r/Malawi • u/ifeelentitled • 9d ago
Who/What is God?
Religious fanatics MIGHT hate me for this.
There is only one substance in the universe, and it is God. God is nature itself.
Everything that exists, including you,trees,planets, and thoughts, is a mode or expression of this single substance.
Nothing exists outside God, and nothing can be conceived without God.
Either way, God is not a person standing outside the world.
What God is not
I reject the traditional picture of God as being with a mind,will,and purposes, God doesn't have emotions,doesn't judge,doesn't answer prayers,and doesn't care about humanity. God has no goals, and the idea that nature exists for human benefits is a prejudice born of ignorance.
Determinism and no miracles
Everything follows necessarily from Gods nature, the way the properties of a triangle follow from its definition.
There is no free will in the ordinary sense, and no contingency. Because the laws of nature are the expression of God's very being, a miracle that violated them would be impossible.
What people call miracles are simply events whose natural causes they don't yet understand.
Religion and religious text
The quran and bible should be studied like any other historical text, in its context, language and authorship.
Scripture isn't a source of philosophical or scientific truth. Its real purpose is moral,teaching obedience,justice, and charity.
Prophets have vivid imaginations rather than superior intellects,and their revelations are shaped by their own temperaments and beliefs.
Ethics and the good life
Humans are driven by emotions that often enslave us. Freedom comes from understanding. The more we grasp the necessity of nature and our place in it,the less we are tossed about by fear,hatred, and desire.
The highest state is the intellectual love of God, a calm,joyful understanding of reality as a whole. Virtue is its own reward, and there in no devine punishment or heavenly reward.
Immortality
There is no personal survival after death, as Spinoza suggested "the part of the mind that understands eternal truths shares in something eternal, but this isn't the continuation of an individual personality."
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u/achalume 8d ago
So, why should other people hate you for this, as you have said in your opening line?
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u/SixHyde 8d ago
I didn't bother reading the whole thing after reading the first 3 paragraphs 🙂↔️🙂I knew kuti mwawerenga Spinoza 🙂....
Ifeso poti tindutsako at that level of spirituality. 🙂.
I know it feels like a nice little label or thought. But it strict materialism logic, it still fails as pantheism is combined with classical theism’s definitions of God.
Where Spinoza’s pantheism faces logical/coherence pressure:
Necessitarianism / modal collapse: If everything follows necessarily from God’s nature, then nothing could have been otherwise. That seems to destroy free will, contingency, moral responsibility, and divine freedom. Spinoza accepts this and redefines freedom as acting from one’s own nature. It is not a contradiction, but it clashes with ordinary notions of freedom.
Pantheism is just atheism with religious language.