morosoph wrote today at 1:13 PM
Well, despite my terse reply, I wasn't deliberately being trivial. I count myself a Spinozan Pantheist, and one of the problems that I have with the Christian god is what I perceive as the slurring of categories. A concept such as love is welled up by the desire for it to have a personification; Christianity is psychologically hard to resist.I have had experiences of the paranormal, but the intelligence that I detect in the world is not a human intelligence, and appears to have the character of a cool ordering force that is slow on the individual scale, yet massively parallel. I would choose to use a word such as the Tao for it; love is simply the wrong concept.However, if there is an emergent pattern, wishful thinking is going to attribute love and a given theology to the design. By saying that the personification of love is not love, I am attempting to get people to remove their rose-tinted spectacles so as to be able to perceive a different, more natural kind of wonder.I'm not a big one for quoting texts, religious or otherwise: to my mind, replacing experience with words is a sure way to push spirituality out of one's mind. I make a partial exception for the Tao Te Ching and similar poetry, for there the words are a springboard for experience. To often, words normalise, distort, and limit experience to acceptable interpretations instead.BTW, it's a he :o)