I’ve got to respect a deity that does that. That is “Odin losing an eye” levels of metal. Obi-Wan throwing away the sword in the face of his twisted creation.

And his main jam that he ties into all this is what? Forgiveness.

That, I can dig.

Douglas Hofstadter – Little Harmonic Labyrinth