alienrodeoclown

I am an atheist and i dont believe in any actual being "greater" than myself. But this is a question i love to ask my friends because i get extremely interesting answers.

If you could define the word god in a way in which it existed, how would you define it?

My personal answer is that anything mysterious is god. Anything unknown, anything beyond my understanding. What it is that makes beautiful art beautiful, the love i feel for the important people in my life. These are the things i could never wrap my head around and if i had to define god in a way in which it esisted that would be it. Therefore whatever makes "Clair de Lune" by Claude Debussy so unbelievebly beautiful is god. The infinite aspect of the universe is god. The structure of reality on a sub-quantum level is god. The moment i gain an "understanding" of something it would cease to be god, it would cease to have that mystery which is the very aspect of it that makes it wonderful. I will never be able to describe the intricate manipulation of sound that is "Clair de Lune", and it therefore will allways be god, just as love and many other things will be.

Christians allways tell us that their god is beyond human understanding whnever we prove them wrong with our logic. Pehaps their on to something(they just seem to be very, very confused about what it is that their on to).

Vicious Love

Any and all objects massing between 12.3 and 2109.781 metric tons, and having a relative density in excess of 0.4.

This is why pointlessly redefining words is a bad thing. I've seen "God" defined as "belief in God", "the human spirit", "the unknown", "the universe", and more. Each and every one of these redefinitions has struck me as an utterly transparent ploy to consciously, explicitly assert an obvious proposition, while implicitly or subconsciously believing in one which we know is logically untenable, specifically the existence of God.

Formally, we might use "God" as a byword for "the universe" or "all things mysterious", but we do so only because we've quite so pressing a need to constantly reaffirm the existence of a conscious, humanoid, all-loving daddy figure who'll look after us when we die. It's not quite as intellectually dishonest as flat-out ignoring the facts and consciously believing in something we know is unworthy of belief, but we're still kidding ourselves.

RAFH

I don't define it. Seems no need exists to do that as plenty of others to whom the word and concept has meaning and value have already done so.

RareBird

God = the word used to "create" a "personification" or "embodiment" of a presumably intervening super-natural overlord. The word is also used by fence-sitting agnostics and wine-and-cheese nibbling "deists" to keep them safe from total ostrisization from the faithful while allowing them to spread god upon "all they survey" like peanut butter to suit their outlook of the day.

JennyRogers

Well said, RareBird. I can't even count the number of times someone has started trying to define their god for me, only to wind up with something that sounds like Zaphod Beeblebrox: "he's just this guy, you know?"

Zelc

EXCUSE ME? You mean someone seriously tried to define God recursively? o.O *boom*

Astreja

My definition is fairly simple: Any being advanced enough to possess abilities that transcend our current knowledge of science, and to demonstrate those abilities without the aid of any external device.

Examples would be such things as time travel, instantaneous healing of self or others, telepathy and teleportation.

There does not have to be one and only one of these beings; and they don't have to be immortal or invulnerable, either (although I imagine them as being fairly long-lived and rather tough).

Stumpjumper

I don't think that you really can "define God"... God is generally viewed as infinite and beyond human comprehension and since define means to "make finite" it seems a contradiction in terms...

I could describe what I mean by God I suppose, but defining God is not on the table... I did a thread about this at CF once in GA and got some really interesting responses...

Here's a quote I put in the OP:

"In any case the word {God} exists among us. Its existence is prolonged even by an atheist when he says there is no god; and that something like god has no specifiable meaning; when he founds a museum without god; raises atheism to the level of a party dogma, and devises other similar things. In this way even the atheist is helping the word "God" to survive longer. If he wanted to avoid that, he would not only have to hope that this word would simply disappear in human existence and in the language of society. He would also have to contribute to this disappearance by keeping dead silence about it himself and not declaring himself an atheist. But how is he to do that to others, with whom he must speak and from whose language sphere he cannot completely withdrawal, talk about God and are concerned about this word?

The mere fact that the word exists is worth thinking about. When we speak about the "God" in this way, we do not only mean of course the German word. Whether we say Gott or "God" or the latin deus or the Semitic El or the old Mexican teotl, that makes no difference here. It would, however, be an extremely obscure and difficult question to ask how we could know that the same thing or the same person is meant by these different words, because in each of these cases we cannot simply point to a common experience of what is meant independently of the word itself. But for the time being we shall pass over this problem whether the many words for "God" are synonomous." (Karl Rahner)

Vicious Love

All the time. Sometimes they rephrase it as "the search for God" and/or dress it up with a Babylon Five-esque analogy involving lanterns and specular light and whatnot, and sometimes they just give it to you straight up and blow your mind.