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[Gee]

I did not mean to imply that spirituality and emotion are one and the same, but they are related in the same way that 'father' and 'man' are related. A person can be a 'man' without being a 'father', but he can not be a 'father' without being a 'man'. Emotion does not have to have an association with spirituality, but spirituality can not exist without emotion. The reasons for this are both, very simple and profound. The simple reason is that spirituality is not recognized without emotion.

Ah, so faith is emotional, or at least partly so? That makes some sense to me.

When I was working in a science forum, I found a neurologist, who explained belief and faith to me. He said, "When you wake up in the morning and look out your window, you see the sun; and the next morning you see the sun; and the next. So you begin to associate the sun with morning and start to anticipate it." The sameness of seeing the sun every morning becomes a comfort, a familiarity that feels like home. That comfort is emotion and causes the belief that the sun will continue to light your morning. (Belief requires feeling/emotion) This is a truth that you have discovered, so if the day comes that the sun does not show up, you will be afraid. Your belief will be damaged, and your belief, and truth, is the foundation of your faith.

I believe because it *feels* right. I think that's what you're talking about, yes? But it also feels right, to me, that spirituality is emotional, but not solely emotion-based.

This part gets tricky to explain -- and understand. Emotion works through the unconscious aspect of mind like instincts do and maybe dreams and all of that psychic mumbo-jumbo. The problem with emotion is that we don't actually know it -- we feel it -- that is why the unconscious is unconscious. So if you are walking along and see a person, you can recognize and know that it is a person; if you see a landscape, you can recognize and know that it is a landscape; but if you feel emotion, you can recognize it but you do not know it, can not explain it. We know that the emotion that we feel always has a source. This is where spiritual ideas come from as we try to interpret what we feel, but do not actually know the source.

So even though I believe that all life reacts to some feeling/emotion because of the way hormones work in life, it takes a species with a brain and maybe language skills to interpret emotion and try to make it into an idea that could be called spiritual.

Would you agree?

I think that my agreement would depend on what you think emotion actually is and maybe what properties you think it has.

Gee

[Sy Borg]

Evidence for a subjective God or other deities is abundant. Clearly deities exist in the subjective realm - the minds of billions of humans, which is a pretty significant part of overall reality (if we consider that reality comprises both objective and subjective domains).

Given the impossibility of determining whether deities or equivalent entities are objectively real, we can at least say for sure that deities definitely exist in the minds of many people, but not in the minds of many others or, presumably, other species.

The question is complicated by the multinudinous definitions of God/other deities. Spinoza believed that God was the Universe. Some believe that God exists beyond human understanding. Fundamentalists believe in an anthropomorphic God. Some equate God with subjectivity itself. Deists believe in a creator that left the universe to do as it may. There's pantheist and panentheist conceptions. Hindu polytheism. Even the Great Programmer of the Universal Simulation ...

[Pattern-chaser]

The question is complicated by the multinudinous definitions of God/other deities. Spinoza believed that God was the Universe. Some believe that God exists beyond human understanding. Fundamentalists believe in an anthropomorphic God. Some equate God with subjectivity itself. Deists believe in a creator that left the universe to do as it may. There's pantheist and panentheist conceptions. Hindu polytheism. Even the Great Programmer of the Universal Simulation ...

I'd go with all of the above. Except for the highlighted bit, of course. [Extremism is always bad, IMO.]

[Sy Borg]

The question is complicated by the multinudinous definitions of God/other deities. Spinoza believed that God was the Universe. Some believe that God exists beyond human understanding. Fundamentalists believe in an anthropomorphic God. Some equate God with subjectivity itself. Deists believe in a creator that left the universe to do as it may. There's pantheist and panentheist conceptions. Hindu polytheism. Even the Great Programmer of the Universal Simulation ...

I'd go with all of the above. 😃 Except for the highlighted bit, of course. [Extremism is always bad, IMO.]

All? Might be a few contradictions there. Do you think God is the universe or more than the universe?

What if there really is nothing - just bits of stuff floating around space and somehow Earth facilitated more complexity than most of the stuff floating in space? Reality might be entirely meaningless outside of personal/ animal meaning.

Many people believe in materialism as if it was in a gospel, but I see materialism as only the most grounded guess, based on what is probably a pretty paltry amount of understanding of reality. Humanity may be suffering from a collective case of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

[Pattern-chaser]

The question is complicated by the multinudinous definitions of God/other deities. Spinoza believed that God was the Universe. Some believe that God exists beyond human understanding. Fundamentalists believe in an anthropomorphic God. Some equate God with subjectivity itself. Deists believe in a creator that left the universe to do as it may. There's pantheist and panentheist conceptions. Hindu polytheism. Even the Great Programmer of the Universal Simulation ...

I'd go with all of the above. Except for the highlighted bit, of course. [Extremism is always bad, IMO.]

All? Might be a few contradictions there. Do you think God is the universe or more than the universe?

If we use the label "Universe" to describe everything that exists, and God exists, then "God is [part of] the universe".

What if there really is nothing - just bits of stuff floating around space and somehow Earth facilitated more complexity than most of the stuff floating in space? Reality might be entirely meaningless outside of personal/ animal meaning.

Indeed so. Uncertainty is the way we live, is it not?

Many people believe in materialism as if it was in a gospel, but I see materialism as only the most grounded guess, based on what is probably a pretty paltry amount of understanding of reality. Humanity may be suffering from a collective case of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

I think we struggle for an understanding that proves to be elusive. To achieve certainty, when certainty doesn't exist (for humans, at least), we need to deceive ourselves, as you describe. Or some other way: the limits of deception leave room for almost any sort of self-deception, don't they?

[Sy Borg]

P-C, technically, "universe" means everything that exists but that's not really what's happening. "Universe" refers to the supercluster of superclusters - the cosmic web - that evolved from the Big Bang (although the BB theory is under assault from the JWT). People have long posited a creator outside of the universe, perhaps encompassing it. Meanwhile, many scientists and philosophers have posited a multiverse.

"Universe" in this sense is relative, like infinity. Examples:

Relative infinities - the infinite number of times one centimetre can be cut in half.

Relative universes - we are essentially a universe to our gut bacteria.

I don't think of as self-deception as much as naivete, and people being too busy making themselves useful to idly ponder the nature of reality. Lack of knowledge/awareness, plus the need to sometimes act decisively, leads people to behave as if the pale Blue Dot is everything. This is the point Douglas Adams made in Hitchhikers Guide with the Total Perspective Vortex. We cannot even imagine how tiny we are. The scale of things simply does not compute.

[Pattern-chaser]

P-C, technically, "universe" means everything that exists but that's not really what's happening. "Universe" refers to the supercluster of superclusters...

As I said,

If we use the label "Universe" to describe everything that exists, and God exists, then "God is [part of] the universe".

"Universe" is just a label,. I did clarify, at the time of writing, exactly what I meant by it, so that there would be no confusion about what I meant. And yet you took a different meaning from my words anyway. I'm sorry, I *did* try.

It looked like your words might refer to something slightly different, which is why I took the trouble to offer a definition with my words.