Exactly what is "a divinity"? This is where atheists, especially those with pretensions to scientific understanding but who are deficient in philosophy, tend to get all tangled up and become incoherent, saying things like "I just believe in one less divinity than you do."
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <anartaxius@...> wrote : nu·mi·nous = having a strong religious or spiritual quality; indicating or suggesting the presence of a divinity. Exactly what is a strong religious quality? Exactly what is a spiritual quality? How do these two qualities indicate or suggest the presence of a divinity? If something is indicated or suggested, is that any reason to assume that something is actually there if it has not been directly seen, directly experienced. All that has to be done is demonstrate, unequivocally, what it is that one wants others to see, then you have a reason to define and investigate what that is. It is not necessary to investigate or define what does not exist, since one will never come across a concrete demonstration. One can imagine all sorts of things mentally, but never be able to show that those things exist, and as such, all such ideas are equivalent in that there is no proof, and no possibility of proof that such things have an existence independent of thought. There is reason to believe that what we call an elephant exists, even if we do not know what it is or have a name for it, it can be experienced through the senses, at some point it can be defined, observed, argued about. There is a problem when the subject matter at hand is empty, but is presumed to be real, such as invisible formless gods, or enlightenment. With gods, we have to presume they exist, and are somehow different from us. With enlightenment, there is the problem that it really does not exist, but we think it does. In this case the spiritual path shows us that the idea of enlightenment was an illusion, that what we were seeking was in fact just what we always were, not some new thing we have never experienced before. But it cannot be proved by argument, one just has to be crazy enough to attempt to resolve the issue. In the rarefied atmosphere of abstract theology, if we think that union with the god of one's imagination is the equivalent of enlightenment, then I suspect there will be a real disappointment because at the end of the road, the thing you have to give up is your idea of what that god is.
