--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Hugo" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Bhairitu <noozguru@> wrote: > > > > I guess if you're going to look at "God" as a "personal" deity > > then your blog makes some sense. But you're forgetting that > > MMY and the Shankara tradition taught "God" as the impersonal. > > If you accept that "laws of nature" is a secular term > for God, then you must accept that MMY was preaching a > personal God because the terms "nature support" and > "Maharishi effect" are implying intervention at a > fundamental level.
That's the issue. Personal, schmersonal...that is irrelevant. The relevant issue is the belief being sold that there is a sentient basis to creation that has the ability to 1) have a "will" or a desire for how it "should" be working, and 2) has the pos- sibility of "intervening" to affect creation, and that thus can be "appealed to" via butt-bouncing or yagyas. Include either of those two attributes, and whether you call your God "personal" or "impersonal," you are still talking God. > Consciousness as Unified Field, > the "enlivenment" of which allegedly increases > positivity in human affairs, is another term for God. > Again, if it was impersonal we wouldn't be able to > gain favour just from mental contact. Agreed, although again for me "personal" or "imper- sonal" is irrelevant. It's the interventionist nature of the concept that makes it about a God rather than about, say, an operating system. I have *no problem* with an underlying unity to the universe that works like an operating system. It just works in the background to allow creation to run itself, without having to be either aware of creation or having the ability to interfere with it. And for me, this operating system can be reduced to two primary components -- karma plus free will. The combination of those two forces accounts for all phenomena in the known universe, without the need for any kind of Godly sentience or intervention. Since I'm an Occam's Razor kinda guy, the simple explanation is the more likely explanation. Any explanation that involves a sentient or interventionist God is more complicated, and thus less likely. > > "Laws of Nature" is still a pretty good secular notion to > > explain what many call "God" especially in abstract terms > > rather than some being that micromanages your life. If you > > don't believe in the laws of nature then turn on your > > webcam so we can see you walk through that wall next > > to you. :) While there may *be* inviolable "laws of nature," I would suggest that no human being on the planet knows what they are. At best they have a guess at what they are. And any scientist *or* philosopher worth his salt would probably agree with me. > The laws of nature aren't something we need to *believe* > in. I can't walk through walls because of the repelling > action of the nuclear forces that hold electrons away > from the nucleus of atoms. Secular or not, I doubt there > is anything we can do to change that. And unless any > genuine sidhas can step forward..... And if they did, their ability *to* walk through a wall that appears solid does not "disprove the laws of nature." It only disproves the puny ideas of what those "laws" were that humans had before. Not that long ago, the "laws of nature" that most human beings in the Western world would agree were sacrosanct and inviolable involved the sun orbiting the earth. That this turned out not to be true did not invalidate the concept that there may be some rules that shape the nature of the universe, it just revealed the poverty of human imagination in trying to get a handle on what those rules are.
