• howrar@lemmy.ca
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      4 months ago

      Anything that you would call a “god”.

      If I give an ostensive definition, I would say it includes the beings like the Abrahamic god, or Olympian gods, and exclude humans, animals, bacteria, the planet we live on, and objects we handle in our day to day lives. I’ll tentatively draw the line at any being that is not bound to the laws of physics as we understand them today.

      • PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmy.ml
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        4 months ago

        Why exclude humans, animals and bacteria? How about Sun? Jesus Christ? God-King Jayavarman II? A cat? Very small spirit of tiny stream? A holy stone (stone is not a human, nor animal or bacteria, a lot of stones were worshipped in various forms and meanings in history)? A tree chewed by pilgrims? Invisible Hand of the Market?

        Incredibly arbitrary definition again constructed to wriggle your way from any concrete statement.

        • theilleist@lemmy.ml
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          4 months ago

          If we had the technological power, would humans run simulations of universes with Planck length precision? Obviously yes. So extrapolating from our one and only example of intelligent life (us), it seems like intelligent life enjoys stimulating universes. If our reality were the result of that kind of project, and the engineers lived outside the laws of physics, I would call them higher beings. And they could be as hands-off or as interventionist as they pleased.

          • PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmy.ml
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            4 months ago

            Sure that’s a valid defintion, albeit a super specific one and it directly exclude all (or almost all) known forms of religion on Earth.

        • howrar@lemmy.ca
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          4 months ago

          I don’t think OP is asking about the existence of humans, or animals, or any other physical entity. If they were, you can trivially say that you exist, and therefore god exists. That’s unless you want to go into ontology and question what it means to “exist”, which I’m pretty sure also isn’t what OP intended.

          • PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmy.ml
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            4 months ago

            I didn’t asked about OP, i asked YOU to define it and you are weaseling out of it continously, you cannot even answer why did you exclude humans, animals and bacteria from your definition, while humans and animals have been historically worshipped in many cases.